Wolf Hall & Bring Up The Bodies, by Hilary Mantel

Cromwell by Holbein. Cromwell thought it made him look like a murderer. His son agreed.

Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived. The handy rhyme that sums up the fate of six English queens almost as callously as Henry VIII got rid of them.

The second of Mantel's trilogy ends with the decapitation of the second one, Anne Boleyn. Even though we know for a historical fact that's it's going to end badly for Anne, Mantel takes us on a journey through the court of 16th century England so magnificently that it still comes as a shock.

The harrowing account of that execution encapsulates everything that is brilliant about her books. Anne's mad terror and hope of a last-minute reprieve; the gambling of ordinary, baying Londoners at the scaffold; the queasiness of the younger courtiers at the horror of the beheading; the cold politics at the heart of the murder; the bundling-up of the severed head by Anne's ladies-in-waiting; even the price paid by the absent Henry to hire a suave French swordsman to carry out the execution so Anne would be spared an English axe - over twenty-three pounds.

So it is that Mantel breathes vivid life into dark brown National Gallery portraits and fleshes out names on dense royal family trees. She provides the missing thoughts, feelings and emotions of long-dead, long-nosed dukes and duchesses, of servants, cooks and innkeepers.

Most brilliantly of all she turns the king's right hand man Thomas Cromwell into a living, scheming smooth-talker who would be as at home on the news channels and social media of today as he was in the candle-lit court of Henry VIII.

She does it all using only the language of the time. No King James Bible and no Shakespeare to borrow words and phrases from. But it never feels archaic. Its present-tense prose, its contant use of "he" to refer to Cromwell gives it an intimate urgency, and it's littered with aphorisms that are as relevant today as in 1536:

"Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters."

"But chivalry's day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys."

I stopped history lessons aged 14. In my hopeless, now-shutdown school the choice was history or geography O-level. You couldn't learn about kings and grykes. It was one or the other. I opted for the limestone pavements.

So I only knew of Cromwell through his role in the execution of half-remembered saints in the film version of Thomas Bolt's A Man For All Seasons (can you believe that won six Oscars in 1966?). Thanks to Mantel, I now know him better than any historical figure I can think of. Not only that, I like him, empathise with him, understand him and want him to get the better of the fops and power-hungry conspirators who surround Henry and his first and future wives.

I was on his side from the opening page of the first book, when he's getting a right old kicking from his beer-making blacksmith dad in Putney. I willed him on as he fled to Europe and befriended some Belgian cloth traders at the start of an educational European odyssey that took him back to England and is gradually revealed over the rest of the books.

He becomes the trusted right-hand man of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a grandiose Stephen Fry-figure who falls foul of the king and dies a confused and broken man. His death and disgrace should have been the end of Cromwell. Instead it was the making of him.

The politics of Cromwell's revenge are at the heart of Mantel's story. He ensures the king's opponents are tortured and killed without bloodying his own hands, even when the torture is happening under his own roof. Many of those opponents were once Wolsey's enemies. Cromwell ticks them off.

He fails in his best efforts to persuade that murdering old hypocrite Thomas More to back Henry's first divorce. So be it, More's head comes off and pragmatic Cromwell moves on. More and Wolsey were never the best of friends anyway. Revenge.

Politics aside, some of Mantel's most moving moments are deeply personal to Cromwell. The death of his beloved wife and young daughters during the annual outbreak of the London plague. The way he treasures the angel wings made out of peacock feathers that his youngest, Grace, wore at her last nativity play. His love of his eldest, Anne's copy book full of drawings of griffins and mermaids. His kindness and generosity to the waifs and strays who come his way and stay. His life-saving loyalty to friends.

And when, towards the end of the second book, you sense the sand starting to shift slightly beneath his feet, you fear for him. As he says, "You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."

The minute it ends, you miss him and every one of the occasionally confusing cast of multi-named and multi-titled characters. At least there is one more book to come. But it's a crying shame it's only a trilogy.

Lionel Asbo, by Martin Amis

Amis's gothic Only Fools and Horses is like C-list life in the modern media - nasty, brutish and not short enough.

It's a heavy-handed satire on the Land of Hope and Chaviness.  Amis leaves us in no doubt how much he hates every last man union jack of us - our high-rise flats, snarling dogs, racist relations, cheating friends, ugly cities, miserable weather, rich man's football and all-consuming smartphones: "They dropped down from the car and assumed the standard modern posture - faces steeply inclined over consoles held at waist height."

There's little to like and nothing to love. Unlike those 80s gems Money, Dead Babies (what is it about those babies?), Other People and later London Fields and The Information, I had no burning desire to share it with anyone when I'd finished it. Do we really went to spend our reading time wondering if those drugged-up pit bulls really are going to savage the sentimentally smiley baby?

Lotto-winning lout and Wayne Rooney lookalike Lionel Asbo is a dark literary monster of the 21st century - a direct literary descendant of Keith Talent in London Fields. A psychopathic would-be baby murderer who calls his mansion "Wormwood Scrubs", stages a tabloid relationship with Jordan-style "Threnody" (the quotation marks are part of her name) and arranges the devastating disappearance of a 14-year schoolboy who's been sleeping with Asbo's mother. His vocabulary makes Vicky Pollard sound like Simon Callow.

So what's in store for the nephew of the tower block caricature named after Lionel Blair? Des Pepperdine is smart, gentle and loving. Just a bit too literally with his gran. She also happens to be Lionel's incongruously cryptic crossword-solving mum. Will Lionel find out? What will he do if he does? Will gran blurt something out as she degenerates into premature, crossword-clue-spewing dementia in a tatty Scottish care home?

Weird, pornographic sex is a recurring Amis theme. Remember horror toddler Marmaduke dabbling with his mother in London Fields? There's plenty more of it here. Plus an acid attack on one of Amis's traditionally underwhelming women characters. Unpleasant.

There are laughs to be found as always with Amis. Asbo's attempt to eat a lobster ends in multiple injuries and a lengthy prison spell: "And then he went back inside to confront the scarlet fortress of the crustacean."

Flashes of pure Amis are blood-spattered around. How about this for a fabulous description of a cat: "Sitting on the table, Goldie (now a ladylike three-year-old) held up a forepaw, as if to receive a courtly kiss; then she kissed it herself, and tongued it, and rolled over on to the Daily Mirror."

Paragraphs of poetic power still surprise you like a knife attack: "And here, under a powerful moon (just short of full), the restless ocean pitched and yawed, the slow churn of its facets, each of them vying to get a share of creamy light - the motion magma, the rolling mirrorball of the sea."

And who'd have thought Manchester City would ever find their magnificent way into the west London world of Amis, even if Brent Medwin is a teenage cokehead City midfielder, both of whose parents are in jail. Still, at least we are told that Lionel and "Threnody" watch West Ham lose heavily to City at Upton Park - a result which dissuades him from investing any of his millions in the aptly-named Hammers.

But I've always had a soft spot for accounts of prodigious boozing and Lionel can certainly put it away: "The champagne arrived in its steel bucket... 'Got a bigger glass? You know, like a beer mug.' Lionel grimly monitored the waiter's movements. '...Yeah, that'll do. Fill her up, boy.'"

For happily fear-free cocktails, however, I'd still rather read Kingsley Amis's excellent Everyday Drinking any day. Like some of the concoctions in that mini classic, his son's joyless novel is to be approached with caution.

Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell

Not just one book; six mini masterpieces in one linked together through centuries by birthmarks, diaries and the burning human desire for justice and freedom.

It's a nineteenth century travel journal from remote Chatham Island, which is mentioned in a young English musician’s letters from 1920s Belgium, whose recipient becomes a character in a 1970s American nuclear thriller, which is read in the present-time memoirs of a small-time London publisher who finds himself imprisoned in a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest care home.

Then there is the Blade Runner-style interview with a human clone in a dystopian future Korea of man-made fast-food restaurant slaves, 1984 thought police and Brave New World production lines. The language is Anthony Burgess; the clone namechecks Orwell and Huxley. All cars are called "fords" - another reference to Huxley's hero? - the publisher's adventure turns up in a well-loved old movie, or "disney".

Next up, a post-dystopian dystopia in which an advanced, overseas visitor turns up to map an agricultural island scarred with architectural and Buddhist relics of on old world. It's like Planet of the Apes without the apes written by goatherd Zachry in the style of Huckleberry Finn. A trick that rarely fails: go into the future to shine a light on the madness of the present.

The male musician, the thriller's heroine, the publisher, the clone and Zachry all have a comet-shaped birthmark between their shoulder blades. Are they reincarnations of the same soul travelling through time and space? Soul regeneration is a core belief of Zachry's people, who talk of a prophet called Malthus: "Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud."

But the publisher rubbishes the idea while subbing the thriller: "Far too hippie-druggy new age."

The journal is formal Victorian prose with a debt to Treasure Island; the letters are risqué, farcical and bawdy in the style of Wodehouse or Jerome K Jerome; the thriller reads like Raymond Chandler and feels like Chinatown; the memoirs - my favourite part - combine the eloquence of Evelyn Waugh and the black comedy of Kingsley Amis.

There's also a salient quote from the stroke-stricken publisher: "Come now, what's a reviewer?" I reasoned. "One who reads quickly, arrogantly, but never wisely..."

The structure takes us through the seven ages then back through them all in reverse order. The horrors of the publisher's recovery from a stroke and his efforts to escape from the care home make even the reader's rush-hour commute to work on the tube feel like a priceless freedom: "Freedom! is the fatuous cry of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is."

The publisher's recollection of Gibbons' assessment of history is a useful summary of Mitchell's brilliant book: "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

The Art Of Fielding, by Chard Harbach

* A warm-hearted literary novel centred around college baseball written in a style like Jonathan Franzen's with hints of John Irving and a homage to Herman Melville. More Field of Dreams than Moneyball.

* Henry is a scrawny poor kid with a gift for fielding at shortstop that gets him spotted by visiting college captain Mike Schwarz. His dedication and skill set him on a record-equalling run of error-free games, but is he mentally tough enough to earn the professional fortune the coaches and agents say he can?

* The head of the middling Wisconsin college is Professor Affenlight, a familar figure from campus novels but with a twist. Wise, self-absorbed, an easy-going ladies' man heading for a comfortable retirement. But suddenly head-over-heels in self-destructive love with Owen, Henry's gay room mate and unlikely baseball team mate. Is that really what happens to old American English professors?

* Schwarz is a widow's peaked captain who's already ruined his body playing sports and has half an eye on  a law career. His relationship with Henry is at the core of the novel; it makes him  joyful, juvenile, and jealous, in contrast to his stuttering relationship with the happy-pill-popping Pella, the Professor's daughter who turns up on the run from a miserable marriage and ends up bed-hopping as gamely as Susan Sarandon in Bill Durham.

* The moment when Henry thinks he's killed Owen with his first ever mis-thrown baseball is a nod to Irving's extraordinary A Prayer For Owen Meany; Meany tragically kills his best friend's mother with a foul ball in a little league match.

* TV news producers everywhere will nod in recognition of Owen's mum's description of her job as a news anchor: "It's really not very glamorous. Sit around all day staring at the internet, then spend an eternity in hair and makeup."

* Harbach has a great ear for sound. This bit reminded be of the pick, pack, pock, puck of the cricket bats in James Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man: "Ping. Ping. Ping. ‘Goddamnit, Izzy. Quit slapping at the ball like that. This isn't a catfight.’ Ping."

* He's also really good at describing dogs: "He was a beautiful animal, old and noble, a sugar-furred husky with one blue eye... Contango settled down on the pale kitchen floor inches from Affenlight's chair, noble head on noble paws."

* Harbach takes us inside the heads of Henry, Schwarz, Affenlight and Pella - but we only get to know Owen through the eyes of others. We never find out what he thinks about the Prof's infatuation with him or anything else. Instead we get a speech: "You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built by effort and error, study and love."

* Melville looms large. Affenlight's discovery of a long-forgotten visit to the college has resulted in a statue, the school trades on the association and the baseball team's nickname is The Harpooners. But the ghost of Emerson is recalled most bizarrely of all in the Burke and Hare finale to a marvellously old-fashioned home run.

A Journey, by Tony Blair

* I was a producer on the Radio 5 Live breakfast show when Blair came to power in 1997. The morning after the victory I remember ushering the BBC's political correspondent John Pienaar into the studio for a chat with presenter Peter Allen; he was carrying a piece of A4 paper adorned with five hand-written words, just in case he forgot amid the national euphoria while on air: "Tony Blair is Prime Minister." This is Blair's candid, conversational and anecdotal account of what happened to Britain next.

* Blair's premiership will forever be defined by the Iraq war, and there are lengthy chapters of explanation and justification as well as a few too many reproductions of official reports on it all. But  A Journey is also a reminder of the real achievements and wide-reaching changes, especially in education, the health service and Northern Ireland, that he and New Labour brought to a generation weaned on Thatcherism and its diluted successors.

* The insights into pre-power life are entertaining: the time the Blairs mucked up a restaurant booking on holiday in Tuscany and couldn't beg a table for the night: "We dutifully rebooked and went there two nights later. I don't think that ever happened to me again."

* There are some lovely stories about parenting at Number 10, Cherie's independent spirit and  even a Leopold Bloom-esque account of the Tony Blair toilet habit: "I am very typically British. I like to have time and comfort in the loo. The bathroom is an important room and I couldn't live in culture that doesn't respect it. Anyway, that's probably more than you ever wanted to know."

* The John Prescott mentions are the funniest and also among the most thought-provoking in the book: "At Cabinet, he would occasionally sit like a grumbling volcano ready to erupt at any moment... John would make some slightly off-colour remark if he was in a sour mood. I would then bring (Patricia Hewitt) in again, just for the sheer entertainment of watching him finally explode... He genuinely made me laugh."

* Prescott's affair with his diary secretary also prompts some candid observations about politics and adultery, which may have caused Cherie to raise an eyebrow or even two: "Then there is the moment of encounter, so exciting, so naughty, so lacking in self-control. Suddenly you are transported out of your world... and just put on a remote desert island of pleasure. You become a different person, if only for an instant, until returned back to reality. Which is not by way of an excuse, incidentally."

* There is always fun to be found among the weighty duties of State. Try not to laugh out loud when reading Blair's account of dealing with some of the more intractable characters in Northern Ireland: "The Drumcree people were the unreasonable of the unreasonable of the unreasonable. In the premier league of unreasonableness, they left every other faction, in every other dispute, gasping in their wake."

* Blair's fear and loathing of Prime Minister's Questions is eye-opening. If a trained barrister as confident and publicly-assured as he is was reduced to a bag of nerves, what hope for the rest of them: "PMQs was the most nerve-racking, discombobulating, nail-biting, bowel-moving, terror-inspiring, courage-draining experience in my prime ministerial life, without question."

* His account of his relationship with President Bush is revealing. That famously overheard "Yo, Blair!" greeting is easily explained and dismissed. Bush also comes out well on a personal, non-political level; when family and friends of Blair's visited Washington after Blair had left office, Bush was a gracious host: "He came out, showed them round, took each one into the Oval Office, had a picture and was thoroughly and completely charming. Didn't need to do it. Wasn't pushed. Just did it. So ‘Yo, Blair’ was a joke; but unfortunately only I got it!"

* Blair's deteriorating relationship with Gordon Brown forms the spine of the book. They started as inseparable allies on a high-minded road to power; they ended on barely-speaking terms with Brown plotting Blair's downfall on every resentful page. Blair emerges as a fair-minded, generous and, yes, honest leader. He is clearly baffled why the Labour party was so ready to replace him with someone who was always going to be difficult for the public to elect as PM - "an extraordinary and weird self-inflicted myopia".

* By the time Blair finally handed over to Brown, I had moved from the BBC to Sky Sports News and he'd played a big part in winning the Olympics for London. I remember watching his final PMQs in the office. His last words in the Commons, that place of low skulduggery, summed him up: "I wish everyone, friend or foe, well. That is that. The end."

50 Shades of Grey, by EL James

* Everyone else has; you may as well see what all the fuss is about. Possible contenders: prose style, plot, character development, profundity, endless pages about kinky sex? It's certainly one of them.

* Some readers say it really does capture that Teenage Kicks sense of all-consuming infatuation that smacks you repeatedly across all four cheeks when you fall madly for someone for the first time. Yeah, baby, give it to me, as Christian might say.  But the feeling tails off for the 50 Shades reader much sooner that it does in real life.

* So why bother ploughing through it when it's basically the same chapter repeated 26 times (impressive length, indeed)? Well, the language Anastasia Steele uses to describe her ladyparts and her overwhelming emotions when pushed to her rosy-cheeked sexual limit is certainly eye-widening (something Christian does a lot): there are more Holy! exclamations than a 60s episode of Batman. "I groan loudly, gutturally, and revel in the fullness of his possession."

* The suave seduction techniques of white-shirted millionaire spanker Christian Grey are in the same OTT vein as Robert Downey Junior in Iron Man. But Iron Man stops short of asking his lady friends to sign an access all sexual areas agreement before getting down to the serious business of butt plugs and Ben Wa balls.

* The entirely present-tense prose style really is as off-putting as everyone says it is. It might give a sense of  heart-racing urgency but limits any chance of  getting to know Anastasia and Christian beyond cliche. It just adds to the feeling that we're voyeuristically reading a gushing teenage diary when we really ought to know better: "I blink at him momentarily, and then I turn over. He unhooks my bra and runs his hand down my back to my behind." Tap the Kindle screen or fiddle for the off button - your choice.

* It's a modern ladies' lexicon of coy sexual references: Christian repeatedly stills himself and finds his release: "He's my very own Christian Grey flavour popsicle." But for an English graduate with a repeated penchant for Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, Anastasia has let the side down.

* There are some chuckles, especially the comedy sex similes that reduce the metaphysical to the humdrum: "Two orgasms... coming apart at the seams, like the spin cycle on a washing machine, wow." Wow indeed, Miss Steele.

* The most awkward bits are the recurring thoughts of Anastasia's Inner Goddess and her admonishing conscience. They conjure images of rival fairy godmothers on each shoulder, a bit like that 70s public information films about cartoon Dave who kept losing the girls because he couldn't swim: "Meet Mike; he swims like a fish." But swimming is not the primary aerobic activity here: "He groans again. Ha! My inner goddess is thrilled."

* There is some tenderness, literally and metaphorically, among the whip lashings. Christian may be a spanker but he's also a cream slapper: he gently applies ointment to Anastasia's palm-printed areas after one of their more vigorous sessions. The caring man behind the gimp mask.

* Ultimately, 50 Shades will disappoint anyone who's looking for either a sex manual or a really convincing, emotional story of sexual infatuation. But it doesn't claim to be either. It's a fantasy, and one relished by enough readers to warrant a read. And you can bet your sore behind that it's a better bedroom companion than iPad porn for anyone who prefers the power of their own imagination to pixels. Laters, baby.

The Fear Index, by Robert Harris

* The cinematic style of the fast-paced narrative as a Geneva-based hedge fund cash-cow computer goes rogue.

* The breathless prose matching Dr Alexander Hoffman's increasing desperation as he tries to find out why his apparently wonderful life is unravelling around him when an intruder attacks him in his home: but who or what put him up to it?

* Being unable to resist casting appropriate Hollywood stars as the characters for the inevitable movie in a couple of years: Tom Hanks for Hoffman, anyone?

* The titillating explanation from the Hugh Grant-ish business partner about how a hedge fund works: gamble a fortune with someone that a partygoer's panties are black; then gamble another fortune with someone else that they might be any other colour. Apply principle to financial derivatives. Ker-ching.

* The insight into the world of the ruthless hedge funders who would rather fire their risk advisers than do anything to stop the relentless pursuit of unimaginable wealth.

* The plot nods to gruesome contemporary events: the consenting cannibal case in Germany and passenger jets brought down by terrorists.

* The entertaining antics of investigating Detective LeClerc, a cross between Columbo,  Clouseau and Robert Duvall in Falling Down.

* The meeting of the hedge fund investors: the motliest crew since the golden ticket winners in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

* The gradual unfolding of Hoffman's back-story via the Cern Large Hadron Collider and his Damien Hirst-style artist wife. He's far from the smug, millionaire antique-book collector the opening chapter suggests.

* The unmistakeable echoes of Hal in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as it seems the fund computer is developing a mind of its own. But can Hoffman shut it down,  live to tell the tale and save his marriage? Go long or short - your choice.