SUMMARIES

. Robert Graves by Jean Moorcroft Wilson (published by Bloomsbury for £25, 480pp)

ALONG with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves was one of the great poets of the First World War. Graves was born in 1895 and when war broke out a week after he left school, he enlisted aged 19.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson describes his troubled schooldays at Charterhouse and the horror of the war, during which he was wounded and reported dead. He survived, and, whilst he was haunted by his experiences, married 18-year-old feminist artist Nancy Nicolson.

The first volume of Moorcroft Wilson’s finely researched biography concludes with the scandalous end of Graves’s marriage, when he and American poet Laura Riding – who had been conducting a turbulent, four-sided relationship with Nancy and Riding’s married lover – threw themselves out of the upstairs windows of their Hammersmith house.

. Becoming by Michelle Obama (published by Viking for £25, 448pp)

FOR most of us, making a toasted cheese sandwich would be almost the least exotic thing we could do. But for Michelle Obama, after eight years in the White House, sitting in the garden of her own house and eating toasted cheese felt like “my new life just beginning to announce itself . . . Here I am, in this new place”, she writes in the preface to her autobiography, “with a lot I want to say”.

Born into a working-class family in Chicago, she studied at Princeton and became a lawyer at a prestigious Chicago law firm, where she mentored a geeky summer associate named Barack Obama. When they bought ice-cream cones one summer evening and kissed for the first time, Michelle had no idea of the destiny that would one day find her bonding with the Queen over their uncomfortable shoes.

Warm-hearted, funny, passionate about social justice and movingly candid about the problems of being a politician’s wife, Becoming is as compulsive to read as a great novel.

. On Leopard Rock by Wilbur Smith (published by Zaffre for £20, 368pp)

FROM his early childhood years and onwards, Wilbur Smith’s twin passions have been hunting and writing. The secret of both, he observes, is tenacity. Smith was born in 1933, in what is now Zambia, to parents who would inspire his future career in different ways. His father, Herbert, was obsessed with hunting (when Wilbur was a child, Herbert shot three man-eating lions), while his mother, Elfreda, was a passionate reader. Shelves of books lined the walls of their ranch house, and every night she would read to Wilbur in bed.

Soon he was determined to become a writer himself, an idea that his father vigorously opposed: “You’ll starve to death,” he predicted.

Uninhibited by the political correctness he detests, Smith’s memoir is a rollicking yarn of slaughtered wildlife, literary superstardom and late-blooming love. “I won’t stop writing until I stop breathing,” he promises.

. Not The Whole Truth by Angela Huth (published by Constable for £20, 320pp)

“SUDDENLY I am old”, writes the journalist and novelist Angela Huth, author of Land Girls. She was born in 1938, the daughter of the director and producer Harold Huth and his wife, Bridget. While Angela adored her father, her mother was “bored stiff by small children”, leaving Angela and her sister to be looked after by a devoted Nanny, who did her best to conceal their mother’s penchant for gin: “Oh dear, poor mummy fell down the stairs last night.”

Haphazardly educated at a girls’ boarding school, Angela studied art in Paris and Italy before returning “to face the dotty business of becoming a debutante”. A longing to write led her to Queen Magazine, where she met the brilliant journalist Quentin Crewe, who would become her first husband. There ensued an intensely glamorous Bohemian social life, with friends including David Frost and Princess Margaret, who shared Huth’s unusual phobia about dolls.

Deliciously gossipy and trenchant, Not The Whole Story is an entertaining collection of stories from times past.