HOWZAT

The life of Douglas Adams, who first surfaced in 1978 as the Arthur Dent of British comedy, is itself an episode of knockabout farce in the larger tragicomedy of life. Just as Alfred Hitchcock said, exasperated with his star, “It’s only a movie, Ingrid”, so one is tempted to say, “It’s only a TV series, guys”. But Galactic Hitchhikers, a sub-division of Trekkies and only marginally less deranged than Doctor Who wonks, will not have it so. They give new meaning to the word “aficionados” — lovers of Goodbye, and Thanks For All the Fish, one of Adams’s weakest books and written to a deadline because his editor, Sonny Mehta, confined him to a hotel suite and glowered at him until he finished. Adams said that the meaning of life was 42, but the meaning of Adams’s own life is probably decipherable only by a close reading of The Meaning of Liff, one of his wittiest, off-the-wall (hell, off the linguistic register) books. Simpson is a dedicated Adams anorak. Inquire within about everything in his universe, an environment that proves the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

MONSIEUR PROUST
By Céleste Albaret
NYRB, £9.99
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Inside the cork-lined room — Céleste is probably the most famous PA in literary history. In the last ten years of Proust’s life, she dedicated her life to his comfort. At 82, long after his death, she talked intimately to André Aciman who recorded and published this memoir of life as Proust’s housekeeper. Her literary touch is almost Proustian — everyday objects, the very stuff and fabric of their lives together, become totemic. Her total recall, usually a fatal gift, is here compelling, convincing and riveting.

AN UNDERWORLD AT WAR
By Donald Thomas
John Murray, £8.99
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“Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War” runs the subtitle, thus establishing the seedy human face of the wartime black market — whose profits Thomas estimates as far in excess of the “normal” proceeds of peacetime crime. Hardly a “nation of heroes”, to judge by the well-researched catalogue of infamy. The scams that Thomas reveals are dismally ludicrous, but the evidence of larceny (grand and petty) undermines our idealised perception of wartime morality.

ATATÜRK
By Andrew Mango
John Murray, £12.99
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The present cultural stand-off between secular republican states, including Turkey, and religious states, mostly Muslim monarchies, gives timely significance to this thorough, authoritative biography of the statesman who established the modern Turkish Republic. Atatürk, says Mango, was not only a radical moderniser and Westerniser; his aim was to participate in a progressive civilisation envisaged and developed by the philosophers of the European Enlightenment.

ROCKET DREAMS
By Marina Benjamin
Vintage, £7.99
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To the moon! To Mars! To cyberspace! We’re looking for a tabula rasa on which to scribble the graffiti of our culture. In a fast-forward overview of How the Space Age Shaped our Vision of a World Beyond, Benjamin describes an ideal of scientific progress as presented by politicians and those-who- would-believe contrasted with the constraints of government budgets and the limits of engineering. The exhilaration of the writing is pinned to reality by sober facts.

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