BOOKS / Paperbacks

John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920-37 by Robert Skidelsky, Papermac pounds 14.99. A self-regulating market was the bedrock of Victorian and Edwardian society, and it withered in the gunfire of the Somme. With it went the old certainties, including the virtues of stable currencies and full employment. This volume (the second of three) tells how Keynes saved capitalism while simultaneously trying to reinvent some kind of economic morality. But the saviour was spurred on by an embarrassing problem: he may have hated capitalism - for Skidelsky, Keynes's 'most poetical pages' are those deploring the tendency of money to become a value in itself - but he feared a total economic collapse and ensuing barbarism even more. This biography is not just the mid-life of a remarkable man, but a challenging history of economic ideas whose continuing relevance hardly needs a highlighting pen.

Complicity by Iain Banks, Abacus pounds 6.99. A psychopath with attitude is on the loose, terminating power-abusing millionaires in ingeniously appropriate (and sadistic) ways. Cameron, the star investigative reporter on a Scottish daily paper, is smart, witty, leftish and highly thought of; he also uses drugs, is addicted to computer games and plays out S & M fantasies with his married girlfriend. It is a moral ambivalence which points the direction of the plot. Cameron's success turns sour when he finds himself accused of being the killer. Actually, this is more than a routine page-turner: by the end we find the gap between our mouths and our morals is painfully and edifyingly exposed.

The Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park ed F H Hinsley & Alan Stripp, Oxford pounds 7.99. Anyone who saw David Hare's angry TV play Licking Hitler will be interested in the professional and domestic secrets of the country house where German codes were broken by a few brilliant minds and a lot of slave labour. In Hare's version there were, on the one hand, the assembled geniuses, maths dons and chess players, cracking codes and clever jokes and having a spiffing war; on the other, the hundreds of 'girls' who made it all possible, sweating endlessly over their decrypting machines under a stifling blanket of security. Hinsley and Stripp have assembled 30 reminiscers - most geniuses, a few slaves, all highly informative.

Zhirinovsky: The Little Black Book by Graham Frazer and George Lancelle, Penguin pounds 5.99. The man who said 'call me Hitler' appears on the cover of this book like a vampire about to take a bite out of Mother Russia's neck. The authors' clear intention in collecting and glossing these quotes is to show that Zhirinovsky (who pulled in 26 per cent of the vote in Yeltsin's general election) is not just a clown, but dangerous. His demagogue's flow of verbal confidence is untroubled by considerations of truth and consistency: he says what he believes his audiences want to hear - viz, Russia is still a superpower and must expand again; the Slav peoples are one nation and Russia is the natural leader; the army must be built up; crime must be dealt with or (to put that another way) minorities must be dealt with; authority is self- legitimising. One quote in particular strikes a chill note of recognition: 'In Russia there will be order, but only our order.'

The Romanov Conspiracies by Michael Occleshaw, Orion pounds 5.99. Who died at Ekaterinburg on 17 July 1918? Whose were the bodies discovered in the nearby forest in 1991 and 1992? Did the British government try to rescue the Tsar's family - and partially succeed? Who was the mysterious Larissa Feodorovna, buried in a Romney Marsh graveyard in 1926? This is a sensible and restrained look at the current state of play in the Romanov murder case. With the Queen due to go and pay her respects to her dead relations, the questions are more than mere mini-series fodder; the fate of the last Tsar has become an important item of political debate in Russia and if, as Michael Occleshaw suggests, the British conspired to conceal what really happened, we should all know about it.

Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer, Penguin pounds 6.99. In 1970 Genie, a Californian child, was found living in almost complete deprivation. Her father had kept her locked for 13 years alone and without stimulation in a back room, fed on pap and strapped to a potty. After her discovery, the almost silent girl was to the scientists who examined her a modern enfant sauvage, a unique test-bed for theories of language acquisition and child development - she was moved straight from cage to laboratory. The atmosphere around her was so jealous and antagonistic that the spirit of science was fatally compromised: both the findings and the in-fighting are thoughtfully documented here.

The Quantum Society: Mind, Physics and the New Social Vision by Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, Flamingo pounds 6.99. When 'old-style' scientists got into politics and the social good the results were frequently horrid: eugenics, social Darwinism, monetarism are authoritarian solutions by believers in cause-and-effect physics. But when quantum physics are used as a model for - even as an explanation of - society, the result is somewhat different. Quantum effects are uncertain, plural. Cause and effect can be interchangeable. Is it a wave? Is it a particle? The quantum effect says it can be both, and its application to society results in impeccably liberal and holistic conclusions. And, oddly enough, by connecting the imprecisions of society to the fuzzy world of the quantum, Zohar and Marshall make quantum physics itself easier to digest. They do both physics and society a favour.

Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions by Martin Amis, Penguin pounds 6.99. Collections like this are not so much garage sales of a writer's old journalism as a tidying up of the mantlepiece. But this is not to suggest a ragbag - Amis's title is meant to draw the material into coherence, and it does: these are not interviews, they're outings. He has lunch with Burgess and goes for a drive with Updike. He plays snooker with Barnes and poker with Mamet. He goes to see a Stones concert, and leaves feeling queasy. The book is highly enjoyable and its soul is the cool form of new journalism. Instead of screaming all over the page and foaming at the mouth as Tom Wolfe used to do, Amis is gently self-deprecating and louchely succinct, pricking his own

occasional bubbles of pomposity with care.