Ten Days that Changed the Nation: The Making of Modern Britain by Stephen Pollard (Simon & Schuster, £10.99; Buy this book; 242pp) The title is tongue-in-cheek, surely, recalling John Reed’s classic history of the Leninist Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World. Pollard plucks ten events from postwar British history which, for good or ill, have had national consequences. The seemingly insignificant act, as much as the headline event, Pollard says, has provoked seismic changes in postwar British attitudes and behaviour: the Windrush docked at Tilbury in 1948; comprehensive schooling arrived in 1965; and BSkyB paid £304 million in 1992 for exclusive rights to televise the new Premier League. The nation reeled.

Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World by Stephen Green (Allen Lane, £25; Buy this book;306pp) The shade of Marcus Aurelius permeates these meditations on money by a senior banker who is also an ordained priest. Stephen Green is, moreover, deeply acquainted with poetry, philosophy, history and economic theory past and present. The combination is engaging and convincing. He moves on, in this tract for our times, from Thomas Friedman’s recent theory of an economically and politically flat Earth to consider economics in more rounded terms of social responsibility to individuals and institutions that goes beyond the principle of pure profit.

Confessions of a Mullah Warrior by Masood Farivar (Atlantic, £12.99; Buy this book; 320pp) We’ve had the jarheads’ and generals’ memoirs of jihad, and there will be more to come, but from the other side of the story come occasional narratives that provide thoughtful perspectives. Farivar, born in 1969, first fought as an Afghan Mujahid against Soviet troops in 1979, then studied at Harvard and worked as a journalist in New York before returning to his homeland. He writes bravely of the intellectual differences between Western and Islamic thought processes, of the difficulty of being in a Western culture largely imbued with anti-Muslim feeling, all coloured by the experiences, in his youth, of fighting for the country to which he has now returned.

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