She then orders him to investigate a 20-year-old murder that took place there. Lamont wants to employ Garano’s expertise (and, with his looks, he’s a PR dream) and cutting-edge DNA technology to show a cold case being solved by her department. He has a frighteningly dynamic female boss – a combination Cornwell is fond of.
District Attorney Monique Lamont has sent Garano to Knoxville, Tennessee, to attend the National Forensic Academy. Garano is a stunningly good-looking, mixed-race, maverick detective who relies on his instincts to solve crimes. Now, in her latest thriller, At Risk, she has returned to what she does best, and in the process has created a new hero: Winston Garano, an investigator with the Massachusetts State Police. That The Man Who Saved Britain isn’t in the same league as Richard Usborne’s Clubland Heroes or E S Turner’s Boys Will Be Boys, both published in the dark ages deplored by Winder, may simply reflect the times we live in.Jeremy Lewis’s ‘Penguin Special’ is published by Penguin.

Patricia Cornwell is most famous for creating Dr Kay Scarpetta and for bringing the latest techniques from forensic technology to crime writing. With the same impassioned scientific scrutiny she gives Scarpetta, Cornwell once investigated the riddle of Jack the Ripper’s identity. She spent £2m gathering DNA evidence, hiring handwriting experts and buying 30 of Walter Sickert’s paintings to establish the artist’s guilt as the East End serial killer Even her fans remain sceptical. Not the most elegant of writers, he pumps up indignation with redundant adverbs and makes frequent use of “to be honest”, that weasel phrase beloved of lying politicians.Matters improve when he stops raging about the past, and turns to the Fleming books and films. We learn that he has seen the film of Goldfinger 45 times; he notes how ill-at-ease Bond seems in New York, transmogrified “from cosmopolitan killer to pursed-lip civil servant from the land of toad-in-the-hole”, writes well about Jacques Cousteau’s films vis-?is Bond’s underwater activities and – bearing in mind the fiasco of MI6 reports in the run-up to the Iraq war – suggests that Fleming’s books implanted a misleading impression of the efficiency of the British Secret Service.Popular literature is a useful guide to prevailing attitudes and prejudices. On a visit to Les Invalides, he is “completely nauseated” by the captured battle standards; listening to a broadcast of Chamberlain’s declaration of war, “it seems nearly impossible to remain standing”; he happily accepts the suggestion that life in Attlee’s England was a “complete horror”. The Raj had been built from “one long bloodbath of on the whole cheap victories”; elsewhere, “great chunks of the world were repopulated and reconfigured by British settlers whose almost insectoid blankness and rapacity will surely to some later global generation make them appear far, far worse than the Mongols”.
Winder is keen to prove himself super-sensitive to the shameful weight of history.

The argument seems reasonable enough, but its elaboration leaves much to be desired. Oddly reminiscent of Soviet cartoons, Winder’s crude and lopsided account of 20th-century Britain is, he warns us, “breathtakingly selective and loaded with no doubt facetious and callow interpretation” Greed and brutality were combined with utter incompetence. The ruling class was personified by some “scarlet-faced maniac in a remote aristocratic pile” who, like Fleming, led an entirely “vacuous” life. Ian Fleming may have been a shit, but he had his finger on “the neuroses, panics, highs, dreams and disappointments of a Britain that has now vanished and whose death-throes he romanced,” and his high-living hero’s “ability to maim and kill foreigners became a great consolation to millions of bitter and confused people”. “Scraped together” from “bits and bobs”, his book suggests that, with the Empire dismantled and the economy in chronic decline, Britons in the Sixties found solace in the activities of James Bond, on the printed page and at the cinema. How is this something for a left-winger to praise? This eradication was achieved by mass terror, with the Taliban slaying bitterly poor farmers dependent on the opium crop – a tactic the most hardline in the Bush administration now want to repeat by trashing the crops and leaving the farmers to die.

The humane solution is legalisation of the heroin trade, not praise for the most vicious and insane drug eradication programme of all. This passage is a reminder that when Pilger is good, he is great, but when Pilger is bad, he reeks.. “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” Dean Acheson famously declared, and Simon Winder’s melange of cultural history, memoir and political diatribe is a variation on that theme. Yet again, the promise of Thatcher-style trickle-down economics is a hallucination, and yet again racial divisions become stronger This is an end to apartheid?And yet…