The latest paperbacks reviewed.
Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life by Peter Conrad Faber and Faber, £9.99
Virtually everything Orson Welles did was both commentary on and celebration of his own excessive, myth-making persona. Citizen Kane, writes Conrad, was an "early instalment" of Welles's own autobiography, "telling in advance the story of a life he had hardly begun to live". Welles was all of the Ambersons, whose loss of magnificence foretold his own decline. The Third Man's Harry Lime was a mercenary self-portrait. Even his most legendary doomed projects - adaptations of Conrad's The Heart of Darkness and Cervantes's Don Quixote - are particularly grandiose versions of a theme. This all becomes a bit pedantic - it's hard to accept as significant his involvement in such dreck as Necromancy and David and Goliath - but the book does provide an overview of Welles's relentless achievement (and under-achievements) in film, radio, theatre, television and literature. Kevin Sweeney
The Collected Short Stories of Richard Yates, Methuen, £9.99
This compendium of two collections and nine uncollected stories was first published in the US in 2001; along with the simultaneous re-publication of Yates's most acclaimed novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), it has largely been responsible for the regeneration of interest in this troubled devotee of the craft of fiction. It made the bestseller lists, thereby encouraging a subsequent republication of much of Yates's oeuvre. While every Yates story provides its own stylistic and thematic justification of his reputation as a writer's writer, the real treat here is his first collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962), a kind of Dubliners for New Yorkers that is the acme of Yates's quirky version of realism. The introduction by Richard Russo is not particularly inviting, but this is the volume that will best welcome first-timers into Yates's unblinkingly honest fictional world. John Kenny
1066: The Hidden History of the Bayeux Tapestry by Andrew Bridgeford Harper Perennial, £8.99
A solid historical page-turner that delves behind the authorised narrative and mystery of a piece of cloth 70 metres long by half a metre wide in search of the shenanigans and subterfuge that led to the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Illuminating the main protagonists - Edward the Confessor, Earl Harold of Wessex and William the Conqueror, and many more - Bridgeford, among other things, offers a thesis that contests the Norman duke William's celebration of victory over "perfidious Harold" . He also explains why the French to this day still refer to it as la tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde, and why, while Hitler's orders to destroy Paris in 1944 stood, Himmler sent two emissaries to France to salvage this primary history of Britain's last conquest by a foreign army. In essence, a deconstruction of the Bayeaux Tapestry without scholarly introspection. Paul O'Doherty
The Medici by Paul Strathern Pimlico, £8.99
Paul Strathern's book on the Medici charts the rise and fall of the extraordinary Florentine family who were at the centre of perhaps the greatest period in western and world art, the Renaissance. From the birth of their founding father, Giovanni, in 1360 to the death of the last member, Anna Maria Luisa, in 1743, the Medici supplied two popes, Clement IV and Leo X, two French queens, Catherine and Marie and, in Cosimo and Lorenzo "The Magnificent", two of the greatest patrons the world has ever known. The talent nurtured by the Medici was simply astonishing: Filippo Brunelleschi, Benvenuto Cellini, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo - the list goes on and on. As Strathern points out, the multifarious achievements of such men helped drag Europe out of the Dark Ages and into a new period of enlightenment. His book offers a marvellous introduction to the period. Ken Walshe
Lifers by Barry Cummins Gill & Macmillan, 12.99
Cummins's first book, Missing, recorded the cases of a number of women and children who disappeared in mysterious circumstances. He continues the macabre theme in this book, which recounts some of the most vicious murders committed in Ireland over the past 50 years. He questions the justice and sentencing system, which allows killers parole and day release early in their sentences, with little regard for the feelings of the victims' families. The case of Thomas Murray in particular brings into question the wisdom of the parole system. Murray received a life sentence in 1981 for the motiveless killing of an elderly neighbour. Nineteen years later, while on a day release from Castlerea Prison, he murdered again. Cummins book gives voice to those who believe it is time life in prison meant just that. Martin Noonan
Differently Irish: A Cultural History Exploring 25 Years of Vietnamese-Irish Identity by Mark Maguire The Woodfield Press, 22
In a well-researched anthropological study of the Vietnamese-Irish, Maguire tells the story of the "boat people" who settled in Ireland in 1979, having fled and survived the ravishes of turbulent governance, the rapine and savagery of South China Sea Thai and Malay pirates, and the purgatory and uncertainty of Hong Kong and Malaysian transit camps. A useful investigation of what it means to be the disasporic "other" in a strange land surrounded by bureaucrats, ignorance and what others think best, it makes for a solid opening salvo on Vietnamese-Irish life and culture, from the initial 212 people to the burgeoning 1,000-plus community that is "differently Irish". Paul O'Doherty