A book about dieting is almost bound by law to have a picture of a woman on the cover. But Louise Foxcroft’s entertaining and occasionally stomach-churning history of the subject is a revelation about the weight problems of men. Daniel Lambert, who was born in Leicester in 1770, was just over five feet tall and weighed fifty-two stone; when he died, at the age of thirty-nine, he was rolled through the streets in a wheeled coffin to his grave: ‘Corpulency’, it was said at the time, ‘constantly increased until the clogged machinery of life stood still, and this prodigy of Mammon was numbered with the dead.’

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