Elizabeth
David Starkey
(Vintage, £7.99)
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Fraudulently marketed as "the book of the TV series", Starkey's life of Elizabeth is no such thing: whereas his glorified lectures on Channel 4 covered the entire reign - so that viewers entertainingly saw one tetchy old queen beadily assessing another - the biography stops soon after her accession. Conceiving it as a "historical thriller", Starkey is transparently besotted with his heroine, sensitive and adroit in teasing out the subtexts of Tudor portraits or ceremonies, and virtually eschews academic bitchery. All of which makes you wonder what drugs they inject him with before he interrogates hapless bien pensants on The Moral Maze .
Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed
Dean King
(Sceptre, £8.99)
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Begun in 1969 on the suggestion of a US publisher looking for a successor to C S Forester, O'Brian's sequence of Napoleonic naval novels featuring Captain Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin could scarcely be less like most 20th-century fiction - indeed, that was central to its attraction, you suspect, for such admirers as Tory ministers and newspaper editors. But O'Brian's own life was a novel by Graham Greene or Patricia Highsmith, in which a wartime intelligence officer called Richard Russ changed his name in 1945 and maintained the lie that he was an Irishman until his death last year.
