All around me people were laughing out loud and I had a struggle to lay my hands on this popular book as one after another, the members of the family hung onto it and hooted. At last I had my turn – and laughed out loud!

For Crying Out Loud! is the third in the series of tongue-in-cheek rather irreverent books written by this outspoken Yorkshireman – The World According to Clarkson. Each short essay continues Clarkson’s defence of common sense or recounts a hilarious (or perhaps not so funny) experience, like his attempts to dispose of a stinking dead seal that had accidentally washed up on his beach – not as easy as you might think!

Clarkson writes with humour but there is sense underlying all that he says. All of us will share, for example, the frustration that led to one of the essays in his first volume, ‘Forget the Euro, just give us a single socket!’ Yes indeed!

If you are feeling gloomy or are one of those grumpy old men who reiterate, “And another thing …”, this is just the book for you.

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.

Lev is a legal East European immigrant into the United Kingdom. In The Road Home we travel with him on the coach that brings him from his home village, his elderly mother, beloved small daughter and his friend Rudi. Lydia is on the seat next to him and stays connected with him throughout the novel.

In London we share Lev’s struggle to survive and rise through the working ranks. London offers him work, friendship, sex and money and also some hostility and misery. This novel is an unusual glimpse into the difficult lives of migrant workers.

Back at home, Rudi’s struggles with his American Chevrolet add hilarity to the novel and there is grief when the native village is going to be submerged under a new reservoir. With great charm and sensitivity, Rose Tremain brings the story to a successful conclusion.

The Road Home won the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 2008 and it is easy to see why. it is a novel of great humanity.

Under Their Skin is another work by our local writer, Dinah Lee Küng and it is just as enjoyable as AVisit from Voltaire. This novel, too, is centred on Geneva, where laser expert, Dr Roman Micheli has a monopoly in the field of removing skin blemishes.

Roman’s marriage to a WHO leprosy expert has lasted twenty years but Isabel is almost permanently on the move and we are discreetly made aware of Roman’s unfulfilled longing for a son. Roman’s practice is threatened, too, by the arrival on the Geneva scene of Isabel’s one-time boyfriend, the ‘Botox King of New York’ who is planning to open a chain of beauty parlours that will eclipse Roman’s more professional clinic.

The patients we meet range from Shino, a low class Japanese gangster who is brilliantly tattooed from head to foot, to the delightful violinist Mira Sullivan. Mira was chosen from an orphanage by her adoptive mother because of her port-wine stain, the same reason her birth mother abandoned her, and is reluctant to lose the mark that brought her into a new life.

The novel follows the various threads, sometimes with delicious humour (as, for example, Shino’s tattoos are removed from his most private places) to great pathos as we get to know Mira. The threads are brilliantly woven together in a very moving finale. This novel is tremendous fun to read. There is an added pleasure in the familiar Genevan landscape that is evoked throughout the novel and the gentle humour at the expense of the Swiss – like for example an interview that takes place with a police officer after an unexplained murder.

It is available from Halban Publishers, London, and a reading guide is can be found at www.halbanpublishers.com

You do not need to have a scientific or mathematical background to appreciate this book by Ben Goldsmith, a doctor working in the NHS who is also the Guardian ’Bad Science‘ columnist. It helps to be curious about the incessant stream of articles or stories that seem to be compulsory nowadays in every edition of a newspaper, magazine or newscast confidently declaring  ’Miracle cure found’, ‘Salt will kill you’ (or, the following day, ‘Salt will not kill you’).

You might also like to know a little more about the basis (or lack of basis) to articles or advertisements on topics such as ’3-day instant detox wonder’ and complementary or alternative medicine.

Some of these articles and claims do have a tenuous link to real scientific evidence, of course, but Goldacre’s book might surprise you about just how tenuous many of these links are, and just how exaggerated and imprecise most of these stories really are. His chapters on ‘Brain Gym’ and ‘Pill solves complex social problem’ deserve to be in your neighbourhood school science curriculum.

Not that Goldacre minds if you still disagree with his views even after you have read his book: as he says in his introduction, ‘you’ll probably be wrong with a lot more panache and flair than you could possibly manage right now’. Read it and judge for yourself.

Goldacre’s book is published by Fourth Estate, London 2008.

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.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, is an astonishing novel. It is moving, gripping, chilling – difficult to find words to describe a book that it is impossible to put down. You will probably read it in one go and carry it in your mind for days afterwards.

The man and boy have been painfully making their way south through a dead world, in the hope of escaping a bleak, grey winter that has followed an apocalypse. Nothing is left growing in America. The sun is hidden by a blanket of grey. Even the snow is grey.

There are other humans on the road, but they pose a threat that becomes increasingly horrifying with each encounter. Starvation faces the father and child, as there is little left to scavenge in the destroyed world that they labour through as they drag their cart south.

Their hope is to find other ‘good’ humans, who have not resorted to violence and cannibalism. However, when they reach the coast, the same post-apocalyptic scene greets them.

A film version of the novel was released in 2009.

The subject is grim, yet this novel is mesmerising and rich with humanity. If you have time for only one novel, I would make it this one!

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.

The seventh edition of this classic was published in September 2009, edited by Elizabeth Knowles. It is thicker than ever since the dictionary keeps up with what is being quoted in print and online and maintains its wonderful fund of quotations. This edition has almost a thousand new quotations.

This edition is also more beautiful than ever. The cover alone is enough to tempt a potential buyer – a far cry from the plain powder-blue with white writing of our old 1953 second edition.

All the old favourites are there; Mallory’s renowned response to the question why he wanted to climb Everest, ‘Because it’s there’, Mark Twain’s, ‘The report of my death was an exaggeration’ and  Barack Obama has even made his appearance with, ‘The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice’.

Browsing the book becomes compulsive and you are left with Oscar Wilde’s famous thought, ‘I wish I had said that’, to which of course Whistler replied, You will, Oscar, you will.’

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.