Books: Paperbacks

! Henry Purcell: Glory of His Age by Margaret Campbell, OUP £8.99. Purcell (1659-95), our only great composer between Byrd and Elgar, lived in Pepys's London at the heart of a vibrant government community rife with gossip and intrigue. He was the star exponent of a massively popular art. So how come we know hardly anything about him? Could it be that, behind the front door of the Purcell house in Great St Ann's Lane Westminster, lived a pretty dull dog? The speculation is sadly undisturbed by this biography. Campbell makes no sustained attempt to reveal the man's personality but resorts instead to socio-political padding, without which this would be a thin book indeed. And a note to OUP's sub-editors: "decimated" means the loss of one in ten (not five) and there is no "Catholic doctrine of substantiation".

! Body and Soul by Frank Conroy, Penguin £5.99. This first novel - by a professor of creative writing who published a noted auto-biography, Stop-Time, in 1967 and a slim book of stories (Midair) in the meantime - concerns the childhood and education of Claude Rawlings, an American musician. There are echoes of Great Expectations from the start as Claude, born into poverty in 1940s New York, is patronised by local big-wigs, and falls in love with a posh girl who looks down her nose at him ("Look at his tie!") before at last winning wealth, esteem and the love of the posh girl. Conroy is a entertaining storyteller, but the vital difference between this and Dickens is the moral simplicity of Conroy's vision. Unlike Philip Pirrip, Claude easily hedge-hops the obstacles in his path. He never has to sweat for grace: he was born bung-full of it.

! The Dogs: A Personal History of Greyhound Racing by Laura Thompson, Vintage £6.99. Unlike the gee-gees, about which I'm passionate, I could never see the attraction of six anorexic canines chasing a soft toy in front of half a dozen pensioners in the rain. This book, by one who "grew up" around the dogs, tracks, bookies and punters, though it has not converted me, remains a fine essay on the essence of sporting allegiance. The important elements of this are not the stars, but the ordinary drudges - in this case dogs who slog round a track time and again with form lines that read 6th-3rd-4th-5th-4th, The Greyhound Life saying "game old timer, out of luck lately" or "no show yet but has time on her side". But what Thompson says of Mick the Miller, the greyhound Pele/Ali/Red Rum, is right. Such figures don't on their own make you love their sport. What they tell you is: keep the faith, "magic and the stuff of myth" can be here.

! The Man in the Ice by Konrad Spindler, Phoenix £7.99. In September 1991, high in the Tyrolean Alps, tourists found a half-naked, sunburned body protruding from the ice. As long-lost climbers are sometimes given back by the glacier after decades, this seemed the likely explanation. But the Ice-man had lain dead not 50 but 5,000 years, his body remarkably preserved, with shoes, clothing, weapons and other personal items. The archaeologist in charge here describes the finding of this unique fully- equipped neolithic man with a teutonic thoroughness that does not preclude our sharing his excitement. A priceless insight into European life way beyond the historical horizon.

! Hardy by Martin Seymour-Smith, Blooms-bury £12.99. There was always something about Hardy that set people quarrelling. They did it over his novels (Edmund Gosse told Hardy over lunch that Jude was the "most indecent novel ever written"). They bitched over his post-humous reputation (as when he allegedly appeared as "Driffield" in Maugham's Cakes and Ale). They fulminated (from the feminist point of view) over his abject record as a husband. They hated his moral outlook and couldn't stand his dog. Seymour-Smith dedicates this Herculean 850-page critical biography to the passionate defence of poor Tom - still, despite the attacks, among the most widely-read of English novelists. Particular energy is spent on Hardy's sexuality (not impotent, just a late developer). He even defends the verse "play" The Dynasts, defiantly calling it long but "eminently readable" - a description which fits this biography.

! Fatal Observations by Catherine Merriman, Pan £5.99. There has been a fair crop of novels recently dealing with the thirtyish problem of whether it is good to be married or single, parent or childless, happy or miserable. This one looks at the world (or Kilburn, North London to be more precise) from the point of view of Jane, a single woman with a live-out boyfriend. The neighbours include Harry, a leather-clad biker to whom she is naturally (but resistantly) attracted - a variation on the Dory Previn song in which "the one who was gentle hurt me much more/ than the one who was rough and made love on the floor". At times Merriman's character analysis is too in-your-face, but when Harry gets involved in defending Jane against a stalker an agreeable tension and then a keen note of tragedy moves in.

! The Last Brother: The Rise & Fall of Teddy Kennedy by Joe McGinnis, Warner Books £7.99. The first entry in the bibliography of this long, journalistic biography is Aeschylus's Oresteian Trilogy. The gloss on that tragedy, quoted in the book, is that "the sin of Atreus has to be expiated by his son; but the son too commits sin ... and thus doubly justifies the fate which is prepared for him." McGinnis must have whooped when he read this. Yo, it fits! The Kennedys are a trilogy, right? They're all trying to atone for the sins of Ambassador Joe, but they're sinners too which is why they go down . . . The story ends at Chappaquiddick, which apparently finished off the paralysed old man and (in McGinnis's judgement) ended the reason for Teddy's life too. It may not be entirely straight to ignore his political life in the '70s and '80s completely, but then it wouldn't fit the Aeschylean idea. And the book would have been even longer.