Books reviewed in the weekend sections of newspapers included Lyse Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan (Hutchinson Heinemann, £25); Jenny Uglow’s A Year With Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer (Faber & Faber, £25); and Graham Robb’s The Discovery of Britain: An Accidental History (Picador, £22).

In Saturday’s Guardian, the historian William Dalrymple said Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel “remains a monument to Afghan resilience and to the bravery of its staff. In Doucet, and her witty and sometimes heartbreaking book, they have found a worthy chronicler.”

In The Observer, Philip Hoare (an author whose subjects have included Victorian spiritualism and whales) found Uglow’s tribute to Gilbert White’s journals “glorious”. White was “conjured up by this magical book, so beautifully illustrated with woodcuts by Eric Ravilious and Thomas Bewick, whose birds hop out of the pages like sentinel spirits, embodying both White’s and Uglow’s perennial sense of perky curiosity”.

In The Sunday Times, James McConnachie says The Discovery of Britain seems to have two authors: one a learned historian, the other an embracer of barmy theories. The book is “less a grand narrative than a sequence of historical essays. Robb plucks curious details from history and sets them against anecdotes from his bicycle-powered researches on the ground, and childhood memories.” It’s “a learned and likeable book”, with “some eccentric excursions”.