Book Review: The Porcelain Thief - Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China, by Huan HsuI picked this up in a work book sale over a year ago. Initially I had assumed it was fiction, but closer inspection explains that it is the author's search for porcelain owned by his nineteenth-century ancestors, buried in 1938 as the Japanese army ( Read more... )

Book Review: The Marches, by Rory StewartI'd seen one half of a pair of TV programmes by Stewart on the consequences of Hadrian's Wall for Britain, but missed the other programme. Nonetheless it piqued my interest and I went looking for more, discovering this book as "forthcoming" on Amazon. After something of a hiatus, it was published last year ( Read more... )

Book Review: The Secret History of the Blitz, by Joshua Levine
I imagine there are so many books on this subject it must be difficult to produce anything original. Whilst we may think of people sleeping on Tube platforms and iconic photographs such as St Paul's Survives, Levine probes earlier into the war, and beyond London, from a shooting ( Read more... )

Book Review: Relativity - The Special and the General Theory, by Albert Einstein (with introduction by Nigel Calder)Special relativity was one of the first topics I studied as an undergraduate, and one of the few that didn't require mathematics beyond A-level. General relativity, on the other hand, was off the syllabus, even for final year students ( Read more... )

Book Review: Stalin - New Biography of a Dictator, by Oleg V KhlevniukI picked this up in a work book sale over a year ago: theoretically interesting but hardly likely to be positive reading material. I think that's how it turned out. Khlevniuk occasionally highlights the partial rehabilitation of Stalin in today's Russia, but certainly doesn't ( Read more... )

Book Review: The Trains Now Departed - Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways, by Michael WilliamsI've really enjoyed previous books by the same author, so I found myself a little disappointed with this one. It's not that it's bad, but rather that some of his examples of lines that closed prior even to Beeching were plainly ( Read more... )

Book Review: The Vienna Melody, by Ernst LotharThis was another work book sale purchase that went in a different direction than I'd expected. The blurb highlights that Christopher Alt and his descendants run a piano factory in Vienna, favoured since the time of Beethoven; in fact, music turns out to be largely irrelevant to the story, and it could ( Read more... )

Book Review: Deciphering the Cosmic Number - The Strange Friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung, by Arthur I MillerHoliday reading can be tricky: if you go for something too light, you might run out; if you go for something unknown, it might turn out to be really boring. Of course ebooks can mitigate these risks, by allowing you to defer ( Read more... )

Perhaps last week was a good week to be away. The shootings in Orlando, the killing of Jo Cox, and the derailment of a train outside Paddington station all impacted on me in a bad way ( Read more... )

Book Review: 1946 - The Making of the Modern World, by Victor SebestyenThis was an instant pick-up at the work book sale some time ago. I find some books demand to be read straight away while others bide their time, and I decided the time was right for this one ( Read more... )