Mal Peet’s Tamar (Walker Books £5.99) is a thoroughly researched, emotionally sophisticated adventure about two men working for the Dutch Resistance.

One is assigned to mend rifts between factions and co-ordinate activity under British Special Operations, the other is his radio operator. It tells of the fear, boredom and deprivation of war; of relationships; of love and sexual jealousy; and of secrets that affect two generations.

Peet, who has worked in educational publishing and as an illustrator, was not published until he was in his fifties. His first book, Keeper, was no ordinary football book but had a similar theme to Tamar — connectiveness to the past. The theme matters to him: “Some younger people — and even grown-ups — do not have any real sense of their personality as shaped by past events. But if you don’t know history, you don’t know what people are doing to you now — politicians, for instance." An understanding of history is a “safeguard against tyranny”. And it is reading widely that matters: “Fundamentalism is a form of illiteracy — believing that one book is enough — whether you are Muslim, Christian, Marxist, Freudian, whatever. And a lot of people who embrace a single book don’t embrace it through reading but being told what it means. That is intellectual tyranny as well as illiteracy.”

Peet grew up in a Norfolk town that “invented boredom and wind-chapped knees”. He was the son of a factory worker and a shop assistant, taught to read on his grandmother’s lap in a house without books, making out the headlines of The Christian Science Monitor. The 11-plus led to Warwick University and to teaching. History teachers, he thinks, are wrong to pursue “relevance — a dodgy word”. Young people come to believe that it is “not relevant because I’ve never heard of it”. “Finding connectiveness is a far more subtle business than discerning relevance. If you find connections withthe past you are taking a small step towardsyour connectedness with mankind.”

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