MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

TRAVELLING LIGHT by Alastair Sawday

(Abacus £9.99) ‘LAURENCE Sterne once suggested that we travel for one of just three reasons: imbecility of mind, infirmity of body or inevitable necessity.’

This is a thought to cherish while stuck at Heathrow Airport, waiting in vain for information about an inexplicably cancelled flight.

But Alastair Sawday finds more positive reasons to travel: escape, curiosity and ‘the longing to be with people who do things differently’.

Sawday’s guidebooks have provided generations of travellers with recommendations for quirky, but comfortable, accommodation: French chateaux, Italian castelli and English farmhouses.

In this genial memoir, he celebrates exploration at a gentle pace that allows time to appreciate the beauty of one’s surroundings — and the pleasures of the local cuisine.

WHO LOST RUSSIA? by Peter Conradi

(Oneworld £10.99) ‘THE founding of the Soviet Union was proclaimed from the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow on December 30, 1922. Its death warrant was signed almost seven decades later in a forest in Belarus.’

Peter Conradi was a foreign correspondent in Soviet Moscow for six years. In his authoritative and readable book, he explores how the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 appeared to offer a tantalising opportunity for international co-operation — even world peace — but it was not to be. How the troubled relationship between Russia and the West will now develop remains to be seen, but Conradi gives the final word to the American Cold War diplomat George Kennan, who said only the Russian people themselves could bring about enduring change in their country.

THE VACCINE RACE by Meredith Wadman

(Black Swan £9.99) MEASLES, rubella, polio and rabies have devastated the lives of countless people across the centuries.

Scientists in the Sixties were desperate to produce vaccines to counter their spread. In 1968, a young microbiologist, Leonard Hayflick, removed 375 vials from his former employers and took them to Stanford University, where he had just become a medical microbiology professor.

The vials contained cells grown by Hayflick from a human foetus: they would bring remarkable benefits to humanity and are still used today.

But, although Hayflick had created the cells, they were not his to take. He narrowly avoided prosecution and his career never recovered from the controversy.

Meredith Wadman tells the inspiring, and sometimes murky, story of the battle to protect the world from viral disease.