Archive for books
Britain Votes 2010: another book, but any more information?
As with other post-election books such as Britain at the Polls, Britain Votes 2010 edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge faces a dual challenge. On the one hand the growth of online political coverage means there is much detailed analysis which appears months before books such as this come out, and on the other [...]
Of pies and politics: The Kit-Cat Club
Founded in the late 1690s by London bookseller Jacob Tonson, utilising the premises and consuming the food of pie-maker Christopher Cat, the Kit-Cat Club evolved into a club with a cast of prominent members of the cultural, political and social circles of the time. In origin the Club had a literary role, with Tonson regularly feeding aspirant authors [...]
The Water Room: a Bryant & May mystery by Christopher Fowler
Christopher Fowler’s The Water Room is another outing for his Peculiar Crimes Unit and its detectives Arthur Bryant and John May, with London’s lost underground rivers playing a central part. As with the other titles in the series, Fowler takes the traditional – even clichéd - murder mystery framework from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, [...]
Ship of Fools: lessons from the Irish crash
Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger is a coruscating account of how the Irish boom turned into biter bust. The sharpness of the prose as O’Toole recounts a tale of property boom, tax evasion and dodgy banking practices both entertains and obscures. Along the way we have a blizzard of [...]
Back from the Brink: the extraordinary fall and rise of the Conservative Party
Peter Snowdon’s history of the Conservative Party in opposition, quickly updated last year to include the final stage in their recovery, has four white men on its cover striding towards the reader – Cameron, Osborne, Hague and Clegg. It tells you immediately the sort of book that Back from the Brink: The extraordinary fall and [...]
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress – review of Robert A Heinlein's book
Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a rarity amongst science-fiction of its era in portraying political decisions and political decision making with a depth and subtlety quite unlike the embarrassingly bad seen in highly praised books such as Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves (where asking one question once of one Senator and not [...]
Book review: 1688 – The First Modern Revolution by Steve Pincus
The traditional picture of 1688 is of a rather English revolution – one much politer, less violent, more limited and rather more sensible and rational than the bloody versions of revolution seen in other countries. In this work Steve Pincus sets out to challenge that view. In his view the Glorious Revolution was not simply a quick and painless transfer of [...]
The technical details of electoral reform matter: Philip Salmon on electoral reform
The central thesis of Philip Salmon’s Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties 1832-1841 is that the details of the 1832 Great Reform Act matter because they had large and significant effects on the development of national politics and the embryonic modern party system. Salmon investigates and illustrates how usually over-looked provisions, such [...]
