Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-84) shared the Nobel Prize with Schrödinger in 1933. He was the youngest scientific theoretician ever to win the prize and is known for his achievement of co-discovering  quantum mechanics as well as his prediction of antimatter.

Graham Farmelo’s prize-winning biography is meticulously researched and sheds light on this elusive pioneer of quantum theory. Of  French-English parentage,  he was difficult to know and uninterested in fame. Yet Dirac loved his family and was a loyal friend. Although he was recognised as a mathematical genius, financial difficulty initially barred his entry to Cambridge. We follow his struggle, including one delightful incident where the college lecturer turns to him to ask, “I have gone wrong, can you spot it?”

Farmelo recounts Dirac’s immense contribution to science and his reaction to the development of the nuclear bomb in the war years as well as his relationships with the other great scientists of the period. This is one of the great scientific biographies that shed new light on a personality and on the period.

David Starkey’s recommendation on the front cover of the Bloomsbury Press edition of this work of historical biography was sufficient to tempt me to buy Mary Tudor, England’s First Queen. He calls Anna Whitelock’s work  ’An impressive and powerful debut’, and indeed it is.

British children were taught at school about ‘Bloody Mary’ and we all learned that she died with the words ‘Calais is on my heart’ on her lips but this is not the Mary that Anna Whitelock evokes with such scholarship and passion.

In four parts, entitled ‘A king’s daughter’, ‘A King’s Sister’, ‘A Queen’, and ‘A King’s Wife’ we meet Mary as the fêted daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. We follow her tribulations during the years of the ascendency of Anne Boleyn, when Mary was declared a bastard and became almost a servant in the household of her sister Elizabeth. We admire her refusal to bow to the new religion even under duress and when commanded to do so by her brother, the young King Edward VI.

Finally we see her fight for survival and her struggle to claim her throne when denied succession by her own younger brother. Anna Whitelock focuses on Mary’s success as a queen which contrasted sadly with her failure as a woman.  Married late in life to Philip of Spain, she suffered phantom pregnancies, debilitating illnesses and the frequent absence of her husband. However, she filled her royal role with wisdom and ability.

We learn, through Anna Whitelock’s clear presentation of the facts, that Mary’s role has been deliberately distorted by politicians almost since the moment of her death when she was denigrated in ‘Foxe’s Martyrs’. This work, totally devoted to Mary, does much to reinstate this first English Queen.

In Now Then Lad, Mike Pannett recounts, with a fair dose of humour, some of his adventures during his first year as a country bobby in North Yorkshire. This is the county made famous by James Herriot’s series of stories of a vet’s life and Mike Pannett, a Yorkshireman who has already worked in the Met in London’s Battersea, works in the same down-to-earth farming community.

He tells of encounters with burglars, incidents with sheep and cattle and even with a lost mole who was anxious to cross a busy road on  the night of an open-air concert. His work involves, among other tasks, hunting for lost hikers on the moors and investigating the balls stolen from the local colonel’s gateway. Mike’s personal life is glanced at, and his developing relationships with local people and with Ann, who was to become his wife.

Most of all, this book is a celebration of North Yorkshire, the Pennines, the Wolds and the farms and villages that nestle in its Dales. Rich with local flavour, this is a delightful true-life account.

1953 was coronation year and the year Hillary and Tenzing made the first ascent of Everest. Yet, for many, the year is remembered because it was the year Arthur Dolphin died. He was a remarkable rock climber who had already made his name as the man who could master inaccessible routes at Almscliff, near his native Baildon in Yorkshire and in the English Lake District.

He had teamed up with a fourth year medical student from Belgium and was making the relatively easy descent of the Dent du Geant – that little spike that sticks up at the end of the Mont Blanc range, when he unaccountably slipped and fell to his death.

Arthur’s skill is legendary in the climbing world and his life has been remembered in Memories of Dolphin, compiled and edited by Tom Greenwood, published by the Green Woods Press in 2009.

The book is particularly welcome as any profit that may result from the sale of the book will be donated to the ‘Jack Bloor Fund’. This fund was created to help those who lack the means to pursue their dreams in the outdoors by allocating grants. www.jackbloor.co.uk The book comes with a free DVD that shows Arthur in Action on the climbs in the Lake District.