What are the trends in new nonfiction? From where I’m sitting, nature writing and major biography appear to be on their way down, history and health are still rising, and every other publisher’s list is littered, somewhat dispiritingly, with what they call genre-defying but I think of as bitty, not-one-thing-or-the-other kinds of books: group biographies of people about whom tons has already been written; collections of essays with no unifying theme; texts that combine fact with a certain kind of fiction in a sometimes rather desperate bid to make the austere and the arcane seem newly “relevant”. But never mind....