Around 170 new interviews provide the detail, including the tale of a Russian PoW who escaped his captors by stealing the camp commandant’s Heinkel. More broadly, the author seeks to explain why the Western Allies took so long to fight their way into Germany following the initial successes of the Normandy landings. The result is a stream of works that find the golden mean between monograph and popularisation.
One of the finest examples is Armageddon (Macmillan £25), by Max Hastings, an examination of the final months of the Second World War in Northern Europe that excels in both anecdote and analysis. Alongside many famous images (the Laoco?culpture; the Alexander mosaic) are less familiar stunners: a ferocious lion carved from a piece of Numidian marble, its striations rendering the beast even more exotic; a charmingly na? depiction of the Trojan horse on a 7th- century pot.

Nothing is omitted, from the humblest amphora to the grandest victory arch.It’s not very festive, but I adored Italian Memorial Sculpture 1820-1940 by Sandra Berresford (Frances Lincoln £40) a survey of lavishly emotional tombs and graveyard statues, from the hyper-realistic to the romantically stylised. The book is filled with centuries’ worth of visual conundrums, from distorted “anamorphic images” (reflective cone and cylinder provided), puzzles on cigarette cards and jokey, macabre prints. Cope is pretty far out, man, but this painstaking survey of standing stones is a real labour of love. The busy layout and artless photos (often featuring Cope and family) make a very welcome contrast to the gloss of the average coffee-table offering. The United States may have overtaken this country as a maker of history, but Britain remains its foremost interpreter.

Our academics are unmatched in their ability to charm a general audience, while our best amateurs compete with the professionals in scholarship. And artists are still playing tricks on us now, as the contemporary section proves.The rich heritage of Greece and Rome is well documented in Nigel Spivey and Michael Squire’s Panorama of the Classical World (Thames & Hudson £29.95), a compendious visual resource. (The delicate tracery of the Doge’s palace, built in an era when heads of state lived in heavily fortified castles, was, he tells us, a “raspberry” blown at Venice’s enemies.) I could find no translator’s credit; so my admiration for da Mosto is now unbounded.Francesco was easy on the eye; less so the dazzling, deranging optical puzzles in Eyes, Lies and Illusions: The art of deception (Lund Humphries £45). To order any of the titles in this Christmas Books Special, call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798897 and save 10 per cent on all orders over £10 (free p&p) Please quote IBDX when ordering.. If you enjoyed the spectacle of gravel-voiced Francesco da Mosto pootling around Venice in a stripy bobble-cap, pausing only to light up a symbolic gasper, the book of his TV series Francesco’s Venice (BBC Books £25) is a total delight. In true coffee-table fashion, it’s overflowing with fine photos (including a haunting view of Venice with the Dolomites looming in the distance), but it’s also a lively, opinionated and thorough history of La Serenissima.