4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

Until he moved house it hadn’t really occurred to him quite how many books that Hodkinson actually owned. Eight boxes of books with around forty per box made 3200. It was actually a little bit more than that, he now knows that he owns 3500 books. He calls it his book cave.

How did he get to that many books though? When he was growing up in Rochdale there was one book in his house, the now rare, Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. ( I really want to get a copy of this!!!) It was kept on top of a wardrobe with other items of great worth. He was allowed to read it, but it had to be treated with all due reverence and care.

Growing up a working-class lad during the 1970s and 1980s was for most of his peers a book free experience. e liked the same music as they did, but there was something about the magic of the worlds contained in a book that he fell for completely. He was quite unusual in trying to find books in out of way places and came across a lot of characters as he slowly began to read and acquire books.

He said at a careers interview that he wanted to be a writer, the guy asked if he meant journalist, and he said no writer. He suggested Marks & Spencer needed people and to apply there. He didn’t but did pursue a job in journalism. These were the days before the internet so the local paper was still read widely and could offer a career path, and for Hodkinson, this opened up opportunities where he finally became a writer and a publisher.

It is an interesting story of his life and there were parts of it I really liked. There are parts that made me laugh in here and it brought back memories of my time growing up in the same decades. It is not just about books though, it is about his take on life and is full of the happy and sad memories he still carries with him. All the way through the book he punctuates his life story with snapshots of his grandfather and the life that he had. It adds a sad and melancholy note to the book, but it reminds us that he has not always had the easiest path through life working as a rare northern-based publisher. I am not counting my books either…

4 out of 5 stars

This is not going to be a review as such, there is far too much data and information in this book to be able to sum it up and quantify it in any meaningful way. I will say that Belton has done a fantastic job in relentlessly and tirelessly sifting through vast amounts of information to try to track what the Putin regime has been doing since he became President.

Money is the key to the way that the regime works, with the vast sums from the energy supplies fund Putin, his men and their chosen oligarchs. Money flows away from Russia into many offshore banks, through nested companies that have no apparent owners to secret accounts. Making this money legal by laundering it is key and Belton explains clearly the methods that they use to make it legitimate.

The ex KGB men also want to fund organisations and people who deliberately are seeking to undermine Western society and they use the black funds over the world to support the far left and right organisations that are responsible for the rise of populism and some terror attacks. The ex-KGB men that make up the current regime have got everything in a tight grip in Russia too. They control the courts, the banks and the security services and any criticism of Putin is treated very harshly.

The West may have thought that they won the Cold War, but reading this shows that their complacency and greed means that they have fallen for the deception that the regime has played over the long term. Belton details the methods that they have used to undermine particular political individuals and tie them into their way of thinking.

How she did this is beyond me as the entire regime is a nest of Russian dolls in a hall of mirrors and with several smoke machines running full tilt. It is not an easy read for many reasons, but if you have the slightest interest in world politics and the way that it is going, especially in the light of current events in 2022, then you should read this.

5 out of 5 stars

As one of the little people, you will find that the rules are more ruthlessly applied to anything that you try and do. If you are fortunate enough to be able to pay in a large cheque to your bank then there are all sorts of hoops that you have to jump through to prove that you are not money laundering. However, if you are much richer then banks will be falling over themselves to ensure that they are going to be custodians of your money and they are discreet in their questioning as to where the money has actually come from, or if it is even yours.

When the money disappears into this global finance system, the chances of the original owner of it being able to ever get it back again is almost nil. It is laundered and then becomes available for the multibillionaire as a tax-free asset to spend on another yacht or a house on a tropical island that their newly bought private jet can whisk them to.

Whilst corruption has been a problem that we have had for millennia, we are now at a point where it is difficult to tell apart the good guys from the bad guys as the grey area is now the entire banking system.

In this book, Bullough tries to shine a light into this dark pit he is calling Moneyland. But the people that make up the global super-rich really do not want other people looking in to see what they are doing and knowing the ways that they hide their money from tax officials governments and in the case of many politicians, from the people that they are supposed to be serving.

I will not say any more than that, because, I want you to find this book and read it yourself. I am amazed that he has managed to find out as much as he has to write the stories in this book. Mostly because the people that have got the money by fair means and foul really really do not want you to know what methods they use to hide it way. He makes some tentative suggestions of how we can fix it, but those with money can often wriggle out of any imposition of rules because of their great wealth. I hope it will make you angry too, as reading this made me feel helpless that we are at a point now where we cannot do anything.

2.5 out of 5 stars

The sound of waves against a stony beach is quite soothing, but sitting on a beach like that is not the most comfortable unless you have a chair. The beach that I remember the most is the one at Norman’s Bay in Sussex; the stones there are multi-coloured from a pale grey to a fawn brown. But if you were to pick up a pebble from the beach, what stories could it tell you?

In this book, Zalasiewicz will take us on through the story of this single pebbles journey from the origins of the universe, the creation of our planet and the movement of the tectonic plates that have shifted the sediments from the surface and sea beds deep into the heart of the planet,

We will learn how the pebble is just not a piece of rock, smoothed by the relentless waves. Rather it is a tiny time machine that if you know how and where to look, it can reveal secrets on how it was made, the remnants of the creatures contained within and how it came to be in that place where it was found.

Mostly this is ok, but I did have several issues with it. I liked the concept of following the timeline of the pebble that he found from the beginnings to that moment of collection, but I thought that taking it right back to the moment of the big bang was a little too far. Even though parts of it were interesting, I did find that it veered too much into academic prose fairly often. One for those that are really into their geology!

3 out of 5 stars

We visit Wiltshire, the county north of us, on a regular basis as my brother in law lives there. Like Dorset is full of ancient monuments scattered across the landscape, the most famous of which is Stonehenge. And like Dorset, it is very picturesque.

In this photobook, published after his death from cancer, Steve Day’s wife has chosen the very best images that he took from his collection of around 20,000 photos.

There are some stunning images in here of the landscapes across the county. I particularly liked the images of the chalk downlands taken throughout the year some lit by the soft autumn sun or those with the dusting of frost. It would have been nice to have an image per page as on some they had split them across the binding and it lessened the impact of the photo.

4 out of 5 stars

As I sit writing this review, in front of my computer screen is a collection of pebbles and other stones that have been collected from a number of local beaches and some from holidays. I have a couple of pikes of the pink Jersey granite and some Sicilian marble as well as fossils from Seatown Beach on the other side of Dorset.

Seatown Beach is at the very far end of the tombolo beach that is Chesil. It is this beach that Christopher Stocks begins the book with and it is a beach that he knows well as he has a house alongside it. The section of the beach that he is lives near is the eastern end where the pebbles are at their largest and he can hear them being made as they are churned around in the waves.

The book will take us from this wonderful beach the beach that Derek Jarman on the bleak Dungeness headland, the old Iron age hill fort of maiden Castle and even to the Natural History Museum and a rogue hand grenade.

Stocks’ prose is conversational and relaxed. He has picked his subjects well and has found lots of interesting anecdotes and has managed to get the balance of providing enough information about the geology of the pebbles that you are likely to find on the beach without making it read like an academic tome. However, what makes this short book so special is Angie Lewin’s beautiful artwork throughout the book. I had got this from the library, but as I like it so much I think I am going to get a copy of my own. You can find her artwork here.

3 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

I cannot recall how many programmes I have seen on or about the Victorians, their successes and flaws are well documented and we still live with glimpses of their buildings and the social norms that they imposed on our society. I didn’t know much about the people of the Georgian age though, and this book intends to make people more aware of them.

Peel has chosen twelve people to show Georgian Society. Rather than pick from the aristocracy and political elite, though a couple of them do feature, we have and wide range of people. Some are well known, or in Lord Byron’s case that is more infamy, and there are others that had faded into obscurity. He uses that to show how open and permissive the society was compared to the stuffy and secretive Victorians.

I did have a few favourites from the people he featured. Anne Bonny and Mary read were pirates showed the men how to do cause havoc in the Caribbean properly. Tipu Sultan was a name that I hadn’t come across before. He was famous for keeping the entire British Empire at bay for many years.

Being an engineer, I had heard of James Watt so knew most of the story of his success in steam engines. And of course, there is Dorset’s own Mary Anning. Even though she didn’t get credit for it at the time, it was her work in finding at cataloguing the fossils that she found on the cliff of Lyme Regis that created the science of planetology. We mustn’t forget that she was poor and uneducated and still could hold her own against the learned gentlemen of Oxford University.

Overall this is a reasonable book. Peal has managed to make the history of the Georgian period relatively accessible as he explores it through the lives of twelve people. It is not a serious history book, so if you are expecting detailed analysis and scholarly prose then this might not be the book for you. It is an easy and entertaining read and he does helpfully provide a list of further reading, should you want to explore this period in history more.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

In 1999 Ruth Pavey bought her tiny patch of Somerset and it has been a place of refuge for her. It was scrubland initially, and she has replanted it and knows almost every tree in there. This book is a year in the life of her woodland. Even though it is a tiny oasis in the modern factory-farmed countryside until recently it had harboured a wide variety of life. But one day she notices that there are not as many rabbits around as there used to be, in fact, she can’t remember when she saw the last one.

She sets about trying to work out what had happened to the population of rabbits and this makes her think about the wider effect that the climate crisis is having. She gets help from experts to look for and list the species that they find in the woods. It makes for quite an interesting list of plants and birds, but she knows that there are not as many there used to be.

Over the course of a year, she has a constant stream of family and friends visiting. Some are there to help with the maintenance and other tasks and there are picnics and an evening of moth trapping and planting of trees for the longevity of the wood. She wants to know who owned the woodland originally and the search for the Sugg family takes her to local history experts in the area teasing details out from the records. But mostly this is about having wood of her own to spend time in alongside the natural world.

I thought that this was a really lovely follow up to her first book, A Wood of One’s Own. The wood is no longer new to her and after two decades of owning it, she is realising that it still needs as much care and attention as it did when she first bought it. Her prose is gentle and reflects how much she loves spending time here. But in amongst the gentle breezes that rustle the leaves in her wood is a mirror on the wider world and how even a place like this that has not been drenched in chemicals can be affected by the wider ecological catastrophe that is happening. It really makes me want to own a little patch of woodland I can call my own.

4 out of 5 stars

A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.

The birth of a child is supposed to be a joyous moment, the reality is often different though, especially with a first child, as mother and father cope with the new arrival and the new responsibilities that it brings. After giving birth to her first child, at first Tanya Shadrick was ok, but a few days after she began bleeding. The carpet and her dress darkened with blood. They run for help and the ambulance arrived in minutes. She was hurriedly strapped to the bed and raced to the hospital.

Her placenta had torn an artery and she was bleeding to death. The consultant left them alone for a moment to say goodbye; until that point the reality of how bad it was hit them. She didn’t know if she would ever see them again…

She did.

This book is the story of her life. She writes about growing up in her childhood and her absent father and the inner turmoil that that causes. We hear about her time at university where she meets her husband Nye and the quiet modest life that they chose to live and the decision to have a child. It was that pivot point of nearly losing everything that galvanised her into taking the opportunities that she never thought a working-class upbringing would offer.

Shadrick decided to make a ‘mile of writing’ written in her local swimming pool, This handwritten art was telling the stories of the swimmers who used the pool and in the end gave her a fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts. She made a friend with a lady called Lynne Roper who had begun swimming outdoors in 2011 while recovering from a double mastectomy. She wrote about this but then was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Shadrick not only edited her words into a cohesive whole but started a publishing company to print it as no one else was interested.

This is a searingly honest book of a woman who tries to come to terms with the things that happened in her childhood and whilst she doesn’t necessarily try to make sense of them, there is a sense in the book of release from those burdens. The prose feels like an intimate conversation with a friend, she is entrusting us, the reader, with those details that you would never normally ever know outside the context of a relationship. Following that time when she nearly lost her life because of the haemorrhaging, she has used it to build her own inner strength. But it has not been an easy path, making the choices that she has, has not always met with approval from her friends or family. But it has given her a new life in art and a courage to speak for herself and other women. This might not be everyone’s choice of book, but I would recommend reading it as you might discover something about yourself that you never knew you were capable of.

I am changing the way I do the monthly review for two or three months just to see if how it goes and this takes less time that it was taking me before. I am going to add in the books that I have been sent for review, bought or got from the library. I am also going to include the top three genres and publishers. So let me know what you think below.

So, February as ever, came and went in no time at all. It always seems much shorter than 28 days, but i did manage to get a grand total of fifteen books read, the target was 16.

Books Read

The Nutmeg’s Curse – Amitav Ghosh

Storyland – Amy Jeffs

Meet the Georgians – Robert Peal

Deeper Into The Wood – Ruth Pavey

The Book Of Pebbles – Christopher Stocks

Wiltshire Moods – Steve Day

The Rose of Temperaments – Various

Tell Me Who We Were Before Life Made Us – Ed. Maz Hedgehog

The Planet in a Pebble – Jan Zalasiewicz

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Universe – Andrew Newsam

The Suburbanist – Geoff Nicholson

Bengal Lancer – Francis Yeats-Brown

The Almost Nearly Perfect People – Michael Booth

 

I had two books of the month:

Orchard – Benedict MacDonald & Nicholas Gates

This is an evocative and well written book about the life in an orchard in Hereford

A Natural History Of The Future – Rob Dunn

This is an essential read about the problems we are causing on out planet. It is a bit grim so might not suit everyone at the moment

 

Top Genres

Natural History – 9

Travel – 7

History – 4

 

Top Publishers

William Collins – Five Books

John Murray – Two Books

Plus 26 other publishers with one book each!

 

Review Copies Received

Hope & Fear  – Ronald H. Fritze

The Year The World Went Mad – Mark Woolhouse

 

Library Books

Bewilderment – Richard Powers

A Curious Absence of Chickens – Sophie Grigson

A Song for a new Day – Sarah Pinsker

The This  – Adam Roberts

 

Books Bought

In England – Don McCullen

Dorset 1900 – 1999: The Twentieth Century in Photographs – David Burnett

The Most Beautiful Walk In the World – John Baxter

The Islandman – Tomas O’Crohan

Banksy: The Man Behind The Wall – Will Elsworth Jones

Hitler’s British Traitors – Tim Tate

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

A Chateau of One’s Own: Restoration Misadventures in France – Sam Juneau

Watching – Harry Lovelock

Discover Dorset: Portland – Stuart Morris

A Shepherd’s Delight – Larry Skeats

Islands Of The Trade Winds – Dr Mary Gillham

Acts of Desperation – Megan Nolan

Here Comes The Miracle – Anna Beecher

My Darling From The Lions – Rachel Long

Islands OF Abandonment – Cal Flynn

Open Water – Caleb Azumah Nelson

Document Your Culture: A Manual – Emma Warren

350 Miles: An Essex Journey – Jason Orton & Ken Worpole

Strangers: Essays on The Human and Non-Human – Rebecca Tamás

Small Bodies of Water – Nina Mingya Powles (Now signed!)

Fifty Sounds – Polly Barton (Now signed!)

The Wars of the Interior – Joseph Zarate

And Artist At Home And Abroad – David Weston

The Dorset Weather Book – Mark Ching & Ian Currie

Seaside Surrealism: Paul Nash In Swanage – Pennie Denton

France On Two Wheels – Adam Ruck

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of Virginia Hall, WWII’s Most Dangerous Spy – Sonia Purnell

Guide to the West Dorset Countryside Paperback – Chris Jesty

Peace Work – Spike Milligan

Goodbye Soldier – Spike Milligan

Where Have All the Bullets Gone?– Spike Milligan

Mussolini: My Part In His Downfall – Spike Milligan

Monty: My part In His Victory – Spike Milligan

Rommel? Gunner Who? – Spike Milligan

Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall – Spike Milligan

Slow Trains To Venice – Tom Chesshyre

Livia – Lawrence Durrell

Tyneham – Lilian Bond

Small Island By Little Train – Chris Arnot

Letters From Skokolm – R.M. Lockley

Ireland’s Green Larder – Margaret Hickey

The Lost Gardens Of Heligan – Tim Smit

Magnus Of Stonewyld – Kit Berry

The New Wild – Fred Pearce

Coasting – Elise Downing

The Trigger – Tim Butcher

It’s a Hill, Get Over It: Fell Running’s History and Characters – Steve Chilton

Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up – Tom Philips

A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution – Travis Elborough

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud – Ana Sampson

At My Table – Nigella Lawson

Soul Music – Terry Pratchett (Signed)

Leylines of Wessex – Roger Crisp

Wimborne Minster 1992 Portrait of a Town – Alan R. Bennett