HARD-HITTING BLOWS

Martin Chilton shares his August reading highlights, which cover subjects as diverse as football, deafness and the wind

- Martin Chilton

Anyone with a collector in their family knows how easily it can become an obsession. In A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity Until Now (Riverrun), James Delbourgo explores the dark mania of the “mad collector”. This witty, anecdote-filled history ranges across the ages, taking in notorious real-life collectors (Adolf Hitler for art; Imelda Marcos for shoes) and fictional ones (such as Psycho's Norman Bates).

Adam Sisman's thorough biography The Indefatigable Asa Briggs (William Collins) astutely pieces together what was a more turbulent life than you might expect from one of the best-known historians of his generation. Briggs, who died in 2016, was certainly on to a good thing when it came to the fees he received. In 1973, he was paid £230,000 (in 2025 values) to write a history of the Bethlem Hospital. He proceeded to string along his commissioners for the next quarter of a century, to the point where they had to hire other historians to finish the book. None of the final content was credited to any one individual, “to conceal that Asa had contributed so little,” in Sisman's words. You almost have to admire Briggs's chutzpah.

One can only imagine what Briggs, a founder member of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, would make of China in the 2020s. Dan Wang's engrossing Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future