MUST READS

Out now in paperback

BRITANNIA OBSCURA by Joanne Parker (Vintage £9.99)

LOOK up at the sky, and you expect to see the white vapour lines and crosses of a plane’s path. A complex web of routes linking our airports with each other spins its way through the blue.

On a world atlas, Britain has an easily recognisable outline, but hidden within its well-known shape are numerous other maps, both above and below our landscape. Like the motorways beneath, Britain’s aeronautical maps contain vast thoroughfares, organised laterally into different zones.

If we could see the airspace above Heathrow — the manoeuvring area shared by all the London airports — it would look like ‘an upsidedown wedding cake’.

This prodigious book takes us on a fascinating excursion around a Britain obscure to most of us. Parker digs into the constantly changing underground tunnels of caving, navigates the land’s canalways and explores the megalithic shape of the nation with its prehistoric monuments — or ‘stone fingers’ — that ‘bejewel Britain like the studs and rings of body piercing’.

LETTER TO AN UNKNOWN SOLDIER Edited by Neil Bartlett and Kate Pullinger (William Collins £8.99)

ON A platform at London’s Paddington Station stands a famous memorial to those who fell during World War I. The life-size bronze statue, designed by Charles Sargeant Jagger, is of an unknown soldier in uniform.

He is reading a letter, but what it says and who it’s from remains a mystery.

So, to mark the centenary of the war, the editors of the book invited members of the public to write that letter.

The bronze soldier received more than 21,000 letters. From children and railway workers to active servicemen and the Prime Minister, imagined correspondence flooded in, and many of the letters are reprinted here.

Predictably, gratitude, loss and the sense of waste are themes of a great deal of the letters, but those that focus on love are the most touching in this simple but reflective commemoration of the war.

MEDIEVAL BRITAIN IN 100 FACTS by Matthew Lewis (Amberley £7.99)

ONE OF the myths that persists about medieval cooking is that most meat was so rotten it needed to be doused in spices to mask the taste.

This, Lewis points out, is simply incorrect. Medieval society found many effective and efficient ways to preserve their food, such as salting it or storing it in barrels, which kept meat edible for up to four years. Though chowing down meat was normally reserved for rich lords and nobles, peasants typically ate between 4,000 and 5,000 calories per day — double today’s recommended intake — to allow them to sustain their physically demanding existence.

There are intriguing nuggets to be found here, but it involves wading through a mass of less surprising material to prise them out.