Janina Ramirez’s entertaining look at Anglo-Saxon England comes saddled with a title that Peep Show’s Mark Corrigan might have written, but thankfully her grasp of history is rather keener than his. As she explores the intersecting lives of everyone from Bede to Alfred the Great, the overall portrait is of men and women in the dark ages who were able to represent a kind of celebrity, both in their own day and centuries later when they would be canonised, often for political ends. There is some much-needed revisionism – Ramirez avoids the caricature of muddy horror, instead describing the period as “vibrant and exciting” – and a delicate balance is maintained between fanciful myth (the Loch Ness monster appears) and a carefully composed examination of a shifting social and political time in which few certainties remained untouched by progress.

The Private Lives of the Saints is published by WH Allen (£9.99). Click here to buy it for £8.19