“I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer” edited by Mary Beth Norton
The world’s first personal advice column came about by accident. In early 1691, the Athenian Mercury was a new broadsheet that sought to provide talking points for coffeehouse patrons by answering assorted questions of the day. However, the three-man editorial team quickly started to receive queries of a more intimate nature from their subscribers and found that matters of marriage, lust and courtship interested their readers more than those on medicine, law and the military. This book, nimbly edited and introduced by the historian Mary Beth Norton, contains a broad selection of questions and answers, and plus ça change.
“It is my misfortune to be red-haired,” laments a correspondent with his eye on a woman with the “greatest aversion” to the shade and asking for a method to turn his locks brown; “I’ve a dreadful scold of a wife,” writes another, asking “how to tame her”; if a man finds his fiancée in bed with another man, is he still duty-bound to marry her? We may now have Mumsnet and Reddit but, nevertheless, many of these three-centuries-old quandaries still come with a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God warning.
By Michael Prodger
Princeton University Press, 203pp, £20. Buy the book
Never Flinch by Stephen King
When it comes to reading books by the “King of Horror” it’s best to go in with an open mind and without assuming what will happen next – unless you want to be let down by your deducing skills. This rule clearly applies to King’s latest book, Never Flinch. Though a standalone novel, it features a much-loved private investigator, Holly Gibney, and those associated with her investigation firm Finders Keepers.
Although the reader is introduced to the murderer from the get-go, this by no means spoils the fun. You may think you know all there is to know, but King’s mastery of withholding those final important pieces of information will have you working alongside Holly, perhaps not on unveiling the identity of the criminal, but on their motives. And let’s not discard King’s signature parallel plotlines which in the end collide to bring everything to light. With a killer on a revenge mission and a religious zealot targeting a celebrity feminist speaker, Never Flinch is not as graphic or as scary as King’s previous novels. What makes the book unnerving and impossible to put down is how real and plausible everything described can be.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Hodder & Stoughton, 429pp, £25. Buy the book
A Perfect Harmony: Music, Mathematics and Science by David Darling
“Math and music are intimately related,” says composer and lyricist Stephen Sondeim. While to many music might seem remote from maths and science, their shared intricacies have been studied for centuries. We all recall Pythagoras’ theorem (some more fondly than others), but what about Pythagorean tuning to create the interval of a perfect fifth? Though its mathematical precision fell out of favour by the end of the 15th century, Pythagorean tuning and its “circle of fifths” remains at the heart of harmonic theory today. It comes as no surprise that many scientists were also musicians.
A Perfect Harmony serves to solidify just how interlinked the fields are. From the Neanderthal bone instrument that mimics the musical scales we commonly use today, through musica universalis of the Middle Ages combining arithmetic, geography, music and astronomy, to the two Voyager spacecrafts’ cosmic LPs, the disciplines co-exist in perfect harmony. Darling’s observant musical odyssey across time reinforces that “music and maths are endlessly entwined… nourishing one another” and have done so for millennia. After all, at its simplest music is melody and rhythm, and rhythm cannot exist without maths.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Oneworld, 288pp, £10.99. Buy the book
The Harrow by Noah Eaton
The Harrow is a local newspaper – for Tottenham. Not, as its hardened editor John Salmon is sick of explaining, for Harrow: “As in ‘to harrow’, to rake the land and drag out weeds, to distress the powerful. As in Christ harrowing Hell, saving the innocent and righteous. Not Harrow as in that miserable bloody town Harrow!” The paper, each issue announces, is “the guardian of your democracy”.
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The reality is not quite so grand. The coverage focuses on villains, not victims, because no one cares about the latter. Salmon keeps a shabby office and three staff above a betting shop and spends much of his time harassing off-licence proprietors who have tried to lower their order. But when the prospect of a last-gasp “big story” heaves into view, Salmon and his team feel their hopes renewed. At well over 400 pages, The Harrow is on the weightier side for a thriller – and for a debut. But author Noah Eaton keeps the story ticking along at a pleasingly alacritous clip. Sometimes the world Eaton has built is told a little indulgently, but all told the story is complex, amusing and readable.
By George Monaghan
Atlantic Books, 389pp, £18.99. Buy the book
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This article appears in the 02 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Just Raise Tax!
