Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

Inferno by Dan Brown (Corgi, £7.99)

Some people think that Dan Brown’s books are preposterous. In this one, the learned academic Robert Langdon is walking across the Harvard campus in his Harris tweed jacket and loafers. The next thing he knows, he’s in a hospital bed in Florence. A woman with spiky hair is trying to kill him; a woman in a wig, who is actually bald, is trying to save him. There is a secret pocket in his tweed jacket, and somebody has planted a strange and terrible device there. Meanwhile, a man dressed up as a bird ... so, yes, preposterous. But Brown is very good at suspense. You might be up half the night.

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell (Penguin, £8.99)

When we think of David and Goliath, we think of a small man who takes on a huge, terrifying opponent and wins. We think of David as someone who has defied the odds. The story, as Gladwell says, is “a metaphor for improbable victory”. But this sort of thinking is all wrong, he says. David was a “slinger” — an expert marksman. Goliath was heavy and unwieldy. So David had better odds than we’d think. This is a handbook for underdogs. Who hasn’t, at some point in their lives, felt like the David of legend, facing up to a big, scary opponent? Gladwell makes us see that when we feel weak, we might be stronger than we think.

Catastrophe by Max Hastings (William Collins, £9.99)

Max Hastings is a terrific historian, and, just as important, a natural storyteller. Here he tells us what life was like before the First World War, and he captures it well, with lovely details that will stick in the mind. Then he tells us how the war, that great unwieldy mechanism, came into being. And then he gives us the early months of the fighting itself, with an expert eye on battle tactics. He explains how, in Belgium in 1914, the Germans tended to occupy the high ground “because as occupiers they felt no embarrassment about withdrawing where this was tactically advantageous heedless of considerations of prestige”. Full of endless good points.