Children’s questions about death are consistently good fun

What strikes me most about the Christmas gift-book industry — for industry it surely is, as I can confirm, having toiled on that production line myself — is the incurable optimism of everyone concerned. After all, most of these books are terrible. Some are merely appalling. But the simple act of writing and publishing them is to hope beyond hope that this will be the year for you, the year that your not-very-good book will become a bestseller and buy you everything you want and need, and that no one will notice its manifest flaws until it’s far too late.

Or maybe not; because every year a few decent titles do somehow manage to peek through the clouds. These are the ones that genuinely deserve to be bought, read and loved. Who, for example, would not enjoy Philip Parker’s The A to Z History of London (Collins, £25)? It’s possible that I have very slightly too many histories of the capital on my shelves, but this will definitely be joining them, for it’s one told through illustrations from the much-loved A-Z streetmaps, which have been going since the 1930s.