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Tick Bite Fever, by David Bennun (Ebury Press, pounds 9.99)
Through an acquaintance with his matchlessly witty music journalism, I had already considered Bennun to be one of the country's funniest writers, and his story of growing up in Zambia and Kenya in the 1970s is a delight. Not another saccharine African memoir, you groan. Well, it isn't. The small Bennun had a genius for causing chaos, and as he grew older he grew no wiser. Refreshingly, he asserts: "I had the emotional depth and sensitivity of a potted cactus." There are numerous farcical safaris, meetings with air- ballooning toffs, multiple viewings of The Railway Children ("the cinema was my retreat into order"), and narrow escapes from death by vehicle or animal. Bennun refuses to sentimentalise Africa or its wildlife (playing with lions from the safety of a Land Cruiser, he determines: "Your cat would eat you if it could"), but underpinning the humour is a clear-eyed and movingly sincere tribute to what he has left behind. Steven Poole
British Politics: A Very Short Introduction, by Tony Wright (Oxford, pounds 6.99)
This useful book seeks to explain the provenance and workings of the British political system, which consists of random bits of history and legal decisions tied together with string. The difficulty is not, Wright asserts, that we have no written constitution, but that there are so many heterogeneous parts of constitutional law scattered far and wide: "A great accumulated jumble of statutes, common law provisions and precedents, conventions and guidebooks"....