- Book Review: Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch
Posted on 09 Mar 2010 in History, Non-Fiction Reviews, Sociology
Voodoo Histories isn’t an attempt to tell everyone to chill out and stop worrying about what people in authority are up to. Rather, it attempts the trickier task of explaining why a set of conspiracy theories do not hold water on close examination, and accounting for how they differ from traditional historical explanations – what is specifically “conspiracist” about them.
- The Scarpetta Factor by Patricia Cornwell
Posted on 04 Nov 2009 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery
She’s developed an enjoyable way of beginning novels in the middle of a story, letting her audience watch the characters carry out conversations and actions which they don’t yet understand, but which will be unravelled as the book continues. This must be an even harder trick than it looks, and The Scarpetta Factor is driven by the reader’s need to find out what the heroes know, as well as what the villains have done.
- Democracy: 1,000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty by Peter Kellner
Posted on 22 Sep 2009 in Great Britain, History, Non-Fiction Reviews
Magna Carta, that legendary document which is so frequently referred to in discussions of freedom, and which permeates our cultural history from Rudyard Kipling (“What say the reeds at Runnymede?”) to Tony Hancock (“Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?! Brave Hungarian peasant girl…”) was produced by a power struggle between the military aristocracy and the monarchy. Any resulting “liberty” for ordinary people was a waste product of the medieval warlord industry.
- Waiting for the Etonians by Nick Cohen
Posted on 28 Jul 2009 in Great Britain, Non-Fiction Reviews, Politics
Nick Cohen is undoubtedly one of Britain’s finest living polemicists, and Waiting for the Etonians will be a genuine treat for readers who have come to rely on his rigorous thinking, stylish phrase-making and carefully controlled rage. The book’s subtitle, Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England, reflects his despair at the current state of left-wing (or “left-ish”) thinking in Britain, which he sees as almost irrevocably compromised by post-modernism, cultural relativism and the focus-group politics of New Labour.
- The Roar of the Butterflies by Reginald Hill
Posted on 05 May 2009 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery
Hill has written far fewer books about the black Luton lathe operator turned PI, but The Roar of the Butterflies displays the same qualities which make the Dalziel and Pascoe series so notable: a remarkable turn of phrase, a generous tone and persistent pushing at the boundaries of what crime fiction can encompass.
- Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwell
Posted on 16 Mar 2009 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery
There are flashes of wit – the description of the morgue as a “deconstruction site”, for example – and a sense of the book probing its own genre at times. A particularly striking passage involves faked emails, supposedly sent by Scarpetta, which purport to “dish the dirt” on autopsies at which the medical examiners mock the corpses, take souvenirs and generally act callously.
- Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell
Posted on 24 Feb 2009 in Fiction Reviews, France, Great Britain, Historical Fiction, Military
Much more serious, though, is the book’s take on the medieval world as a whole. Alongside the loud cynicism of its insistence that the battles are meaningless, the church is corrupt and the aristocracy live in a different world, Agincourt continually asserts a broadly positive, modern outlook.
- A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré
Posted on 18 Nov 2008 in Espionage, Fiction Reviews, Great Britain, Politics, Thrillers
The violent and crude final pages of the book force us to scrutinise our feelings over the last three hundred pages – did we will this? Are we guilty of this ending, if only by five percent? The brutal inanity of the dialogue is a warning that in Le Carré’s world, we don’t get to argue over the proportions and scale of what we set in motion.
- The Right Side of the Tracks
Posted on 20 May 2008 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Great Britain, Literary Themes, Mystery
Detective fiction revels in the possibilities offered by railway travel, but it also expresses some anxiety about them. The ability to travel across Britain at such speeds was exciting, but also potentially unsettling for a social system which still, in many ways, preferred that people remained “in their place”. When Sir Henry Baskerville is being followed by an unknown bearded man in London, he suspects it may be the butler from Baskerville Hall, and sends a telegram to check whether or not “Barrymore is at his post in Devonshire.”
- Lots in a Name
Posted on 21 Jan 2008 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery, Writers
Rather more subtle is Hercule Poirot, whose name contains elements of both “Hercules”, the classical hero, and “Pierrot”, the Italian clown – an interesting combination of heroism and buffoonery. The name reflects Christie’s practice of presenting Poirot alternately as a figure of fun and a stern emissary of justice. Dorothy L. Sayers balances her detective hero in a similar way – Peter Wimsey’s name has all the connotations of his silly-ass-about-town persona, but he is shadowed by his middle name – “Death.”
- Gentlemen and Players
Posted on 13 Nov 2007 in Crime Fiction, Fiction Reviews, Mystery
Yet it is the amateur, the eccentric and the outsider who plays the hero in the whodunnit. Lord Peter, with his silly-ass-about-town front, Holmes, with his Goethe and cocaine bottle and Poirot with his obsessive neatness and ostentatiously Gallic egotism, all seem pretty unlikely champions of order and public safety.
- The Solution to History
Posted on 03 Oct 2007 in Fiction Reviews, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Writers
These days the historical mystery buff can choose from works featuring Owen Archer, Prioress Eleanor, Petroc of Auneford, Mathew Shardlake, and many others. From a brief survey of the genre, it’s a wonder that anyone noticed when the Black Death took hold, as the inhabitants of Britain had apparently been offing each other in industrial numbers right through the medieval era.
- Who Didn’t Do It?
Posted on 31 Jul 2007 in Fiction Reviews, Mystery
The “golden age” of detective fiction, which began roughly with Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, occupied the years between the first and second World Wars – anything but a golden age for Britain, and one in which British society was undergoing massive and lasting changes. The experience of total war, which moved women into the munitions factories, and domestic servants into the army, caused serious questioning of the established social order. The assumed codes of deference and conduct never quite recovered. Country estates were shut up or sold, and the rural economy was destabilised by wage increases after the labourers returned from the front, or didn’t. Crime fiction, however, was busy denying that anything had changed, keeping the experience of death safely within rational and domestic confines where it could be explained away.
- Book of Hours
Posted on 26 Jun 2007 in Fiction Reviews, Mystery
Clocks, with their symbolic freight of time and plot, can serve as weapons with which the murderer and the detective attempt to impose their will on the world. In changing a clock’s hands, falsifying an alibi, or cheating a timetable, the killer tries to take control of time, and it is up to the detective to wrest it back from him by proving that time is logical and relentless.
- Family Values
Posted on 13 Jun 2007 in Horror, Movies, Movies & TV
Their glossy and frequently rather smug “postmodernism”, which refuses to acknowledge any authority other than previous horror movies, masks a fear that such authority is all too real, and is probably furious with them.
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