Former government ministers treated with rudeness by Jeremy Paxman need not read far into his memoir to discover why the presenter had such an urge to humiliate those in authority. As early as page six he recounts how his father, a former Naval officer, 'was accustomed to chains of command, and the merest suggestion of insubordination would send him into a fury, during which he'd grab the nearest hard object with which to beat whoever had provoked him. I was thrashed with sticks, shoes, cricket stumps, cricket bats or the flat of his hand.'
NEW FICTION
- POPULAR FICTION Imagine Agatha Christie combined with Father Ted and you've got TV chat-show and Eurovision host Graham Norton's literary debut.
- MUST READS 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.
- LITERARY FICTION The latest in Hogarth's patchy series of Shakespeare tales retold by novelists, Margaret Atwood's take on The Tempest is an unqualified success.
- CRIME FICTION This is crime writing at its most sublime: spell-binding story-telling with a heroine to treasure in Detective Antoinette Conway of the Dublin Murder Squad.
- RETRO FICTION It's the first meeting of a men's group. At host Kramer's spacious Californian house, they bond, share stories, the drinks flow and the waccy baccy circulates.
- HISTORICAL FICTION After taking her first communion in a rural Irish village, 11-year-old Anna O'Donnell stopped eating.
- DEBUT FICTION Alex's nine-year marriage is in tatters. His wife, Jody, has asked him to leave home until he has figured things out.
THIS WEEK'S PAPERBACKS
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Why the first SAS soldiers were mad, bad - and VERY dangerous to know: The fearless killers who thought nothing of crossing the desert without water or boots
Ben Macintyre's book is the first ever fully authorised history of the SAS, covering its secret activities in World War II. Macintyre had access to a confidential, 500-page 'war diary' compiled by the regiment's archivists. It was a gold mine of first-hand reports from those who took part in one clandestine operation after another, from the regiment's formation in 1941 until 1945. A master at setting the pulse racing, Macintyre relates stories of raw courage and daring by extraordinary men whose chief characteristic was that they defied every convention.
LITERARY NEWS
- Adrian Mole author Sue Townsend, 68, dies at her home in Leicester after a stroke
- New chapter in the history of the Bronte birthplace as new owners turn it into a cafe honouring the family's literary heritage
- Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, hospitalised with lung and urinary tract infections
- You don't need sex to sell! Dan Brown's Inferno tops Amazon best-seller list for 2013 as readers look for different thrills after Fifty Shades trilogy
The loves and lust of lonely Mrs Amis: Elizabeth Jane Howard's affairs with married men ended in tears, as did her marriage to cruel Kingsley
Kingsley Amis, who was married to her from 1965 until 1983, ended up absolutely hating Elizabeth Jane Howard (pictured). Amis was particularly aggrieved by her 'automatic assumption of the role of the injured party in any clash of wills', by her 'bottomless pit of neediness', and the theatrical way she had of unpinning her hair and slowly tossing it about.