The narrator, Christopher, is a 15-year-old with Asperger’s who is brilliant at maths and hopeless at people. The latest, Eagle Strike (Walker £12.99), is now out on audio, and read so well by Oliver Chris that it is guaranteed to stun any boy or girl of eight plus into seat-clenching silence. The reluctant teenage spy now has 90 minutes to save the world, but first he has to survive as a matador, out-race the evil Sir Damian Cray on a customised bicycle and worst of all, kiss the beautiful Sabina Pleasure.Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Random House £12.99) is this year’s literary phenomenon, and as gripping for children of 10+ as for adults. This is a tale to keep children of eight and up quiet as mice for four hours.

Be warned, though, it ends on a cliff-hanger that may ultimately cause screams of frustration.One series I can’t recommend too highly for its mix of suspense, comedy and outstanding writing is Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series. George is a friendly giant who, after years of scruffiness, has a makeover. Then he meets various animals desperately in need of help – and his clothes. Written by Julia Donaldson of The Gruffalo, this lively, witty, charming story packs music, action and half an hour of fun.More animal adventure comes in Zizou Corder’s Lionboy (Puffin £7.99; see review, above), read with relish by the marvellously sonorous Anton Lesser. Imelda Staunton, Jim Carter and Steven Pacey do a great job dramatising what is effectively a jolly version of Oscar Wilde’s fairy-tale about the Happy Prince. On the other, they can persuade parents that reading aloud to a child yourself, every day, is not necessary It is. The least confident parent is still more important than a full cast of actors; these are not a substitute.
The Smartest Giant in Town (Macmillan £7.99) comes with book and tape, and is simply brilliant for five- to eight-year-olds.

Audiobooks are the boon, and the bane, of childhood. On the one hand they can make a dull journey interesting, a sick-bed less miserable and keep a dyslexic child abreast of fiction that would otherwise be too complex to read. She survived into the 1640s.”I can’t say for certain this is the Dark Lady,” Haygarth says, “but the evidence that it was Emilia is strong, and I’m sure this is a miniature of Emilia. But whoever the lady in the portrait is, she is an outstanding beauty.”. “I found that it couldn’t have been Angela because she had died in about 1584,” says Haygarth. “But Emilia was exactly the right age in 1593.”The clincher for Haygarth is in the detail. The sitter’s bodice is decorated with the silkworm moths and mulberry trees of the Bassano coat of arms and the stag of the Earl of Essex, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth in the 1590s, in whose service Lanier had once been.Emilia Bassano was born in 1568, five years after Shakespeare, and was at one point the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, by whom she had a son.

Haygarth has studied the same material and discovered more telling references.Haygarth’s discovery – his findings are revealed in the January issue of BBC History Magazine – was pure chance. “I found it in the new British Galleries at the V&A.”More research by Haygarth identified “Mrs Holland” as Angela Bassano, Emilia’s elder sister, but the attribution came from a 19th-century inscription on the reverse. Glancing through a book about Hilliard’s Tudor miniatures he saw the portrait of a stunningly beautiful young woman.”She was ‘Unknown Lady, aged 26, formerly called Mistress Holland’ and dated 1593, but there was something about her that made me want to see the actual miniature,” Haygarth says. George Bernard Shaw thought she was one of Elizabeth I’s ladies-in-waiting, Mary Fitton, and even wrote his own play about her.Another theory was that she was the landlady of an Oxford inn and the mother of Shakespeare’s supposed illegitimate son, Henry Davenant. She might have been Shakespeare’s London landlady, the delightfully named Marie Mountjoy, or the black prostitute Luce Morgan, the “Abbess of Clerkenwell”. Equally, it is possible that “she” might in fact have been a man, perhaps Shakespeare’s patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.But in the 1970s, having studied the papers of the court apothecary and astrologer Simon Forman, the historian A L Rowse came up with the name of Emilia Bassano, daughter of a court musician and wife of another, Alphonse Lanier.