Nothing Tra La La?

“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149) Thursday, 30 July 1964 saw publication of two paperback “Penguin Spec...

A lot of this excellent history of British politics over the past century was already familiar to me. In some cases, that's because I...

Through my day job as a journalist for Infotec.news, I spoke to Rebecca Paddick at Mantis PR for the latest episode of their Tech to Transfo...

“The museum is a powerful and extraordinarily malleable cultural sorting house. [Museums] are places for demonstrating that the West is best...

This gripping, near-future political thriller is published by Gold SF, the newish imprint of Goldsmiths Press that aims to discover and publ...

This extraordinary, meticulously researched book is an essential read just now. Belton charts the rise and rise of Vladimir Putin from his e...

I mentioned Stuart Hood in my last post  because I recently saw him in an episode of the BBC's Talkback from 7 November 1967, with six m...

This very timely memoir is about the damage done by public schools, especially to boarding pupils separated from their parents at an impress...

This enormous volume - 591 pages before  the exhaustive acknowledgements, notes, bibliography and index - is a detailed history of the Secon...

It's taken a while to get through this because it's both dense and pretty grim. The anonymous author makes a compelling case about ...

This is the second of 12 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation recommended to me. The first one was 1.13 Datalore . We begin 2.9 ...

More than a decade ago, I was in the audience to see my clever friend Farah Mendlesohn interview Iain Banks . In preparation, Farah had r...

Subtitled, "Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works", this is an insightful and often funny insider's account of the in...

Helen Lewis has written a very good overview in The Atlantic  of Samira Ahmed's case against the BBC over pay discrimination . It inclu...

Around the childcare, the Dr and I had turns this week to stand in solidarity with Samira Ahmed taking the BBC to tribunal over unequal p...

When Michelle Obama was supporting her husband's bid to be president of the USA, she used to tell her own story. Growing up in a &quo...

A month ago, while I was busy preparing a talk on utopia and dystopia for the Hastings Writers Group, Francis Wheen tweeted about  Agent ...

This glorious, funny, wise and sad novel had me utterly enthralled. It's the tale of two former Suffragettes in the late 1920s, the p...

I was given this 2017 book after chatting with a friend about Andrew O'Hagan's 60,000 word essay on the Grenfell fire , which bri...