Smash hit

CONAN DOYLE: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes by Andrew Lycett
Weidenfeld £20

The biographer of previous excellent studies of Dylan Thomas and Rudyard Kipling, Lycett turns his attention to the contradictory and sometimes downright loony Conan Doyle. Creator of the immortal, coldly logical Holmes, Doyle was also a keen spiritualist, communed regularly with his Mesopotamian spirit guide, and was a passionate believer in the Cottingley Fairies. His energy and creativity were extraordinary, and there is real poignancy in his agonised love for the beautiful young Jean Leckie, even while his own wife was dying of tuberculosis.

AGENT ZIGZAG by Ben Macintyre
Bloomsbury £7.99

Eddie Chapman was that most interesting of figures, the apparent rotter who is secretly a hero. The book is subtitled The True Wartime Story of Eddie Chapman: Lover, Betrayer, Hero, and Spy, and with his shady practices and numerous seductions, Chapman makes you think inescapably of a certain 007. As a double agent, however, his achievements for Britain were rock solid, most notably in bamboozling the Germans over the targeting of V1 rockets. In the words of his spy-chief, Sir John Masterman, in this alone he saved “many thousands of lives”.

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ROBERT PEEL: A Biography by Douglas Hurd
Weidenfeld £25

This was one of the more surprising hits of the year, and although you would hardly expect it, given the author and subject matter, genuinely gripping. Peel introduced annual income tax, at around 2.5% in modern terms (even though the head of Barings Bank declared that “it would be next to insupportable to live in a country where such a tax were permanent”) and, of course, bobbies, or peelers, intended to tackle “the streets of London in the nightly possession of drunken women and vagabonds”. So what went wrong?

BESTSELLERS

1 Shakespeare by Bill Bryson
(HarperPress) 41,425

2 Damagedby Cathy Glass
(Harper Element) 36,685

3 The Diana Chroniclesby Tina Brown
(Century) 19,125

4 Agent Zigzagby Ben Macintyre
(Bloomsbury) 15,950

5 William Wilberforce by William Hague
(HarperPress) 11,830

Bestsellers list prepared by The Bookseller using data supplied by and copyright to Nielsen BookScan taken from the TCM 02/01/07-10/11/07

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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