MY book of the year to date. 1599: Britain is about to start throwing her weight around. Ahead lies the conquest of one-third of the globe and the subjugation of its peoples. Ahead lies Captains Cook and Nelson, the novel, the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution.

1599 begins with the death of the poet Edmund Spencer.

The burial, at Westminster Abbey, is attended by one Will Shakespeare, and we are away. What was going on in the writer's head that year? For one thing, Hamlet.

Shapiro argues that the play was born at the crossroads of the death of chivalry and the birth of globalisation.

Shapiro is an American academic who argues and speculates, writes delightfully and wears his obvious scholarship lightly.

TW

The Descent of Woman: The Classic Study Of Evolution Souvenir Press £9 288pp By Elaine Morgan

DON'T be put off by the heavy-sounding sub-title. Morgan's work first became a rallying call to feminists in 1972 and the youthful passion she summoned up still reads as freshly and as amusingly today. This is a great gift. Morgan takes on some weighty stuff and makes it understood by the ordinary housewife. Oooops. All right, ordinary househusband. Beginning with Genesis, which placed Man over all other things which crawl upon the earth, Morgan chips away delightfully until every myth is exposed for the nonsense that it is. The title comes from the stage in human evolution when men were arguing whether or not women had souls.

And, of course, if they didn't have souls, they were to be treated no better than animals. And God created woman from the rib of Adam.

TW

A Woman In Berlin Anonymous Virago £8 311pp

ANYONE who read Antony Beevor's account of the 1945 Red Army ?taking' of Berlin in Berlin: The Downfall, will be acquainted with the monstrous attacks on women and children by the advancing Soviets. Anonymous, who had her book published in 1954, was greeted with disgust by German readers and within months the book vanished unsold from bookshops. The controversy centred on the lengths most women went to survive, what they were prepared to do for a meal. To the rest of the world, which ignored the plight of these women, "we were (German) trash, " Anonymous claims. What also intrigues is the pitiless treatment of women by men who had just a few weeks earlier liberated Jews from the camps. The experience, far from chastening, seems to have turned them into monsters of equal barbarity.

TW

Sightseeing By Rattawut Lapcharoensap Atlantic Books £8 247pp

LAPCHAROENSAP is well-qualified to comment on Thai attitudes to America and Yankee tourists, or "Farangs" and does so wittily in this debut collection of stories. He was born in the west of far eastern parents. If you were around at the time, think back to the way Irish locals treated monied American tourists with awe back in the '50s and you will have some idea as to where this writer is coming from. For example, one Thai child climbs a tree to shake some coconuts free for the Farangs who clap approvingly while the child makes monkey noises. In another scene a man is flattened fatally in a factory by a falling crate filled with goodies for US children. A heartfelt, but unsubtle read.

TW

The Laughter of Triumph: William Hone And The Fight for the Free Press By Ben Wilson Faber £10 451pp

THIRTY-FOUR pages of bibliography, notes and references reflects Wilson's energy, dedication and respect for his subject. His biography of the journalist William Hone is a rediscovery of a wonderfully talented, witty and brave man who poked fun at the British government in the early 1800s. He was censored by that government - any word politicians saw as unwholesome was the sole criterion for censorship. Hone responded with laughter. If a thing is a figure of fun, he claimed, what else can one do but laugh at it? The era, though, is vital to the understanding of the government's overreaction. In France, a few years earlier, the common man had been roused to revolution, and a similar "rabble" would not be allowed overthrow the British aristocracy.

TW

Cold Skin By Albert Sanchez-Pinol Canongate £9.99 192pp

COLD Skin is an irresistible blend of Robinson Crusoe and Night Of The Living Dead. On the run from an act of political betrayal, the young narrator has arrived on an island in the Antarctic Circle shortly after World War I, to measure the intensity of the wind. Despite the absence of the weather observer he has come to replace, he takes the job, only to find he has unwelcome company. No, not Gruner, the bedraggled keeper of the lighthouse. The visitors are reptilian creatures who rise from the sea at night. With only two rifles and their wits to protect them, Gruner and the narrator form an alliance soon tested by the lighthouse's ?mascot', a domesticated she-creature that Gruner, weirdly, has turned into a sex slave. Cold Skin has intellectual pretensions, but is best read as a shamelessly enjoyable piece of pulp.

CW

A Winter In China By Douglas Galbraith Vintage £7.99 304pp

THE Rape Of Nanking forms the backdrop to Galbraith's novel - the story of an innocent, who witnesses one of the worst atrocities of the past century. Sally Marsden has been hankering for adventure, for something "beyond the ordinary in that whole bleak, safe scene of English female life." When her fiancée is posted to China, she takes herself off there, where she becomes involved with the complacent English set.

"Say what you like about the Japanese, " the ambassador says, "but they're an efficient lot." Through their opera glasses, the embassy set watch the Chinese and Japanese armies fight. When war raises the temperature, plans to evacuate are made. But Sally misses the boat and is forced to seek refuge in a zone soon to be immersed in horror. Galbraith's is tight prose depicts a memorable season in hell. CW