Brian Bollen's Blog

Hail, Populus, a parable from Rome for modern times

Title: Populus

Author: Guy de la Bédoyere

Pages: 468 including appendices, glossary of terms, notes, suggestions on further reading, list of illustrations and index

Publisher: Abacus Books

Price: £25.00

Published: April 2024

ISBN 9781408715154

Who other than Guy de la Bédoyere would start a history of life in ancient Rome with the tale of a tomb made in the shape of a stack of bins for kneading dough? He immediately explains the context, that it is the resting place of the ashes of a successful baker, Eurysaces, who made a small fortune from a state contract for supplying the dole and  'was keen for everyone to know it for eternity'.

Anyone who is aware of the author from his years as the de facto expert on matters Roman on the Time Team television archaeology programme will appreciate his ability to share knowledge in an instructive and entertaining manner.

Anyone who read his previous book, Gladius, from the same stable, will look forward to digging into more of the same in Populus (which he translates very helpfully as 'ordinary people').

A paragraph later he moves effortlessly from the ordinary people to the not-so-ordinary people at the top of the pile, writing of the halls and vaulted chambers where emperors had lived, 'some wisely, others with absolute barbarity, some for decades and some for only days or weeks.

He tells us how on his first visit to Rome, at Easter 1975, his most compelling thought was of the Roman people themselves who crowded into the Circus Maximus to cheer for their favourite charioteers, jeered at the defeated gladiators in the Colosseum, jostled, argued, idled at the forum, worshipped at the temples, rioted, fought and feuded during elections. He makes it all sound rather like the modern day, and effortlessly so, which is one of the gifts of the very good history story teller.

“In our own troubled times, there is something reassuring about discovering how much of the human experience is common to other ages,” he then writes, anticipating the above comment.

He even makes the organisation of trade guilds interesting, and thoroughly modern. “Roman trade guilds were notorious for their factionalism, rivalry and their increasingly dominant role in day-to-day urban politics,” he writes, provoking a stab of recognition in the consciousness of anyone who has lived in the UK in the past 60 years.

”The most important guilds were also closely involved in local politics, with the freedmen members playing active roles in make sure their preferred candidates were elected to office and would thus promote their interests,” he observes. Later he draws on the work of the satirist Lucian about a religious charlatan fiddling prophecies that had not been fulfilled so that it looked as if he had been right all along. Nostradamus meets the Bene Gesserit in Dune, one is tempted to add.

And there is a very real warning embedded in the history, pertinent to the gullible of today. “A slave manager of a farm estate should not allow 'fortune-sellers and sorceresses' onto the farm where would inveigle 'unsophisticated people' into handing over money in return for a useless prophecy,” he writes.

Next he tells of a man called Cosmus in Rome, who loitered on the thresholds of the Temple of the Divine Augustus and Temple of Minerva, where the crowd gives him the scraps he barks for. Does that not also sound terribly 'modern' in terms of everyday experience?

The writer ends, as he began, with specific reference to an 'ordinary' person, in the form of Agilia Prima, also known as Auguria, who had died following her 20th birthday. The funerary text celebrated her chastity, modesty, and frugality, and exhorted her husband not to mourn her because she has preceded him to the grave. 'Death is the nature, not the punishment of mankind. Whoever chances to be born, therefore also faces death'.

The inscription finishes thus: 'Be well, those who live above, and all men and all women'. A lesson deftly delivered to today's Populus.

In summary, Guy de la Bédoyere is uncommonly good at putting a human face to what in other hands would often be tediously dry historical fact. Though the fact that this reviewer misread 'underpins' as 'underpants', leading him to make a mental note to place an advance order for the author's next work on the topic before finishing the second page of the introduction to Populus, possibly says something about his own mindset...

* Apologies for the absence of the 'grave' accent on the second 'e' of the author's surname but I simply cannot work out how to translate it from the brain onto the iMac keyboard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jam Tomorrow? WHY TIME REALLY MATTERS IN ECONOMICS

 

Title: Jam Tomorrow? WHY TIME REALLY MATTERS IN ECONOMICS

Author: Charles Crowson

Pages: 280 including bibliography and index

Publisher: Whitefox

Price: £16.99

ISBN 9781915635624

“If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, then you don't understand it yourself.”

The first full chapter of this book about the importance of time in economics begins with this quote, generally attributed to Albert Einstein, someone who surely needs no introduction as one of the most talked about theoretical physicists of his generation.

I'm afraid that much of what follows would surely not pass that test.

For example, from page 124: “The nature of money as a thing which has various roles to play but whose roles are often incongruent, if not outright contradictory, only really becomes clear if one admits the centrality of time to the economic decision-making process. The economic experience is essentially indexical. In economic terms this means that economic activity has a point of view and that it acquires its significance from the context in which it happens. For economic value judgements, this indexicality is a temporal one. The economic agent decides and acts from his or her position in the now of the present, and this now stands in relation to the past and the future.”

Do you know any six-year-old who would understand that? At the time of writing (December 11 2023) I am 11 times that age and have spent my entire adult professional working life in and around banking and finance. I had to read most of the sentences twice, often three times, to even begin to have a smidgeon of a grasp of what the author was saying. To say it is a challenge is an understatement. I had never even thought of money as having tenses.

What I can say without fear of personal contradiction is that I have not read so much about and understood so little about the theory and practice of money since I began studying Applied Economics for my Institute of Banker banking exams back in September 1979.

The timing of my being asked if I would like to review the book arguably could not have been better. The book arrived on the doorstep just before the final instalment of the BBC's transmission of three hour-long 'specials' to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the rogue Time Lord broadly known as Doctor Who.

I have followed this programme on its rollercoaster journey ever since I watched the first episode on a flickering black and white as it was broadcast on the evening of November 23 1963, the day after the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

To be scrupulously fair to the author, the publisher and the public relations company charged with securing media coverage, I devoted as much time time as I could to reading the book on the day after the airing of the third of the Doctor Who hours. I'm not sure I could tell you with certainty which experience I enjoyed most or which is more likely to wake me up in the night screaming for mercy.

One of the joys of being older is the ability to contextualise more confidently based on personal experience. Reading Charles Crowson's opus brought to mind a quote often attributed to journalist-turned-diplomat Peter Jay, in response to a suggestion that one of his articles in The Times newspaper was difficult to follow.

Jay (according to Wikipaedia) replied: “I only wrote this piece for three people - the editor of The Times, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

Charles Crowson might be following the same path.

If Gondolas Could Talk

Title: If Gondolas Could Talk

Author: John Hemming-Clark

Pages: 272

Publisher: Searchline Publishing 2022

Price: £10.99

 

ISBN 9781897864685

I do try to be honest in my opinion of books that I review, as my own reputation goes on the line every time.

I am not entirely sure that I agree with the publicity material surrounding If Gondolas Could Talk; I dipped into it at random and found every one of the items I sampled pedestrian and unsatisfying.

But how many light-hearted books about skiing are ever published, especially just in time to give as a Christmas present? And how many of that vanishingly small number feature an anecdote about Wengen, which will leave every DHO reader striving to work out which hotel the narrator was staying in?

The major clue is that she says it has a swimming pool, which narrows it down to three, as far as I can recall, not having been there since before Covid struck.

This is what John Hemming-Clark says about his book.

“Everyone* who has ever skied has a ski story - If Gondolas could Talk has one hundred and one of the very best.

“There are contributions by or about pop stars, MPs and royalty, but mostly they're people like me and you.

“I have skied nearly every year for the past forty years, and along the way I have amassed more than my fair share of ski stories. I can't believe no one has ever put  together such a book, but they have now!

“This is a diverse collection, mostly humorous, that feature Alpine ski resorts in the main, lifts, instructors, chalet hosts, hotels, restaurants, bars. lift attendants, cross-channel ferries, overnight stops, motorways, péages, dry slopes and other skiers. A sizeable number of the contributors to this book have been unable to return to the resorts from where their stories have originated.

“My own contributions are based on my inability to ski, learn a foreign language or behave at anything approaching a competent, let alone professional, level whether by design or accident, in and around the Alps. It appears from the offerings that I have received for this new book that I am not alone.

“You can read much more including an introduction to all the stories at www.johnhemmingclark.com/skistories. Here's a taster:
Les Arcs: Never mess with chalet staff's night off.
Cervinia: Safeguarding shocker with the ski instructor.
Chamonix: A not-very-friendly Café de l'Amitié.
Courchevel: L'andouillette AAAAA. Possibly the worst thing you can ever put in your mouth.
Gstaad: Accidental acquisition by an ageing aristocrat...
...and many, many more!

ISBN 9781897864685

Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/abBGck8
More details: www.johnhemmingclark.com/skistories

As with all of my books, mirth guaranteed or your money back!

With best wishes.

John

*99.9%

Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

Title: Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle

Author: Ben Macintyre

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 353 including aftermath, notes and index

Price: £25.00

Format: Hardback

Published: September 15 2022

ISBN: 9780241408520

I approached this latest “definitive” account of life in Colditz Castle during World War II with mixed emotions. As I’ve noted before in previous reviews of Ben Macintyre books, I've read and very much enjoyed much of his output, including Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat, Double Cross, SAS: Rogue Heroes and Agent Sonya.

But Colditz is different. I've read so much about it before, from Pat Reid's The Colditz Story (first published in 1952) and The Latter Days at Colditz (1953), from Padre Ellison Platt (Padre in Colditz, 1978), Colditz The German Viewpoint, penned by Rheinhold Eggers, the German Security Officer (first published 1961) and Pat Reid's Colditz The Full Story (1984). Henry Chancellor's Colditz The Definitive History, published in 2002, is based on a C4 televison series, Escape from Colditz, which for the life of me I cannot currently remember.

I've seen the 1955 film The Colditz Story with John Mills. I devoured the BBC's multi-part series Colditz, shown between 1972 and 1974, and enjoyed it even more when I was able to binge watch it via YouTube some 40-plus years later. Let's not even mention the dreadful ITV two-part mini-series with Damian Lewis in 2005.

I need not have worried. Ben Macintyre's book is worth picking up if only for the array of images on the front, back and inside front and back covers. Inside, we see one of legendary flyer and double amputee Douglas Bader hauling himself and his tin legs into the cockpit of a Spitfire, another of two Belgian escapers being brought back to the castle at gunpoint and from the Colditz Museum a collection of fake uniforms, ropes, insignia and other escape aids assembled by Rheinhold Eggers, and the drawing of a New Year's eve 1942 conga of inebriated prisoners.

On to the text, a quick trip through the publisher's press release promises a tale of the indomitable human spirit, but also one of snobbery, class conflict, homosexuality (an issue addressed by Padre Ellison Platt in his work), bullying, espionage, boredom, insanity and farce.

The author's preface underlines the point, noting that participants in the Colditz drama included Communists, scientists, homosexuals, women, aesthetes and philistines, aristocrats, spies, workers, poets and traitors. “Many of these have hitherto been excluded from history, because they did not fit the traditional mould of the while, male Allied officer, dedicated to escaping,” he states. And then immediately goes on to highlight the traditional mould with the always absorbing story of the Franz Josef escape attempt.

The story of the glider is given due coverage, including the detail that a book sitting in the prison library, Aircraft Design (by Cecil Latimer Needham, a gliding pioneer who also invented the Hovercraft skirt) helped in the drawing of plans for the glider, which was “built from stolen bedboards and coated in old porridge”.

A much more sobering passage, in the Besieged section recounting the liberation of the castle by the advancing Allied forces, tells of the systematic murder of Jews held in a slave labour camp on the outskirts of Colditz. The average life expectancy in that camp in “normal” times was three-and-a-half months from arrival. I had never previously known of the existence of that camp, but it is well nigh impossible to accept that the likes of Rheinhold Eggers did not know of Jewish slaves there, stating that it “was an SS matter”.

Returning to Douglas Bader, I learnt that his long-suffering batman, Scotsman Alex Ross, had to carry him up and down stairs, make meals for him and wash his stump socks. And that while many young officers found Bader an inspiration, others found him intensely irritating, not least because his ceaseless goon-baiting antics provoked collective punishments that “adversely affected everyone in the camp”.

MI9, Ben Macintyre, recounts, did not dismiss out of hand a suggestion that an attempt be made to rescue him from the castle by landing a plane on a nearby Autobahn. “The government wanted Bader back in Britain and many in Colditz would have been happy to see him go,” we read.

In the Aftermath section, we learn that Bader called Ross a “cunt” in a telephone call made in an attempt to locate his tin legs, two weeks after returning from Germany. Ross never spoke to him again.

I have to be careful about making comments on value for money as I am sampling a complimentary review copy, but the book seems to me to be worth the purchase price for the photos and other images alone. This is a book for keeping in one's library and savouring. It will be staying on my shelves per omnia saecula saeculorum, and I fully expect it to grow in texture with regular re-reading.

 

 

 

 

The Churchill Girls: The Story of Winston's Daughters

Title:                The Churchill Girls

Author:            Rachel Trethewey

Pages:              320 including index

Publisher:        The History Press

Price:               £20

ISBN:               978-0-7509-9324-1

To be perfectly honest, I never even knew until relatively recently that Winston Churchill, arguably the greatest leader that the UK has ever had, even had daughters, let alone four. If prompted, I might recall a couple of scenes in The Crown, but they scarcely registered.

I remember first becoming aware of the Churchill name when the great man died, on January 24 1965, when I was still aged just seven. The media made the most enormous fuss, for a name that to me at that time meant absolutely nothing. He was just an old man whose death cleared the television schedules.

And what limited schedules those already were. In those days, most ordinary family television sets in the UK still offered only two channels: BBC1 and ITV. BBC2 had launched in April 1964, yes, but became widely viewed only in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As I recall, the television schedules and newspapers were stuffed with stories of Churchill’s passing and images of his state funeral procession, pushing regular programmes out of their slots.

To me, they seemed endless, and are forever etched in my memory in fuzzy black and white. One of the pictures in this book, of the family standing on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, brings that occasion firmly into the present, albeit in much sharper focus.

This book, though physically all in black and white, brings colour, often vivid colour, into the Churchill saga. As the blurb inside the front cover reads: In any other family, Diana, Sarah, Marigold and Mary would have shone. But they were not in any other family. They were Churchills and neither they nor anyone else could forget it.

As the author says in her introduction: Thousands of books have been written about Winston Churchill, but this is the first focussing on his daughters. And what a read it is, giving cinematic glimpses into a privileged but not always idyllic world, even if youngest daughter Mary likened her childhood at Chartwell, the family home, to growing up in the Garden of Eden.

Post-divorce Diana, turning to her father for support, was invited to join him at ageing film star Maxine Elliott’s luxurious villa in the south of France. There, we are told, if your feet ached after dancing all night in Cannes, a bath would be filled from bottles of iced champagne to refresh them. And when the real moon was not shining, the hostess switched on a large electric one.

Future heavy drinker and inmate of Holloway Prison, Sarah, when not high-kicking across the stage in a very short skirt and frilly knickers (sic), played a wounded pheasant in a ballet satirising an Edwardian shooting party. We are told that when Sarah was sober, she was charming, funny and talented. When in drink, it was another matter. She knew the inside of the Priory clinic as a patient, and during her 10-day sojourn in Holloway she made friends with the prostitutes, confidence tricksters and thieves she came across. When lesbian prisoners propositioned her, she took it in her stride.

Marigold died on August 23 1921, aged two years and nine months, after a sore throat developed into septicaemia. According to Winston, at the time of her death, her mother, Clementine, let out a series of wild shrieks like a wounded animal.

Mary, the youngest daughter, displaying an early entrepreneurial spirit, set up a business called The Happy Zoo, selling budgerigars to guests at Chartwell, which included the likes of Lawrence of Arabia, turning up on his motorcycle.

Another visitor was Brendan Bracken, after whom is named Bracken House, the once and future home of the Financial Times, at 1, Friday Street, London, where I began learning my trade as a journalist in October 1984. The book contains, incidentally, the one and only suggestion I have ever read that Brendan Bracken was rumoured to be Churchill’s son.

I could go on, and on, but I highly recommend that you seek out this book and read it for yourself. I think you’ll enjoy it very much.

Brian Bollen, March 26 2021

Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy

Title: Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy

Author: Ben Macintyre

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 377 including afterword, notes and index

Price: £25.00

Format: Hardback

Published: September 17 2020

ISBN: 9780241408506

I’ve read and very much enjoyed several books by Ben Macintyre, including Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat. At first, second and third glance, Agent Sonya is a worthy addition to his body of work.

Despite a longstanding interest in books about WWII and associated matters - which began with reading Commando comics, The Wooden Horse and Reach for the Sky in my childhood years and, seeing The Great Escape in glorious Technicolor on a big cinema screen in 1967, when I was about 10 - I have never before heard of Mrs Burton, codenamed Sonya.

The blurb explains that she was born Ursula Kuczynski, was a German Jew, a dedicated Communist, a colonel in Russia’s Red Army and a highly trained spy.

Inter alia, we learn that she planned an assassionation attempt on Adolf Hitler, spied on the Japanese in Manchuria and helped the Soviet Union build the atom bomb.

Her three children had different fathers, one of whom was also a secret agent. Oh, and she baked excellent cakes and had at least one holiday in a Butlin’s camp on England’s south coast. One has to ask why her story has never been told until now.

Ben Macintyre is a good writer, and as a professional writer I don’t say that of many people.

Here’s an early example, from the second chapter, Whore of the Orient, of Sonya/Ursula’s first impressions of Shanghai:

“The first thing that struck Ursula was the smell, the pure hot stink of poverty that wafted up from Shanghai harbour, a miasma of sweat, sewage and garlic….Encircling the ship in floating tubs were beggars, moaning cripples with stumps for arms and legs, children with festering wounds, some blind, some with hairless scab-encrusted heads.”

I suspect some of this came from a diary, but it demonstrates an eye for what my first editor often referred to as the telling adjective, and it whets the appetite for more. There is a picture later in the book, of at least part of the scene, just in case the words don’t do it for you, but I think the word picture is better than the photograph.

There are others, too (spoiler alert), including one of Chinese Communists being executed during the White Terror in Shanghai in 1927, something I had never previously even heard mentioned. It is not an image for the faint-hearted.

The pictures in general are very good, including one of a Russian stamp featuring the notorious British spy, Kim Philby, and Hitler in his favourite restaurant in Munich, Osteria Bavaria, looking almost human, but not quite.

And it might sound a bit silly, but I particularly enjoyed reading the Afterword: The Lives of Others, in which the author gives a brief summary of what happened next to many of the characters featured in the body of text.

This is something more writers should consider doing, especially when there are so many characters involved and it can be easy to lose track of who did what, where and when.

I commend this book, the only one I have ever read that has a dead-letter box in the quiet quintessentially English market town of Banbury, for heaven’s sake. And I suggest that it will make an excellent gift on a certain day in December, even if, as seems likely, the half-witted Muppets currently holding office in the UK government effectively cancel Christmas, in a way that Oliver Cromwell, Adolf Hitler, Uncle Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao could never have dreamt of.

Put it on your list, either to receive or to give: Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy, by Ben Macintyre.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1931 Debt, Crisis and the Rise of Hitler

 

Title: 1931 Debt, Crisis and the Rise of Hitler

Author: Tobias Straumann

Publisher: Oxford University Press

PP: 240 including notes, credits and index

Price: £16.99

ISBN: 9780198816188

I opened this relatively short book with a touch of excitement, as the various components of the title are all subjects in which I have a continuing interest. I closed it with a touch of trepidation as the very last sentence, on page 208, sounds very much like a description of the current international situation in the so-called developed world.

At times, the book is a right rollicking read as it narrates the events from 1929 to 1931, paving the way for the political rise of Hitler. I had always had a vague idea that the WWI reparations imposed as part of the Versailles Treaty had a part to play in the prelude to WWII, but Tobias Straumann explains exactly why.

Bitcoin Billionaires: a must-read, in parts

Title: Bitcoin Billionaires

Author: Ben Mezrich

Publisher: Little Brown

Pp: 275 (inc acknowledgements and bibliography)

ISBN: 9 781408 711903

Price: £20.00

There is no doubt that this book is good in parts, at times very good. It can be bright and breezy and entertaining, but even at this relatively modest length with generously leaded pages and much white space, it feels too long.

Not least because Ben Mezrich, who wrote The Accidental Billionaires which became the film The Social Network, goes off into too many tangents at times. But it is a must-read for anyone interested in the modern financial world.

As a writer myself, I recognise the desire to pass on knowledge obtained in the research process of a book, but a stronger editor would have tugged more firmly on the reins, at least occasionally, I feel. Now and again, it feels like listening to a classical epic in the ancient oral tradition when the performer goes off into sub-clause after sub-clause after sub-clause, vamping while trying to remember what he is supposed to say next in his memorised text.

But I do love discovering that Mark Zuckerberg, the god of Facebook, apparently uses a booster cushion as part of daily life, and not just when he is appearing in front of government committees.

Dear me, though, the book is SO repetitive. I lost count of how many times we are told the central characters, Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss, are identical twins (though not identical as one is left, the other is right, which Mezrich tells us again and again), that they are six feet five, and that they are Olympian rowers.

The Olympian feel extends throughout what is in essence a hagiography of the Winkelvii, as we are reminded several times they are nicknamed. Are they superhuman beings who have assumed divine form while on Earth? Or are they genuine gods come to disport themselves among us?

If they feel that being awarded $65m in compensation between them for their role in the early days of Facebook is inadequate, even insulting, perhaps it is indeed the latter. They are portrayed throughout without any apparent sense of irony as poor victimised creatures. On page 190, Mezrich actually describes these undoubtedly privileged Men of Harvard as ‘underdogs’.

I find the US spellings in Bitcoin Billionaires irritating. If you are going to do an English edition, do it properly. English English uses sceptic, not skeptic. Ahold is a Dutch international retailer (we say a hold, as in ‘a hold of’). And the English expression is 'on a par with', not 'on par with'.

And I do wish that Mezrich, and/or his editor, would recognise the difference between ‘its’ and ‘it’s’. Oh, and re the use of ‘peaked’ on page 37, it should be piqued.

Anyone looking to be educated on what Bitcoin is will surely be disappointed. The author uses Bitcoin and lord knows how many other words related to it from start to finish, but every attempt to explain bitcoin, BTW, fails miserably, reinforcing my own utter scepticism that it is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

But that is self-indulgent editorialising rather than reviewing. The circular reasoning used in the book, though, is, in my opinion, a dead giveaway. As in, bitcoin is great because it’s digital but bitcoin is great because it’s physical. And, to understand bitcoin, you only have to understand bitcoin.

The use of US references often baffles me, especially when being used to make a point of some kind. I personally have no idea of what the 208 and 101 in Silicon Valley are. I would hazard a guess at a busy road of some kind, but why not add a couple of words to tell those who have never visited the USA.

And I have no idea what a ‘peanut gallery’ is or what an ‘OG’ is. There is a helpful acronym in journalist to nudge the writer into explaining such references: DARK. Don’t assume the reader knows.

It is not often that I read a book about a subject at the same time as I am researching and writing an article about it, but this was the case here, so my senses were probably heightened a little bit more than usual, though my personal bullshit factor is switched on at 100% constantly.

I found other points grating, points which the non-financial specialist might not even notice. I did not realise, for instance, knowing a little bit about financial history since being forced to study it for my first batch of banking exams in late 1979, that New York was the ground zero of the world’s financial system.

Tell that to the Bank of England, founded by a Scotsman in July 1694, or to the Medici family and other famous Italian bankers in earlier history. Or the Knights Templar who in effect invented travellers’ cheques during the Crusades. Or to David Graeber, author of ‘Debt: The First 5,000 years’. I really don’t think the Mellon family created the financial system by founding a bank in 1869.

But I digress and am showing off. I really did enjoy the book, despite the reservations expressed above, and it is without doubt a must-read for anyone working in the modern financial world, whether as a practitioner or as an observer.

I can see it being made into a film, if only because it often reads like a screenplay and a lot of scenes being inserted (the father of the twins gazing over a favourite stretch of water and reminiscing, so well captured that I can almost see a slight mist and hear the sounds of the oars in the water and the rowers puffing and panting with their exertions) purely for cinematic reasons.

My favourite character is Charlie Shrem, the founder of BitInstant, a conduit for the buying and selling of bitcoin, who ended up being given a two-year jail sentence and accused by the downtrodden victimised twins, separately, of stealing 5,000 bitcoin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Man who was Saturday

Title: The Man who was Saturday

Author: Patrick Bishop

Publisher: William Collins

PP: 291 including index

Price: £20

ISBN: 978-0-00-83094-6

I have been an avid fan of WWII escape and escape-related stories with particular reference to Colditz Castle and Stalag Luft III ever since reading The Wooden Horse by Paul Brickhill when I was about nine years of age and then seeing The Great Escape in full glorious colour at the Odeon cinema in Coatbridge (about 10 miles east of Glasgow) when I was about 10.

I couldn’t quite believe it the other week when a former soldier I know told me in the Downhill Only Ski Club clubhouse in Wengen that he knew Tony Rolt, who built the Colditz glider. Talk about degrees of separation!

So when I saw details of this new book devoted to the first British escapee from Colditz, Airey Neave, I just had to have it.

One Football, No Nets

Title: One Football No Nets

Author: Justin Walley

Publsiher: Bennion Kearney

Pps: 340 including closing photos

Price: ??

ISBN: 978-1-910515-64-8

 

I had my doubts when I was offered a copy of this book to review but I thought the underlying concept, of an amateur football coach becoming the national team manager of Matabeleland in 2017, sounded intriguing, particularly given the promised involvement of Bruce Grobelaar, the one-time Liverpool goalkeeper who effortlessly creates a stir wherever he happens to go.

It is actually quite well written, as a combination of unifying narrative and diary entries detailing the journey from an extremely unpromising start (a clue is in the title) to the CONIFA World Football Cup in London in 2018 (not a competition of which I have ever heard but featuring also the Isle of Man and Tibet, the latter of which, we discover, has been screwed over by Yorkshire). 

But - and this is where my doubts about its being another self-publishing venture re-awoke - when you use the word 'peddle' instead of 'pedal' as the author does on page five (I found myself cycling home, so tired I could barely peddle'), it suggests a certain element of basic illiteracy in regard to two different words on behalf of the author or of whoever edited the book. A shame, because that puts me right off. Exacerbating matters is an unfortunate formula of words on page six in which the author says 'I would return there this year to aid the dire plight of the elephants'. I can work out what he means but it is clumsy to say the least.

These howlers are a shame, as Walley's description of the religious Colditz (his exact words) in Macedonia where he accidently finds himself on retreat with a group of young men who could be bona fide ex-prisoners or on the run, is gripping.

The chapter titles show a level of wit and ability to grab the reader's attention (If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans; Aim low and work upwards; WIndolene smuggling; Frogger; 17 players and a truck) and the story itself is strong enough to persuade the reader to continue. Walley is good at word pictures, of that there is little or no doubt. En passant, he paints a portrait of the economic collapse of Zimbabwe and the third world challenges faced by people who are little more than children losing parents.

I can, hand on heart, recommend giving it a go, but without knowing the price I can equally say hand on heart that I don't know whether it represents value for money. I have looked everywhere you would expect it to be but just can't see it.

Agent Jack, The True Story of MI5’s Secret Nazi Hunter

Title: Agent Jack, The True Story of MI5’s Secret Nazi Hunter

Author: Robert Hutton

Publisher: Orion Publishing (www.orionbooks.co.uk)

Pps: 313 including notes and index

Price: £20

ISBN: 978-1-4746-0511-3

Fans of Ben Macintyre will love this book, is the quote featured on the front cover of Agent Jack, and as soon as you start reading it, if you are a fan of Ben Macintyre, you see exactly what he means. It is well written and tells you things, interesting things, that you just didn’t know.

I have read a lot of books on the subject of WWII and spies and PoWs and escapes in my lifetime and I had never even heard of Agent Jack until I spotted this title being reviewed in the recent weekend papers. I just had to read it for myself.

It has not disappointed, delivering a mix of James Bond and Dad’s Army, with a touch of John Betjeman thrown in through the evocation of Metro-Land. Horror writer Dennis Wheatley puts in an appearance, too, producing a paper on possible German invasion tactics which was largely dismissed by prime minister Winston Churchill’s chief military adviser as too far-fetched even for Hitler. Hands up among the readership who even knew of that.

The Spy and the Traitor

 

Title: The Spy and the Traitor

Author: Ben McIntyre

Publisher: Viking

Pps: 366 including notes and index

Price: £25

Publication date: September 20 2018

ISBN: 978-0-241-18665-7

“The best true spy story I have ever read.”

Who could ask for more than a commendation like that from John Le Carré, the undisputed master of spy fiction since the early 1960s?

I almost ripped this book out of the arms of the postman when he arrived this morning, his trademark loud knock announcing that he had a parcel that would not fit through the letterbox.

I have read several of Ben McIntyre’s books, including Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, Doublecross and SAS Rogue Heroes, and on doing a quick Google search for confirmation of those titles am delighted to see that there are several others I haven’t even seen yet, including one about James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

The raw material of this latest title takes us into less familiar territory, telling the story of a senior KGB officer who, as the blurb tells us, for more than a decade “had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine”.

Standing on the pavement of a busy street in Moscow, the Safeway plastic carrier bag he was holding “was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia” (a rather more nuanced move than the way suggested by Peter Cook in the best of the Derek and Clive live recordings).

Ben McIntyre is a very good writer. He writes simply and communicates quickly and effectively. Even his introduction is breathtaking: by the bottom of its second page any lingering doubt that I might have had about the subject matter.

He introduces Colonel Oleg Antonyevich Gordievsky, newly promoted to be head of the KGB station in London (a plum posting he reminds us) and returning to a flat in Moscow that has just had KGB eyes and ears installed throughout and radioactive dust sprinkled on the clothes and shoes in the wardrobe (I instinctively prefer that to the ‘closet’ but that is as much of a quibble as I will utter here).

Hitler's British Traitors

Title: Hitler’s British Traitors

Author: Tim Tate

Publisher: Icon Books

Pps: 454 including notes and index

Price: £25

Publication date: September 6 2018

ISBN: 978-1-78578-405-7

 

I would have thought that it was well nigh impossible to publish a book containing reams of factual material about events before and during World War II (WWII) that most people will never have read before.

But Tim Tate has done just that with this book, subtitled The Secret History of Spies, Saboteurs and Fifth Columnists, ‘drawing on hundreds of declassified official files – many of them previously unpublished’ as the blurb inside the front cover states.

As the blurb continues, this book ‘uncovers the largely unknown history of more than 70 British traitors who were convicted, mostly in secret trials, of working to help Nazi Germany win the war, and several hundred British fascists who were interned without trial on evidence that they were working on behalf of the enemy’.

Escaping Hitler: Heroic True Stories of Great Escapes in Nazi Europe

 

Title: Escaping Hitler: Heroic True Stories of Great Escapes in Nazi Europe

Author: Monty Halls

Publisher: Pan

Pp: 307 including bibliography and acknowledgements

Price: £8.99 (paperback)

I've said here before more than once that I have been an avid fan of World War II escape literature since seeing The Great Escape when I was 10 or 11.

This book looks like a cracking addition to the canon. I dipped into it for a quick taste this morning and came across the following advice from MI9, the intelligence organisation established to help would-be and actual escapers.

Do not march in a military fashion, but adopt a tired slouch.

Try and 'collect' a bicycle.

Sling your haversack: French peasants commonly carry one in this way, but never a pack on their backs.

Village priests are likely to be helpful.

Every large animal in Europe is edible.

Some of this advice is obvious. Some is not. The combination of well informed tips and practical help must have been enormously helpful to the people at the sharp end of escaping. Here's a statistic: Germans were of course well aware of the escape ethos, notes the author. They were also aware of the existence of escape aids, in particular maps, 'but evidently not to the extent that they could intercept them as a matter of course. By 1944 they had uncovered nine escape maps, out of a total of 200 originals and 750,000 copies'. 

I thought I might be not so keen on the accounts of following in the footsteps of escapers, but Halls very adroitly mixes the mundanity of the present with the tension of the underlying escapes, as with the escape of Len Harley from Campo 78 in Italy on September 8 1943, bursting out of the camp in the belief that the war was over as a result of the Italian armistice. Much very good writing follows as Len and his fellow escapees spend months making their way through the landscape.

The author is an ex-Royal Marine, marine biologist, documentary broadcaster, expedition leader and writer, his biography at the front of the book explains. What, this writer wonders, does he do in his spare time? 

Seriously, I vaguely remember the Great Escapes series on BBC2. Thanks to the most cursory sampling of this book I'll be hunting it down on the iPlayer and/or YouTube. Any self-respecting fan of the genre will likely do the same.

I'm now going to break my own rule on premature use of the C-word, but as Waitrose is already selling magazines with special seasonal covers, I almost feel justified. If you know someone who likes reading escape literature, you have just found an excellent Christmas present.

 

 

The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram

Title: The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram

Author: David M Guss

Publisher: Macmillan

Pp: 432 including index

Price: £18.99

When I took my review copy of this book out of the padded envelope my first thought was that looked great. It looked like a real book from a real publisher (no matter how hard non-traditional publishers try, they just do convince the naked eye in the way that the older houses do).

I asked for a copy as I had read a couple of reviews in the weekend press of three or four weeks ago and very much liked the sound of it from those reviews. I was hesitant to start reading for a couple of reasons. One, I was very busy with real work, the kind that pays the bills. Two, I wondered if it might fail to live up to expectations.

Having finally read the author's Preface, I felt I could relax, not least because the author cited The Wooden Horse (the first WWII escape book I read as a child in the late 1960s) and Pat Reid's The Colditz Story (my second). The author then mentioned two other books and authors in the genre that I had never even heard of on the same topic.

George Millar's Horned Pigeon and Jack Pringle's Colditz Last Stop sound intriguing, and are available via Amazon, but at elevated prices that I would find difficult to justify in current economic conditions.

We're off to a good start, I thought, and plunged into the opening chapter, which features Operation Crusader (the British Eighth Army's plan for relieving the garrison at Tobruk), devastating losses, the capture of Lt Cram by a frightened young German soldier, his handover to Italian troops, their attempt to convey him and more than 300 prisoners out of Libya by sea, his escape, his being mistaken for a young Italian woman and pursued by an ardent would-be lover, his escape by climbing up the side of a rocky gorge, close encounters with several helpful Sicilians, their philosophical musings on the nature and purpose of war, theories about sexual repression among Nordic women and the origin of war and his recapture. All between pages nine and 26.

Unusually for a book written by a modern American writer, it is accessible and cracks along at a lively pace.I am hugely looking forward to reading the rest. 

Stand and Deliver!

 

Title: Stand and Deliver! 40 simple steps to successful public speaking

Author: Ian Nichol

Publisher: Matador Publishing

Pp: 528 including index

Price: £12.99

I asked for a review copy of Stand and Deliver because I have a personal interest in the subject of public speaking. It was something I strenuously avoided for decades having made an idiot of myself once or twice at secondary school and never recovered until I discovered a marvellous panacea around July 2004 when I was looking for a way to keep myself occupied of an evening while spending several weeks on a severely restricted diet.

Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium

Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium

By Lucy Inglis

440 pages including notes and index

Published by Picador (hardback £25)

I asked for a review copy of this book because I read a review in a supplement to either The Times or The Sunday Times in late July and it sounded fascinating. And it is, in parts, and worth reading for the very best anecdotes that include St Paul's Cathedral architect Christopher Wren administering the first known transfusion to a dog, a familiar-sounding rant from the 18th century berating the British government for failure to invest in building roads and bridges and other infrastructure and the mention towards the end that some people are now using medication designed to sedate elephants to get high.

To someone who has never consumed a drug stronger than the stuff a pharmacist will sell you in Luxembourg if you ask for the equivalent of Benylin to help deal with the effects of a very bad cold this is literally incredible. Nor did I know that opium poppy was administered as a suppository in ancient times. The author's brief account of the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the mid-19th century is as articulate and informative as any other I've read. I had entirely forgotten, incidentally, that the Opium Wars ultimately derived from the insatiable British appetite for that other well known everyday drug, tea.

Bankers: from Pillars to Pariahs

Bankers: from Pillars to Pariahs

Author: Ian Peacock

Publisher: Novum Pro

Pp: 132

ISBN:978399064269-6

I asked for a review copy because I enjoy reading a good financial history, having spent my entire professional life around international financial services in one way or another, and because I had read a positive review in either The Times or The Sunday Times a weekend or so earlier.

The Jacobite Rebellion: read all about it

Title: The Jacobite Rebellion

Author: Paul Adams

Publisher: The Book Guild Publishing

Pp: 227

Price: £7.99

ISBN: 978-1-912362-55-4

 

I asked for a review copy of this book because I liked the sound of the basic premise. Charles Edward Stuart is arrested and held by the police on suspicion of terrorism, specifically a threat to overthrow the monarchy and replace the Queen with the real Charles Stuart, a modern day Bonnie Prince Charlie. As a Scot who has lived in England for nearly 40 years, that piqued my interest.

Paul Adams can certainly write light humour, of that there is no doubt, and I say that as someone whose own professional writing life started with gags and sketches for BBC radio and TV. In fact, as I said to the publisher, his style sounds very much in tone like the satire I deployed in my own (so far unpublished) comic novels with an Emergency Holographic Detective (EHD-1) at their core.

I have enjoyed the 50 pages I read yesterday after the book arrived in the morning post and I am looking forward to reading more today, but the half a dozen minor typoes and grammatical errors are irritating and interrupt the reading flow for this linguistic pedant.

As a full-time writer and editor I know how easy it can be for this to happen but if the 1100 or so pages that make up The Lord of the Rings can be proofread properly, so surely can The Jacobite Rebellion.

But that is a quibble; I am enjoying the story and want to read more. That almost literally speaks volumes...

15.27h, July 1 2018...Just finished reading the book. The typoes and grammatical errors irked me to the end, and the humour began to grate about half way through. But I did want to see how it finished, despite the sloppy editing and the contrived jokes. It made a big difference from all the biographies, autobiographies and World War II escape books I've read recently.

Real-Tme Risk

This is a fascinating book, by Irene Aldridge, president and head of research at AbleMarkets, a big data for capital markets company, and Steve Krawciw, CEO and head of business development at AbleMarkets.

It is accessibly written, making a potentially technically daunting read something to dip in and out of easily and quickly. And the main body of text is only 200 pages, making it a minnow in relation to some books that have recently come to the market.

World's Most Influential People

The Exchange Invest 1000 The World's Most Influential People In Market Structure is the title of a recent publication from Exchange Invest, a daily newsletter 'devoted to analysing and understanding exchanges and market structures throughout the world'.