"The Three Emperors" by Miranda Carter

George V looked so like
 Tsar Nicholas II of Russia
that they were
sometimes confused.

This book considers the three cousins who became Nicholas II tsar of Russia, George V, King and Emperor, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. All three had similar childhoods, isolated from normal people (although George, as second son, served in the Navy for ten years and so at least met sailors) and brought up to believe that they were special. They were clearly lonely. Able to understand only royalty, their family formed a sort of pan-Europe business with the belief that family loyalties would trump national interests and ensure peace.

But their world was changing. Each empire needed to grow and there were inevitable tensions as their colonists and merchants clashed in various parts of the world. More particularly, the industrial revolution had created a working class that increasingly demanded a share in power. With their educations, isolated by privilege, they were unable to understand and were all fundamentally reactionary.

At least George was powerless. The British constitution ensured that he understood that he had to work with parliament and obey 'his' prime minister. Nicholas and Wilhelm were autocrats. They believed in personal rule (Nicholas was the only man in Russia who could authorise divorces and name changes) and attempted to enforce their will on 'their' people.

Not only was it fundamentally absurd that a single person could possibly rule complex modernising countries such as Germany and Russia but their isolation from the governed both because of the layers of courtiers through whom all information was filtered and distorted and because of the conceptual gaps between emperor and plebeian meant that autocracy was doomed.

In the end they didn't want the first world war. The Russian defeat by the Japanese in 1905 had sparked revolution and the Russian ministers were well aware that another war risked revolution (although Nicholas seems not to have had any idea that he could possibly be deposed). Wilhelm, for all his aggressive posturing, was frightened of war and tried at the last minute to back out of it as he had done several times before. But the Austrian's aggressive response to the Serbians abject apologies after the assassination at Sarajevo tipped the balance. War was inevitable. The colonial clashes and the militarisation of German society (which had been encouraged by Wilhelm) had led to several crises in the previous few years in which last-minute diplomacy had just averted war. At some point the tipping point would be reached.

The war destroyed the idea of empire. Although George V clung on the Tsar had abdicated and been assassinated before the armistice. Kaiser Bill abdicated on armistice day as did the Emperor of Austria-Hungary. Also in 1917 the 'tsar' of Bulgaria and the king of Greece both abdicated. The last Ottoman Sultan was deposed in 1922.

A beautifully written book about a fascinating period in history.

June 2011; 500 pages

"Tulku" by Peter Dickinson

13 year old Theodore flees from his father's mission as Boxer rebels burn it. Rescued by a colourful ex-music hall actress turned botanist, Mrs Jones, he travels with her and Chinese Lung to Tibet. There an old Lama decides they bear the secret to the reincarnated Tulku.

A fast-paced adventure story with three-dimensional characters, real human relationships and brilliant descriptions of beautiful landscapes with a little bit of mystery.

June 2011; 301 pages

"1599" by James Shapiro

In this fascinating book Shapiro (who also wrote Contested Will) chronicles a year of Shakespeare's life during which he wrote Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. He shows how circumstances changed the way Shakespeare wrote. For example, Will Kemp, the clown who had played Falstaff, left the company (to Morris Dance to Norwich). So Henry V has no Falstaff, despite having promised Falstaff to the audience at the end of Henry IV part II. The clown parts in the subsequent plays are more subtle, matching the skills of the new comedian.

 Another important event was the popularity of Montaigne's Essays. Suddenly it became fashionable to consider oneself the subject of writing. Shapiro believes that this encouraged Shakespeare to develop the soliloquies that characterise Hamlet.

This was an excellent book which translates Shakespeare from a myth into a real flesh and blood writer.

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

June 2011; 373 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The History of Mr Polly" by H G Wells

This anatomy of a mid-life crisis was ranked 39th by Robert McCrum in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. 

Alfred Polly was an only child who was sent to school by 'his parents' (although his mother died three years before), then apprenticed in a department store when significantly lacking in mathematical ability but extraordinarily well read with a massive imagination; a superb salesman with an ability to charm others with his nonsensical mispronunciations of words. He goes through a number of jobs before a legacy from his father enables him to set up shop in a place called either Foxbourne or (later) Fishbourne. He marries at the same time and then spends 15 years regretting a loveless marriage and slowly going bankrupt (in common with almost all the other shop-keepers). So he sets his shop on fire for the insurance and becomes a hero in the ensuing blaze; then he abandons his wife and ends up working at a country inn.

It is an amusing little story enlivened by acerbic wit:

• "Outside the regions devastated by the school curriculum he was still intensely curious." (p15)
• "On the whole he preferred business to school: the hours were longer but the tension was not nearly so great." (p17)

Any word play: "if, indeed, one may speak of a recent meal as a circumstance - seeing that Mr Polly was circum" (p9)

June 2011; 234 pages

Other novels by H G Wells reviewed in this blog include:

• The War of the Worlds
• The Time Machine
• Tono-Bungay
• Love and Mr Lewisham
• The History of Mr Polly
• Kipps
• The First Men in the Moon

Biographies of H G Wells reviewed in this blog:

• H G Wells by Lovat Dickson
• H G: The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

'Smart Swarm' by Peter Miller

This book analyses animal behaviour and tries to learn lessons for they way humans do things (especially in the business world). He considers ants, bees, termites, birds, fish and locusts. Some of his lessons seem contradictory but I suppose one wouldn't expect behaviours that have evolved would necessarily be the same in species that fill different ecological niches. Thus the haphazard way in which ants pass communicate and therefore manage the nest is very different from the way honeybees do.

Foraging ants wander randomly to find food and then scuttle straight back to the nest, laying down a pheromone trail as they do so. Other ants follow the pheromones, laying their own. Soon the best trails are those most strongly marked with pheromones so the ant paths become marked. I have experienced this; if you disrupt an ant trail using an obstacle such as your foot which they have to go around and you leave that long enough then remove it the ants will continue to loop around the now non-existent obstacle, blindly following the pheromones. That might suggest parallels with business!


Instead of relying on a priori algorithms to lay down procedures top-down, just trying something and scoring how well it succeeds can quickly transform routing problems through complex networks (such as the travelling salesman problem) whether geographical or virtual.

Honey bee scouts search for great places for the swarm to hive and then return home and communicate with the others using dance. Lots of scouts do this, many checking out the places suggested by their rivals and then (maybe) and the hive then decides. They have a sort of distributed democratic decision making procedure. First the scouts possess diversity of knowledge, second the hive only swarms once there are sufficient scouts agreeing on the best place to go (a sort of Tipping Point concept).

Miller explains the Wisdom of Crowds idea in terms of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 'Ask the Audience' strategy. Imagine you have to choose which person was NOT a member of the Monkees (A, B, C or D) and you asked 100 random people. Suppose only 7% know the right answer but 10% can narrow down the answer to a 50:50 guess and another 15% can eliminate one wrong answer leaving the remaining 68% to make a pure guess. So the right answer gets 7+5(half of 10%)+5(one third of 15%)+17(one quarter of 68%)=34%. The other options will share the remaining 66% giving 22% each. So there will be a clear majority for the right answer even though 93% of the sample guessed (to some extent)!

But the key to true wisdom is to ensure a useful diversity of knowledge and that this is expressed. There are lots of irrationalities to which humans are prey when making decisions such as anchoring (eg when a salesman suggests an initial figure for the cost of a product so that all other prices are compared to this 'anchor'). Other decision traps include preferring the status quo and the 'sunk-cost' trap. Miller diverts to talk about the Beer Game ( from Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline) and then explains how town meetings in Vermont are run according to Robert's Rules of Order (whose best rule is that everyone who wants to should have the chance to speak before anyone may speak twice).

Miller next compares the way termites repair a damaged hill with the chaos that ensues when a highly connected system such as a power network fails and a small initial failure cascades through the system (which made me think of what happens when a person dies). Termite hills apparently are designed to regulate the environment inside the nest (which is actually below ground) by using resonating air columns to catch and tame turbulent winds. Miller suggests we should develop buildings where the walls are porous and thus able to regulate the internal environments of the buildings without using energy eg for air-conditioning.

Termites work using stigmergy,  a form of positive feedback in which the action that one agent performs makes it more likely that the same or other agents will perform the same action, such as when you get an intrinsic reward from the performance of a task. Stigmergy involves indirect collaboration which, Miller implies, could solve failures of highly connected networks, although he never really suggests how. It seems to be connected to wikipedia.

Miller then compares two forms of networks: small world and scale free (which is one in which a proportion of nodes are many times more connected than other nodes in a 1/r way). Random failures affect small world networks most but scale free networks are very vulnerable to hub failures (if one airport in the world closes then air travel is unlikely to be affected because most airports handle a few planes to weird places but if that airport is Heathrow then there is big trouble). In scale free democracies a small group of well connected individuals are able to impose their will on everyone else. Later Miller shows that informed individuals can also effect big changes on inter-connected systems as the Wisdom of Crowds meets Tipping Point meets Critical Mass.

Generally "it doesn't make much sense to discuss the properties of network structures ... without also discussing what it is that you want them to do." (p149)

He also explains about the power of mimicry in social animals when discussing the flocking of birds or fish. He discovers that starlings use a sort of small worlds network in which they pay attention to 7 other starlings (presumably because they cannot cope with the amount of information processing that paying attention to more than 7 implies). This creates swirling behaviour and also the sort of phase transition discussed by Philip Ball in Critical Mass. In schools of fish communication seems to travel in a wave that moves up to 15 times faster than any single fish. Because this form of communication means that not every animal needs to be on high alert against predators, all animals can spend more time feeding and therefore each animal is more likely to survive. The phase transitions seen between one sort of shoal formation and another are classic threshold situations: Critical Mass meets Tipping Point.

Society "consists of institutional arrangements to overcome those divergences between perceived individual interest and some larger collective bargain." (pp265-266)

I learnt the expression 'ground-truth' which means to apply a theory or simulation to the real situation to see whether it works in practice.

Other great books in this area include:

• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts
• sync by Steven Strogatz
• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman about fitness landscapes
• How Nature Works by Per Bak about sandpiles and self organized criticality; an excellent explanation of complexity science
• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is a brilliant introduction to this whole field
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

Fascinating although a lot of what is said are points better made elsewhere.

May 2011; 269 pages

"Room" by Emma Donoghue

Wonderful!

Jack is 5. He lives with his Ma live in Room. Jack sleeps in Wardrobe at night when Old Nick comes.

At first I thought this was going to be a hard book to read. Jack's fifth birthday is described in detail from the point of a five-year-old boy who does not know anything outside Room. I thought it was going to be hard to read a book written by a five-year-old.

I won't say why Jack and his Ma live in Room. Or what happens. You need to find out for yourself. I will only say that in the middle of the book I was so excited because I genuinely had no idea what would happen next that I was speed-reading, tearing the pages with my eyes. There is one moment when a tension is resolved only to be immediately replaced with another tension which takes another few pages to resolve, a twin peak of excitement. And even after that every page had compassion and bitterness and tenderness and anger and even humour.

And the ending was just right.

What a wonderful book.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010 and the Women's Prize for fiction in 2011.

May 2011; 401 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Contested Will" by James Shapiro

This common sense but even-handed investigation of the ‘Who wrote Shakespeare’ controversy concludes that Shakespeare did. The argument that he did not rests on the concept that a Glover’s son would not have had the experience to write such wonderful plays; it argues that the author of the plays must have lived in Italy, must have had three daughters, must have experienced betrayal, must have been captured by pirates; because these experiences are recounted in the plays. Shapiro suggests that this is an anachronistic understanding of Elizabethan literature: the fact the fiction today is heavily based on autobiography does no mean that it was so then.

The argument against the Earl of Oxford being the author is principally that he died in 1604 but that some of the plays were being premiered up to 1610. Oh, but he wrote them and they were first performed after his death. But there are references to historic occurrences after 1604. Oh, but they were inserted by other authors.

Shapiro shows how Shakespeare’s dramas changed after 1604 (a) because he resumed collaborating after years of single authorship and (b) because the Globe had burned down and his company was using an indoor venue which required candles which needed to be refreshed periodically so his plays began to include music and dancing so that the refreshment could proceed. Would a noble author such as Oxford or Bacon really have co-authored with low commoners as Shakespeare’s collaborators?

Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The only argument that Shapiro neglects is the unusually high proportion of Warwickshire words in the plays.

A brilliant book. I must find out more about Shakespeare.

May 2011; 316 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Other books about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

Random points I noted.

The creator of the Oxfordian myth was a man named Looney who came from Blyth where my Dad came from.

Shapiro uses the term ‘sock-puppetry’. Wikipedia tells me that this means " the use of multiple accounts to deceive other editors, disrupt discussions, distort consensus, avoid sanctions, or otherwise violate community standards"

In Elizabethan times “People didn’t think in terms of modern binaries of ‘homosexualty’ and ‘heterosexuality’” (p307)

"Long Time Coming" by Robert Goddard

A classic Goddard: a man is released from an Irish gaol after spending 36 years inside. He and his nephew embark on a quest to prove that the Picassos presently being exhibited at the Royal Academy are were stolen. Nephew (ex oil executive with no obvious talent for a murky world of cross and double cross not to mention espionage and high living low lifes) falls in love with pretty girl and uncovers secrets that the British government have been at pains to hide.

And I read it quickly in a few 'can't put it down' days.

But.

I couldn't quite see how the Picassos and the uncle's imprisonment were related. People from the past kept cropping up in a tightly incestuous circle. And the British agent gave half the plot away without really needing to so he could enlist help that he really didn't seem to need.

So this is the second disappointing Goddard in a row (also 'Found Wanting' from March last year). It wasn't as compelling as the others. The motivations weren't as necessary. And the plot wasn't tight enough and the twists and turns seemed contrived. Perhaps the master is growing tired.

May 2011; 541 pages

"Henry I: King of England and Duke of Normandy" by Judith A. Green

 I was rather frightened of this biography: it looked a little too much like serious history which usually means it is rather boring to read. But it was well written (not quite a page turner!) and I read it quite quickly.

The most fascinating episodes in Henry's life were:

• His accession: his elder brother King William II 'Rufus' died hunting in the New Forest in an 'accident' when Henry was in the same hunting party;
• His coronation Charter which promised to uphold the laws of Edward the Confessor; later when Henry married Matilda who was descended from Saxon royalty this was seen as a beginning of the healing of the breach between the Saxons and the conquering Normans; the coronation Charter was the model for the Magna Carta and is thus the beginning of British liberty;
• His fight with his elder brother Robert who was Duke of Normandy which ended when Robert was captured in battle: Robert spent the rest of his life in captivity;
• The death of his son and heir William in the wreck of the 'White Ship' after which "he never smiled again"
• His death "of a surfeit of lampreys"

Sometimes I felt that Green rather skimmed over these issues (there is probably very little evidence for single incidents) but of course I found out many more fascinating things about this king.

• His wife (Edith) was the daughter of King Malcolm and descended from the Saxon kings. She had been brought up in a nunnery and there was some discussion as to whether she was therefore fit to marry. When she married Henry she changed her name to Matilda. 
• The sons of King Harold Godwinson fled to Ireland from where they ravaged the Avon region.
• Henry's second wife Adeliza was possibly the dedicatee of a book describing the voyages of St Brendan.
• Henry liked his manor at Dunstable, a town built where the Icknield Way crosses Watling Street. He also enjoyed Windsor (although frustratingly Green never makes it clear whether this was the old Saxon and Norman palace at Old Windsor or the new Windsor Castle; according to wikipedia Henry I was the first Norman king to use Windsor Castle as a residence at Whitsuntide 1110). 
• Other places associated with Henry I include Kingsthorpe in Northampton, Woodstock and Winchester. It was during Henry I's reign that old St Paul's was built.
• Henry's favourite nephew was Stephen of Blois who succeeded Eustace of Boulogne as Count by wedding his daughter, Matilda; this marriage could have given Stephen claims on the throne of Jerusalem too. Stephen succeeded Henry (despite Henry wishing the succession to England on his daughter Matilda). Every woman seems to have been called Matilda at this time.
• Henry's daughter Matilda (!) married first the Holy Roman Emperor (thus becoming Empress) and, after ebing widowed, Geoffrey of Anjou once his dad Fulk had 'taken the cross' at Le Mans. For a wedding present Henry gave Geoffrey a sword said to have been forged by Wayland the legendary Smith. There is dispute as to whether the three golden lions on the Royal Standard come from Geoffrey or Henry.
• The scholar Adelard of Bath wrote a treatise on the use of the abacus which soon became adopted for the tresury because it used a blank space for zero. Roman numerals do not have a zero.
• Those whom the king wishes to destroy he first praises said a Bishop to chronicler Henry of Huntingdon.

A fascinating read.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

May 2011; 321 pages

"Between the Assassinations" by Aravind Adiga

Aravind explores the life of ordinary people in this tourist guide to the (fictitious) South Indian town of Kittur. Each character struggles to survive against poverty, corruption, and the caste system. A wealthy schoolboy explodes a bomb in his chemistry class to humiliate his teacher. A Deputy Headteacher struggles to keep his favourite pupil pure. An Oliver Twist from the villages  gets mixed up with Fagin. An old virgin housekeeper works for her master.

All of these characters have thwarted dreams; they are all defeated by the system. Their puny struggles against it are doomed. In the end, the poor are always exploited by the rich. But every character is written from the inside, with flesh and blood and hopes and needs.

A stunning chronicle of a dreadful society.

April 2011; 355 pages

"Samuel Pepys: The unequalled self" by Claire Tomalin

This is a massively readable biography about a key player in the dramas of restoration politics.

I knew Pepys wrote a diary and recorded the Great Fire of London; I knew he was involved as a civil servant with the navy. I had not realised how much he played a part in so many of the key historical events of his time.

He was the son of a London tailor. Fortunately his uncle lived in a farmhouse in Brampton near Edward Montagu, a prominent Huntingdon landowner from Hinchingbrooke House, who knew and fought with Oliver Cromwell. Through this connection Pepys was sponsored to go to St Pauls School (he truanted for the day to watch the execution of Charles I) and thence to Magdalen Cambridge. He then started working for Montagu who became an important naval admiral under the Commonwealth. After Cromwell (referred to regally as Oliver) died and the Commonwealth under his son Richard began to dissolve into factions, Montague changed sides with brilliant timing and Pepys travelled to Holland with him to pick up Charles II and James, Duke of York, to take them back to England. Montagu became the Earl of Sandwich and Pepys received a significant boost to his career and an important role in naval administration.

He worked hard with the navy for many years. Not only did he get a decent salary but he also received presents from the many people who sought naval contracts (though goodness knows why they wanted to do work for the navy because the typical Stuart court never paid its bills). His career did not suffer when the Dutch sailed down the Thames to the Medway and burnt the dockyards in 1667, exposing a scandalous inadequacy in Britain's preparedness during war. His first setback was when he became a member of parliament and was attacked for being a Catholic by Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (who was effectively Britain's first Prime Minister and inventor of the party system lisitng all MPs as either 'w' for worthy or 'v' for vile; Shaftesbury started the anti-Catholic, anti-Stuart Whig party and Pepys was a Tory). Though Pepys was not a Catholic he was tolerant and employed Catholics and his (now dead) wife was French and in the feverish atmosphere of Titus Oates and the Papist plot these were enough to have him thrown into the Tower (though acquitted at trial) and for him to lose his job. He spent five years in the wilderness (during which time he attended Charles II at Newmarket in an attempt to win a job back but only succeeded in taking down Charles's account of his escape after the Battle of Worcester including oak tree) before the Duke of York (who had been Britain's Lord High Admiral and as such respected Pepys's abilities) succeeded his brother as James II. Pepys then became, in effect, the Minister for the Navy. Of course James was forced into exile in three short years and Pepys once again lost his job (and briefly earned another spell in the Tower as a suspected Jacobite). He then retired.

As well as all this, he was a member of the Royal Society and mates with Hooke, Wren, Evelyn, Halley and Newton. He was President in 1684 when he commissioned the History of Fish that took all the Society's spare cash and meant that Principia had to be privately printed.

So Pepys had a fascinating life and Tomalin tells the story well.

As well as Montagu/ Sandwich Pepys's other early patron was George Carteret. Carteret had been de Carteret but changed his name on joining the Navy because it sounded too French. As governor of Jersey he had held it for Charles I during the Civil War; he later worked for the Commonwealth Navy and changed with perfect timing during the Restoration. He retired to 'Hawnes' which later became Haynes Park in Bedfordshire near Ampthill.

After his first wife died Pepys took a common law wife who lived in Woodhall near Hatfield.

"The Snowman" by Jo Nesbo

A blockbusting whodunnit style thriller with no fewer than three red herrings (all of which are reasonably obvious as red herrings). A serial killer is on the loose in Oslo. Inspector Harry Hole (atypically irascible alcoholic loner) and his new sidekick Katrine investigate the disappearances and sometimes gruesome deaths of women. Well written but absolutely standard fare.

Kept me going though. I read it in under four days.

April 2011; 550 pages.

"Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami

Toro Watanabe's best friend Kizuki kills himself when they are both at school. When Toro gets to University he meets Naoko, Kizuki's girlfriend. As Toro grows up, studying and shagging in the free love days of 1968 and 1969, his relationship with Naoko gets ever more complicated. He visits her and her friend Reiki in a lunatic sanatorium in the mountains; Reiki plays Naoko's favourite Beatles song, Norwegian Wood. Back at University, Toro meets the bossy Midori who wants him to be her boyfriend but he cannot commit to her while Naoko needs him.

Toro, a strange introvert but someone who fascinates others, gets fucked up. The last sentence says: "Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place."

Another quote: "An unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit."

There is a lot of death in this book. (There is also a lot of explicit sex.) We know Naoko will die almost from the very start. Kizuki and Naoko's sister have both killed themselves. Midori's mum is already dead, her dad is dying.

I once had a girl
Or should I say
She once had me.

I think Toro was very much had by Naoko.

Murakami's prose is unsettling in its clarity. A compelling read.

April 2011; 386 pages