| | Review by The Spectator

Volume III of Jonathan Sumption’s history of the Hundred Years War (Divided Houses, Faber, £40) is the next instalment of an undertaking at least as great as those of the 19th- century Stakhanovite historians. Sumption clearly knows every step of the ground, organises his narrative in masterly fashion and stimulates and sustains the reader’s interest for over 1,000 pages. I can’t wait for Volume IV.

Raymond Carr

I have been impressed by Jonathan Sachs’ Future Tense (Hodder, £16.99). As Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation he gives non-Jews, like myself, an understanding of Judaism over the last 4,000 years of its history. Persecution and the rise of a new violent brand of anti-Semitism, he maintains, has turned some Jews into considering themselves as a people apart. Isolation invites danger. ‘We must stand together with other faith communities’. It must be confessed, however, that Sachs’ universalism is full of unresolved contradictions.

Jimmy Burns’ lively biography of his father Tom Burns, Papa Spy (Bloomsbury, £18.99) is more than an act of filial piety. For Tom Burns, a product of Stoneyhurst, his Catholicism determined his politics. During the Spanish Civil War he supported Franco; in the subsequent world war, as press attaché in Madrid, he used his Catholic friends in Spain to keep Franco out of the clutches of the Nazis. He made many enemies on the Left. It is to his credit that Kim Philby, long a Soviet agent, moved heaven and earth to get him dismissed. His son has the journalist’s eye for good copy. The actor Leslie Howard, brought by the British Council to Portugal and Spain to boost British prestige, disappears as his plane vanishes on his return flight. The murky world of intelligence, counter-intelligence, deception and double agents, provide a series of real James Bonds.

Piers Paul Read’s Death of a Pope (Ignatius Press, £14.35) is a theological thriller that reveals the inner workings of the Vatican. It is so skilfully constructed that it makes compulsive reading from its first words to its dramatic conclusion.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, £18.99) is an acclaimed historical novel based on extensive researches into Tudor history. Novels are legitimate sources when describing the intellectual and social currents of the time in which they were written. Historical novels, as such, fall between two stools, blurring the distinction between history as a discipline and fiction. This is the case with Mantel.