Their 36 barrels were ample to blow up the Houses of Parliament and burn Westminster

Their 36 barrels were ample to blow up the Houses of Parliament and burn Westminster. It was easy to come by, and Clive Ponting, in Gunpowder (Chatto, £16.99/£15.99), has written its painful history. It was accidentally discovered by the Chinese around 800AD; Oriental armies were soon driving oxen loaded with giant tubs towards their enemies. Exquisite handwritings suggest the efficiency of the state terror network; crossings out and second thoughts give horrible immediacy. Hogge tells the stories of the martyrs.In his handsome Gunpowder: the Players Behind the Plot (The National Archives, £18.99/£17.99), James Travers reproduces portraits, woodcuts and letters, including orange-juice letters that had to be warmed before reading. In 1592 Anne Bellamy, from a priest-harbouring Catholic family, was interrogated and raped by Richard Topcliffe, Elizabeth’s psychopathic Catholic-hunter. Pregnant, she traded the location of the poet-priest Robert Southwell for her freedom, her parents’ lives and a husband.

Fraser disposes of her with the headmistressy philippic: “an exception to the honourable record of her sex”. Agnostics may sympathise more with casualties like Bellamy than with Southwell, whose life was a preparation to “go down into the sun-scorched arena” of martyrdom; his wish was granted at Tyburn. Once their cover blew, the government judged them guilty, and though Gerard escaped, Garnet was hanged. Fraser honours the Catholic gentry, especially the women, who kept the faith alive by hiding priests.All later accounts show influence from Fraser’s racing narrative, but Alice Hogge’s God’s Secret Agents (HarperCollins, £20/£18 inc p&p from 0870 079 8897) is fuller on some minor figures. Passing as tutors or musicians to evade a death penalty, most intended a long-term mission, not the overthrow of Elizabeth’s government. Catholics endured fines and executions as long as her wannabe heir promised tolerance; once James’s succession was secure, his attitude changed, a group of Catholic men would wait no longer, and the rest has caused a lot of bonfires and books.
Antonia Fraser’s The Gunpowder Plot (Phoenix, £9.99), reissued from 1996, remembers the Jesuits, especially John Gerard and Henry Garnet, who tried to dissuade Catesby, Fawkes and co, and thought they had succeeded.

The survival of Catholicism in England needed clergy in safe houses to celebrate Mass and hearten parishioners. Shakespeare staged a world of terror where “Night’s black agents to their preys do rouse,” then reasserted King James’s right to reign, cracking a few jokes along the way about the fork-tongued Jesuits thought to be the masterminds. Today’s “remembering” is more sympathetic, if not to the Plotters, at least to the Catholic networks they came from

By the 1580s, priests educated abroad were coming home. It takes place at Congress House, in Great Russell Street, London, and tickets cost £7 Call 0870 420 2777.. Performed in 1606 for a court still shaken after its narrow escape, Macbeth is the Gunpowder Plot’s lasting memorial.

Its sale provided former Picador publisher Peter Straus, of Rogers, Coleridge and White, with his first major deal as an agent, and Fourth Estate with its first big buy in the post-Caroline Michel era.A rare treat is in the offing for fans of Patricia Cornwell. Her 14th novel Predator is published next week by Time Warner, and the novelist makes a a rare UK appearance on 7 November at a Foyles event. But Bennett has recently exhorted us to support the independents. Supermarkets, real and virtual, cream off a few bestsellers and make publishers supply them at discounts that are ruinous to the book trade as a whole.
One of the few “hot” books at Frankfurt was a novel by “a Muslim Irvine Welsh” – Londonstani by the journalist Gautam Malkani. The OFT has been furnished with all manner of evidence on Waterstone’s market position – including, it is rumoured, a tape of controversial chief buyer Scott Pack talking to a publisher.