Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq by Patrick Cockburn
Faber, £16.99

We need not only to know as much as possible about powerful men, but also to glean that information from reliable narrators. Muqtada Al-Sadr is a radical nationalist Shia cleric and militia leader, a complex character and kingpin force in current Iraqi politics, who has opposed Saddam Hussein and the US occupation. Patrick Cockburn is an independent-minded reporter, a veteran of some 30 years' first-hand experience of Iraq, whose journalistic eye for horror in a handful of dust does not compromise his informed perception of the broad wasteland of terror. Cockburn's book fits another piece into the jigsaw of global politics.

A Corkscrew is most useful: the Travellers of Empire by Nicholas Murray
Little, Brown, £25

I am a toff traveller; you are a typical tourist; he is a tinpot tripper. Even in the 19th century, globetrotters were ranked on a sliding scale of respectability. Murray's snapshot guide to explorers of the Empire entertainingly presents, as sideshow acts supporting top-of-the-bill adventurers, such neglected characters as Julia Pardoe looking for literary romanticism in Constantinople, the enthusiastic Fanny Parks pleasurably “vagabondizing over India” and Annie Hore, who travelled for three months to Lake Tanganyika, carried in a custom-made Bath chair.

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