LORD MINIMUS by Nick Page

(4th Estate, hb, £12.99)

IN 1644 Jeffrey Hudson, England's smallest man, just three feet nine inches short, grew tired of the insults and jokes hurled at him. He announced he would challenge the next person who ridiculed him to a duel.

This provoked widespread merriment. A group of well-to-do-men put up one of them to deliberately taunt Hudson. Duly challenged and asked to name his weapon he produced a large syringe, a kind of water pistol, the fire extinguisher of the day.

The furious Hudson insisted on a mounted duel with proper pistols. An expert horseman and marksman, not to mention a much smaller target than his opponent, he shot his insulter dead, through the head. No one laughed at Hudson again.

The duel was but one of numerous dramatic moments in the true story of Britain tiniest man. Another was when, aged seven, Hudson, just 18 inches tall but perfectly formed, was placed in a pie that was set before the Queen. As she prepared to cut it, Hudson, clad in a suit of armour in case the knife came down too soon, emerged and proceeded to march up and down the table, waving a flag.

Captivated by this, the Queen adopted Hudson, son of a Rutland butcher, as a virtual pet. A wonder of the age, his portrait was painted by Van Dyke, and he appeared in a masque, a kind of play-cum-dance, by Ben Jonson. It featured a giant who, on reaching into his pocket for what the audience supposed was a piece of cheese to go with a loaf of bread, drew out Hudson instead.

During a voyage between France and England Hudson was captured by pirates. Aged 25 and still only two feet tall, he was sold as a slave in North Africa. He rapidly grew another foot or so, probably because the shock of capture, followed by his first hard physical work, triggered off dormant growth hormones.

After about 20 years Hudson returned to England, probably with other English slave whose freedom was bought through voluntary donations. Wrongly accused of plotting against the Crown, he was later imprisoned in the Tower, and though Charles II ultimately gave him two payments totalling £70, he never regained favour at court and died alone and forgotten.

Today, however, there is a Jeffrey Hudson Bitter, brewed in his Oakham birthplace, and millions watching the Antiques Roadshow learned of Hudson when one of the items, which adorns the bar of an inn in Galway, was a large porcelain statue of Hudson emerging from the pie.

Nick Page tells all this and more with relish in an aptly-diminutive book, just seven inches by four-and-a-half inches. Like Lord Minimus himself it's a little gem.

MARIE ANTOINETTE by Evelyne Lever (Piatkus, £20)

THE fall of the French monarchy makes a thrilling centrepiece to this latest biography of France's last Queen.

Prised out the Royal palace by the mob, the King and Queen were conveyed in the royal carriage to Paris, surrounded, as Evelyne Lever puts it, "by a populace drunk with fatigue, wine, and bloodshed". She continues:

"At the end of pikes, two blood-drenched heads (of royal guards) twisted in atrocious grimaces led the hearse of the monarchy... The King spoke not a word... Men and women in mud-stained tatters sang at the top of their lungs... Some fishwives hung on the carriage doors, hollering insults at the Queen, who remained impassive, holding her son tightly against her bosom".

After the Queen's execution, the executioner held up her bleeding head and the crowd called "Long Live The Republic".

It had not been a happy life that now came to this most unhappy denouement. Married off at 14 to the unprepossessing future Louis XVI, the immature Marie Antoinette fell into her notorious habit of luxury, perhaps as a substitute for personal contentment. And, despite that fateful "let them eat cake" remark, she wasn't always on the side of indulgence.

When her husband offered to a buy her a necklace so expensive it had been turned down at royal courts throughout Europe, she refused to accept it, saying: "France has greater need of a warship".

Drawing partly on little-known private letters and obscure archive material, Evelyne Lever paints a picture of a tragic Queen who, despite the injustice that rightly brought the monarchy's downfall, will probably win many readers' sympathies.

SHIP AND SHORE: LIFE IN THE MERCHANT NAVY by David Stevenson (Caedmon of Whitby, pb, £9.95, available post free from 128, Upgang Lane, Whitby, YO21 3JJ, Tel 01947 604646)

DAVID Stevenson's last job before retirement was harbourmaster of Whitby, where he still lives. He came to this after being master of a fleet of ocean-going tugs based in Abadan, working on cross-Channel ferries, a spell in marine management and piloting ships in various parts of the globe.

As he says, all this might make a book. But it is not the present one, which runs from a perilous Merchant Navy baptism at 17, when he was an apprentice on oil tankers making the hazardous Atlantic crossing in wartime, to his postwar tanker career, sailing to and from the Gulf up to 1951.

Stevenson brings out all the interest of what was never entirely humdrum work, and his account of service in the wartime convoys is particularly vivid and valuable. One incident reveals that danger didn't always come from enemy U-boats and battleships.

"I had the impression of a huge black mass hurtling past to port," David writes. "A gust of hot air and funnel fumes engulfed our bridge...The Third Mate and I peered through our binoculars. I got a glimpse of four tall funnels before the drizzle swallowed them up. 'My God,' said the Third Mate, 'that was the Aquitania'".

Harry Mead