I began reading the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain nearly 40 years ago, having stumbled upon them entirely by accident in a library. McBain (real name Evan Hunter) is widely seen as the inventor…Read more…

This book is a cross between Jack Finney’s time travel classic Time and Again and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Written in 1979 and set three years earlier, it tells the story of a young African…Read more…

This is a very strange — and to me, sad — book. It was Morchiladze’s first novel, published in 1992, and describes the journey of two young men from Tbilisi to Armenia. As Georgia began…Read more…

British historian Dick Geary, who passed away last year, apologised several times in the course of this short book for not being able to go into any detail. That’s because the book was a part…Read more…

Most books I’ve seen about “life extension” and immortality are written by advocates of various ways of living much longer, or even forever. These include Ray Kurzweil, the noted tech guru, and Dave Asprey, the…Read more…

It’s said that when he died, Lenin left behind a library in which the largest number of books were written by himself — but the second largest group were books written by Karl Kautsky. Kautsky…Read more…

I read lots of books about health, obesity, diet and nutrition. I learn something from almost all of them. Even the most useless of them will contain one or two new insights, or sometimes ideas…Read more…

I’m probably wrong about this, but I think the trend of writing police procedurals set in totalitarian societies started with Martin Cruz Smith, whose Gorky Park was published back in 1981. Since then there have…Read more…

This short book is a brilliant book. Many of the books I read are quite predictable, and that is one of the reasons why I read them. If I read a thriller or crime fiction,…Read more…

On page 74 of this book, a character is described as “a Service legend, in her way. Not a bona fide legend like your Jackson Lambs – the plural uncalled for, because there was only…Read more…

One reviewer described this book as “‘Inglorious Basterds’ but much better”. I don’t buy that at all. This is not, in any sense, based upon or linked to Tarantino’s brilliant film. Instead, it’s the true…Read more…

I am of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it hasn’t stood the test of time. Kautsky’s predictions from 1918 about what was going to happen next in Soviet Russia turned out…Read more…

I am of two minds about this book. On the one hand, it hasn’t stood the test of time. Kautsky’s predictions from 1918 about what was going to happen next in Soviet Russia turned out…Read more…

This is a long, detailed and quite interesting account of the first years of Germany following the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945. But it is not comprehensive. There are many topics that…Read more…

This is a long, detailed and quite interesting account of the first years of Germany following the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945. But it is not comprehensive. There are many topics that Jähner has…Read more…

This is one the great works of anti-Stalinist literature. It is an attempt by the ex-Communist Koestler to imagine how Soviet interrogators squeezed confessions out of men like Zinoviev, Kamenev and…Read more…