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I started reading Crisis by Henry Kissinger as Covid-19 lockdown started in the UK. It seemed… appropriate, given that it’s a record of a group of people trying to respond to a situation that is changing on a daily basis with limited information. Crisis covers the Yom Kippur war and the last days of the…
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Sunken Cities: Egypt’s lost worlds is the exhibition book from the British Museum‘s Sunken Cities exhibition. I went to the exhibition in 2016 and picked up the book in the sale somewhat later. It has been my breakfast book for the past couple of weeks. The ones with lots of photos take much less time…
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Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck is an examination of the media treatment of female celebrities (mostly celebrities, always women) when they go off the rails. Starting from the contemporary examples of Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan (the book was published in 2016 but draws extensively from Doyle’s journalism over the preceding ten years) Doyle examines…
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The Bear and the Serpent is book 2 of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Echoes of the Fall series. Maniye now has three shapes she can step into and, with the aid of her champion form, has learned to work with all of them. The power structures in the north are shifting and re-aligning and Maniye finds herself…
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The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers is about a crew of space tunnellers who are offered the biggest job they’ve ever had: to travel to the edge of civilized space to a small, uninhabited planet that is pretty much entirely made up of the fuel used to power spacecraft and…
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There have been twenty four Jack Reacher books. Amazingly, I’m still not bored. Amazing because I have a fairly low tolerance for this kind of character-based series and usually give up after three or four. In Blue Moon, Jack Reacher gets himself in the middle of a territorial war between two organized crime gangs on…
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The Eye of the Tiger is an account of the trips of the wildlife artist and environmentalist Pollyanna Pickering and her photographer and business partner Anna-Louise Pickering to India in search of tigers. There were two trips, one in the late 1980s and the next ten years later. The first expedition was to Nagarahole National…
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Published by Make Votes Matter and the Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, Peterloo 200: The Path to Proportional Representation is a short report making the case for adopting PR in the UK. The 200 year anniversary of the Peterloo massacre was in 2019. This report was published to highlight that the fight for democracy in…
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Misha Glenny’s The Balkans has been my breakfast book for the last year. Breakfast books are the many large, heavy books I have on my shelf that I can’t commute with so they get read in twenty minutes stints while I have breakfast. Sometimes twenty minutes is enough time to read a reasonable chunk. Other…
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Adrian Tchaikovsky is fast becoming my favourite author. In The Tiger and the Wolf, the first book of the Echoes of the Fall series, Maniye is a child born to two tribes and beloved of neither of them. In this world, all humans have a totem animal and can shift into that shape whenever they…
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Boudica Marginalia 