Fiction & Nonfiction

Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell

By Tom Bower

Faber and Faber, £18.99

He is one of the most powerful – and cruellest – men in show business, dashing young artists’ dreams on such programmes as The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. He’s got it all – wealth, fame, influence – so why would Simon Cowell want revenge? You could see why hundreds of X Factor rejects would want to exact vengeance on this modern-day Machiavelli, but, like the shark, Cowell himself seems to have no natural predators.

It turns out that, like many successful and driven people, Cowell has several scores to settle, not least with Simon Fuller, his former partner in the music biz, with whom he was locked in a decade-long dispute over who originated the idea for American Idol.

Cowell grew up in the reflected light of show business: his mother was a dancer in the West End of London, and she socialised with many stars in the family’s neighbourhood of Elstree. (Young Simon got to sit on Bette Davis’s lap.) He modelled his brutally honest judging style on the pop producer Mickie Most, whose withering barbs on the talent show New Faces entertained viewers in the 1970s. It took a while for Cowell to develop the Midas touch: while working as an AR consultant with RCA, he turned down Take That, saying “the singer’s too fat”.

Cowell’s sexuality has been the source of much speculation – his brother tried to “out” him at his own 50th birthday, and Louis Walsh taunted him with the song title Does Your Mother Know? He wears high-waisted trousers (I thought gay men liked hipsters), uses Botox, travels with enough lotions and potions to stock a branch of Boots, and holds his Kool cigarette decidedly camply, but these, says Bower, are simply signs of Cowell’s vanity and narcissism.

Many suspect that his ever-lengthening string of casual girlfriends is a cover for homosexuality. His exes include the singer Sinitta, an early protegee of Cowell’s, and the models Terri Seymour and Jackie St Clair. He prefers glamorous types who are not afraid to show off their curves, but he shies away from commitment: there’s no room in his bathroom cabinet for anyone else’s perfumes. His work, says Cowell, is his mistress, as his ex-fiancee Mezhgan Hussainy learned when she tried to move into pole position in his life.

The most explosive revelation here is Cowell's fling with his former fellow X Factor judge Dannii Minogue, a salacious titbit nicely timed to stir up media interest in the run-up to the next series, starting at the end of the summer. As Cowell is quick to remind producers, The X Factor is not about the contestants; it's about the judges, whose bickering and backstabbing fuel the soap opera of reality TV. KEVIN COURTNEY

The Bicycle Book

By Bella Bathurst

HarperPress, £8.99

Bella Bathurst, in this wonderful book, begins her multifaceted and vastly entertaining look at the history of cycling with Flann O’Brien’s famous theory that those who spend too long on their bicycles begin to meld into their machines. As Bathurst points out in the closing pages of the book, having filled her chapters with weird and wonderful stories about every aspect of the bike, from its use as a weapon of 20th-century warfare to the punishing world of the professional road racer, O’Brien’s theory isn’t that surreal after all: some cyclists truly are incomplete without their bike.

Some of the history will be familiar to anyone who has read Robert Penn’s excellent It’s All About the Bike, but Bathurst is such a vivid writer that her stories will appeal to even the most cyclephobic motorist.

A favourite chapter is the one about Zetta Hills, an indomitable woman – in later life she became a sea-lion tamer and a stunt motorcyclist – who in the 1920s cycled across the English Channel to France on a bike fixed to two planks of wood.

Indeed, while most women weren’t quite as full of derring-do as Hills, Bathurst points out that bicycles and the freedom they gave were a boon to women. The US suffragette Susan B Anthony argued in 1896 that “bicycling has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world”.

Early female adopters did, though, have to overcome a number of obstacles, from the unwieldy business of cycling in crinolines to the concerns that cycling would, as one French expert declared, “ruin the feminine organs of matrimonial necessity”. There’s quite a body of literature written by male doctors and commentators about how dangerous sitting astride a saddle could be. Happily, their solution, side-saddle bicycles, never took off.

In London, Bathurst points out, cycling has become hugely popular for commuters, thanks, she says, largely to the congestion charge. In Dublin, the bike-to-work scheme has had a similar effect, although her research into deaths and injuries experienced by inner-city cyclists are cautionary. A London law-firm partner who acts for many cyclists in personal-injury cases said that she regards cycling in London as “completely suicidal”.

The Bicycle Book is not a handbook that will tell you how to mend a broken brake cable or replace lost ball bearings, but it is a fascinating and colourful exploration of the bike in all its guises. BERNICE HARRISON

The Universe in Zero Words: The Story of Mathematics as Told Through Equations

By Dana Mackenzie

Princeton University Press, £19.95

The equations Mackenzie exhibits in this wonderful book represent 24 of the most profound discoveries in the history of mathematics. They range from the ancient world’s discovery of arithmetic – 1 + 1 = 2 – to Einstein’s E = mc2. Among those lesser-known, at least to nonmathematicians, are Cantor’s continuum hypothesis, Lorenz’s equations of chaos theory and the Chern-Gauss-Bonnet formula.

Mackenzie selects the equations based on four criteria: how surprising, concise, important and universal they are. He draws them from all four main tributaries of mathematics: algebra, geometry, applied mathematics and analysis. Each chapter is an elegant vignette, standing alone, but the author is always conscious of the historical context. He succeeds in blending the pure mathematics, the historical background and the stories of the mathematicians’ lives into a coherent chronological narrative.

Our own WR Hamilton is here, with his discovery of quaternions as he walked along the Royal Canal at Broombridge; the equation i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = -1 is commemorated on a plaque under the bridge.

So, too, is the tragic figure of the French mathematician Évariste Galois, killed in a duel in 1832, aged 20, over a woman he described as “an infamous coquette”. Galois was a revolutionary and spent time in jail. He also laid the foundations of group theory, “the main tool that mathematicians use to express the ancient idea of symmetry”. I can still remember Prof Tom Laffey enthusiastically introducing the ideas of Galois to an undergraduate class 30 years ago at UCD.

Then there’s the “notoriously taciturn” Paul Dirac, whose abstract mathematical equation “became the fulcrum on which fundamental physics pivoted”. Mackenzie ranks Dirac’s equation ahead of E = mc2 in importance.

Mackenzie's writing is understated and clear. The complex ideas he explains so lucidly are beautiful in themselves, but this book is physically beautiful too, imaginatively illustrated and stylishly designed to complement its subject. The printer's art survives in the digital age. TOM MORIARTY