MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

KEEPING ON KEEPING ON by Alan Bennett

(Faber £9.99) ‘ONE does try not to be an Old Git,’ grumbles Alan Bennett in his latest volume of diaries, ‘but they don’t make it easy.’

Then again, if anyone were to give Old Gittishness a good name, it would be Bennett. His third collection of diaries spans the decade from 2005, when Bennett was 71, to 2015, recording the transition from early to late old-age.

He grumbles about being 80 — the diaries record the decline and death of many of his friends. But he continues to cycle intrepidly around London, and his eye for the absurd remains as keen as ever.

He worries about being seen as cosy: ‘Were I to stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a teddy bear,’ he writes. Perhaps, but a teddy bear with a well-developed streak of sharp-edged satire.

THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH LANDSCAPE by Nicholas Crane

(W&N £9.99) IT IS always a promising sign when you encounter an unfamiliar word in the first few pages of a book.

‘We’re all topophiliacs,’ writes Nicholas Crane. ‘We have a predisposition to invest locations with attachments.’

It is this tendency that lies at the heart of his study of British landscape. Beginning in the ninth millennium BC, when Britain was still linked to the continent by a plain known as Doggerland, across which it was possible to walk from the Rhine to the Thames, Crane traces the layers of habitation, agriculture and urbanisation that have formed the British landscape.

‘From the hearth of the first reindeer hunter to the glass spire of the Shard . . . landscape matters because it is our habitat,’ he observes. ‘It is the only place we have.’

BRINGING IN THE SHEAVES by Richard Coles

(Orion £8.99) CURRENTLY tripping the light fantastic (emphasis on the tripping) in Strictly Come Dancing, the Reverend Richard Coles, vicar of Finedon in Northamptonshire, came to the priesthood by the scenic route.

In the Eighties, he and Jimmy Somerville, his partner in the duo The Communards, had three top ten hits. Coles was ordained as a C of E priest in 2005, and he has been enlivening Saturday mornings as the presenter of Radio 4’s Saturday Live since 2011.

This entertaining account of the ‘ wheat and chaff from my years as a priest’, chronicles the highs and lows of the clerical life with a lively wit and a self- knowledge and compassion not always evident in vicarage circles.

As he remarks, ‘even the Church of England, which sometimes seems about as mysterious as S Club 7, maintains some sort of lookout beyond the far horizon of our lives’.