MUSTREADS
Out now in paperback
GENTLEMAN JACK
(Serpent’s Tail £8.99, 352pp) WHEN John Lister inherited Shibden Hall, a Tudor manor house near Halifax, in the late 19th century, he also inherited an impressive quantity of junk: tiger skins, a stuffed crocodile and a mass of family papers, including the diaries of his ancestor Anne Lister, which were partly written in code.
John enlisted a friend to help decipher them. What they discovered shocked their Victorian sensibilities: they were a detailed record of Anne Lister’s exuberant sex life with a succession of female lovers.
With the last of them, a neighbouring heiress, Anne went through an informal marriage ceremony at Holy Trinity church in York, which now bears a blue plaque to commemorate their samesex union.
Angela St e i d e l e ’ s biography of a woman joyfully aware of her own sexuality has been adapted into a BBC1 series to be aired this spring.
MI5 AND ME: A CORONET AMONG THE SPOOKS
(Bloomsbury £8.99, 256pp) WHEN Charlotte Bingham was 18, she was called into the drawing-room by her father, John Bingham, an aristocrat and spy on whom John le Carre based his character George Smiley.
‘I think you should know certain facts’, he announced. Charlotte, anticipating a talk on The Facts Of Life, thought she was going to pass out ‘with the horror of what was to come’.
What her father had to say turned out to be almost as unwelcome: it was time, he decreed, for her to take ‘ a steady worthwhile job’ at MI5.
Thus Charlotte found herself taking dictation from a lugubrious Naval officer who only cheered up when she brought him jam doughnuts, and practising interrogation techniques on a girl from the typing pool named Doreen.
Bingham’s memoir is an engagingly frivolous insight into the grim business of Cold War spying.
TERRACOTTA WARRIORS
(Weidenfeld £9.99, 304pp)
IN MARCH 1974, some farmers were digging a well near Xi’an, in northwestern China, when they struck something hard. Excavating further, they found fragments of pottery, bronze arrowheads and a terracotta head that frightened them.
Their first thought was to make some quick money by selling their finds, but news spread and a team of archaeologists arrived to evaluate the site.
What they found was astounding: an army of almost 8,000 life- sized terracotta warriors and hundreds of horses and chariots from the vast mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang, who died in 210 BC. Edward Burman’s fascinating account explores the history and mysteries of the emperor’s tomb, now a global sensation, and considers what treasures may yet be unearthed there.