paperbacks

No nation more than the United States is founded on the principle of letting people do pretty much what they like - yet no other nation believes so firmly in human perfectibility and in arranging society with a view to perpetual improvement. The balance of these opposing principles is the best possible snapshot of the State of the Union at any given time, and in 1920 - with the economy booming and a European war just satisfactorily concluded - the upwards-and-onwards school of thought was at its high-water mark. Progress and prosperity were on the march, and no way were they going to slip on a puddle of spilt hooch: hence the remarkable breadth of support for the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution banning the sale and consumption of any alcoholic drink stronger than shandy.

Henry Ford wanted Prohibition so that his workers would work harder; socialists wanted Prohibition because, in the words of the good old Wobblies (the International Workers of the World), ''the capitalists use saloons to tranquillise and humiliate the proletariat''. Women wanted Prohibition, doctors wanted Prohibition, the churches wanted Prohibition, even a significant minority of drinkers wanted Prohibition. How could it fail?

This is what veteran journalist Edward Behr explains in this marvellously entertaining history of the rise and fall of a moral crusade, first published last year to accompany a BBC TV series on the same subject. It's a rich field for racy anecdotes and Runyonesque black comedy, and he mines it assiduously, while on the serious side his conclusions - principally, that trying to make people behave better by legal compulsion is the perfect recipe for making them behave worse - are extremely relevant to America and Europe today, what with tobacco being demonised and the narcotics trade positively flourishing, like Al Capone and his friends, on the back of almost universally rigid prohibition.

To be fair to the Eighteenth Amendment, for its first year or two on the books it appeared to be working. Crime (and the population of prisons and asylums) fell as the numbers of holders of savings accounts rose, and the nation's new habit of getting up in the morning without a hangover - for America had historically been the hardest-drinking nation in the Western world - was having a marked positive effect on public health statistics. Inevitably, however, the great American itch to do one's own thing soon needed scratching, and the result was organised crime, rampant corruption, gunplay in the streets, deaths from drinking improperly distilled booze, and more drinking than ever: in Edward Behr's words, ''a wild drinking spree that would last 13 years, five months, and nine days''. Or, as Will Rogers summed it up: ''Prohibition is better than no liquor at all . . .''

et cetera

I MUST CONFESS by Rupert Smith (Hamish Hamilton; #9.99)

As all book reviewers soon learn, you can - contrary to the proverb - judge a book by its cover, and this one has a cover that is worth the price of admission on its own. I Must Confess (cover and contents alike) is a lurid 1950s-style pastiche of the old Pan and Corgi paperbacks that specialised in what one might loosely call The Shame of our Cities, fearlessly exposing all sorts of glamorous vice and scandal involving dope, night-clubs, and blowsy dames with not many clothes on. Rupert Smith has quite a bit of form in the matter of period London lowlife, being the author of (among other things) a biography of John Barrington, publisher of many illustrated magazines devoted to the masculine figure, and here he's taken for his territory the debatable lands where the fringes of crime and showbiz meet, and where his hero, an unbelievably lucky rogue, actor, and pop star called Mark LeJeune,

lives. Camp as anything, and very funny too - especially when you try to work out upon what real people LeJeune is based.

LONGITUDE by Dava Sobel (Fourth Estate; #5.99)

Every once in a while there comes along a popular-science title that, despite its demands on the lay reader, sells by the warehouse. Stephen Hawking created the daddy of them all with A Brief History of Time, and more recently we had a couple of books about Fermat's Last Theorem; but some kind of award must be due to Dava Sobel for shifting 400,000 copies of a book about a man who made a clock. Not just any old clock, admittedly; the achievement of eighteenth-century horologist John Harrison was to design a clock that would keep accurate time at sea (pendulum clocks have a fairly obvious drawback here) and thus let mariners work out their longitude - until Harrison's innovation, every sea voyage was a journey into the unknown. How he then proceeded to get thoroughly diddled, dished, and done by the British Government, which had offered a lavish prize for such an invention, is the meat of

Sobel's story, but it seems somewhat undercooked. Most popular-science writing is about making a dull subject interesting, but Longitude makes an interesting story dull.

BY HEART: 101 Poems to Remember, edited by Ted Hughes (Faber; #7.99)

The mental possession of a few well-loved poems known word for word is, even among people who like poetry, a rarer accomplishment than it used to be. Challenged to recite our own favourites, most of us end up like the boy at the school concert who starts off with Hiawatha and ends up in the middle of The Charge of the Light Brigade. This collection, along with the Poet Laureate's introduction suggesting a method of memorising poems by associating the words with visual images, is Ted Hughes's attempt to do something about this lax state of affairs. For the method I can't speak - sounds too much like hard work, frankly - but the selection of poems is admirable: neither over-familiar nor wilfully obscure, austerely modern nor doggedly traditional, making this as good a short introduction to English poetry as you can buy, full of midget gems that deserve to be known, and loved, by heart. You

would have to be a very well-read poetry lover not to find something new and wonderful here.