MUST READS

Out now in paperback

EXCEEDING MY BRIEF by Barbara Hosking

(Biteback £9.99, 384 pp) BEFORE starting a memoir, it is always entertaining to look at the index, where an enticing selection of jokes is often hidden.

But turn to the back of broadcaster and civil servant Barbara Hosking’s memoir, and you find this pithy line: ‘If you are looking for the index, there isn’t one. It would be too long.’

This sums up Hosking’s character: blunt, witty and delighted with the richness of a career that saw her at various times holding up the unexpectedly heavy body of a dead cobra, telling Ted Heath to change his droopy old cardi for something more becoming and placating a bunch of thirsty journalists whom she inadvertently booked into a temperance hotel.

This funny and fearless memoir (she came out as gay aged 91) of a Cornish scholarship girl who grew up to roam the corridors of power is a delight.

LADY M by Colin Brown

(Amberley £9.99, 304 pp) MANY of us have heard of Byron’s lover, the highlystrung Lady Caroline Lamb, who memorably described the poet as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.

Her mother-in-law, Lady Elizabeth Lamb, is a less familiar name but she, too, caught the poet’s eye.

Byron called her ‘the best friend I ever had in my life and the cleverest of women’. Elizabeth was born in 1751; at 17 she married a rakish and vastly wealthy young MP, Sir Peniston Lamb, later Lord Melbourne.

Lady Melbourne proved as fertile as she was socially ambitious: she was soon pregnant with the first of her six children — the only one definitely fathered by her husband.

Another son, William, later Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister, was said to have been fathered by the Earl of Egremont. ‘Who the devil can tell who’s anybody’s father,’ he once observed.

Colin Brown’s biography is a lively portrait of a clever, beguiling and freespirited woman.

THE SECRET BOOKS by Marcel Theroux

(Faber £8.99, 384 pp) ‘IT SEEMED to me that the people we didn’t become, the lives we couldn’t lead . . . were like so many secret books,’ writes Marcel Theroux.

The hero of his novel, Nicolas Notovitch — based on a historical figure — is a man of many unled lives. Notovitch, born in 1858 near the Black Sea, dreams of escaping his humdrum life when a chance encounter with a U.S. reporter offers an opportunity he knows will never come again.

He abandons his old life to become a journalist, spy, and the author of a book claiming Jesus trained as a Buddhist monk.

Ranging from the Crimea to Tooting Bec, via Paris, Moscow and the Indus valley, Theroux’s novel mixes fact and fiction to spellbinding effect.