While Pears’ ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’ (published 1997) tells its story through the voices of four people and is set in one time period, ‘The Dream of Scipio’ (published 2002) and his ‘Stone’s Fall’ (published 2009) combine multiple protagonists over different time periods.

All three periods in ‘Scipio’ are set mainly in Provence, in and around the towns of Vaison and Avignon. In the 5th century the Roman Empire was coming to an end, its power and influence waning rapidly without the resources to maintain control over its territories. The Christian Church was building its own power.

In the 14th century, Avignon was the seat of the Catholic Pope Clement VI. Bishops and cardinals contended for personal power; heresies challenged the Church’s teachings.

The 20th century saw the rise of fascism, the outbreak of war and the German occupation.

These periods are linked in the book by three characters, each with an interest in Cicero’s ‘Somnium Scipionis’ (‘Dream of Scipio’). In the 5th century Manlius, a Roman nobleman who is appointed Bishop of Vaison, writes a commentary on Cicero’s text. In 14th century Avignon a young scholar, Olivier de Noyen, is obsessed by Manlius’s work and other old manuscripts, and in the 20th century a student, Julien Barneuve, is in turn researching the life of the 14th century scholar.

Other threads link the three periods. In the Roman period Sophia, a female philosopher originally from Alexandria, has a strong influence on Manlius. Her Neo-Platonic ideas challenge the conventional teachings of the early Christian church. By the middle ages she has become Saint Sophia with a chapel outside Vaison dedicated to her. Olivier de Noyen knows the chapel well: a close friend paints a fresco in the chapel. Olivier himself is obsessed with Rebecca, the servant of Gersonides, a Jewish Neo-Platonist who challenges his thinking. Julien Barneuve has an enduring relationship with a strong and independent Jewish female artist (painter) who similarly challenges his view of the world and who for a time lives as a semi-recluse in St Sophia’s chapel.

And in each period the characters’ world faces a challenge – attacks on the rule of Rome by the Burgundians and the Goths; the Black Death; the rise of Fascism, the second world war and the German occupation of France.

Several of the characters are genuinely historic: the Jewish philosopher Gersonides, Pope Clement VI and the Burgundian King Gundobad for example. Others have close historical parallels – Pears’ Manlius is a close match to the 5th century Neo-Platonist Macrobius. The Wikipedia article about the book has more information on this aspect.

What of the book itself? For me it was a tough one to read, at least to start with. The first and easily the longest of its three parts I found particularly dense. Pears skips rapidly from one period to another in a succession of short episodes, demanding a lot from the reader to follow each thread and understand what’s going on. By half-way through (and still in Part 1) I wasn’t sure I would be able to finish. But when I finally reached Part 2 the episodes lengthened, the pace quickened: it became clear that there was a story to be told about each of the characters. And in Part 3 events in each period come to a climax. Some of the action is violent.

So this is a book that is gruelling, fascinating and astonishing. You could say it’s about Neo-Platonism and the battle of ideas. It’s about antisemitism. It’s about what it means to be a ‘civilised society’. But I ultimately see it as about power; how it is sought and wielded by the powerful and how it affects those who suffer under it. It implies that the actions of individuals, sometimes powerful, sometimes close to power but not themselves powerful, can lead to events that determine the course of history.

In summary, if you decide to read the book be prepared to settle in for the long haul. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it at the time but I felt it was a challenge, and in retrospect I’m glad to have read it. It’s an impressive achievement by the author, and I’ve learned some history along the way.

Well, it finally arrived – the third and final volume of the ‘Book of Dust’ trilogy. Parts 1 and 2 are reviewed here. I was critical of the third book of the ‘Dark Materials’ trilogy (review here): would Pullman pull it off this time, I wondered? Well …

Story-telling is an important part of Lyra’s character and a pervasive theme in both series, so I assume it’s important to Pullman himself too. And like ‘Dark Materials’, this is a good story. There’s plenty of intrigue, action, fantastic creatures old and new (notably gryphons), a return of the witches, scheming, friendship and betrayal played out by some familiar and some new characters.

But I feel that if ‘The Rose Field’ and its two precursors were ever to be studied as part of an English Literature syllabus there would be many faults found. Some episodes covered in detail disappear like water in the sand and are never followed up; new characters enter the narrative, are described in detail and then dropped; some seemingly important concepts (‘good numbers’ and the disembodied voices who first mention them, for example) are referred to and discussed but never appear again. Of course it’s a story, a fantasy, and not everything has to be explained or resolved; after all, that is part of the world in which it is set. Mysteries are allowed! But I can’t help thinking that Pullman has indulged himself by bringing in some ideas that he finds intriguing, like quantum mechanics, number theory, or the strange ‘wandering lake’ of Lop Nor (a real thing), purely because he wants to write about them. Consequently the story sometimes loses focus, leaving the reader thinking “What was that all about?”, or “Why did we have all that stuff earlier?”

But despite all that, and repeating my views on ‘Dark Materials’, I think most readers will be carried along by the pace and excitement and not worry too much about these problems. It is after all a cracking good tale!

Isherwood’s story set in Berlin at the end of the Weimar Republic is a fictitious account drawing on his own time there and featuring characters based on real people. It is entertaining and amusing, but don’t expect to be shocked either by the decadent society he describes or the violent upsurge of the Nazis. Isherwood treats these matters lightly to make a palatable story – a choice he later renounced:

What repels me now about Mr Norris is its heartlessness. It is a heartless fairy-story about a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and near-starvation. The “wickedness” of Berlin’s night-life was of the most pitiful kind; the kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them, but here the prices were drastically reduced in the cut-throat competition of an over-crowded market. … As for the “monsters”, they were quite ordinary human beings prosaically engaged in getting their living through illegal methods. The only genuine monster was the young foreigner who passed gaily through these scenes of desolation, misinterpreting them to suit his childish fantasy.

Source: Wikipedia, downloaded 17/02/2026; quoted from Fryer, Jonathan (1977); “Isherwood: A Biography” pp 146-7; Garden City, NY, Doubleday & Company; ISBN 0-385-12608-5

Having admired and enjoyed Pears’ ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost‘ and ‘Stone’s Fall‘ I came across ‘The Portrait’ by chance when I was looking for his ‘The Dream of Scipio’ in my local library catalogue. But while ‘Fingerpost’ and ‘Stone’ are both multi-layered historical mysteries, ‘Portrait’ is something very different: a continuous, sustained, first-person monologue like nothing else I can remember reading. There are no chapters, just section breaks.

The setting is an artist talking to his sitter – someone he has known well in the past but not been in touch with for some time. The publisher’s blurbs on the cover give away that there’s a crime involved, but even well over halfway through the book I had no idea where the story was going. From the start there is a slowly growing sense of menace as events in the past begin to coalesce into a narrative which comes to a dramatic head in the final few pages of the book.

A classic I should have read long ago. It bounces up and down along the surface – entertaining, amusing. Then with the introduction of Bernhard Landauer you find you’re slithering and bumping down the crumbling cliff until you end up in a bruised heap at the bottom.

It’s just over ten years ago that I first read a full-length novel by Dave Hutchinson. It was the first in his ‘Fractured Europe’ series, and I’ve been a fan ever since: ‘The Essence’ is now the ninth I have read.

If I were to choose one word to describe to all these novels it would be ‘weird’. In some the weirdness is dialled up high with time-shifts, alternate realities and sci-fi technology. In others, including ‘The Essence’ , the weirdness creeps into the narrative almost by stealth. The story opens with its protagonist, Michael Brookes, in a hospital which

was not, strictly speaking, a hospital. It was more of a rest home for fuddled gentlefolk. It occupied a big house in several acres of grounds tucked away at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac on the edge of Mill Hill. (p7)

It turns out that the not-hospital is run by the security services: Michael, who worked as an economist in a fairly insignificant part of MI6, is there because he had some kind of extreme breakdown at work which seems to have ended with an office room being trashed, but Michael has no memory of what happened. The nice people in the hospital are doing their best to look after him, rehabilitate him and bring back his lost memory. So far so normal. The plot seems fairly familiar.

Michael makes steady progress. His medication is down to two different pills once a day. He’s allowed – encouraged – to make independent excursions first to the local shops, then further afield. At last he’s allowed to go home. He still feels mentally fragile, but they have given him a friendly social worker who visits every few days and he seems to be coping. He’s not back to work yet, but HR want to see him to discuss his work situation. He goes in, and surprisingly finds they want him to go to the Netherlands to find out why there’s been a problem between the British and Dutch intelligence services. He doesn’t feel he’s ready but it seems he’s the only person who can do this. Just a quick visit, out and back, one day. Two days at most.

And so the weirdness begins to build. An attempt to kidnap him is foiled, and he finds himself mixed up with a group of people – they call themselves ‘essenceheads’ – who believe there is some mysterious phenomenon which they call ‘The Essence’ which manifests seemingly at random and interferes with the known laws of physics.

No more spoilers; you must read the book for how this plays out. The action happens in the Netherlands and Poland, both of which Hutchinson knows well. As in his other novels there’s a good cast of characters to keep track of as the story unfolds, and it all moves at a good pace with plenty of action. While the final plot reveal may not come as a complete surprise, the ending itself is completely consistent with Hutchinson’s practice of leaving some things unexplained for the reader to puzzle over and imagine what might happen next.

And in case you’re wondering if it really is weird – does The Essence exist? – you’ll have to make up your own mind. All I’ll say is that there’s a teleporting dog in the story.

I came rather late to this party. Anna Hughes cycled 4000 miles around the coast of Great Britain in 2011 and this book – her account of that epic journey – was published in 2015. I only discovered it late in 2025, but the time gap doesn’t matter because the things she focuses on – the landscapes, the weather, her personal highs and lows, are as valid now as they were then.

Each day of the 72 days of her journey is a separate chapter, but far from being a repetitive turn-of-the-pedals account Hughes’ fluent and easy (I suspect deceptively easy) style ensures the reader looks forward to each new day, eager to discover what the next miles bring.

What appealed to me most was the number of times I found myself nodding vigorously in agreement with her descriptions of places and experiences I know myself. Although I’ve hardly cycled any of the coastline I’ve visited a lot of it on foot or by car, and my times spent in the hills and mountains means I can share Hughes’ exhilaration – and exhaustion – with making progress through the landscapes and the weather, good or bad. There are days which just flow by and you feel you could go on for ever, and then there are days when you just don’t want to set off and your morale stays at rock bottom all day.

I was amused reading the five days she took to ride from Minehead to Plymouth, a journey which walking the South-West Coast Path has taken me forty! And I sympathised with the twelve consistently unpleasant days as she cycled round the coast of Wales: that country has been like that for me too. I have a strong feeling that if Anna Hughes and I were to sit down to fish and chips in a pub somewhere with her book in front of us we would still be comparing notes and sharing experiences at closing time.

So belated congratulations on your achievement, Anna. I enjoyed the ride!

Calt is an academic and an expert on the history, culture and language of The Blues – the black American music of the first half of the 20th century. After an introduction setting out his purpose and intentions for the book, and an extensive bibliography, the Dictionary itself is 270 pages of definitions, explanations and quotes from source materials.

To save you the trouble of reading it yourself I can summarise it as follows:-

a verb: to have sex;

a proper noun: the name of a musician, a preacher, a dance, a railway train, a riverboat or a sexual activity;

any other noun: a person, a type of liquor, part of the human body (especially a part involved in any sexual act);

an adjective: a skin colour, an intensifier or a word used for emphasis;

an adverb: adverbs are uncommon in the dictionary.

It’s quite good fun to pick up the book and browse a few pages now and again, especially when you come across one of Calt’s rants against any of his academic foes.

“A rock and roll life” it says on the cover. That’s a bit punchier than “sex, drugs and close-harmony falsetto”, though the longer version is probably a better summary as there’s a lot of all three in the book.

This is the autobiography of Graham Nash; working class lad from a poor area of Manchester, founder member of The Hollies – probably the second most successful British pop group of the sixties after the Beatles – friend of Cass Elliot, lover of Joni Mitchell, the N of CSN and CSNY^*, two-times inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and later in life a political and environmental activist, founder of a successful high-quality art-printing business, and photographer whose work is widely exhibited and collected.

Without reworking Nash’s entire life trajectory in this review, the elements in his story that stand out for me are his break with the Hollies, his lifelong friendship with Dave Crosby, and the fundamental importance of music to him as expressed particularly in his talent for vocal harmony.

The teenage Nash grew up listening to pop music dominated by Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and other Americans. But as the fifties turned into the sixties British artists started to establish themselves – Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Billy Fury, Tommy Steele, The Shadows. And then in 1962 The Beatles and ‘Merseybeat’ exploded onto the scene.The Hollies had their first UK Top 10 hit Stay in 1963. At the same time and from a different direction The Rolling Stones, The Animals and other blues and R&B acts were making their mark with British re-working of American black music.

As the sixties progressed a clear change became apparent. The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, and later The White Album, showed that pop music could be more than yeah-yeah-yeah. In America country music and pop was also changing, with bands like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and The Beach Boys moving into fuller. more personal and meaningful compositions. Bob Dylan famously went electric. Joni Mitchell was writing songs like Clouds and Chelsea Morning (though her commercial success was still a few years away).

British bands started going to America. The Hollies toured with reasonable success but Nash was becoming frustrated with their output, which he felt was just offering more of the same.  And in 1967 in Los Angeles he met Stephen Stills, Dave Crosby and Joni Mitchell, and was smitten! Joni – a beautiful woman and talented musician; Stills and Crosby equally talented and glorious close harmony singers. Unable to persuade his good friends and bandmates to change direction and experiment with new material, the following year Nash packed his guitar, broke with the Hollies, and flew to Los Angeles to work with his new friends and become Joni Mitchell’s lover.

Of the other two in CSN – soon with Neil Young making an intermittent and unpredictable third – David Crosby was the one who Nash was always closest to. Throughout the book Crosby is there: Nash writes frankly about their friendship and their fallings-out; Crosby’s excesses with drugs which became so bad that they could hardly perform or record with him; how at one point a group of friends held Crosby hostage while they told him how his addiction was destroying him; his failed efforts at rehab; arrests for posession; physical and mental breakdown. Miraculously Crosby survived and though never clear of drugs at least managed to keep his addiction under control. Nash’s enduring friendship for Crosby pervades the narrative.

And then the singing, which is what it’s all about. Nash and his mates in The Hollies listened to and did their best to emulate the Everly Brothers; Nash clearly has a natural talent for close harmony singing. He describes a night in 1957 at The Odeon, Manchester, when at the age of fifteen he heard the Everly’s record Bye Bye Love for the first time:

I’d never heard anything like it before. … Barre chords layered on top of each other. Two twangy voices harmonising seamlessly as one. … That moment was … one of the turning points in my life. … I knew I wanted to make music that affected people the way the Everlys affected me.

A few years later the Everlys were on tour and played in Manchester at the Free Trade Hall. After the concert Nash and his Hollies bandmate Clarkie (Allan Clarke) tracked down the Everlys’ hotel and doorstepped them at the entrance. To their amazement Don and Phil stopped to have a few words with them.

“We sing like you”, I said. “We copy your style.”
“Are you any good?”, asked Don.
“We think we are”, Clarkie told him.
“Hey, Graham and Allan, keep doing it. Things’ll happen”, Phil said.
It was Allan and me and Phil and Don standing on the steps of the Midland Hotel talking music.

That particular circle finally closed in 1992 when the Everlys invited Nash to sing with them at a concert they were giving in Toledo, Ohio. The three of them performed So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad); Nash says his tape of that session is something he treasures to this day.

There’s much more in the book of course: the other women in Nash’s life; stadium concerts; global music stars; the commercial music business with its promoters, financiers and lawyers; the technical aspects of playing, performing and recording. It’s an autobiography with no ghost writer credited, so of course you wonder how much is true and really happened, and how much is gloss or false memories. But I think there’s enough that is corroborated by other accounts to put those thoughts aside and just enjoy the ride. Unlike too many of his contemporaries in the business, Graham Nash OBE survived. He’s lived the rock ‘n roll life.

* If you really don’t know, that’s Crosby, Stills and Nash – and Young

Dr Hilary Hamnett is a forensic toxicologist and Associate Professor of Forensic Science at the University of Lincoln, UK. In this book she reviews a number of fictional stories involving poisoning, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Casino Royale, The Count of Monte Christo and Harry Potter. She suggests what poisons might have been used and what their effects would have been. She quotes other cases, real and fictional, of poisoning by these substances.

Along the way we learn about monkshood and aconitine, belladonna, mandrake, henbane and other poisonous plants. Then there are venomous snakes (Cleopatra) and poisonous chemicals (arsenic, lead).

Each section is meticulously referenced, and the technology of analysing for the toxins or their by-products in a modern laboratory described. A glossary at the start gives the chemical structure and brief notes about each chemical mentioned and a description of the various laboratory techniques.

Is it a useful handbook for would-be poisoners? Possibly, though perhaps the most significant lesson to be learned is that making your own poisons is a very hit-and-miss affair and probably best avoided!