Recent Reviews

6 January 2023 (368 words)

In the City of Bikes (Pete Jordan)
The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist

4 January 2023 (153)

Still Born (Guadalupe Nettel)
- a novel of many motherhoods

7 December 2022 (438)

About Our Schools: Improving on Previous Best (Brighouse, Waters)
- the past, present and future of the English school system

26 November 2022 (351)

The Golden Rhinoceros (François-Xavier Fauvelle)
Histories of the African Middle Ages

1 November 2022 (288)

Bolt From the Blue (Jeremy Cooper)
- an epistolary novel of London's avant-garde art scene

25 October 2022 (591)

Empires of the Word (Nicholas Ostler)
A Language History of the World

15 September 2022 (242)

Three Apples Fell from the Sky (Narine Abgaryan)
- life revives in an Armenian mountain village

1 September 2022 (635)

In Praise of Walking (Shane O'Mara)
The New Science of How We Walk and Why It's Good for Us

8 August 2022 (157)

Surreal Numbers (D.E. Knuth)
- a lightly dramatised exploration

6 July 2022 (451)

Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City (Geert Mak)
- from polders to provocations

27 June 2022 (405)

How Dead Languages Work (Coulter H. George)
- a linguistic, historical + literary potpourri covering six languages

25 May 2022 (714)

**The Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Camilla Townsend)
- using indigenous Nahuatl sources

26 April 2022 (280)

The Road to Middle-Earth (Tom Shippey)
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Tom Shippey)

5 April 2022 (365)

*Atlas of the Invisible (James Cheshire, Oliver Uberti)
Maps and Graphics That Will Change How You See the World

3 March 2022 (234)

The Travelling Cat Chronicles (Hiro Arikawa)
- a road-trip around Japan with a cat

8 February 2022 (717)

Fire and Ice (Natalie Starkey)
The Volcanoes of the Solar System

26 January 2022 (205)

Autumn Rounds (Jacques Poulin)
- an exceptionally gentle novel, a quiet romance

3 January 2022 (299)

Tomb of Sand (Geetanjali Shree)
- from family comedy to the politics of partition

17 December 2021 (309)

The Pursuit of Italy (David Gilmour)
A History of a Land, Its Regions and Their Peoples

15 November 2021 (268)

*Manaschi (Hamid Ismailov)
- a Kyrgyz story, modern and traditional

18 October 2021 (401)

Britain Begins (Barry Cunliffe)
- from the Ice Age to the Norman Conquest

3 September 2021 (318)

**Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics (Joel David Hamkins)
- from numbers and rigor to incompleteness and set theory

2 September 2021 (157)

The English Civil Wars 1640-1660 (Blair Worden)
- a straightforward but insightful account

7 August 2021 (351)

*Combinatorics and Graph Theory (Harris, Hirst, Mossinghoff)
- from the elementary to the infinite

31 July 2021 (293)

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 (Cho Nam-Joo)
- a woman's life in modern South Korea

14 July 2021 (647)

The Miracle Pill (Peter Walker)
Why a sedentary world is getting it all wrong

23 June 2021 (211)

Everything Like Before (Kjell Askildsen)
- stories of estrangement and misunderstanding

6 June 2021 (265)

*Tokyo Ueno Station (Yu Miri)
- down and out in Tokyo and Fukushima

18 May 2021 (659)

*Jellyfish: A Natural History (Lisa-Ann Gershwin)
- a fascinating survey with stunning photos

27 April 2021 (539)

Viruses, Plagues, and History (Michael B. A. Oldstone)
Past, Present, and Future
Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Dorothy H. Crawford)

15 April 2021 (540)

Across the Bridge (Henry Gee)
Understanding the Origin of the Vertebrates

29 March 2021 (547)

Turning Points (Mark A. Noll)
Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity

24 March 2021 (576)

Salt Water (Josep Pla)
- stories of the north Catalan coast

1 March 2021 (796)

Mathematics in Ancient Egypt (Annette Imhausen)
A Contextual History

4 February 2021 (988)

**Army Ants (Daniel J.C. Kronauer)
Nature's Ultimate Social Hunters

2 February 2021 (607)

Lying For Money (Dan Davies)
How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World

11 January 2021 (218)

*The Writer's Map (Huw Lewis-Jones)
An Atlas of Imaginary Lands

4 January 2021 (441)

*Trees: Their Natural History (Peter A. Thomas)
- the challenges of being a tree

4 January 2021 (128)

*Difficult Light (Tomás González)
- age and memory; pain, suffering, love and joy

7 December 2020 (228)

Beyond Global Warming (Syukuro Manabe, Anthony J. Broccoli)
How Numerical Models Revealed the Secrets of Climate Change

30 November 2020 (301)

*Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Apostolos Doxiadis)
- a novel of obsession and mathematics

25 November 2020 (598)

Transport Matters (Iain Docherty, Jon Shaw)
- seventeen essays on a range of UK issues

Full chronological listing (long)