"All the king's men" by Saul David

This book chronicles "the British redcoat in the era of sword and musket" from the first standing army of Charles II in 1661 to the battle of Waterloo in 1815. It starts with a brilliant prologue describing the (closer than normally accepted) battle of Sedgemoor of 1685 when the irregular rebels of the Duke of Monmouth were defeated by a small royal army that contained the future Duke of Marlborough. It then proceeds through the Glorious Revolution, the anti-Jacobite wars of William of Orange and the War of Spanish Succession culminating in Marlborough's successes at Blenheim etc; the Seven Years War with the Canadian success of James Wolfe; the failures in the American War of Independence; and the triumphs of the Duke of Wellington both in India, the Peninsula, and at Waterloo.

This is an unashamedly 'great man' version of history although there are many moments when the ordinary private is squeezed into the story of the great generals. There are times when David seems uncritical: some of the old stories about Waterloo, for example, are repeated without comment: did Wellington really call Waterloo a 'close-run thing'? But by and large these tactics keep the narrative rattling along; it could easily have been very boring.

I am not really a fan of military histories. I find it incredibly difficult to picture a battlefield and the long descriptions of columns advancing and flanks and wheeling squares leave me hopelessly confused. The maps in this book help little. Some maps of inadequately labelled: I did not realise the idfference between cavalry and infantry on one map until I encountered a better-labelled map later in the book. And I found the campaign maps frustrating: some were on too small a scale so that places mentioned in the text were off the map and others were on too large a scale: one map, for example, showed the entirety of Wellington's Peninsular campaign even though he advanced and retreated over several years.

I always like to pick up trivia. It fascinates me that famous people are often woven in and out of narrative threads that are far apart. Thus the doomed Duke of Monmouth had earlier been exiled for his part in the Rye House plot which had been against his own father. James Wolfe drilled his men in using their bayonets held at the hip rather than the shoulder many years before his martyr's death. William Cobbett 'accidentally' enlisted as a soldier and had to flee England after bringing allegations of corruption against some of his senior officers. The grand old Duke of York who was not much cop as a field commander was a fantastic administrator of the army. And the Duke of Wellington allegedly came up with the name Thomas Atkins (a soldier who had died at Breda against the French in 1794) to go on the specimen page of the Army paybook, thus creating the immortal Tommy.

An enjoyable book with a careful mixture of great men and little. March 2013; 500 pages

"The making of Europe" by Robert Bartlett

This is a history of Christendom (Western Europe) during the Middle Ages (from 950 to 1350). It follows the expansion of the Normans into England and later Wales, Ireland and, at least culturally, Scotland. It follows the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Moors and it follows the expansion of the German speaking world around the Baltic and into the territories of the pagan Wends and Slavs. Even in Italy, the Christians drive down south and recover Campania, Calabria and Sicily. It is thus principally a story of expansion.

What drove this expansion? Was it the extraordinary vigour of the Franks? Was it the religion? Was it the  economic model of prototype capitalism? Or was it technology? Inventions such as the modern plough enabled German farmers to cultivate much more land than the pagan Wends and to increase the productivity of their farms. This in turn led to their ability to support more monks, warriors and merchants. And this drove expansion. Frontier Lords repeatedly found new towns and are able, because of the agricultural improvements, to invite colonising peasants on favourable terms knowing that they will make a profit even if they tax their peasants at a lesser rate.

What is remarkable about this story is how modern everything is. Founding charters talk of investments and profits. And yet things are strange. Ethnicity is principally a matter of language and religion; therefore one can change one's ethnic group by converting and learning a new tongue. For the multi-cultural populations that grow up in frontier colonies there is the expectation that each will be tried by their own traditional laws; it is only with time that unified laws for all people in the same region are developed.

And there are the novel institutions. The Benedictine monasteries are each individual, though following the one Rule of St Benedict. The Cistercians, however,are all bound through mother houses back to the great grandmother abbey of Citeaux. But the expansion of monasteries, which each require a significant capital outlay to found with sufficient resources to sustain themselves, is dwarfed when the mendicant orders of Dominicans and Franciscans which need much less investment expand. And Universities set alight the touch paper of learning.

So this is an extraordinarily fascinating period. But the book is really difficult to read. It is a scholarly work but the general reader will find it tedious. Bartlett spends too long mustering his evidence, and sometimes defending his sources and criticising other authorities, and too little time telling the glorious story of these years. This does not make it a bad book. For its audience it is great and I hope to keep it as a work of reference. But I was frequently bored.

Exhaustive and sometimes exhausting. March 2013; 314 pages

"Last orders" by Graham Swift

Jack Dodds, Bermondsey butcher,  is dead and has requested that his ashes be scattered off the Pier at Margate. Friends and drinking companions Vic (funeral director), Lenny (ex boxer), Lucky; Raysy (who plays the gee-gees and knew Jack in the desert campaign of WWII) and adopted son Vince (second-hand car dealer) but not wife Amy have a day trip to Margate (via pubs in Rochester and Canterbury) to fulfill his wishes.

The story is told from the point of view of the characters although Ray is the principal narrator. As they travel through Kent they think about their present concerns and their past relationships with Jack and his wife. Told in authentic south London voices, the author uses hints and ambiguities to keep the reader guessing and piecing together the back story.

This is a tautly written and captivating read which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and won the James Tait Black memorial prize and the Booker Prize in 1996 . 

It has also been made into a super film.

March 2013; 295 pages.

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

"The Prague Cemetery" by Umberto Eco

It starts in a very Dickensian (that should probably be Balzacian) vision of Paris. A man who forges documents for a living has lost his memory and wonders whether he has a split personality, the other half being a Jesuit. His grandfather suffered from paranoid fantasies about the Templars, the Freemasons, and the Jews. Already within the first hundred pages we have met du Maurier discussing hypnotism and someone who might be Freud. So far, so reminiscent of Foucault's Pendulum (though it is many years since I read that).

Then we trudge through the forger's history, sometimes from the diary he is writing, sometimes from the notes added to the diary by the Jesuit half of his split personality, and sometimes from the perspective of the Narrator. We go through his time fighting with Garibaldi and his transfer to Paris. He then works for various secret services, getting involved in a variety of famous plots. He works to discredit satanists and Freemasons and Catholics and Jews. He is involved in the Dreyfus plot and writing the Protocols of Zion; there is a scene at a satanic orgy.

But it rambles. It is boring. Eco sometimes goers on for a whole page about nothing such as when he lists the Masonic titles of one character for twenty lines (pp 406-407). There are scenes which Eco calls coups de theatre  such as the meeting of rabbis in the Prague cemetery, the black mass orgy, and the bodies in the sewer; these are rather cliched. The forger-hero has almost no personality except for a love of good food (another opportunity for Eco to show off his erudition by listing dishes in French) and as a result I really couldn't care about him. Huge dramatic moments such as his first killing are thrown away because he has so little character that these are just another episode for him. As a result, the fact that he suffers from a split personality and has amnesia prompted by a crisis seems rather implausible.

Eco wrote the wonderful The Name of the Rose; this dreadful book is so disappointing.

More recently (2022) Eco has written Numero Zero: more conspiracy theories, this time centring around the death of Mussolini.

Ramshackle and tedious. March 2013; 556 pages.

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

"The signal and the noise" by Nate Silver

Nate is the man who called 49 out of 50 states correctly in the 2008 US Presidential election; he has earned money from online poker as well as by setting up a baseball stats prediction website. It was therefore refreshing to find that he was so sceptical about the prediction industry.

His concerns are:

• Human forecasters are unreliable because:
• As humans we are prone to attending best to data that confirms our prejudices. 
• Sometimes there are incentives to be biassed (people prefer weather forecasters who predict rain when it turns out sunny rather than vice versa so there is a perverse incentive to over-forecast rain)
• As humans we like spotting patterns even in random noise
• Many of use are 'hedgehogs' who specialise in one very big idea (rather than 'foxes' who generalise in lots of ideas) and we seek to tell 'stories' that use data when it adds to the narrative and explains it away when it doesn't
• We're rubbish at estimating probabilities: in particular, we convert small probabilities into impossibilities and large probabilities into certainties
• Most patterns in data are swamped by noise
• Things such as earthquakes and stock markets follow a power law (probably because of feedback effects)  which makes statistical forecasting possible but exact prediction impossible: we know the chance of a big earthquake striking LA but we don't know when it will happen
• You can only make a decent living from poker (or the stock market) while there are enough bad players/ investors in the pool whom you can exploit. As they drop out it becomes harder and harder to have an edge. 
• Big data crunching methods ('data-mining') are likely to find patterns because if you have enough variables all wobbling randomly then for some time at least two of them will correlate. So the patterns data-mining finds are quite possibly false positives. 

This means that you need to start with a theory before looking at the data.

This means that Bayesian logic is the way to go to detect patterns. First establish your prior probabilistic expectations, then run the experiment or check the data and then refine your probabilities.

This was a good book though it didn't live up to my expectations. It was easy to read but I was a bit bored by the obsession with baseball.

I certainly learnt about Bayes! March 2013; 454 pages

"The casual vacancy" by J K Rowling

Barry Fairbrother's death vacates a seat on the Parish Council of Pagford, chaired by grotesquely fat Howard Mollison. This opens up a feud about the future of the Fields Housing Estate and starts a chain reaction of anger, unburying resentments and leading to disaster.

Rowling's first adult book after the phenomenon that was the Harry Potter series is an update of Peyton Place. She starts like Peyton Place, introducing each of the large cast of characters in a short chapter. The small town of Pagford is an English version of Peyton Place: The rich characters mingle with the poor, connected through the school; every adult has a guilty secret: the only nice characters seem to be the man who dies at the start and his family; nhe teenagers hate their parents and vent their hatred so as to bring distress and destruction upon them; no one emerges victorious although some agree a truce.

It is well written: the plotting is tight and the characters are deftly drawn. She does dissect the complexity of the characters although many (for example, Shirley Mollison) lack depth. I read it swiftly, driven by a desire to know what happened next but at the end I didn't really care.

It begs for a sequel. It really is just like Peyton Place. February 2013; 503 pages.

"Tube London" by Rebecca Sams

I loved this book.

Every tube station in Zone 1 is described together with the history and notable features of its hinterland.

I thought I knew loads about London but I had never heard of the London Stone near Cannon Street. I had no idea how many ghost stations there were, nor how many had changed their names, nor how many had moved their entrances or were originally more than one station.

In short it was a fascinating mine of information.

I have two minor niggles and one major issue. The niggles are that some of the information is replicated on wikipedia; and that there is no index so it is very difficult to look things up.

The major issue is that this only covered zone 1. I want another book to cover the rest of the tube. Please!!!! Or I will have to write it myself.

Great fun. February 2013; 160 pages

"The Lighthouse" by Alison Moore

Futh, a rather pathetic recently-separated, middle-aged man with a mother fixation, goes for a disastrous walking tour in Germany.

In this book, all relationships are doomed. Futh has a loveless marriage with Angela who, we assume, cheats on him. Ester, his hotel-keeper, cheats on Bernard. Futh's mum leaves Futh's dad. Futh's dad, who is boring, drunk and violent, hooks up with Gloria, whose husband left her. I cannot recall anyone happy in the book.

The prose is taut. Many things are left unsaid. This makes the reader fill in the gaps, often to discover later that the gaps have been filled incorrectly. Lighthouses permeate the book. Significant events are replayed over and over again. And the book heads to an inevitable doom (we assume, this is another gap which we fill in).

Miserable but rather well written, this book was a worthy Booker shortlist in 2012 losing to Hilary Mantel with Bring Up The Bodies.  February 2013; 183 pages

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

"A History of the world" by Andrew Marr

It seems unlikely that any single person can possibly write a history of the world and that any person attempting to must be guilty of self-confidence bordering on arrogance. Such a wide canvas must surely suffer from a lack of depth and no single point of view can possibly permit the multiple perspectives needed.

Marr's history of England from 1900 to 1945 was brilliant. He encapsulated the spirit of the times through multiple vignettes. I loved it. But he fails utterly in this new book. It is too big. His attempts to summarise moments become bland generalizations when I was crying out for more details. Try as he might to avoid it he inevitably falls into the trap of being western-centric and focused on the modern world. He has not got the space to say anything truly worthwhile and the result is regrettable, forgettable.

Disappointing. February 2013; 565 pages

"The Maul and the Pear Tree" by P.D.James and T.A.Critchley

In December 1811 the family and household of a young shopkeeper on the Ratcliffe Highway in the East End of London were brutally bludgeoned to death. A few days later an innkeeper and his family met the same fate. These bloody murders caused panic through the neighbourhood and a sensation across the nation; the magistracy and watch were exposed as incapable and floundering.The scandal led indirectly to the foundation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829.

The story of the murders and the bumbling investigation is vividly told. As in a classic whodunnit, there is a large but limited cast of suspects, most of whom are closely linked to one another and to one or both victims.  Evidence is presented, sometimes obliquely so that the reader is given parts of the puzzle to solve, and testimonies are forensically dissected. Sometimes background details become extended and slightly impeded the flow of the narrative and the ending is a little disappointing (perhaps I was unrealistic in expecting a rather more ingenious solution to a two hundred year old mystery) but apart from these niggles this is an outstanding read.

Thrilling. February 2013; 364 pages

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

"Tales of the city" by Armistead Maupin

I really did not like this book.

Mary Ann, Mona, Brian and gay Michael 'Mouse' Tolliver rent apartments from a pot-smoking woman of mystery, Anna Madrigal. Mary Ann works for ad agency boss Edgar; she has an affair with colleague Beauchamp who is married to De-De, Edgar's daughter. Coincidences abound as these sad, pathetic characters seek love amongst the one-night-stands in San Francisco.

Their tales are told in brief (two to three pages) episodes. The paragraphs and sentences are also short which gives the book a staccato style. Descriptions are littered with brand names: "Once, after smoking half a joint of Maui Wowie, he'd been reduced to using Crisco as a dip for Ritz crackers." It is only after making some effort on the internet that I learn that MW is a variety of THC infused marijuana from Hawaii and that Crisco is a brand of vegetable oil. The overall effect is to render some descriptions scarcely comprehensible I know what Levis are but not Weejuns. I can guess that Mark Spitz briefs are like swimming trunks and that a Ball Park frank is a type of sausage and that the Fol de Rol may be an entertainment but what on earth is a "hemostat roach clip"?

The far more pernicious effect of all this product placement is to make it appear that the characters in this story are two-dimensional and obsessed with appearance and brand names and possessions. I think I am supposed to feel sorry for them. The rich get no pleasure from their wealth. They struggle to get more column inches in the society papers than their rival hostesses. Everyone is searching for love and meaning. But I don't care. They are too shallow. Their tragedies are appearing in the wrong shade of nail varnish. One character only is interesting. He is dying of a terminal illness. There is a reason he wants a meaning to life. The rest of them are butterflies.

Rubbish. February 2013; 269 pages

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

"Grammar for Grown-Ups" by Craig Shrives

This comprehensive little book has lots of advice about punctuation and grammar. The second section goes through easily confused words such as 'weather, whether and wether'; some of these are less easily confused than others and there were very few that I needed advice on. The first section was better.

The advice is clear and unpatronising but the best bit of the book is the use of wonderful quotations from wags and wits such as Oscar Wilde, Groucho Marx and Homer Simpson. For this alone it is a treasure.

Keep it on the shelves. February 2013; 235 pages

"The house of silk" by Anthony Horowitz

Horowitz writes a new Sherlock Holmes novel, using the authentic voice of Doctor John Watson.

And it is pretty authentic. He really gets the feel of Watson and the relationship between the narrator and his hero. Watson is perhaps a little too stupid (Holmes sometimes mocks him) and the social conscience seems a little modern (Conan Doyle was no Dickens) but foggy London is still there. Horowitz succumbs a little to the temptation to put in as much from the canon as possible: the Baker Street Irregulars and Mycroft and Moriarty and other characters from previous stories as well as a horde of red-headed men. And all the set pieces are included: the violin and the drug addiction and Holmes being able to tell what Watson is thinking and being able to correctly deduce others' occupation and history (although I loved the bit where he got the teacher wrong).

My basic problem with this book is that I didn't really like Sherlock Holmes in the first place. The stories are too far-fetched. Holmes is impossible. The villains are unreal. But worst of all, the author doesn't play fair.

The fundamental rule of detective fiction (which of course post-dates Conan Doyle) is that the reader must have the chance of guessing whodunnit before the revelation. When Holmes does his clever clever stuff he usually gives the observations after making the deductions. And often the solution is so extreme and improbable that it leaves me unmoved.

So Horowitz has to modernise the story to the extent that he offers the reader the chance to play the game. And he succeeds in doing this. The clues are there. Some are very easy, others well-hidden. I guessed the identities of two of the three criminals (although Horowitz follows Doyle in making some of his villains so blatantly villainous that there is little room for error).

A worthwhile update on a classic. January 2013; 399 pages