Churchill and the Jews Martin Gilbert (Pocket, £9.99)

Gilbert has devoted his life to Churchill, having been named his official biographer in 1968. An honorary Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, he is also Jewish, and therefore excellently placed to look at the sometimes contradictory evidence of Churchill's attitudes to Jews, starting with his father's friendship with wealthy British Jews, and ending with his last meeting with Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion in 1960. Churchill's views of other races, were generally pretty reactionary, but he believed the Jews were the bedrock of Western civilisation. Supporting the idea of a homeland for Jews in Palestine, he was horrified by Arab opposition.

Bomber Boys Patrick Bishop (Harper Perennial, £7.99)

RAF Abingdon gets a couple of honourable mentions as a training ground in this readable account of the young men of Bomber Command, who risked death, injury and capture to send bombs through shreiking flak into enemy territory. Bishop argues that because of the controversial policy of reducing German cities to rubble, the bravery of these pilots, and their contribution to the war effort has not been recognised. As a war correspondent, he gives us the full story of the suffering of the bombed as well as the stories of victors.

Darkmans Nicola Barker (Harper Perennial, £8.99)

This weird book does grow on you, though I'm not sure I fully understand the plot, or even partially. It takes place in 21st-century Ashford, and involves a Kurd who isn't Kurdish, a drug dealer and his laundry supervisor father, and a chiropodist who believes her son has been fathered by the ghost of a medieval court jester. Short-listed for the Booker Prize, it undoubtedly takes fantasy to new levels of confusion.

Michael Foot: A Life Kenneth O. Morgan (Harper Perennial, £12.99)

Following the recent elections, we probably don't need more reminders of the Thatcher era, which ended the career of this duffle-coated Old Labour politician, who took part in 20 general elections between 1929 and 2005. In this authorised biography, Morgan shows how his famous debating skills were honed at Oxford, where he arrived from the Quaker school Leighton Park. In the end, his career mirrored those of his beloved alma mater in its guise of "home of lost causes".