Viewers of Ron Howard’s rather sanitised film about John Nash the schizophrenic genius of game theory will come away

Viewers of Ron Howard’s rather sanitised film about John Nash, the schizophrenic genius of “game theory”, will come away moved by Russell Crowe but with a host of unanswered questions. The movie’s source fills the gaps: Nasar’s is a beautiful biography, perceptive about the man, precise about his maths. The true story is both more terrible than the film allows (the Nashes’ son Johnny also suffers from schizophrenia), and more miraculous. One day, after decades of blank, psychotic silence, a ritual greeting from Freeman Dyson – father of computer guru Esther – was met with Nash’s cheery “I see your daughter is in the news again today” Hankies at the ready. The great historian of British class turns his eye on Empire with droll results. We learn how imperial rulers imposed home-grown snobbery on the world. In 1881, the Prince of Wales insisted that the visiting king of Hawaii should enjoy due precedence: “Either the brute is a king or a common or garden nigger; and if the latter, what’s he doing here?” More palatable is the reaction in 1874 of the Governor of Fiji’s wife to the snottiness of her English servant to the wives of local dignitaries: “I don’t like to tell her that these ladies are my equals, which she is not!” Cannadine’s own memories of growing up in Empire’s fag-end will resonate with other baby-boomers.

FREQUENTLY, IN fiction as in real life, the children get neglected It makes sense. Send the little ones to bed early, and your grown-ups are free to commit and suffer crimes, get sexually entangled, and bang on about their own, interestingly neglected formative years. So when a writer does decide to put an under-18 centre stage, you can’t help getting out that plastic trumpet and blasting a raucous note of celebration. A Child’s Book of True Crime Frequently, in fiction as in real life, the children get neglected It makes sense.

Five-year-old Lily Garner, an “onely-bonely” child, lives in a flat with a harassed single mum who needs Space and Time and likes SHOUTING, and an ailing Grandad who keeps prize rabbits with names like Newbiggin-on-Hill in hutches in his bedroom.Lily isn’t the smartest cookie on the block, and she doesn’t so much narrate as run her mouth – unstoppably. But Bryan has a keen ear for the idiosyncrasies of kid-speak, and this gift makes her junior creation so touchingly real, so fresh, and so alive: “A secret’s a secret,” “a promise is a promise,” and the flume at Splash World is “a good idea for children”. All very fantastic-elastic, and not as easy-peasy-lemon-squeezie as it looks.Lily’s garrulous charm begins to pall when you realise, with real dismay, that she doesn’t really have a story to tell. There are tantalising moments when it looks as if she might: the threats of a sadistic older child; the arrival of a smelly man in the playground who might be a “willy-weirdo”, but is actually her father Jed coming to check out his offspring; intimations that Lily’s mother is having a lesbian affair.But instead of becoming the stuff of drama, these almost-events remain peripheral to a narrative that sticks disappointingly to the safety of its hutch.

By the close of a book whose only real point of drama is Grandpa’s fatal heart attack at a rabbit show, we are left with nothing but the appealingly poignant, but insubstantial echo of Lily’s childish prattle.The Australian writer Chloe Hooper’s method is a little sneakier. In her poised, delightfully eccentric first novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime, she plants her child-heroine in the body of an adult.What do adults do? Commit adultery, of course! But as the 23-year-old teacher Kate is to discover, it’s an ugly game to get sucked into if, mentally speaking, you’re still mucking about in the sand-pit.As Kate watches a group of boys – her lover’s precocious son among them – playing little-league cricket, she notes with envy that “puberty seemed like a foreign disease they’d never have to catch.”Empathising more closely with the children in the primary-school class she teaches than with the grown-ups whose world she has reluctantly entered, Kate realises that her own naughty-little-girl act could one day accord her “Doomed Girl” status. Life as an older man’s mistress may have begun as a bag of sweeties – illicit lunch-hours in motels where you have sex, then nick the shampoo – but there’s poison in the dolly-mixture.Thomas, the urbane lover in question, is married to Veronica, an elegant fortysomething crime writer. Veronica has written a book about a gruesome local murder, a Tasmanian crime de passion whose victim is Ellie, mistress of the town vet. According to Veronica’s best-seller, the vet’s aggrieved wife discovered the affair, went ape, murdered Ellie with a broken bottle, then chucked herself off Suicide Cliffs.Kate has read the book, so when her car is sabotaged, she becomes increasingly worried about her rival’s intentions.