THREE KINGS

Martin Chilton shares his March reading picks, including Paul Fischer's behind-the-scenes look at titans of cinema

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Some 1.9 billion people around the globe live with chronic pain.

In Tell Me Where It Hurts: The Science of Pain and How to Heal (Allen Lane), Rachel Zoffness offers constructive advice on how we can all dial down our “pain volume” and confront negative emotions. Good sleep is important, she insists. Incidentally, Zoffness states that the risk of a heart attack increases 21-fold the day after a loved one dies, suggesting Saul Bellow was right when he wrote his novel More Die of Heartbreak.

There is plenty of agonising pain in Paul O’Keeffe’s Trafalgar: Battle and Aftermath (The Bodley Head), although one needs strong sea legs to cope with the gory descriptions of the brutality of naval warfare in 1805. His gripping history deals with the life and death of Admiral Horatio Nelson - and the mournful aftermath. London was bursting with people who wanted to be part of Nelson’s funeral service at St Paul’s Cathedral and O’Keeffe describes how a vast gang of pickpockets helped themselves to “a feast” as they preyed on well-wishers. The cost of war adds up in so many ways.

Late in life, while living in Berlin, sozzled poet WH Auden was reported to the police for driving erratically. When he appeared in court, he was asked if he took alcohol and replied: “I have been drinking every night of my adult life.” The German authorities acquitted him and, according to Peter Ackroyd, in his first-class new biography Auden (Reaktion Books), Auden’s typically Auden comment to his friend Peter Hayworth was: “The judge was rather a dish, my dear, didn’t you think?”

There are 450 pages of drollness in Alan Bennett’s fourth and final diaries collection Enough Said (Profile Books and Faber), which starts in 2016 and ends in 2024, the year the playwright turned 90. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s