Paperback choice: Robert Pearce looks at a selection of the season's titles newly out in paperback.(Book Review)

POETRY, WORDSWORTH WROTE, involves 'emotion recollected in tranquility'. Many believe that history should be written with similar detachment, and for no other purpose than to inform ourselves about times other than our own. Yet such a view falls foul of the perennial concern that history should be 'relevant'.

Certainly the volume among a selection of the current crop of new paperbacks that demanded immediate attention was the most topical: The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia by Lutz Kleveman (Atlantic, 8.99 [pounds sterling]). Its opening account, of a US ...

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