In this well-written and fascinating short book, Roberto Garvía focusses almost entirely on Esperanto’s rivals among the other “international auxiliary languages”. There are two of these that matter Volapük and Ido, both long-forgotten except by…Read more…

Stephen King is a superb writer of short stories, even if he is better known as a novelist. And to call all the stories in this hefty, nearly 500 page book, “short” stories is a…Read more…

A clever and witty book filled with examples of things NOT to do if you’re writing your first novel. And while the authors insist that unlike other writing books, they are telling you about sure-fire…Read more…

This, the second book in Mark Billingham’s new Blackpool-based crime series, continues an unbroken trend of superb story-telling, mixed with humour and characters you actually care about. DS Declan Miller sounds at first like a…Read more…

The third book in the long-running Alex Cross series seems a good place to take a break. While the story has a good beginning, by the end it becomes an excuse for the author to…Read more…

The second Alex Cross novel was actually made into a Hollywood film before the first one was. And maybe that’s a good thing, because it’s a better, tighter book. Cross is becoming an increasingly interesting…Read more…

A handful of observations about this book — the first in the long-running Alex Cross crime novels. First, it is a very long book, much longer than, for example, Roses are Red, the sixth book…Read more…

Years ago, when James Patterson was an author and not a brand, he wrote some terrific stories. This is one of them and I’ve read it at least twice. It’s a textbook example of how…Read more…

This is a good, short introduction to the subject for anyone thinking about writing a thriller. While much of the text is formulaic (it’s part of the “Teach Yourself” series, so there are a lot…Read more…

This is a beautifully-illustrated, short history of America’s war for independence and the global war it triggered. But it is very much a work of “military history” focussed on the names of commanders and locations…Read more…

At first, this did not look promising at all. Erik Larson, who always writes well and chooses some great subjects, took on the story of one American family who lived in Berlin during the first…Read more…

A publisher I know used to say that if you want to sell more books, put “Hitler” in the title. In this case, someone may have been taking his advice. It was not Hitler who…Read more…

Ryan Holiday is a young-ish American marketing executive who seems to have stumbled upon stoicism and turned the philosophy of the ancient Greeks into a real money spinner. His books are fast reads and mega-best-sellers,…Read more…

Writing a biography of a man as complex — and elusive — as Boris Savinkov is not an easy task. But Richard Spence has done an exemplary job of this. HIs 1991 book is comprehensive…Read more…

This 1930 book is not about that Russian secret police — the one that comes to mind — but about an earlier one, the one which author A.T. Vassilyev commanded until the collapse of the…Read more…

The Socialist Revolutionary Party, like other groups working in opposition to the autocratic regime that ruled Russia until 1917, was rife with secret police agents. The most famous of these, Ievno Azef, rose to become…Read more…

This novel by Russian terrorist icon Boris Savinkov is remarkably similar to his final work, Black Horse, leading one to believe that he chose the titles deliberately. The format is the same: short, dated entries…Read more…

Boris Savinkov was possibly the most dangerous man in Russia. A leading figure in the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Combat Organisation, he was the scourge of the Romanovs in their final years. When the tsarist regime…Read more…

By the time this book was published in 1934, the name of Ievno Azef had already faded from popular memory. But a quarter century earlier, he had achieved infamy as the most dangerous man in…Read more…

Sixty years after Boris Nicolaevsky wrote his account of the notorious Ievno Azef — the most infamous police agent to ever infiltrate a revolutionary organisation — Richard E. Rubenstein took a crack at the same…Read more…