Out now in paperback
WITNESSING WATERLOO
By David Crane (William Collins £9.99) WELLINGTON looked through his spyglass, surveying the field in front of him.
Minutes later, a ricocheting ball struck his childhood friend, ripping eight ribs from his spine and piercing his lungs. The Duke knelt by his side, holding his hand as he died. Most of his troops would be wounded by the end of the day.
At the same moment, just across the Channel, the din of battle could not be heard. As the early evening light streamed into London’s Somerset House, a former Life Guardsman was enjoying an art exhibition.
Like the old- fashioned watercolour paintings of the river at Eton or Reading, this England had nothing to do with the war.
This is just one of the delightfully detailed vignettes of both the everyday and the extraordinary in this excellent narrative of Waterloo, hour by hour.
NO MORE WORLDS TO CONQUER
By Chris Wright (The Friday Project £9.99)
IF SOMEONE is renowned for a single moment or achievement — that opening sentence on their Wikipedia page — what do they do next?
Chris Wright picks out 16 such characters from recent history and asks them this very question.
Gloria Gaynor’s worldwide hit I Will Survive has inspired millions of karaoke sessions, but despite a lifetime of recorded music, this is still the one track for which the singer is best known. Now she gives lectures about the importance of fathers playing an active role in their children’s lives.
Ray Wilson, who played in England’s winning football team at the 1966 World Cup, returned to school at 40, passed his embalming exam and became an undertaker in Huddersfield.
Gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s career peaked aged 14, when she scored a perfect ten at the Olympics, a feat so inconceivable that the scoreboards had not been designed for double digits.
By the Eighties she was living an unhappy life in Romania and under constant surveillance from the Securitate.
An entertaining portrait of those whose public contribution can be summed up in a one-line epitaph.
A VERY DANGEROUS WOMAN
By Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield
(Oneworld £9.99) PEOPLE looked forward to invitations to Baroness Budberg’s parties in Fifties London.
The guests were an eclectic and eccentric bunch, including Graham Greene, Laurence Olivier and Guy Burgess — but the biggest draw was Budberg herself.
She was famous for having been the mistress of both H. G. Wells and Maxim Gorky and for her long affair with British diplomat and secret agent Robert Bruce Lockhart.
But at these gin and vodkasoaked soirees, most of the salonistes gossiped about whether this charismatic woman was a double or even triple agent working for MI5, MI6 and the KGB.
Drawing on extensive new material, including a released file kept by MI5 from 1920-1951, this is an absorbing biography of Russia’s most seductive spy.