(by Vivienne Westwood & Ian Kelly)

As soon as this was published, Westwood was hit by plagiarism claims by British writer Paul Gorman. Whatever the outcome, this is still an enthralling examination of 70-year-old Westwood’s very full life, as told to Kelly, in which the arts, reading, thinking and activism matter just as much as her success in the world of high alt-fashion.

Running at about 400 pages, it opens with a quote from her: “In the pursuit of ideas you will start to think, and that will change your life”, and ends with a photo of the magnificent anti-capitalist on the “We Need to Talk About Fracking Tour”, taken in June 2014. She is a supremely clever mother of self-invention.

(by Graham Norton)

Struck by food poisoning on his 50th birthday, Norton (unusually) stayed sober all night at his party and, as k.d. lang sang to him, he looked at his 300 guests and thought, “All the stories of my life were together in that one room and it made me very happy. The idea of this book began to grow.” Although Norton wrote an autobiography 10 years ago, this is a “prism” on aspects of his life and very insightful it is too.

His chapter titles don’t muck around: “Dogs” (more stable companions than a boyfriend); “New York” (the perils of making TV shows in the US, and a roll call of good, bad and ugly guests); “Divas” (Madonna, Cher — she wasn’t one, Liza Minnelli); “Booze”, quite frankly, he loves it ... well-written, straight-talking, it makes me like him even more.

(by Witi Ihimaera)

Writing a memoir meant confronting a problem which troubled Witi Ihimaera: putting himself at the centre of the narrative. He deals with it by writing about the “spiral” of his family and the rural community he grew up in; the arrival of an older halfbrother who stripped Ihimaera of his place as first-born; the awakening of his sexuality.

While there are flickers of references to his later adult life, Maori Boy essentially ends when he was 15 and he had to perform a harrowing act at a hangi to prove he was “a man”. He lost the plot and went too far. Maori Boy is a very intense piece of writing. Despite his best intentions, Ihimaera is very much at the centre of the spiral.

(by Ian Wedde)

Wedde, one of our very best poets, essayists and fiction writers, goes back to the womb at the start of this very thoughtful memoir, when he and his twin brother David arrived in the world, David ahead by 20 minutes. Wedde looks at the photos of the twins as children; David sunny and happy, Ian querulous and quiet.

It’s a narrative that moves around New Zealand and the world a lot as, over a 10-year period, he retraced his family’s movements from Blenheim to East Pakistan, Bangladesh, boarding school in England and Jordan during the 1969-70 civil war. Dedicated to his beloved brother Dave, it will make many readers start musing on their own early family life.

(by Rose Mitchell and Andrew James)

Mitchell and James, map archivists at the National Archives in London (what a great job), have assembled 100 maps traversing 1000 years of history. They point out that maps are often not completely realistic, but a means of making sense of the world. The variety is astonishing — portraits of empires as they rose and fell, colonial expansions, ordnance surveys, land subdivisions. The earlier ones incorporate beautiful illustrations, and the narratives facing each plate are really interesting.

It includes a map of Nagasaki drawn up after August 1945, with concentric circles marking the impact of the bombs, with the orange areas denoting “damage by fire and blast”. The map was attached to a British report so sensitive it was classified until 1993.

(by Peter Ackroyd)

Ackroyd is halfway through his six-part series on the history of England with this rollicking account of the 17th century Stuart dynasty, following Foundation and Tudors. The first Stuart king, James I, son of Mary Queen of Scots, rises to the throne, binding England and Scotland together, an unhappy merger. James lived in interesting times: he faced the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and a robust literary culture (Shakespeare, John Donne) was in full flight.

James was obsessed with witchcraft and preferred “male company”. The arrogance of his successor, Charles I, led to the English Civil War and the abolition of the power of the monarchy, which had repercussions throughout Europe. Ackroyd is a master at bringing history to life, blending accessible writing with scholarly depth.

(by Hazel Flynn)

Australian journalist Hazel Flynn is fascinated by the human stories embedded in history’s big adventures, which is the best kind of historical writing. This is a broad sweep, opening with The Age of Heroism (The Trojan Horse to The Defeat of the Spanish Armada); The Age of Subterfuge (The Gunpowder Plot-The Defence of Hougoumont); The Age of Derring-Do (The Alamo-The Irish Hero of the Somme); The Age of Dirty Tricks (Escape of the Goeben-The Human Torpedo Attack at Alexandria); The Age of Special Operations (Australian Companies in Timor- Raids Behind the German Lines in Italy); to our age, The Ageof Terror (The SAS in Iman-The Impossible Odds Rescue, Somalia).

How depressing that we live in The Age of Terror but, as this survey proves, mankind has never been very good at peace. New Zealand is in here, too, with The Sabotage of the Rainbow Warrior.