Sophie Mackintosh: tangible evocation of longing and desire. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

In brief: The English Actor; Cursed Bread; The Restless Republic – reviews

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A woolly history of stage acting; a sensuous tale of deadly obsession in a French town; and a seminal exploration of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate

The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern

Peter Ackroyd
Reaktion, £20, pp416

The biographer and historian Peter Ackroyd is justly celebrated for his innovative and enthralling writing. Alas, on the evidence of The English Actor, his previous flair has left him and its loss is to be much mourned. Ackroyd takes a fascinating and potentially rich subject – the evolving role of the theatre actor in Britain from medieval times to the present day – and smothers it beneath windy generalisations and Wikipedia-level summaries of actors’ careers. There is a brilliant book to be written about this topic but this, unfortunately, is not it.

Cursed Bread

Sophie Mackintosh
Hamish Hamilton, £16.99, pp192

Sophie Mackintosh’s remarkable third novel is loosely inspired by a still-unexplained historical event in which the inhabitants of the French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit succumbed to a mass poisoning in 1951. This is the backdrop to a sensuous and thrillingly written account of the growing obsession that the frustrated baker’s wife Elodie comes to feel for the glamorous, mysterious Violet and her ambassador husband, who arrive in town and set about causing discord among the local people. Mackintosh’s evocation of longing and desire is so tangible that the reader can smell the aroma of illicit sex.

The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown

Anna Keay
William Collins, £9.99, pp496 (paperback)

Between 1649 and 1660, Great Britain was a republic. There have been countless books written about the leading players in this period, not least the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, but in this ceaselessly fascinating account of one of the most epochal events in the country’s history, the deserved winner of the Pol Roger Duff Cooper prize, Anna Keay skilfully delves beneath the well-worn cliches about the Commonwealth and brings a time of quiet, uncertain and ultimately fruitless revolution to vivid life. It is hard to imagine a better examination of the Protectorate.

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