Out now in paperback JANE SHILLING
NO PICNIC ON MOUNT KENYA by Felice Benuzzi (MacLehose Press £9.99)
IN 1941, an Italian civil servant, Felice Benuzzi, was taken prisoner by Allied forces and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp at the foot of Mount Kenya.
Glimpsing the ‘ethereal mountain emerging from a tossing sea of clouds’, Benuzzi was entranced.
‘It was the first 17,000ft peak I had seen... I was definitely in love.’
Inspired by the sight, he plotted a daring adventure.
With two comrades, he would escape from the camp, climb the mountain, then return to imprisonment, for he concluded that permanent escape was impractical.
And that, with meticulous planning, crampons made from barbed wire and a picture of the mountain taken from a tin of Kenyan corned beef, is what they did, audaciously hoisting the Italian flag on the summit.
This classic adventure story, first published in 1947 and reissued with a previously unpublished final chapter, is a gloriously readable celebration of courage, humour and the human longing for freedom.
QUEEN OF SPIES: DAPHNE PARK by Paddy Hayes (Duckworth £9.99)
‘I HAVE always looked like a cheerful, fat missionary,’ Daphne Park once remarked to an interviewer. ‘It wouldn’t be any use if [I] went around looking sinister, would it?’
Indeed not. Park’s motherly appearance was the perfect cover for her remarkable career as Britain’s top female spy. She was born in 1921 in what is now Tanzania, and received little formal education until she was sent to school in England, aged 11.
Her tough early years fostered a personality of unusual determination, and after Oxford she found a job with the wartime Special Operations Executive, and later with the Secret Intelligence Service.
Her biographer, Paddy Hayes, chronicles Park’s dashing career in posts including Moscow, Hanoi, Mongolia and Africa with great gusto, compensating for a certain shortage of personal material (Park remained the soul of discretion) with a vivid account of the very male world of spies and secrecy in which Park played such a
distinguished role.
MAIL OBSESSION by Mark Mason (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £8.99)
‘ONE man’s list is another man’s challenge,’ writes Mark Mason in the introduction to his compendium of the strange facts attached to Britain’s postcodes.
The UK is divided into 124 postcode areas, from AB to ZE (referring to the Shetland Islands which, until 1975, were known as Zetland), and Mason makes it his mission to ‘poke into every one of the UK’s 124 nooks and crannies’.
Postcodes, he found, were pioneered by Sir Rowland Hill in the mid-19th century.
Beginning his adventure at the Watford Gap service station — the very first such station on one of the country’s first motorways, the M1, he set off in the pleasant pursuit of idle trivia.
If you are thrilled by the information that British Summer Time was invented by the great-great-grandfather of Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, you will find this book a source of endless delight.