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.

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!

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’.

The subtitle of this book is “Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World”. It presents a series of case studies supporting the author’s belief that what we think is ‘history’ – what we think we know about the past – is inevitably partial, incomplete, and coloured by our own perceptions of ourselves and others. As English puts it, it’s “how we deliberately misremember the past”.

Whether it’s the family stories of what Grandad did in the War (which war doesn’t matter), or the popular belief that what we call ‘curry’ came to the British Isles in the waves of migration in the mid-20th century, or that Winston Churchill really did say many of the witty aphorisms attributed to him, the story or myth takes on a life of its own and becomes ‘true’ simply because enough people believe it to be true.

This is a timely analysis, as claims about Britain, its place in the world and the heroes it honours have polarised the country. Right wing politicians deplore the toppling of a statue to a slave trader, saying such actions attempt to “rewrite history” and “cancel” Colston, or Cecil Rhodes, or whoever, while at the same time they vilify the National Trust for acknowledging that many of the properties in its care exist because of money made through slavery. Lies told to win the Brexit referendum and the subsequent departure of the UK from the EU have become unassailable truths in many people’s minds.

There are no easy or obvious solutions to these problems but awareness of them, understanding how they came about and how they permeate popular debate should at least be a starting point.

Rachel Clarke’s account of life as a junior doctor in the NHS is based around the industrial dispute in 2016/7 which was ostensibly about seven-day working. Reading it you will laugh and cry, and if you care about the NHS you will get angry. Clarke describes the best of the NHS – the caring, the kindness and the professionalism of the doctors and nurses. And she describes the worst – the impossible workloads, the indifference of politicians, and the tragedy that happened at Mid-Staffordshire when a caring organisation stops caring.

She is frank about the failure of the junior doctors’ campaign, acknowledging that they were out-manoeuvred by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s spin machine. She is most angry about the government’s denials that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the Health Service when everyone on the front line of health care knows this is not true. She places the blame firmly at the door of May’s government and Hunt in particular.

Rachel Clarke has the advantage of having been a journalist before she became a doctor, so she writes well. The book isn’t a polemic; there are anecdotes and stories drawn from her personal experience, some funny, some harrowing.

This book confirms what I thought already; that for whatever reason this government is determined to shut down the NHS even though people will die unnecessarily in the process. Unless it is stopped the government’s spin machine will make sure that whatever happens is blamed on the fault of the medical profession and the hospitals, never the government. If you value the NHS, read Rachel’s book and get angry!

Rachel Clarke is on twitter as @doctor_oxford