What are you reading now?

[DracoM]

JM Coetzee 'Boyhood'. (Autobiography)
Complex and interesting reflection on his upbringing and interior life as a lad in S.Africa. Vivid and absorbing.

[Pianorak]

Just read Wilkie Collins' No Name. . . A 'good read' . . .

I am hooked! Just downloaded the Delphi Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (a steal at £1.83). Never got round to reading Collins.

[Petrushka]

I am hooked! Just downloaded the Delphi Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (a steal at £1.83). Never got round to reading Collins.

I read the Moonstone and The Woman in White many years ago but No Name?: No! I've never searched it out but am intrigued now so will do so.

[verismissimo]

Good Living Street: Portrait of a Patron Family, Vienna 1900 by Tim Bonyhady

Follows (for me) Zweig, George Clare and de Waal. Features Mahler and Klimt!

[aeolium]

I have been dipping into a work I recently picked up in a charity shop, a good illustrated copy of Nicholas Culpeper's Complete Herbal, a wonderful compendium of common plants with their medicinal properties. His life was full of incident, including a failed elopement in his youth when the carriage of his beloved was struck by lightning and she was killed, an event which probably strengthened his belief in the power of planetary influence, which he felt operated on every plant. He was a strong republican and fought on the Parliamentary side in the English Civil War (I wonder if this was partly due to the fact that one of his ancestors was executed by Henry VIII for illicit relations with Catherine Howard). Indeed his hatred of authority and tradition, particularly in medical practice, led to an accusation of witchcraft and attack from the Society of Apothecaries. What partly drove Culpeper to research and publish his Herbal was the desire to make ordinary remedies, available from common plants, widely known to those who could not afford the preparations of apothecaries.

I find it impressive that two famous works dealing with three peacetime obsessions - plants, common ailments and fishing - should have been published in one year, 1653, during one of the most turbulent periods in our history.

[Petrushka]

Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble by Antony Beevor. Those who have read Beevor before will know what to expect. No-one today can make the complexities of the battlefield more readable than Beevor. This is well up to the usual standard and must be the definitive book on what has become known as the Battle of the Bulge.

[Richard Tarleton]

Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble by Antony Beevor. Those who have read Beevor before will know what to expect. No-one today can make the complexities of the battlefield more readable than Beevor. This is well up to the usual standard and must be the definitive book on what has become known as the Battle of the Bulge.

One of the Allies' great intelligence failures of the war, according to Max Hastings in his masterly new tome, The Secret War - Spies, Codes and Guerillas, 1939-45. A selection of lengthy reviews to be found in the usual place.

As Hastings says in his introduction, "...I seek below to establish the "big picture" framework, and to weave into this human stories of the spies, codebreakers and intelligence chiefs who served their respective masters - Turing at Bletchley and Nimitz's cryptoanalysts in the Pacific, the Soviet "Red Orchestra" of agents in Germany, Reinhard Gehlen of OKH, William Donovan of OSS...". He explains why the democracies did so much better than the tyrannies on either side, the narrative littered with insights that help make sense of it all.

Most of the familiar tales of espionage and deception that one grew up with rate barely a mention. "Ill Met By Moonlight" (the capture of Genral Kriepe by "SOE's intrepid buccaneers" in Crete in April 1944) gets a paragraph, only to point out how unnecessary it was at that stage in the war given the cost in reprisals (the dashing Paddy Leigh-Fermor is not name-checked). Stories that have been well-told already he does not repeat (The Man Who Never Was) but are well represented in the bibliography.

Bletchley, he reminds us, was not known about by anyone who wasn't there until the mid-70s. He remembers with embarrassment declining to review FW Winterbotham's The Ultra Scret in 1974 because he could not then credit the extraordinary claims it made.

In support of on of his main conclusions, that all the great achievements of intelligence in the war were the result of sigint, not humint, he quotes Hugh Trevor-Roper: “Of all the great intelligence triumphs of the was not one was directly or exclusively due to the Secret Service proper”. For me, the role of Trevor-Roper, who knew more about the Abwehr than they did themselves, was one of the great revelations of this book. I remember a remote and rather scary figure whose lectures on Gibbon and Macaulay I attended during my first term at university. At the end of one of these he said he'd be in his room if anyone wanted to ask questions. A chum and I went along, assuming there would be a small crowd in which to hide, and to our horror found it was just us and him. Chum froze, I managed to produce a passable question that got things going, and we just about survived. This, I learn, was the man who interrogated Schellenberg, head of the Abwehr after the fall of Canaris, at the end of the war.

[Petrushka]

Max Hastings ... The Secret War - Spies, Codes and Guerillas, 1939-45.

On my Christmas wish list! Hastings and Beevor are both wonderful writers and amazing how they manage to pen such lengthy, authoritative and impeccably researched volumes time after time. I wonder where their attention will turn next?

[Richard Tarleton]

On my Christmas wish list! Hastings and Beevor are both wonderful writers

And friends, luckily, generously acknowledged. They have a Russian researcher in common, Dr Lyuba Vinogradovna.

On my Christmas wish list!

On mine (and probably on yours Pet) is Adam Sisman's biog of John le Carré - I've handled it in the bookshop, a hefty tome.

[Petrushka]

On mine (and probably on yours Pet) is Adam Sisman's biog of John le Carré - I've handled it in the bookshop, a hefty tome.

[HighlandDougie]

Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble by Antony Beevor. Those who have read Beevor before will know what to expect. No-one today can make the complexities of the battlefield more readable than Beevor. This is well up to the usual standard and must be the definitive book on what has become known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Also gracing my bedside table. As always, I very much like his no-nonsense approach to a complicated subject (his book on D-Day inspired me to go to Normandy). In my unhumble view, more reliable than the estimable Max Hastings, who sometimes gets a bit carried away, although that doesn't make him any less readable.

[Beef Oven!]

Published in 1940, this book is an absolute joy.

[usher]

"The Swerve" by Stephen Greenblatt, an account of the impact of Lucretius' 'De Rerum Natura' on the Renaissance world following the discovery by Poggio (a fascinating study in himself) of the manuscript in a German monastery in 1417. Eminently readable and sent me back to my Penguin Classics translation and to Bolgar's "The Classical Heritage" to remind myself of the ways in which what survived of classical literature came down to us.

[gurnemanz]

Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble by Antony Beevor. Those who have read Beevor before will know what to expect. No-one today can make the complexities of the battlefield more readable than Beevor. This is well up to the usual standard and must be the definitive book on what has become known as the Battle of the Bulge.

I agree. Very readable. We know the area quite well but I was unaware of most of the detail - eg the intensity of the Americans' fury at Montgomery's behaviour and attitude and the terrible suffering of civilians (as usual) innocently caught up in the whole thing.

[Richard Tarleton]

More World War 2 - "Swordfish", by David Wragg, the story of the raid on the Italian fleet in Taranto Harbour on November 11, 1940. This daring raid by 21 slow, open-cockpit, obsolescent Fairey Swordfish biplanes flying from a single aircraft carrier (Illustrious), sank three battleships and badly damaged three cruisers and a destroyer, as well as wrecking the seaplane base and onshore fuel store. This followed repeated attempts by Admiral Cunningham, Nelson-style, to tempt the Italian navy out into battle, which they would have of course lost. The Italians, in trying to enforce a 180-mile exclusion zone around Taranto (with their actually very competent air force), entirely failed to understand the significance of aircraft carriers - the Swordfish attack was from 170 miles away. Apart from the damage to the Italian fleet (for the loss of 2 Swordfish and the lives of one crew) the raid resulted in what was left of the Italian navy being withdrawn to Trieste for the remainder of the war where it caused no harm to anybody.

A family connection - one of the swashbuckling Swordfish pilots was my godfather Ian Swayne - whom sadly I never got to know as he died in a train crash in the early 1950s. I remember seeing a Swordfish in a flypast at Yeovilton air show in the 1960s. John Culshaw talks about flying Swordfish in his memoir "Putting the Record Straight".