4 out of 5 stars

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

We are living in an uncertain world at the moment, the coronavirus pandemic has changed people’s and governments priorities, then there is the impending climate change crisis that hasn’t gone away and here in the UK, we are almost about to embark on the disaster that is Brexit.

On top of that, we seem to have gained politicians who are even more shady and corrupt than usual, they have always lied, but the current crop seems to be telling massive ones nowsdays that are shouted into the echo chamber that is social media. They seem to be more grubby too, not only is nepotism and cronyism rife in our present government, but the people that back them crave secrecy and avoid the transparency that comes with knowing where the money comes from.

‘Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947

Peter Geoghegan has been tracing this dark money to its sources and his findings are very worrying. There has been a massive concentration of wealth and power in the past 50 years and those that are donating their cash to political parties expect and demand certain things for their money. Their demands are starting to break our antiquated democratic systems, the fines that are supposed to keep things honest, are paltry compared to the sums sloshing around.

He begins with the LeaveEU organisation and unpicks the way that they used social media and vast sums of money to win the referendum and this theme carries on into the second chapter about the Bad Boys of Brexit and the third on the DUP and how they ended up with nearly half a million pounds to spend on the Brexit campaign from an unknown source.

The next chapter is about the European Research Group (ERG) who are a very right-wing section of the Tory party who sadly now seems to be in charge of things. He explains just how they are using the expenses system in parliament for us to effectively fund them. A lot of the money and influence on British politics at the moment is coming from America. Most of it is coming from hard right-wing individuals including Christian organisations who are funding populist and far-right groups all over Europe.

“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.” ― Terry Pratchett, Mort

This book makes for grim reading. That is not to take anything away from Geoghegan’s research and writing, which is a diligent, brilliant guide through a shadowy world of dark money and digital disinformation stretching from Westminster to Washington, and far beyond. Follow the money is always the maxim, but in most of these cases, it always disappears into some sort of black hole. The main problem is that those that have benefited from our deeply flawed democracy have a vested interest in ensuring that it is still kept as it is. He does make some suggestions on how to start fixing the democratic system, but you need politicians in place that want to embrace that change; the present government has no desire to change, as it is highly likely that it would mean that they could be a generation out of power. It will either make you furious or despondent but should be counted as essential reading.

4 out of 5 stars

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

For most people, the thought of reading a maths book is not even something that they would ever consider. They had been put off maths at school and almost certainly have never done anything other than added a few numbers up or split a bill in a restaurant (when we could go to them). But in this modern world maths is the foundation of our modern society.

Every time you are online, you are using prime numbers to make secure transactions, we use AI in our phones and home to find and recommend music and lots of other things and we mustn’t forget the power that algorithms have over our lives that never seems to diminish. Over the past year, numbers have been a feature of our life as the pandemic has spread like wildfire across the world. We see the charts and graphs rising with the horrific death toll.

How this figure rises is covered in the first of the seven chapters of this book, exponential numbers. In here he looks at real-life examples of numbers that grow in the way from nuclear explosions to bank interest. The second chapter is all about risk as he begins with an email about his DNA after a genetic test with a particular emphasis on calculating medical odds and a lot on false positives and how to understand results.

The phrase, there are lies, damned lies and statistics is so very true. They are banded about a lot on the news by people who frankly have no place in repeating them nor have the first clue as to the statistic being quoted in a lot of instances. Thankfully Yates is her to clear the muddied waters in his Chapter, Don’t Believe The Truth. He starts with the birthday problem, which is how few people do you need in a room before you will find two people with matching birthdays. Discounting twins, the real answer is much less than people expect. He debunks statistics that papers use but explaining that you need context to understand increases in numbers, not just a percentage.

The next chapter talks about errors and how people can make simple errors when converting from one number system to another, i.e. imperial to metric, as well as making mistakes when miscalculating dosages and increasing them by tenfold. Maths ignorance is ripe for errors to be made and they can be life-threatening too. The penultimate chapter is on that modern joy, the algorithm. In here, Yates, explains how they do have their uses, i.e. by working out the best delivery routes and how some books on Amazon are priced in the millions of dollars because of an over-enthusiastic algorithm. The final chapter is all about disease. Cheerful stuff, I know, but maths can be used to model outbreaks and there is the clearest explanation of the R number I have read.

Bearing in mind this was written in 2019 before the coronavirus outbreak this is still quite a prescient book. For those that get break out in a sweat when they read x = 2y, they will be pleased to hear that there are no equations in the book. There is the occasional graph and all the way through there are clear diagrams and explanations as to what is going on and why it is happening in a particular way. It can sometimes be grim, but it is an endlessly fascinating book.

4 out of 5 stars

I gave my first pint of blood at the age of 18. There were two reasons for doing so, I had just started riding a motorcycle and thought I would make a moral deposit just in case and the other reason was that I could get 45 minutes off as they came to my workplace. I have given fifty pints before stopping for a variety of reasons. Several armfuls, in the words of Hancock.

Blood is the stuff of life. We have around nine pints of it flowing endlessly and continuously around our bodies for our entire life. It carries our immune system, oxygen and waste products around the body and yet for some people the very sight of it outside our skin can make them faint.

Removing blood from bodies to cure has been going on for centuries, doctors would think nothing of bloodletting people in the vain hope of finding a cure. A more repulsive way of removing blood is by using leeches, something that I thought had stopped ages ago, but they are still in use by medical professionals today. Her first visit on this bloody tour is to a leech farm in Wales where she meets the man breeding them for use today. It turns out that they are pretty much essential is operations where body parts have been reattached, if the microsurgeon is having trouble with the veins then he will use a leech; the way that they draw blood through to the reattached helps decongest veins.

George head back to her Oxford College, Sommerville to discover more about Dame Janet Maria Vaughan. It was because of her that blood transfusion, that removal of blood from someone else and passing it onto another person with the hope of saving their life became a standard practice. As well as giving life, infected blood can make the recipient of the donation ill. To see how it affects people she heads to the township of Khayelitsha in South Africa. She is there to try to understand why being a young black woman in Africa is a death sentence. The killer here is HIV and at the time the book was written South Africa had increasing rates of infection.

One of the more useful parts of blood is plasma. Unlike blood where a match in blood groups is needed it can be transferred between any two people. This makes it very useful and because of that, it gives it a high a value. In the UK we do not get paid for donations, this is considered the gold standard, but elsewhere money is offered for donations of blood and plasma. It is found that those that donate this way are sometimes less than truthful about their past medical and sexual history. There are lots of haemophiliacs who were passed infected plasma and now carry with them HIV. It is quite a scandal and it has really been brushed under the table.
Each and every month women menstruate. Even though there are TV adverts for various products for women in the UK, it is a taboo subject. In other parts of the world, women who are menstruating are banned from participating in normal family life and are seen as unclean until it has passed. She meets Arunachalam Muruganantham in India who saw what was happening to women at that time of the month and has developed a really cheap pad that women of all castes there can afford to buy.

There are lots of other things that George talks about in this very readable and endlessly fascinating book. Not only is it well written, but it comes across as well researched without feeling dry and academic. Quite a sizable chunk on menstrual blood – which is good, this subject should not remain hidden and shameful. If you like reading non-fiction books that explore subjects that you wouldn’t normally consider, then this, like her book, Deep Sea and Foreign Going about the container shipping industry, then this might be for you.

3.5 out of 5 stars

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

The image we have of spies has long been tarnished by Bond. It is not a glamourous job and often involves long hours watching and waiting for a target or asset to make a move. For those that collates the information gather from signals intelligence or actual observations have to try and place the pieces together is some semblance of order. This is not particularly easy, especially when you don’t know what the full picture is nor do you know if the snippet of information in front of you actually relates to the task in hand.

Somehow they manage to pull together a picture of what is happening. So how do they do it? One of the methods that they use is the SEES model

Situational Awareness
Explanation
Estimates
Strategic Notice

The first part is gaining a fuller understanding as you are able to of what is happening. The second part is a deep understanding as to why it is happening and the various motivations behind any parties involved. From that, you need to assess different scenarios of what might happen if events unfold in particular ways. The final element is the assessment of any issues that might affect the item under consideration, including events that might be considered as outliers at the moment.

Even though these four stages sound fairly simple, they can absorb a lot of time and effort and things still get missed. It is also important to think of all possible outcomes as the assumptions that are made are often not bold enough. In this book, Omand takes us through the process behind this system in ten lessons and provides lots of examples of how he used these techniques in his time in government and as the director of GCHQ.

It is very detailed, which is kind of what I would expect from someone of his calibre and experience in the role. There are some really useful lessons in here, especially the final lesson on digital subversion and sedition and that seeing is not always believing, especially with the sophisticated. Parts of the book did feel like there were more of a memoir of his time in various government departments and was loosely linked to the lesson being discussed. That was a minor detail though, there are lots of details to take away here and use.

4 out of 5 stars

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

The islands of Fuji deep in the Pacific were known as the Cannibal Isles. It was a feared place by many, and they were subject to many influxes of Europeans and Indians over the past 150 years. These slavers, traders, missionaries and those with imperial intentions all had planned on what to do with the islands and its people. The Fijians absorbed these people and have emerged out of the other side with their society, language and lands intact and still their own.

In the early 1980s, Ronald Wright arrived there with his companion, Derek. It was much less of a shock that when he had arrived in Lima together. Even at 3 am the airport seems to be organised and refined and this could be seen in the landscape as they headed out to their hotel. After breakfast Derek popped out to get a paper and appeared back with a young Indian called Krishna, he was offering to be their taxi driver for the day. Setting off they arrived at a cultural centre and had guided tour of a village. The houses were arranged in a circle and it was so quiet they could hear the sounds of the waves.

It’s hard to be a Methodist after eating one

They would spend their time there travelling around to the different islands and learning first hand about the history and culture of the islanders, meeting various people and seeing different places. Cannibalism was a ritual that was carried out to both honour and insult a person and Wright recounts details from his visit to the museum. They developed a unique culture, and they have thankfully still had it for the most part (they have stopped eating people now!).

Most Fujian’s believe that rapid urbanisation, industrialisation and economic advance would cost them their cultural identity. They see land as more substantial than capital, subsistence farming more worthwhile than cash crops and they have been able to continue in these ‘old fashioned’ ways by developing a political system that defends them.

Before starting this review I spent a little while looking up some details about the islands of Fuji. All I can say is that it is utterly beautiful with their idyllic beaches and azure blue seas. Reading this, I get that impression from Wright too, that he loved being on these tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific. Even though he is moving around the islands, it doesn’t completely feel like a travel book as there is a mix of history, culture and his take of the people of Fiji. It is an interesting read though and a good starting point for anyone wanting to know a little more about the place.

4.5 out of 5 stars

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

I watch much less TV than I used to, and I am very much more selective now about what I choose to watch too. I tend to prefer to watch documentaries on a variety of subjects, occasionally a drama and some humour or panel game. Much like my reading.

A lot of what passes for popular culture passes me by as I have my head in a book normally. I have seen one series of Big Brother, I think it was the second series, I don’t watch Bake Off, though the rest of my family do. I can’t bear the braying alpha males and females on the Apprentice, who seem to think that the only way to get ahead is the trample on all those around them. If fact, almost all the programmes that he references, I haven’t watched…

He has somehow managed to divide these TV programmes into five sections that loosely hang together. The first, Reality TV Reality focuses on Big Brother, the Apprentice and Britain’s Hardest Workers but he also manages to squeeze in, The Office, The Thick of It and Have I Got News For You. When Big Brother first started they took a bunch of people off the street and shut them away under the pervasive gaze of cameras and an intrigued and bemused audience. Not much happened but it was a big success. This lead to more profiling of the people selected to join in and a house that was more spikey and not quite as comfortable as the earlier series. It has made a number of people famous for no other reason than being on there. The Office was not a programme I liked. As I work in an office usually, the little I watched felt far to close to home but to pull off a drama that felt like a cringe-worthy embarrassing documentary takes some doing…

The fascination of seeing people who live differently will never go away and this sort of documentary is never going to go out of fashion. In How The Other Half Live, Harrison considers various programmes that give us a window into these other worlds. The Secret Millionaire is a programme that took the super-rich out of their opulent mansions an into the lives of ordinary people. In principle, it was a good thing, but in practice, it became a way of the show exploiting those in the lower levels of our society and probably showed as much the chasm between those at the top and bottom that is still widening.

I have watched Top Gear since William Wollard waxed lyrical over different types of engine oil and the cars they feature you could see quite often broken down of the side of the road. It was reinvented with Clarkson et al and became a lifestyle show that I must admit has made me laugh a lot. He was a man who didn’t let trivial things like facts get in the way of his opinion and he drove as close the edge as he could. In Hypernormalisation by Adam Curtis, he shows how we can all retract into our particular bunkers and by consuming a niche of content from various providers we reinforce our particular world views.

The BBC is a common thread throughout the book and they merit a special chapter to themselves. Harrison goes onto list the flaws of the corporation and the way that it works, especially the delusional attempt to get a balance on every single subject they talk about. I like the BBC, even more so now that I have stopped listening to their news output, but they do make some excellent programmes on a variety of subjects.

In, A Very British Identity Crisis, he considers various programmes that show us as a culture and he begins with those programmes that have increased thousands of waistlines across the country. It feels like a country fair where villagers take their garden and kitchen produce to be judged by the great and the good. Another of the programmes that he uses as points of reference, Downton Abbey, I have never seen or wanted to see for that matter. But I completely get his point that it has been written to show that the English upper class have the right to remain in charge in perpetuity. Glad to see that he mentions the Detectorists, a show that is gently funny, but has quite deep truths in ti and shows that two men can have fallen in love with their local landscape and the history below the soil.

I thought that this was a fascination book. In my opinion, Harrison hits the mark each and every time with his analysis of how culture, society and what we watch on TV act like some grim hall of black mirrors back on society. There are contradictions, what works for one class now days is frowned on in other classes even though the behaviours are the same. There have been certain milestone programmes that have provided a stark, if not shockingly vivid image out our society and the way that it has changed for the better. He celebrates the great TV that has been produced and hopefully still will be but is also wary of those programmes that seek to shame and polarise particular sectors of our society. He rightly bemoans that we are losing that common TV conversational starters as so many people are watching very different things. If you love TV, then why not read a book on it? This is a very good place to start.