Books of the month: From Ali Smith’s Companion Piece to Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses

Martin Chilton reviews six of April’s biggest releases for our monthly column

(The Independent )

The BBC celebrates a special centenary this year, although I’m not sure “she” is still everyone’s favourite Auntie. Condensing 100 years of its history into under 300 pages is no easy feat, and Simon J Potter does an accomplished job in This is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain 1922-2022 (Oxford University Press). The book contains many tasty nuggets. The first “funny football radio show”, for example, came in 1923, with witticisms courtesy of Arsenal director Charles Crisp, a name funnier than his jokes, judging by his “wisecracks” about referees.

The book deals with the Beeb’s dark modern era, and Potter details how, in the 1960s and 1970s, there was “a widespread tolerance of sexual harassment” inside the corporation. However, given these were times in which “fêted” presenter Jimmy Savile was raping children and Stuart Hall was committing sexual assaults on BBC premises, it surely merited a chapter title more damning than “Transformation and Stagnation, 1960-1979”.

Modern-day Everest climbing is often the preserve of the bored rich, a pursuit attracting the type of thrill-seekers who can afford £100,000 VIP tour packages. A century ago, however, George Leigh Mallory and a team of British climbers attempted to scale the world’s most famous peak “because it’s there”. In Everest 1922: The Epic Story of the First Attempt on the World’s Highest Mountain (Allen & Unwin), Mick Conefrey tells the full dramatic story of an extraordinary expedition.