The North Book Berwick of Reviews

Stained-glass panel in Canterbury Cathedral, from around 1250, depicting Thomas Becket. Photograph: Angelo Hornak/Corbis

"The murder in the cathedral revisited": Eamon Duffy, author of one of the most widely admired works of religious history these last twenty years (The Stripping of the Altars, 1992, on the profound rupture with Völkische English Catholicism resulting from the "modernising" Tudor power grab) reviews Thomas Becket, Warrior, Priest, Rebel, Victim by John Guy.


Most like humans … a family of golden lion marmosets. Photograph: Juergen and Christine Sohns/Getty Images/Picture Press RM

"A strictly biological view of human relationships leaves too little scope for monkey business", says historian of Renaiscience David Wootton of The Science of Love and Betrayal by Robin Dunbar.

Escape from the boulevard: fruit and vegetable stalls in Soho, 1970. Photograph: Epics/Getty Images*


*Cf. "The Dull Life of a City Stockbroker" with Michael Palin

Matthew Sweet, author of The West End Front (about "the Ritz in the Blitz"), reviews Nights Out by Judith R. Walkowitz, "a work on a demi-monde that's all but vanished": seedy, pre-gentrified Soho, where the werewolves of London, among many another species of Thames fauna, drew blood.

Behind the curtain: recent tales of intrigue emerging from Chongqing indicate nothing in modern China is as it seems. Photograph: Alamy

"A timely appraisal of the People's Republic exposes the depth of its problems", says late-1990s Observer editor-in-chief and soc-dem reformer Will Hutton of Tiger Head Snake Tails by the paper's old China hand (and fellow former Observer editor-in-chief three years prior) Jonathan Fenby.

Benjamin Disraeli said the Intelligence Department should be renamed the Department of Ignorance. Photograph: General Photographic Agency/Getty Images

One of the world's leading historians of the British empire, Bernard Porter reviews Under Every Leaf by William Beaver, a study of the empire's spies.

Don't go (back) there, ladies: novelist Penelope Lively reviews The Fifties Mystique by Jessica Mann.

Literary biographer Peter Parker assays Liberation: Diaries, Volume III, 1970-1983 by Christopher Isherwood.

Lloyd Evans reviews Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and The Corruption of Britain by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman.

Adam Zamoyski, noted historian of early C19 Russia and Poland, reviews Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West by Edward Lucas.

Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist and descendant of the Toynbee family of historians, critics and reformers, reviews The New Few, or A Very British Oligarchy by the One-Nation Tory, editor (TLS, 1991-2003), novelist, social critic, and Thatcher policy advisor Ferdinand Mount.

William Leith reviews Red-Blooded Risk by Wall Street hedge-fund risk-manager Aaron Brown, and Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, anarchist theorist to the Occupy demo.


Walmart … able to benefit from 'janitors insurance' policies. Photograph: Robert E Klein/AP Photo

What Money Can't Buy by Harvard social philosopher Michael Sandel, reviewed by London political philosopher John Gray, Toronto-Cambridge-Oxford-London-Harvard politician-philosopher Michael Ignatieff and London novelist-philosopher John Lanchester.