Book Review: The Z Murders, by J Jefferson FarjeonI picked this up from the station book-swap shelf several months ago. In the wake of the terrorist attack in Westminster, some comfort reading seemed to be in order, so what better than golden-age crime fiction? Hmm ( Read more... )

Book Review: Amazon Web Services in Action, by Andreas Wittig and Michael WittigWe're a heavy user of AWS at work; in fact, someone once described Amazon as "a cloud provider with a bookstore on the side". As such it's inevitable that you get a view of some services and just enough knowledge to get by, but without a real understanding of the bigger ( Read more... )

Some time ago we decided we should go on the Unite for Europe March, and though there was some momentary doubt and confusion about whether it was going ahead after Wednesday's terrorist incident, we felt it was the right thing to carry on. GWR ran their train from Reading to Paddington rather slowly, and we were a bit late getting to the Lib Dems' ( Read more... )

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... )

There were free tickets available at work for The Taming of the Shrew at The Globe. I'm not a Shakespeare fan at all, and further investigation that the production was designed for a family audience didn't improve things, but I decided that it was at the very least an opportunity to see The Globe. It turned out that our seats were in the front and ( Read more... )

Book Review: Angela Merkel - Europe's most influential leader, by Matthew QvortrupUnsurprisingly, a fair few political books show up in the work book sale, and I thought this would be interesting. Politicians are often viewed differently at home and abroad - Thatcher and Gorbachev are two obvious examples of leaders whose overseas reputation is ( Read more... )

Book Review: Five Go On A Strategy Away Day, by Bruno VincentI'm behind on book reviews. I picked this up in a recent book sale at work as a bit of a joke, having seen it and others in the series heavily advertised. What with this and the Ladybird parody books, there seems to be a bit of a thing at the moment for revisiting childhood books of the ( Read more... )

We went up to Oxford last weekend to meet up with the in-laws and visit the Ashmolean. Degas to Picasso was perhaps a misnomer for the exhibition, which ranged rather more widely, collecting influences from the late eighteenth century onwards. Although there were a lot of works in the exhibition, many of them were pencil drawings or sketches for ( Read more... )

None for ages, and then two come along at once. Last year, 82 portraits and 1 still-life; this year, the Tate's blockbuster Hockney exhibition. We booked well in advance and visited last Saturday. It was, of course, busy; but as usual, the rooms further into the exhibition became more comfortable. The exhibition takes a broadly chronological ( Read more... )

Book Review: The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope
The subtitle of - and quite a few references in - Empire of the Fund prompted me to seek this one out. In fact, as a few months had passed, I only spotted one of the quotations directly ( Read more... )