The Taste Of War – World War Two And The Battle For Food by Lizzie Collingham is published in hardback by Allen Lane, priced £30.

In the West today, plagued by obesity, the only food problem experienced by most people is how to summon up enough willpower to eat less and get their weight down.

In this interesting, scholarly and sometimes horrifying book, historian Lizzie Collingham has meticulously researched the complex role played by food in the combatant countries during the Second World War, and come up with startling facts.

In Nazi-occupied eastern Europe the Germans allowed millions to die of hunger, so that the German homeland could be adequately fed. The Germans’ turn to suffer in this way came after the war had ended.

Britain was the only combatant nation which never experienced actual starvation, although food had to be rationed and meals were, to say the least, uninspiring.

In those days, long before cholesterol had become a buzz-word, nutritionists, who exercised great influence during the war, believed that a substantial level of fat in food was necessary.

8/10

The Stranger In The Mirror: A Memoir Of Middle Age

by Jane Shilling is published in hardback by Chatto & Windus, priced £16.99.

The “official landmarks”

of a fulfilled existence as a woman in these strongly feminist times are a love, a home, a job and a child, notes the intensely focused Jane Shilling.

The theme of this book is that it isn’t only journalists like her who struggle to get these items neatly in line between the ages of 20 and 50.

At 50, she looks around to mark her own checklist: the son she has brought up single-handedly has shattered the egotism of her early decades, while working-class neighbours of south London have brought a closer appreciation of everyday pleasures than a Kentish childhood which sounds brittle.

This is a beautifully written book, its perceptions of the joys and despair of modern-day living eventually more absorbing than a journey through life which is, ultimately, sketched out rather lightly.

9/10

The Price Of Everything by Eduardo Porter is published in paperback by William Heinemann, priced £11.99.

Much like its similar forerunner Freakonomics, Eduardo Porter’s book – subtitled The Cost Of Birth, The Price Of Death, And The Value Of Everything In Between – has won praise for its ‘wise and clever’ cracking of the mysteries of modern value.

Using everyday examples of just about everything – from petrol to coffee to funerals to drugs – it lifts the veil of consumer pricing and reveals some shrewd and uncomfortable truths.

According to Porter, the implications of economics show that some people are inherently worth more than others – Americans’ lives are worth 100 times more than Chinese lives, for example.

9/10