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The Cabaret Of Plants: Botany And The Imagination by Richard Mabey (Profile Books, £20) Mabey’s wonderful book celebrates the theatrical ingenuity of the plant world, from “the extraordinary mechanical contrivances which orchids employ to ensure cross-pollination – rocket launchers, pistons, trap doors, levers, triggers” to the repelling nature of the lotus, whose “non-stick” leaves make it impossible for fluids to get a grip. Poets and scientists have found memorable images and startling solutions through a close study of plants and the erudite Mabey is a witty and enthusiastic guide to these remarkable organisms. The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us by Diane Ackerman (Headline, £8.99) We humans are a speedy species, outstripping the more stately pace of the rest of Earth’s inhabitants. We have “subdued 75 per cent of the land surface, concocted a wizardry of industrial and medical marvels, strung lights all across the darkness”. We have unquestionably altered life on this planet, sometimes for the good, often for the bad with man-made climate change being a prime example. Ackerman’s compelling, inspiring study looks to our future and ponders the way we might come up with innovative solutions to repair the damage. The Invention Of Nature: The Adventures Of Alexander Von Humboldt, The Lost Hero Of Science by Andrea Wulf (John Murray, £25) Alexander von Humboldt was restless and intellectually curious, with an irrepressible need to discover all he could about the natural world. Wulf’s brilliant biography traces his daring travels in South America and across the Andes, his sojourns in Berlin, Paris and London, and the intellectual circles he moved in. His achievements were astounding: he predicted climate change, recognised the dangers of environmental destruction and worked out that the world was an interconnected web, complex, delicate and ingenious. The Shark And The Albatross: Travels With A Camera To The Ends Of The Earth by John Aitchison (Profile Books, £17.99) Cameraman John Aitchison has a rare quality in our hurly-burly world: he understands the need for patience. In these absorbing, elegant essays, he relates how being still allows him to see the world uniquely then to capture those images on film for programmes such as the BBC’s Frozen Planet. He has waited in the cold grip of the Svalbard for hungry polar bears, perched on a skyscraper in New York to watch for a peregrine falcon and wandered Yellowstone Park on the trail of wild wolves. Heirloom Harvest: Modern Daguerreotypes Of Historic Garden Treasures by Amy Goldman with photographs by Jerry Spagnoli (Bloomsbury, £40) Goldman is on a mission. A passionate gardener, she is dismayed by “the staggering… loss of genetic diversity in agriculture’’ and is intent on preserving old and intriguing varieties of fruits and vegetables with wonderfully evocative names – Granny Cut Short bean, Sheepnose pepper – by growing them and saving their seeds. Spagnoli’s detailed but dream-like daguerreotype photos of these crops are a haunting reminder of what is at stake.

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Well versed The life and times of novelist Charlotte Brontë and musician Elvis Costello hit the spot this week Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello (Viking, £25) When it comes to songwriting, Elvis Costello doesn’t mess around. The artist formerly known as Declan MacManus has recorded almost 30 studio albums and penned countless tracks for other singers. Most of those songs are stuffed to bursting with puns, epigrams, dark allusions and cinematic imagery. Costello will recall an episode from his childhood in London and Liverpool, often revolving around his father Ross MacManus, a club crooner who sang with Joe Loss’s dance orchestra. In the same chapter, he will jump ahead to his own stardom as the combative frontman of The Attractions, their hits including Pump It Up and Oliver’s Army, then he’ll delve into his family history. All that’s missing is Costello’s own feelings about these incidents. While the virtuoso writing is never boring, it can be distancing. Rather than opening up, Costello defaults to the jokes, slogans and wordplay of his songs. He doesn’t ponder the causes and effects of his considerable alcohol intake, for example, saying: “I drank a lot of gin. I thought it was a tonic.” Costello’s facility for transmuting ordinary life into slightly cryptic fables is what makes him such a prodigious songwriter. But in an autobiography, it can come across as coy and even cowardly.

His first marriage, to Mary Burgoyne, merits fewer words than the concert he went to on the night his son was born. He doesn’t say much about his marriage to Cait O’Riordan, bassist with The Pogues, except that he gave her co-songwriting credits that she didn’t deserve. And even when he is paying tribute to his third wife, jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall, it’s more for her music than anything else. It’s intriguing but exasperating. If a pop star has a decades-long feud with his own bassist or if he marries a member of The Pogues when lead singer Shane MacGowan detests him, you want to know the gory details. The only times when Costello is really frank is when he is talking about music in trainspotter-ish detail. He is fascinating on his favourite records and his growth as a recording artist, and he is particularly effusive on his amiable collaborations with Burt Bacharach, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and other musical heroes. But even here, there are no revelations about these greats’ personalities or private lives: Costello focuses solely on their work. His book is almost essential as an idiosyncratic history of 20th-century pop music. But you might as well listen to the songs themselves to get to know the man behind them. VERDICT: 3/5 Nicholas Barber

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Charlotte Brontë: A Life by Claire Harman (Viking, £25) Charlotte Brontë is the great artist of internalised suffering. To read her fiction is to encounter heroines afflicted by a torrent of emotional pain. Think of poor Jane Eyre with her defiance at an unjust world; plain Frances Henri in The Professor with her diffidence and yearning; or orphaned Lucy Snowe in Villette with her hopeless heart. Brontë makes us feel their anguish acutely. Readers of Claire Harman’s new biography will be left with little doubt about the origins of this aptitude for heartache, showing greater clarity than previous biographies about just how distressing Brontë’s world could be. Brontë was born on April 21, 1816. Five years later, her intelligent, “philosophical” mother Maria died and her passing struck “a blow from which none of the family ever fully recovered”. By 1824, Brontë had enrolled at school at Cowan Bridge, a foetid institution where her elder sisters, Maria, 10, and Elizabeth, 11, would die of consumption.

Brontë then attended a new school at Roe Head where she would teach before going to study at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels. She spent her time there in a state of near-permanent “crisis” largely because of her obsession with her teacher, the married Constantin Heger. After unhappily leaving Brussels in 1844, she returned to the family home at Haworth in Yorkshire and, with her remaining sisters Emily and Anne, began to submit work for publication. By the autumn of 1848, her alcoholic and consumptive brother Patrick was dead. By May 1849, so too were Emily and Anne. Despite a weakness for clichés, Harman’s narration of these devastating events is elegant, sensitive, beautifully paced and moving. The connections she makes between Brontë’s work and life are often illuminating, and the book is full of fascinating detail about her writing habits, her early ambitions and her excruciating death at the age of 38 which seems to have been caused by extreme morning sickness. It struck just as she was finding contentment, having married her long-standing acquaintance Arthur Nicholls. While this is in many ways a melancholy book, it is to Harman’s credit that she has also produced a work that is affirmative, edifying, inspiring and humane. It’s an admirable and appropriate tribute to its subject: a writer who lived a life of anguished strength but who wrote the works that would make those feelings sing. VERDICT: 4/5 Matthew Adams

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Top fives Top five fiction 1. Grandpa’s Great Escape by David Walliams (HarperCollins Children’s, £12.99) 2. The Burning Room by Michael Connelly (Orion, £7.99) 3. Lonely Girl by Josephine Cox (Harper, £7.99) 4. A Brief History Of Seven Killings by Marlon James (Oneworld, £8.99) 5. Warriors Of The Storm by Bernard Cornwell (HarperCollins, £20)

Top five non-fiction 1. The Road To Little Dribblingby Bill Bryson (Doubleday, £20) 2. The Amazing Book Is Not On Fire by Dan Howell and Phil Lester (Ebury Press, £16.99) 3. Everyday Super Food by Jamie Oliver (Michael Joseph, £26) 4. Guinness World Records 2016 (Guinness World Records, £20) 5. My Story by Steven Gerrard (Penguin, £20)