There is no stronger proof of the power of marketing to overcome reality than the posthumous reputation of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. At a time when the death penalty was increasingly regarded as a barbarous relic of a bygone age, an enthusiastic mass-executioner - after only the most summary of trials - came to represent youthful rebellion. His puerile economic theories self-evidently entailed the most absolute form of tyranny, yet Guevara came to represent the free spirit itself - complete with wind through the hair - for the flower-power generation and all its progeny.

How did this remarkable transmogrification come about? This is one of the questions - perhaps the most interesting that can be asked about Guevara - that this dual biography of Castro and Guevara does not answer. It does not answer it because it does not ask it. And it does not ask it because its attitude to the dynamic duo is unclear.

Fidel & Che: A Revolutionary Friendship
Simon Reid-Henry; Sceptre, 480 pp, £20

Rooting round in a second-hand bookshop a few weeks ago, I came across a copy of the 1906 Boosey & Hawkes New National Songbook. Having a soft spot for this sort of thing, I took it down from the shelf and scanned the index eagerly. Amongst the old familiar favourites, such as The Vicar of Bray and Scots, wha hae wi'Wallace bled, my eye was caught by a number I hadn't before seen, Marching to Candahar. It turned out to be by the once famous songwriter A.P. Graves. It had a stirring tune with an attractive Irish lilt, but the lyrics themselves were far more striking. "Marching and marching/ Away for Candahar/ They say she's sore beset/ But thro' the Afghan net/ We boys will break/ and no mistake/ And save the city yet."

Butcher and Bolt
David Loyn; Hutchinson Random House, Hardback, 351 pp, £18.99

The Wire, HBO's five season series about (among many other things) drugs, policing and politics in Baltimore, concluded its final season this year, and its enthusiasts-many of them journalists--have been in mourning.  Two months ago the first of seven episodes of Generation Kill appeared.  A new mini-series made by two creators of The Wire.  Generation Kill dramatizes a book by Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone journalist embedded with a platoon of the U.S. Marine Corps' First Reconnaissance Battalion, with whom Wright traveled from Kuwait to Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq.

My face lit up with pleasure when I heard that a Book of English Eccentrics had appeared. The world of English Eccentrics is a sunny place, filled with eighteenth century hobbyists with names like Mad Jack, and given to riding on bears or crocodiles. Many Great Eccentrics were squires or writers, others rose from humble spheres of life to become great enthusiasts, philanthropists and reformers. Enthusiasm for a hitherto unthought-of or despised subject is the mark of a True Eccentric, such as the late Miriam Rothschild who became a world authority on fleas. Her distinguished Uncle Walter sometimes rode on the back of a giant tortoise or drove around in a coach pulled by zebras.

 In Search of the English Eccentric
Henry Hemming; John Murray, Hardback, 320 pp, £16.99

Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
Nicholson Baker; London: Simon & Schuster, Hardback, 576pp, £20

All considerable thinkers start with a problem. In the case of Philip Bobbitt, the problem is adumbrated in the title of his formidable new book: along with all the other aspects of civilised existence that terrorism threatens, it undermines the basis of liberal democracy, which is the consent of the governed to submit to the laws made on their behalf by their governors. These polities, which Bobbitt calls “states of consent”, have already undergone a profound metamorphosis from nation states to “market states”, according to the theory first put forward in his earlier work The Shield of Achilles. Now the globalised market state has come under attack by equally global “states of terror”, of which al-Qa’eda is the paradigm. The coercive measures that the market state has been forced to take in order to survive now endanger the consent on which the rule of law depends. So democracy is damned if it defends itself and damned if it doesn’t.

Terror and Consent: The Wars of the Twenty-First Century
Philip Bobbitt; London: Allen Lane, Hardback, 668 pp, £25