Wavell

Adrian Fort (Cape, £25)

Churchill’s fire-eating, empire-loving command embraced many generals. The trouble with Wavell was that he was too much of a gentleman, with huge responsibilities in wartime Asia that would have defeated the toughest of soldiers. This biography by Oxford author Fort portrays Wavell’s life — victory in the Middle East, the loss of Singapore, the viceroy of India – as a mixture of heroism and failure. A poet and tiger-shooter, he was a man of contradiction, shunning the ruthlessness that war demands, yet ultimately a stout defender of Britain's colonial outposts.

Constable in Love

Martin Gayford (Fig Tree, £18.99)

As love stories go, the life of landscape painter Constable is full of Austen magic. He and his bride, Maria, waited seven long years for permission to marry and she was to die young after the birth of eight children. It is the waiting years that Gayford brings to life so poignantly, as graphic as any of the great Constable reflections of the countryside. A beautiful book for the romance in us all.

A Passion for Nature Donald Worste (OUP, £18.99)

America owes a great debt to the Scotsman John Muir. With his biblical beard, he was truly a prophet of nature, preserving vast tracts of mountain and forested landscape as extraordinarily beautiful national parks. His pride and joy was Yosemite, yet his wilderness travels as a deeply committed environmentalist extend far beyond. Walk in his path today in California and be grateful for his vision. Worste’s book is a tribute to the paradise Muir created.

The Lost City of Z David Grann (Simon and Schuster, £16.99) Colonel Percy Fawcett was one of the last great explorers, famed not for the lost cities (El Dorado) he presumably did not find but for his disappearance in the jungles of the Matto Grosso. It is claimed that a hundred searchers in his wake did not return. Grann mixes his own adventures with that of Fawcett, combining a riveting narrative with forlorn suspense. The eye-opener is that there were ‘lost’ Indian settlements in the Amazon, but not the stone fortresses that lured Fawcett and his companions. As with all explorations into uncharted territory, this book revels in the quest and, in Fawcett’s case, the vanishing.