Tilar J Mazzeo’s story of how Mary Ann Patten, 19 and pregnant, took charge of her sick husband’s clipper, put down a mutiny and saved ship and crew from a gale around Cape Horn in 1856 features in an article in the London Review of Books by Laleh Khalili, professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter. Khalili draws on the US edition of Mazzeo’s work, titled The Sea Captain’s Wife (published in the UK by Elliott & Thompson as To the Edge of the World). She offers no judgement on the book, but her piece is well worth reading for what she has to say about how women were, and still are, perceived at sea. She draws on her experience of sailing on two freighters while researching a book of her own on shipping. She considers Mazzeo’s book alongside a study of racial mixing in three port cities – London, Liverpool and Hong Kong – in the first half of the 20th century).

Charlie Walker’s On Thin Ice (which was recently Book of the Week on Radio 4) was reviewed on Saturday in The Guardian by Charlie Gilmour, who says Walker evokes Siberia “with a masterly touch. Nobody, after reading this book, will be in a rush to book tickets [there], least of all its author”, who is now banned from Russia.