It is a highly original literary trip into retro-sleuthery and it is read by the irresistible Alex Jennings. Our hero is experimenting with a hallucinogenic drug that transports him back to that same house as it was in the 14th century - where he falls despairingly in love with a woman who can never even see him. Pleasingly, "truth" and fiction are mingled when he researches the period and finds archive traces of the family he visits. In The Silver Pigs (BBC: £10.99/£12.99) he finds himself grumpily back in Britain, being driven far too fast in a racing-chariot by a glamorous and well-connected divorcee. If you enjoy imagining what life was like long ago, it will hit the spot.Daphne du Maurier hits that spot every time. Michael Maloney (another top-class reader) is beguiling as the narrator, temporary occupant and ultimate owner of The House on the Strand (Naxos CDs £16).
His conclusions are not far from Southey's unfashionable, bitterly ironic poem: Blenheim, like the Somme, wasted far too many young lives, yet it was hailed as a "famous victory".Lindsey Davis takes a different and much more cheerful approach to history. Her Roman mysteries plunge the listener into the everyday complications of life in 70AD, where her hero Falco - played here by Anton Lesser - is a penniless private detective with an attitude problem. His words are good, but a strange diffidence obscures their elegance and makes listening seem like hard work. He too is in the business of dispelling myths, in this case those swirling around the battle of The Somme (Orion £14.99/£17.99).
He uses the words and often the voices of veterans to create a complex aural collage in which every romantic stereotype is called into question It is often very sad, sometimes funny, always fascinating. Anyone who still believes that war is a proper way of settling disputes should be forced to sit through it.Another battle is revisited by Charles Spencer, whose ancestor was the hero of Blenheim (Orion £13.99/£16.99). This too is a well-researched book but, as often happens, it was a mistake to encourage the author to read it. If it were not so thoroughly convincing, it would be simply incredible.Peter Hart is Oral Historian at the Imperial War Museum. Though scarred with many an individual grief, its ground bass is factual, chilling and relentless.