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!

This is a nice little^* book. I felt the blurb on the back says everything I wanted to say about it.

Packed with surprising facts, this delightful and gorgeously designed book will beguile anyone who is curious about weather. Expertly written and beautifully illustrated throughout with colour photographs and original colour artwork, ‘The Little Book of Weather’ is an accessible and enjoyable mini reference on the world’s weather, with examples drawn from across the globe. It fits an astonishing amount of information in a small package, covering a wide range of topics – from weather forecasting and extreme events such as hurricanes and typhoons to climate change and the future of weather. It also includes curious facts, myths, and history – from whether animals can predict the weather to the wintry conditions that helped to sabotage Napoleon and Hitler’s invasions of Russia. The result is an irresistible guide to the amazing world of weather.

* 10cm x 16cm

Written in the wake of an outbreak of statue-toppling driven in part by the death of George Floyd in 2020 and the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement, historian Alex von Tunzelmann (‘AvT’) presents case studies of 12 examples of statues which have been thrown down (and in some cases restored, then thrown down again) in the past two and a half centuries. Her statues range from King George III in America in the 18th century to Saddam Hussein in modern times.

The list includes some thoroughly unpleasant people like Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and King Leopold II of Belgium, the brutal colonialist of the Congo. Others are controversial even now: Robert E Lee of the Confederacy,  Bristol slave-owner Edward Colston are still dividing opinion.

AvT makes the case that statues of ‘Great Men’ – and public statuary is almost exclusively of white men – have been idolised, ridiculed and removed either by force or general consent ever since they were first erected by classical civilisations. It’s nothing new; ‘wokeness’ (whatever that means) doesn’t come into it. She presents four common arguments deployed by the backers of the status quo against would-be topplers and explains why on closer analysis none have any merits: “The Erasure of History”, “A Man of His Time”, “The Importance of Law and Order” and “A Slippery Slope”.

Overall the book is informative, thought-provoking and fun, which is a good enough reason for reading it!

The author is a long-term staff writer for ‘New Yorker’ magazine who lives outside the city on the banks of the Hudson river. In 2014 he happened to meet a stranger, a big grizzled man wearing “denim overalls, a faded baseball cap, and muddy brown boots, … [he] had a patchy rust-colored beard … [and] the complexion of a boiled lobster, to go with the build of a manatee.” This was Richard (‘Dick’ or ‘Dicky’) Conant, and Dick was slowly travelling to Florida by canoe, living rough with what he could pack in his flimsy vessel. McGrath discovered Conant had been leading this waterborne itinerant life intermittently, but more on than off, since 1999 and in that time he had covered much of the United States using its network of rivers and canals.

McGrath searched for and met Conant again several times. In their conversations it emerged that Conant quite liked the idea of his story being published in the ‘New Yorker’. He had kept detailed, rambling notes of his journeys and showed some to McGrath; the journalist set about writing an account of the man and his travels. Before publication he set out to verify the stories he had been told, and this was ultimately to become if not an obsession, at least an enduring interest and investigation of the life of Dick Conant.

Through contacts with Conant’s family and people who appeared in his accounts, McGrath was chasing a ghost, trying to resolve the enigma of Conant’s life and experiences. During his search he came across more and more people who live in the liminal spaces alongside America’s waterways; not a community as such but a sub-culture which McGrath calls “the State of Riverbank”. It became clear that Conant affected strongly the people he came across – they all remembered him. McGrath writes:

“… the mere mention of Conant’s name was like a social lubricant, a fast track to making unlikely new friends of my own. Free plane tickets, moonshine, an apartment in New Orleans, a cabin on the James [river]: these were all offered to me, no strings attached, for the simple reason that I’d inquired about a mysterious man who meant something different to each person he met.” (p158)

< – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – spoiler alert! – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – >

The book does not have a strong narrative stream; it is more a catalogue of incidents and anecdotes. It is as much the story of writing the story as about Conant himself, but still an intriguing attempt to get to know and understand a remarkable man. Conant disappeared in 2014 and the manner and cause of his disappearance is unresolved in the book. By the end we may know more about Conant’s life and travels but are no closer to really understanding the man than we were after the first chapter.

As her honour affirms, Dame Janet Suzman is one of the great stage actors of our time. She is also an acclaimed director. So her personal insight into some of the great female roles in Western classic theatre is a thoughtful and thought-provoking read.

In the first section, titled ‘A Rogue Prologue’, she dismisses the “Shakespeare didn’t write (all) the plays” conspiracy theory. She then turns to the matter of boy actors and argues that the great Shakespearian female roles are too complex and demanding to have always been played by such young people. They require in her view an emotional maturity which only an experienced adult woman could deliver.

She then analyses in turn the roles of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, Joan of Arc (Shaw’s Saint Joan and Shakespeare’s la Pucelle in Henry VI pt 1), Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and Gertrude and Ophelia in Hamlet.

These chapters show the meticulous preparation Suzman put into the roles when she played or directed them. At times her reading of the text and researching of the background have led her to find meaning and depth in the characters that others have not; some may agree, others disagree with her interpretation but it is hard to fault her arguments.

This brief review is not the place to go into the detail of her analyses, but if I – or you after reading the book – see any of the plays it covers it will certainly give you a starting point from which to evaluate the performances you see.

Not a follow-up but in the same vein as his previously published ‘Fake History‘, Otto English turns his debunking searchlight on “heroes”. In ten chapters each devoted to one hero, he sets out to show that they are all deeply flawed, and through a thorough and critical appraisal of each calls us to re-evaluate whether they deserve the pedestals on which they have often been placed.

From Mother Theresa (a probable non-believer, a definite money-hoarder and inflictor of suffering) to Andy Warhol (cynical exploiter and disruptor of the art market, happy to give his name to work he had no hand in creating), Che Guevara (one-time racist, failed statesman, enthusiastic political executioner) to Coco Chanel (Nazi sympathiser and collaborator, close friend of fascists at the top of British society), English picks apart the uncritical legends to expose the unpleasant truths about his targets.

The book might be depressing if it wasn’t written with a sense of humour and an appreciation of the absurd. And for every deeply-flawed hero, English introduces us to another often uncelebrated individual who you may well conclude is much more deserving of the title of ‘Hero’.

Matsuo Bashō was a 17th Century Japanese poet considered to be a master of the haiku, a traditional form of poem written in three sections of five, seven and five syllables. In his comprehensive introduction translator Yuasa traces the history of the haiku through the preceding centuries showing how it developed from earlier forms and through the concept of ‘linked verses’ into the mature form it achieved in Bashō’s time.

This collection of Bashō’s works consists of Yuasa’s introduction followed by five of Bashō’s accounts of his travels:

• The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton
• A Visit to the Kashima Shrine
• The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel
• A Visit to Sarashina Village
• The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Bashō himself and the world he describes seems completely alien to a 21st Century Western reader. It is a world where an ascetic with few material needs travels on foot or horseback with the sole purpose of seeking out beauty and harmony. He could travel for several days just to admire the cherry blossom at a particular shrine, or to see the full moon rise over a single pine tree – perhaps one made famous by an earlier painter – or to contemplate the serenity of islands scattered in a bay.

For food and lodging he relied on inns, farms, priests, the hospitality of villagers, fisherman and the like, or of friends, often poets or artists themselves. He might spend several days with a fellow poet, exchanging haikus and composing linked verses. Against the background of undeveloped 16th century rural Japan the journeys he made are astonishing, though it’s hard for us now to imagine the full reality.

Reading ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’, which I thought was the best of the collection, I was reminded of Jack Kerouac and ‘The Dharma Bums’. Kerouac was deeply interested in Zen Buddhism and haiku poetry, which feature strongly in that novel. Kerouac doesn’t mention Bashō in ‘Dharma Bums’ although he does reference the earlier (9th century) Chinese poet Hanshan and his ‘Cold Mountain’ poetry. I think Bashō’s travels would have appealed to Kerouac.