GREAT DANE: The Hermit by Thomas Rydahl (Oneworld Publications) AN especially meaty read, with a most unlikely protagonist; Rydahl's award-winning debut was a bestseller in his native Denmark, hailed as top-drawer "existential noir" - although, we could argue, that is the case with most Nordic crime. The body of a small boy is found in a deserted car on an island beach near a run-down Spanish resort. The police want to bury the case; it's bad for tourism. But an elderly taxi-driver, in a drunken self-imposed exile some two decades after his wife and children left him, alienated and alone, has other ideas.THE ISSUEIt's tempting to regard Candice Millard's well-received Hero of the Empire: The Making of Winston Churchill (Allen Lane) as popular history for Generation Brexit. "If this long island of ours is to end at last, then let it end only when each one of us lies, choking in his own blood." and so on, as the fortress nation casts its nervous gaze towards Europe.No, here we're concerned with Churchill's adventures in what would be the Victorian era's last great conflict. "The delicious climate stimulates the vigour of the European," the young correspondent reported upon arrival in South Africa to cover the war against the Boer republics. "All Nature smiles, and here at last is a land where white men may rule and prosper."There's a decidedly Freudian element to the book. Hero of the Empire, the New York Times archly noted, "draws out three strands of Churchill's personality: the imperialist, the adventurer and the momma's boy." As Winston wrote of his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill: "She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her dearly - but at a distance." It is this element of an otherwise familiar tale, the newspaper added, "that forms perhaps the most intriguing strand of this narrative".CRASH COURSEOne for serious music lovers. Guardian critic Fiona Maddocks' Music For Life: 100 Works to Carry You Through (Faber & Faber) does exactly what it says on the cover. She's selected classical works from across nine centuries that, she argues, reflect the key moments in our lives; works that inspire, delight, comfort and console.Writing in the Observer, Maddocks said that in compiling the list, she had one rule: "The music comes first. I resist the idea of expecting music to feed or prompt an emotional state, so I tried to turn the matter on its head. Why do I want to listen to a particular work at any given moment?" Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata was the first work she wrote down. "Soon I had a couple of hundred absolute dead certainties and a mild sense of panic."THE BOTTOM LINE"[John Major]: Well, Boris, in a word, how is Russia?""[Boris Yeltsin]: Good.""And in more than one word?""Not good." - A Life in Questions by Jeremy Paxman (Wm Collins)..