Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over the latest crop of paperbacks.
Edwin Lutyens: A Biography - His Life, His Wife, His Work. Jane Ridley, Pimlico £12.50
Edwin Lutyens was a chilly man but this story of how "a Lutyens house and a Jekyll garden became an Edwardian status symbol" is a racy biography. Ned, without education, money or useful connections, became husband of a one-time suffragette; father of several children and architect to the Empire. How did he do it? He worked so hard his wife scarcely saw him; he applied himself to social climbing and he fused an adequate imagination with a clear understanding of clientilism to create "Surrey" houses, "dream" houses, adaptations of the English Arts and Crafts style, houses of eccentric modernism and neo- classicism. - Kate Bateman
The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina, Uki Goni, Granta £9.99
A talented - and courageous - journalist, Uki Goni has revised his exhaustive and authoritative expose of his country's dark history of collaboration with the Third Reich and assorted war criminals. It includes, in particular, a new afterward which finally and firmly lays to rest any doubts about the Vatican's, and Pope Pius XII's, direct and personal collusion in giving sanctuary and assistance to the most vile of the Catholic Croatian Ustasha. It is an incredibly tangled web with a massive cast of characters, but Goni's clear prose, his ability to tell a story, his sense of history and his moral grounding turns what could be an unreadable mess into a fascinating if chilling treatise. - Joe Culley
Collected Stories. Saul Bellow, Viking, £8.99
Bellow fans will have already read most, if not all, of these 13 stories. Still, when stories are this good, does it matter? Death is a major presence, if not quite a theme. In grand Bellow style, his ageing characters look back on the messes they've made, the hurts they've caused, the people who have died. His favourite stock types dominate: troubled male academics with the souls - or at least the vocabularies - of gangsters, not forgetting the cringing guys who made the wrong business deals. Characterisation is the essence of Bellow's art; an entire individual emerges, created through one choice sentence. True, he is a novelist, and his idea of "short" story is longer than most, but there are great performances here, including 'What Kind of Day Did You Have?' and 'Leaving The Yellow House'. His world is that of the Jew adrift in the US intent on becoming American. The prose is physical, his sinners are human and his fiction lives, breathes and dazzles through its frenetic street-speak and wealth of life-defining moments. - Eileen Battersby
Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. H.J. Jackson, Yale University Press, £11.95
This expansive treatment of the history of readers' meta-textual interpretations otherwise known as "marginalia" is based on a study of thousands of books annotated by readers from the 18th century to the present day. Jackson, the woman who helped to coin the word "marginalia", proposes many reasons to annotate books, the case for and against annotation and the benefit (or otherwise) of marginalia to historians, subsequent readers and to society itself. Anyone who has ever underlined, highlighted or taken notes in the margins of a book (and that is everyone) will find this book a thought-provoking insight into a very common but little understood phenomenon that has a universal relevance for all readers and annotators alike. - Mark McGrath
The Immortal Dinner. By Penelope Hughes-Hallett, Penguin, £7.99
In Regency London, literary parties were regular events - the famous breakfasts given by the poet-banker Samuel Rogers, for instance, have become canonical. In the last days of 1817, Robert Haydon, the painter and author of famous journals, gave a dinner party which was attended by Wordsworth, Keats and Charles Lamb among others. (Leigh Hunt was not invited because he and Haydon had fallen out, while Hazlitt was persona non grata thanks to a recent attack on Wordsworth.) For once, it all lived up to expectations, with fireworks of wit and antics (mainly from Lamb), scintillating intellectual exchanges, good food and drink, and high good humour from everybody. The affair was remembered fondly for years afterwards, and Penelope Hughes-Hallett has recreated it with style. - Brian Fallon
Wild Irish Women. By Marian Broderick, The O'Brien Press €11.95
Take 75 women and gently pirouette your way through history doused in personality. Marian Broderick's book examines unorthodox Irish women from patriots to pirates, warriors to writers. The biographies are testimony to lives lived on the edge from the more well known, such as Peig Sayers, Nano Nagle and St Brighid, to aviator Lady Mary Heath or Lola Montez, a dancer and courtesan renowned for her Tarantula Dance. The detail is in the telling with the women categorised in a wonderfully irreverent fashion, such as "Tough Cookies" (the healer Biddy Early, philanthrophist, Molly Browne), "Political Animals" (suffragist Charlotte Despard, trade unionist Louie Bennett), the "Great Pretenders" (surgeon Dr James Barry, soldier Kit Cavanagh) and so on. And the sepia-tinted illustrations wrenched from time truly enhance an endlessly informative publication. - Mary Moloney