Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (Bloomsbury, £8.99)

Mass extinctions are extremely rare — only five have happened in the past 500 million years. In a mass extinction, something changes the planet so much that life cannot evolve to keep up with it. The something could be an ice age or an asteroid. Or a new species. As Elizabeth Kolbert tells us in this frightening analysis, a species emerged 200,000 years ago, and it’s causing a sixth mass extinction. That species, of course, is us.

Roth Unbound by Claudia Roth Pierpont (Vintage, £10.99)

A superb study of the novelist Philip Roth by a sharp biographer. She’s very good on the two things Roth is most famous for. One is his novel Portnoy’s Complaint, in which the narrator’s pornographic imagination “spoke to the generation-wide rejection of long unquestioned and nonsensical rules”. The other is the portrait of Roth in Leaving a Doll’s House, the memoir by his ex-wife Claire Bloom. Plus stuff you probably didn’t know about — for instance, Roth went on dates with Jackie Kennedy in 1964.

Lives In Writing by David Lodge (Vintage, £10.99)

This is a series of essays, almost entirely on British writers: Kingsley Amis and his very particular Englishness, Graham Greene’s later years, Simon Gray’s “interior monologue”. There’s a moving piece on Lodge’s friendship with Malcolm Bradbury and a detailed recollection of how he felt and what he observed when Diana died.