Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo by Murat Kurnaz
Palgrave Macmillan, £14.99

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The “anomaly” of Guantanamo Bay, as Tony Blair mildly characterised it, is now being exposed as a disgrace. Murat Kurnaz is a young German Muslim who in October, 2001 flew to Pakistan to study the Koran at the madrassas. He was arrested, interrogated, transferred to Guantanamo and spent five years there without charge or trial, despite the American and German governments knowing that he was not an “enemy combatant”. His candid account is an indictment of our system of justice.

Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes by Ferdinand Mount
Bloomsbury, £20

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To Ferdinand Mount's “butterfly mind”, the world has evidently seemed full of wonders. With a light touch, self-deprecating humour and a not-quite-disingenuous tone, his memoir amounts to a catalogue of English privileged class eccentricities. These are personified first by Mount's own family and Prince Michael of Kent as a schoolboy jumping naked on a bed every night for ten minutes, to Margaret Thatcher eternally insisting, wrongly, that she had had a mandate to push on to Baghdad in the first Gulf War.

Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Ballerina and Mrs John Maynard Keynes by Judith Mackrell
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25

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The publisher's blurb hypes “Lydia's place as a major character not only in the history of ballet, but also in the history of the 20th century.” Mackrell's biography, though a brave attempt to retrieve Lopokova's reputation from the historical footnote to which she has pretty much been demoted in the past 50 years since the death of her husband, the economist John Maynard Keynes, struggles against two difficulties: a dearth of first-hand material about her early career as a dancer and the disdain of the Bloomsbury group for her powerful personality.

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