Barbarossa

Radcliffe family, whose second son Archie is clearly vulnerable to a spot of minxy manipulation. Unfortunately, his impeccably brooding older brother James (aka Lord Radcliffe) sees through her little schemes and is confident he can see her off. Except that there’s something about how shamelessly she goes about her fortune-hunting that he finds rather beguiling…

As the London balls pile up, we learn a lot about the strange demands of Regency etiquette—including the different gradations of curtesy required for a duke, a marquis or (god forbid) somebody with no title at all. Irwin also deftly juggles several subplots as Kitty’s unstoppable progress continues.

Granted, you probably won’t be too surprised by what happens in the end, but you may well be by how the book gets there. Irwin obviously had a huge amount of fun writing this, her first novel—and it’s difficult to imagine many readers who won’t have just as much fun reading it.

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by Jonathan Dimbleby (Penguin, £9.99). Dimbleby’s account of the 1941 German invasion of Russia is a highly readable, if inevitably shocking reminder of the scale of the campaign— and the horrifying violence involved.