The latest paperbacks reviewed.
The Great Dying: The Black Death in Dublin. Maria Kelly, Tempus, £14.99
In the middle years of the 14th century, the English colony of Dublin was in a desperate state, due to repeated famine, raids by resurgent Gaels from Wicklow in the south, and by Bruce's Scots and Irish army in the north and west. Into this besieged fortress, in 1348, came an apocalyptic horror from the east. From ships in the harbour, into the city's filthy, narrow, teeming streets, entered the most unwelcome intruder, Rattus rattus, the black rat, carrying with it Xenopsylla cheopis, a deadly flea, a mere sniff of whose excrement was enough to infect humans with Yersinia pestis, the most likely cause of the Black Death. Fear, panic and desolation followed the plague as it swept through Dublin, killing perhaps half of the city's 20,000 inhabitants. Though in parts technical and repetitive, this is a great read, with some fascinating period detail. - John Moran
The Broken Cedar. By Martin Malone, Scribner, £6.99
Irish soldiers did UN peacekeeping operations in Lebanon for more than a generation - but we haven't exactly been overburdened with novels on the subject, which makes The Broken Cedar an unusual novel by any standards. It cuts to the heart of contemporary life on the Israeli-Lebanese border by focusing on an elderly shopkeeper called Khalil. Khalil has plenty of problems - his wife wants him to give up the business he loves, his daughter is married to a low-life, he himself is dying of cancer - but these pale into insignificance when a young Irishman walks into his shop and demands to know what happened to his father, a UN soldier who disappeared many years earlier. The story is perhaps a bit too simple, and the ending a little ragged, but the restrained delicacy of Malone's writing makes it a rewarding and absorbing read. - Arminta Wallace
Wilfred Owen. Dominic Hibberd, Pimlico, £8.99
The mission of this biographer is to adjust and correct Harold Owen's biography of his poet brother. Hibberd deals with the poet's homosexuality and two great bothers of the poet's early life: money for education and a heavy sense of class-
consciousness. As a young man, Owen studied hard and sat for many scholarships but failed to attend university. However, much later, when he was invalided to Craiglockhart Hospital, he had a strong sense of self-worth. This derived from: having lived in France before and during the war; reading the Symbolists; immersing himself in art, poetry and language and "directly by leading them \ as well as an officer can". He greatly enjoyed meeting the literati of the day: Sassoon, Sitwell, Scott Moncrief and, yes, Robert Ross. Hibberd's treatment of Owen's poetry is, perhaps, more complete in his other books on this wonderful poet of the first World War. - Kate Bateman
Feast : A History of Grand Eating. Roy Strong, Pimlico, £9.99
Rather than concentrating on recipes or the development of the kitchen and cookery methods, this book offers us two millennia of upper-class eating, "history from the top, somewhat out of fashion these days". The author's thesis is that "the feast" has always involved "the manipulation of one group by another for sociopolitical aims" and he describes in a dazzling breadth of detail how the ethical, political and religious fabric of society was exhibited through mostly public festivals of gastronomy. The catalogue of exotica is stunning, if at times indigestible: camels' feet, flamingo brains, peacock and nightingale tongues, dormice dipped in honey and a depressing "litany of small birds sacrificed to the table". The author is fascinated by the ritual accompanying these epic culinary occasions. - Olivia Hamilton
The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century. Philip Knightley, Pimlico, £14.99
This is a revised edition of Knightley's book, first published in 1986. Despite the seemingly glamorous material, this was not a book replete with debonair characters, risking life and limb. Rather, it was a catalogue of the absurdity and ineptitude of the intelligence world during the 20th century, and this edition sees Knightley veering little from his original judgment. Two new chapters have been added to cover the war on terrorism, an unforeseen offshoot of which has been a renewed investment by governments in their espionage departments, which had been slipping into senility since the end of the Cold War. The additions are fascinating, if painfully brief, but the book as a whole is an engrossing and disquieting condemnation of intelligence in the West, and almost as disturbing as the atrocities committed is the poor quality of information produced. - Laurence Mackin
The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth. Tudor Parfitt, Phoenix, £8 .99
The quest to find the lost tribes of Israel as written about in the Old Testament has been an enduring motif underlying the historical Western view of the world. Parfitt's study explores the links between the Jews and the Japanese Samurai, the American Indians and Burma's Karen people, among others. He looks at the remarkable reach of the legend and its adaptability, but he also shows how these "links" were based on little more than conjecture. For Parfitt, such myths mostly served as a convenient channel for placing unfamiliar peoples within the familiar context of Christian knowledge. It is often the least-grounded myths that become the most potent in the popular imagination, but by scrutinising these, Parfitt does a fine job of exposing them for the bunkum they are. - Fergal Quinn