These are among the books that landed on my desk this first month of 2024. The first four are from Exclusive Books’s top reads. Some will be reviewed in full later. – Vivien Horler

Normal Women – 900 years of making history, by Philippa Gregory (William Collins)

The Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered to embellish the newly built cathedral in Bayeux in 1077, tells the story of the conquest of England by William I, the French Duke of Normandy. It is 70m long and depicts an invasion force of 632 men, along with almost 200 horses, 55 dogs, 500 other animals and birds, and just five women – all of them threatened or suffering violence. In fact, points out author Philippa Gregory, there are more penises in the tapestry than women.

This indicates the way that women have been largely ignored by historians over the centuries. The only women of interest to male record keepers – mostly men of the church – were mothers, queens, taxpayers and criminals.

William Churchill’s magisterial A History of the English -Speaking Peoples, published in the 20^th century, “is a description not of the ‘peoples’ but of English-speaking men, 1 413 named men, and just 98 named women. What we read as a history of [Britain] is a history of men, as viewed by men, as recorded by men”.

Gregory, an admired writer of historical novels, notably The Other Boleyn Girl, was originally inspired to write this (equally magisterial) book by the life of Mary Boleyn, sister to the unfortunate Anne. Mary “made her own remarkable life but enters history only as the sister to the more famous Anne. She made me think of all the other women whose names and stories are lost…”

Gregory says what she wanted to write was “a huge book about women – those engaged in unusual practices and those living uneventful lives…”

They were there, in history, brides and queens, nuns, witches and soldiers, “all part of women’s history… even though they lived and died without a man noticing them for long enough to write down their names”.

I think this book looks brilliant.

A Memoir of My Former Self – A life in writing, by Hilary Mantel (John Murray)

Hilary Mantel was the prize-winning author of the brilliant Wolf Hall trilogy, for which she won the Booker Prize twice, along with other novels and two works of non-fiction, Giving Up the Ghost and Mantel Pieces.

Now, following her death in 2022, her book editor for 20 years, Nicholas Pearson, has compiled a collection of her writing for newspapers and periodicals in which, he says, her wicked sense of humour often comes shining through.

The pieces reveal “a full and exhilarating self-portrait… she isn’t afraid to lay herself bare”. While Mantel Pieces was a collection of writing from the London Review of Books, this collection is drawn from wider sources.

She wrote for the Guardian for years, the New York Review of Books and The Spectator, as well as delivering the BBC Reith Lectures in 2017, which were meditations on how people interpret the past. Pearson says these lectures “are perhaps the finest distillation we have of the art of the historical novelist”.

In one piece, dated 2007, she refers to a remark by Martin Amis, who said he thought of journalism and criticism as writing left-handed, “where the connection isn’t to the part of me that novels come from”.

She says, being contrary and literal-minded, she decided to write a paragraph with her left hand, and this is what emerged:

“It’s so slow, so uncontrolled… the least flourish slides all over the paper… ‘W’ I find is the very devil… tension transmits to your whole body, as if you were trying to write with your legs. No wonder it was so tiring to be at infant school. Noon, and you were done for.”

I think this title looks great too.

Killers of the Flower Moon – Oil, money, murder and the birth of the FBI, by David Grann (Simon & Schuster)

This is an extraordinary story of indigenous people – Native Americans – who in the 1870s were kicked off their productive and traditional lands in Kansas to a barren reservation in Oklahoma, which turned out, several decades later, to be on top of some of some of the richest oil deposits in the US.

To access the oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage people for leases, rights and royalties, and by the early 1920s, the Osage were believed to be the wealthiest people per capita in the world.

At the centre of the story is Mollie Burkhart, a member of the Osage tribe, and her white husband, Ernest. In 1921 Osage people began to disappear, including Mollie’s older sister Anna, whose body was found a week or so later with a bullet wound to the top of the head.

The blurb on the back of this book says, “as the death toll climbed, the [fledgling] FBI took up the case and with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history”.

David Grann’s book, based on years of research, was first published in the US in 2017, but has now been rereleased to coincide with a Martin Scorsese feature film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert de Niro and Lily Gladstone.

I’ve watched the film’s trailer and read the first couple of chapters of the book, and it looks like a cracker.

The Secret Life of John le Carré, by Adam Sisman (Profile Books)

In his epigraph at the start of this volume, Adam Sisman quotes from John le Carré’s novel A Perfect Spy: “All his life he’s been inventing versions of himself that are untrue.” It appears that’s what Le Carré did too.

In 2015 Sisman published a biography of Le Carré, writing that it was the truth “insofar as I was able t ascertain it, but not the whole truth. While [Le Carré ] was alive, I was obliged to suppress some of what I knew.”

When the biography appeared, a reviewer wrote: “It’s hard not to feel there is a great deal we’re not being told.” He was right.

Among the information Sisman suppressed was the fact Le Carré had been a serial adulterer, with his pursuit of women apparently the key to unlocking his fiction.

In a letter to Sisman, Le Carré wrote: “My infidelities produced in my life a duality & tension that became almost a necessary drug for my writing, a dangerous edge of some kind… They are not therefore a ‘dark part’ of my life, separate from the ‘high calling’, so to speak, but, alas, integral to it, & inseparable.”

Sisman says without much effort he identified 11 women with whom Le Carré had had affairs in the first 30 years of his marriage, and he knew there were plenty more. Some were recognisable as characters in the novels.

Despite this, he forbade Sisman to write about them in his lifetime. Le Carré died in late 2020, and his wife Jane just a few weeks later.

This volume, then, is not a reworked biography but a supplement to the biography, containing material Sisman says he omitted then as well as information that has emerged since. “It might be described as What Was Left Out.”

How’s that for a teaser?

How to Fight a War, by Mike Martin (DeltaBooks/ Jonathan Ball)

With wars raging in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa, geopolitical tensions  over China, Taiwan and the South China sea, “the world has not looked this chaotic for decades”.

Apparently there are ways to fight wars and ways not, and the current problem is that often those waging wars don’t have much grasp of the tried and tested ways to succeed.

A former British Army officer with military experience in Afghanistan, Mike Martin has a PhD in war studies, and is a senior visiting research fellow in the department of war studies at King’s College, London.

In his introduction he says at the core of How to Fight a War is the notion that winning wars “is about understanding and following basic principles… wars are almost always lost due to the same simple ideas being misapplied or ignored”.

“When war leaders fail in their aims, it is usually because they have ignored warfare’s simple ideas, thinking that, for instnance, logistics matter less to them than to their adversaries. This ‘wishing away’ happens because of three fallacies: overconfidence; being bewitched by a new technology that will ‘solve’ their problems; or misunderstanding the enemy and their perspective.”

The book is intended as a reference guide for the commander in chief of a nation’s military, because leaders need the strategic, operational and tactical skills to wage war successfully.

Martin has chapters on strategy, tactics, morale, training, the environment in which fighting takes place, the necessary land, sea and air forces, information and cyber operations, and nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

He is nothing if not blunt.  Part three of the book, he says, “brings it all together and shows you how to orchestrate lethal violence to achieve your political goals. In other words, how to change your enemy’s mind, or kill them.”

The book has a foreword by Professor Abel Esterhuyse, chair of the department of strategic studies at Stellenbosch University’s faculty of military science.

Words Words Words, by David Crystal (Oxford University Press)

David Crystal OBE is a British academic who works on the linguistics of the English language. Linguistics is a highly technical and philosophical field, but Crystal’s brilliance – to my mind – is how he can make the subject fascinating to the lay person. He is the author of many readable books on the subject, including this one.

It is not a new book (it was first published in 2006) – but it is new to me; I spotted it on the Exclusive Books’ shelves at UCT’s summer school, and snapped it up.

He says while all the world’s 6 000 or so languages have fascinated him, English is his favourite, “probably because of its literature”. It is also his home language, which helps.

Everyone has some interest in words, whether in dialect words, or the way small children put words together, or the history of a word’s meaning.

So how many words are there in English? This is an impossible question, but we can get a hint from the Oxford English Dictionary which had over half a million words in its 1992 edition, or The Third New Webster International, the biggest American dictionary, which had 450 000 entries in 1961. Both dictionaries have grown since.

He writes about the development of language in children, saying most utter their first word around the age of 12 months, starting off with individual words, but some launch directly into simple sentences.

Lord Macaulay, the historian, was said to have been a late talker who began speaking in full sentences at three. There is a story, which Crystal is pretty sceptical about, that when he was asked, at three, why he started talking so late, Macaulay is said to have replied: “Hitherto, nothing of sufficient significance has warranted my verbal attention.”

This is a little book, but a delight.