This hilarious account takes us back over fifty years to the cold-war period when the UK was still requiring all eighteen-year-olds to do two years of national service. Brasso, Blanco and Bull is Tony Thorne (recruit no 23339788)’s detailed factual account of how it was for a boy straight from school to be licked into shape (or ‘gripped’ in the language of the book) by his semi-literate L/Corporal Prudence.

We accompany him through his disastrous medical to the training camp and through two years of slow progress through the ranks towards a hilarious court-martial where he is the witness. (His colleague, in a drunken stupor, had demolished the cookhouse!)

There is a ‘laugh-out-loud’ moment on almost every page, yet the entire two-year experience is portrayed as a crude, senseless and brutal way to create a standing army. The most moving message that emerges from the text is the lasting friendships that were created during the national service experience.

There seems to be a spate of historical works and novels about the Tudor period of English history on the shelves just now. It isn’t difficult to see why. This is history that is shared by most of the English-speaking world – and what history! One man, brutally beheading two of his wives and heartlessly divorcing the ugly one and the one who couldn’t produce a son!

Philippa Gregory’s novel recreates the atmosphere of the Tudor court, seen through the eyes of Anne Boleyn‘s younger sister, Mary who was Henry VIII’s mistress in her early teen years, and bore him two children, including a son who later became one of Queen Elizabeth’s favoured courtiers.

Any feminist will be shocked at the way these Boleyn girls are pawns in the hands of the men of the powerful Howard family and raised to power or discarded according to the whims of the pampered King who is portrayed as an unendearing figure.

Anne Boleyn is shown to be the scheming girl that history has painted yet, even though we all know her fate, it shocks us when, after 500 pages of history recreated, she reaches the scaffold. The rivalry between the Boleyn girls – the thread that holds this novel together – is finally at an end and we follow Mary into an unexpected conclusion.

This is very readable historical fiction.

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.

A truly well-written autobiography can be sheer pleasure to read. I believe that Lorna Sage’s ‘Bad Blood’ is a classic of the genre. Her name briefly hit the headlines when I was at school. She was of my generation and did the ‘unforgivable’  in the tiny village of Hanmer, in Flintshire, North Wales in the sixties. She became pregnant at the age of sixteen, while still at school.

The autobiography recounts her vicarage childhood, living with her eccentric grandparents until her father returned from the army. She tells of the trials of bullying at school as well as her bleak family life. Although Lorna was convinced that marriage was not for her, her pregnancy made her a teenage bride.

In what was liberal and forward-looking thinking in the sixties, Lorna and her husband, Vic Sage, were both admitted to Durham University where both earned firsts. Lorna became a distinguished literary critic before her death from emphysema, just days after her autobiography won the Whitbread Prize for Biography.

Paddy Ashdown, A Fortunate Life

Ed. note: Paddy Ashdown is the guest speaker Tuesday 2 June at the Chateau de Prangins. The event is  sponsored by Executives International. Details, registration He will also be appearing Wednesday 1 July at a book signing at Off the Shelf in Geneva, followed by a presentation at an evening event sponsored by the British Swiss Chamber of Commerce at the Hotel Beau Rivage.

Paddy Ashdown, for eleven years leader of the UK Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third political party, has a special significance for Genevans. For years he was one of us, and his love of skiing, the Alps and nearby Savoie and Burgundy rings through his autobiography. He even has a French son-in-law and French grandchildren.

Paddy’s Bedford School reports claim that he had ‘no aptitude for languages’.  He modestly declares in a footnote that, when asked how many languages he speaks, he says he has forgotten six and is ‘nowadays only comfortable in French’. This from a man who has the equivalent of a first class honours degree in Chinese and who, in the course of a thrilling career, has functioned in Hindi, Malay, German, and what used to be called Serbo-Croat!

Such modesty is typical of the man we feel we know well from his political days. Many of us remember his years in Parliament, the initial triumph in the Yeovil seat and the growing strength of his party. We recall a scandal where he was hounded by the press. We sympathise with the failed ambition to partner Tony Blair in a move towards the proportional representation and constitutional reform that the UK’s third party would so warmly welcome. This section of Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon’s autobiography leaves us with a sense of  ’déja vu’ where we love Paddy for his honesty. In the current British political climate of corruption, it is refreshing to read of such political passion, defence of liberal ideas and devoted enthusiasm for a cause.

But this section of the autobiography (just over a third) pales in significance compared with the other parts: the accounts of Paddy’s school years, his leadership of a commando in Borneo, the Special Boat Service, time in Belfast, and his deeply emotional involvement with the cause of Bosnia Herzegovina.

Paddy admits, several times, that a privileged education has led him into his ‘fortunate life’, but Bedford was not easy. Gifted at sport but not keen on the academic aspects of school, he survived  early years of rough-and-tumble of a public school because of his ability to fight.

At 18, he chose the Royal Marines rather than a university. That is where the really exciting sections of the book begin. The descriptions of the jungle patrols of his commando are in such evocative prose that we feel as though we have shared the experiences – like the parachuting, and  nerve-wracking underwater entries and exits from a submarine during his Special Boat Service years.

The most moving element of the work is, undeniably, the involvement with the Balkan crisis. Lord Ashdown himself says in his prologue,

two of my Technicolor days, the best and the worst, fall consecutively in the second week of August 1992. Together they form not just a memory but also somehow a distillation of the theme of my life; that of conflict and its human consequences when the beast of intolerance and bigotry gets loose. Looking back, this seems like a subterranean stream which has appeared, vanished and re-emerged, never completely leaving me, since my earliest days.

He is speaking of his meeting with Radovan Karadzic and subsequent visit to  the brutal prison of Manjaca.

His description of Bosnia Herzegovina, where he spent nearly four years as the International High Representative and European Union Special Representative, is simply beautiful. We live with him and Jane, his wife, through four moving years there.

We leave this book feeling immense admiration for such a gentle and honest man who has given his life so generously for causes he truly believes in.

There is the light-hearted side too! A wealth of anecdotes enriches this autobiography and raises a smile on almost every page – like the wonderful one about a lecturer’s demonstration of how to survive – eat a live frog sandwich - or the description of coping with Balkan politics – ‘like herding cats’.

Paddy Ashdown’s autobiography, A Fortunate Life, can be obtained in Geneva from the English Bookshop, Off the Shelf.