MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

THE TIME TRAVELLER’S GUIDE TO RESTORATION BRITAIN by Ian Mortimer (Vintage £9.99)

‘THIS book,’ Ian Mortimer promises, ‘will tell you how to live, day by day in the late 17th century.’ Unlike traditional history, which takes an objective view of the past, the third of Mortimer’s best-selling guides places the reader at the centre of the story.

He leads us down the malodorous byways of Restoration London, ‘a decaying mass of antiquity, adaptation and dilapidation’, with intimate insights into the everyday lives of ordinary people, and a bystander’s view of the most dramatic events between 1660 and 1700.

Samuel Pepys gives an eyewitness account of the Great Fire of London, and there are fascinating accounts of such homely subjects as underwear and cosmetics: Pepys’s wife used a facial oil made of newborn puppies.

Intriguing, informative and entertaining.

A LIFE IN THE DAY by Hunter Davies

(S&S £8.99) HUNTER DAVIES’S latest memoir, a sequel to his account of his Carlisle childhood, The Co-Op’s Got Bananas, is dedicated to his late wife, the novelist Margaret Forster.

Trenchant, self-contained and deeply beloved, she is a constant presence in the book, which begins with her marriage to Davies in 1960, and ends with her death from cancer on February 8, 2016.

Theirs was a writing marriage: Forster gained early success when her novel, Georgy Girl, was made into a film starring Charlotte Rampling, while Davies worked for The Sunday Times.

With three children, their family life was a vibrant mixture of domesticity and improbably heady glamour: Paul McCartney drops in unannounced with new girlfriend Linda; Tom Stoppard confesses his ambition was once to be Davies. Moving, funny and brilliantly readable, this is an evocative portrait of a marriage and an era.

BLUE by John Sutherland

(W&N £8.99) IN APRIL 2013, John Sutherland was six months into his job as borough commander at Southwark, in south London, when he began to think, ‘I don’t know if I can do this any more’.

His descent into profound depression was the result of many years of accumulated stress, danger, pity and horror. ‘This job brings you into repeated contact with every form of human sadness: death and grief, wickedness and violence, the lonely, the lost and the hurting,’ he writes.

‘As a society, I don’t think we have even begun to understand the compound impact on police officers of repeated exposure to extreme trauma,’ he adds.

This courageous and finely written book is a timely invitation to think more deeply about what we ask of our police.