Book Review of Reasonable Doubt by Christopher Morris

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A meticulous analysis of a careless prosecution.

(This review is based on a paid-for copy of the Kindle edition.)

On the day that Lucy Letby was first convicted, the author had only a passing interest in the case, which seemed to be dreadful beyond belief. But as the day wore on, the frenzied and sensational reporting began to ring an alarm bell or two, so he started listening to and closely watching news broadcasts and online reports, waiting for someone to describe, or at least summarise, the evidence. He eventually began to wonder if there WAS any evidence, and thus began a three year investigation which led to his reading millions of words of often complex medical information, and interviewing hundreds of genuine experts, whereas the police investigation and prosecution employed only a handful of experts, who were notable for the fact that the better they understood the weight of what they were saying, the less they found it prudent to say in public or in court and this had the effect of surrendering the witness box to one of the least reliable “expert” witnesses in legal history for more than 90% of the trial.

The author’s journey was from examining what seemed to be one of the worst serial killing cases in British history, via a belief that the only crimes actually committed might be those of negligence and omission, to a belief that there were no crimes committed at the Countess of Chester Hospital at all. The text of this book includes something of significance on every page and this means that there are hundreds of them. It’s an awesome piece of work but the author does lack one thing: knowledge of issues and legalities around bullying, stalking and harassment (especially of females) and how those laws were all being tightened in England and Wales in the same years that the Letby saga was unfolding. Armed with some knowledge of these issues it is possible to see, amongst all the evidence which Mr Morris presents with so much care and skill, that which Lucy Letby’s principal accusers created for themselves and which could have proved them guilty of criminal harassment and not just breach of codes of conduct and professional slander.

And having created that “evidence” for the purpose of both bullying Ms Letby into abandoning the career that she loved and her managers into wanting her gone, they reacted to the “grievance” panel finding in favour of Ms Letby by “doubling down” that is, they made a determined effort to get the police to commence a murder investigation, to which they handed certain cherry-picked and manipulated “evidence” including the document variously known as the “Roster Chart” and the “Shift Chart”, which was the most influential evidence in the prosecution.

If you use concocted evidence to make someone leave her job, or get her sacked, that’s harassment and if there are two of you it’s conspiracy to harass. But when you hand that concoction to the police to use in an investigation which you campaigned for and which you have been (most improperly) allowed to advise despite being the complainants and this causes your intended victim to be wrongly convicted of multiple murders and attempted murders, that’s perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Sentencing guidelines say that the penalty for perjury must be in proportion to any penalties that were imposed on the victim of your perjury. Lucy Letby was given FIFTEEN whole life prison orders.

It is the evolution of the Roster Chart originally created with the help (under protest) of hospital managers desperate to stop Lucy’s accusers making completely baseless claims by helping them to stick to the facts, into the scarcely recognisable “Shift Chart” presented at Ms Letby’s trial, which proves an intent to bully and harass Ms Letby. And in the process of making it look as if she was, uniquely, always on duty when “murders” were done, by removing others (including ALL doctors) from the chart completely, they managed to deceive not only the court into thinking that Mr Letby was often on duty and nobody else was present at the relevant times, they convinced themselves of this fact too and they changed their recollections of events to fit! A nurse being alone in an intensive care unit for premature babies with several patients requiring one to one care would not have been suspicious: it would have been an EMERGENCY and had it ever happened there would be records of an immediate investigation. There are none: it never happened that way.

The references that Amazon forbids:

The Ministry of Justice documents which give an understanding of how the law, and policies around investigation and support for stalking were changing at the time of the Lucy Letby saga, are on this link:

https://hmicfrs.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/publications/living-in-fear-the-police-and-cps-response-to-harassment-and-stalking/

This was the culmination of a process begun by David Blunket; it all started to actually happen while Theresa May was Home Secretary.

To read a short, but enlightening document, it is necessary for the reader to visit the “evidence” page of the Thirwell Inquiry websites and search for:

“Pages 1-3 of notes of an interview of Ian Harvey conducted by Dr Chris Green”

This is document INQ0003156 – dated 07/11/2016 but you have to search for the description not the document number; perhaps to stop bots trawling for data to feed the dreaded AIs! Click on the link with the right number, though, if you are presented with a choice of several.

Dr Chris Green, who conducted the grievance investigation on behalf of the grievance panel, was already concerned about the Roster Chart (known by several names as it evolved) precisely because it was evolving in a way which made it more and more focused on and lethal to Ms Letby, whose grievance he was investigating. What he wants to check with Dr Ian Harvey, was whether or not the Roster Chart as it once was, now names only nurses and no doctors whatsoever. And he’s trying to get Dr Harvey to see for himself how legally dangerous it is for the whole hospital if Ms Letby does file a formal complaint of workplace bullying. (If she had got her complaint in before she was accused of murder, that chart would have proved that she was being targeted for harassment by its creators and the hospital would have had to sack them and compensate her. The hospital’s legal advisors actually said that Lucy Letby suing for constructive dismissal and winning compensation was actually the BEST outcome they could expect! A criminal harassment case would be worse, and her accusers had just created proof of that.)

Beyond Reasonable Doubt by Christopher Morris is published by Cinto Press (Bath Publishing Ltd) as of the 9^th of July 2026.

Book Review of Icarus 17 by Charles Cumming

 

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(This fair review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

 

A compelling thriller about an Anglo-American intelligence agency at the fag-end of the Special Relationship, highlighting the dangers of the digital-everything culture.

The action starts in Sweden (whose intelligence-sharing agreement with the UK actually predates the Special Relationship and the “Five Eyes”). A gunman travels by riverboat to a borough some distance from central Stockholm and starts to shoot people, apparently at random but right outside the house overlooking a public park which is where the wife and daughter of the chief of “BOX 88” live. The chief, Lachlan Kite, is in London and he hears about the shootings as he’s meeting an old flame, whose son has gone missing in Athens. He is torn between several duties and loyalties, but leaves the safety of his own family in the (perfectly competent) hands of the Swedish authorities and gets sucked into rescuing somebody else’s family. Only, the old flame hasn’t told him everything he needs to know about that.

The young man who has gone missing is in love with a young woman of part-Arab descent, who takes most of the book to get around to telling the young man everything he needs to know about herself and the dangers facing them. And she knows only half the story in any case. There’s an attempt to kidnap the girl resulting in the young man being beaten up, and the pair go on the run, the young man quickly learning that it’s nearly impossible to do this in any country within the Schengen “free movement” area where all movements are closely monitored and controlled, including by AI biometric recognition of individuals appearing on any CCTV footage from almost any source, as well as people being identified and located when they appear in the background of selfies and scenic images taken and shared by others with completely benign intentions. They can be tracked by bank cards and smart phones, by passports which they need to check into hotels with or use air travel. And although all this tracking and monitoring infrastructure has been constructed for the purposes of the states in question, it is not only open to abuse by non-state actors: the non-state actors are frequently more skilled and more prolific in their exploitation of the surveillance state than the “proper authorities.”

The intensity of the dangers they face, coupled with their own limited resources (they have cash, they lack good ID) drive the young woman and the young man to run away from “civilisation” as far as is possible by surface transport within Greece and, pending the emergence of an actual plan and firm destination they survive mainly by being too terrified to do much except keep going, but they have a very near miss and they learn that their only source of fresh ID has fled Greece for Sarajevo for his own safety. They decide to travel, on the documents they have, across the Balkans and, fatally, find that non Schengen Area states are less dangerous, so they stop moving for a bit. Things get very frightening, very quickly and the climax is dramatic.

The story namechecks several American presidents in a positive way, but Trump is portrayed as a destroyer, not just of American public (and secret) services but also of America, and it transpires that US Citizens who can’t swiftly prove their identity get turned away from American Embassies. That makes for a very bleak atmosphere, but one which gets more credible with every day’s headlines from the real world. Indeed, the only thing which stops this novel being the first of a new genre of Blairtopian thrillers is that the world’s most passionate cheerleader for the surveillance tech and surveillance state portrayed in it, is never mentioned once, though his shadow falls across every page.

 

Icarus 17 by Charles Cumming is published on the 2^nd of July 2026 by HarperCollins UK/ Hemlock Press

Book review of Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell

 

 

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(Review based on a review copy from the publisher.)

 

A timely historical novel about the culture war waged in Germany before the Holocaust, which is also a deep and loving portrait of a self-invented young female artist making an impact in the most difficult and dangerous of circumstances. It is timely because it is published as Tech Oligarchs seek equivalent control over the arts as the NASDAP once did and the mechanism of control, deliberate impoverishment of the talented, is very similar in nature but further-reaching than Goebbels could ever have dreamed of.

It is apparent that whilst the accusation against the Jews is that they prosper, unduly, at the expense of the German people, it is the creative talent of the Jews which the new masters of Germany envy and fear in equal measure. The heroine, Hannah, a seamstress from a family entirely engaged in the garment business, who likes to draw, leaves home and starts out on her own, becomes interested in fine art, attracts the attention of an expert who mentors, but does not really teach her as she becomes a painter. None of the Jews in the story are hugely wealthy and only one family is even prosperous, but an Aryan female patron who funds and exploits Hannah in equal measure is indeed hugely wealthy and has several other wealthy Aryan female friends. They do not start out as obvious fascists and for several years Germany remains a democratic republic. But once there is a new Chancellor (who is not named until well towards the end of the novel) the wealthy swiftly and overtly side with the newly powerful and make themselves believe in the new doctrines, heart and soul.

Hannah gets paid lots of money to paint nudes of her wealthy patron and her friends and gives pretty well all of it away. Her art becomes both a target of the culture war and a weapon in it, used by both sides! She is betrayed by her patron and betrays her patron back, but it is the patron who rescues Hannah from imminent arrest and gets her out of Germany. The divisions are deep, but also complicated and ambiguous.

The principal difference between the culture war in the novel and that in the real world in the present day is that the historical German Chancellor passed surprise edicts and even enacted complicated legislation to deprive his victims of their rights, their jobs, their goods and their homes. The relevant quote from the present day Oligarchs is “Tech is how we by-pass the constitution” (so no need for laws at all!) and they are not just targeting an ethnic minority, or even a disenfranchised ethnic majority, or the creatives within them. All creative effort is being stripped of reward and the costs of carrying out creative activities for one’s own expression steadily ramp up. Every non-Oligarch is being steadily impoverished and the thought of what that might be preparation for makes one wonder if this novel is prophetic as well as historical?

Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell is published by Pan Macmillan/Picador on the 16^th of July 2026.

Tales From The Topless Café, new book coming soon.

 

 

 

A sequence of eight science fiction tales set in a lightly-revised version of the author's "Forest" universe (published via HMS Press in Canada in the mid nineties) this work includes seven original Katie Hounsome illustrations (in addition to the Katie Hounsome cover art, above) and seeks to add AI-free artistic value to the text while it is testing the waters for the significant investment of work required to revise and republish "Forest", "Tiger" and "Protegeé" and finish the fourth novel in a Milligan's trilogy: "Badge of Stars."

 (The only tale containing any serious (but entirely proportionate) mayhem is left unillustrated out of prudence rather than prudery.) 

 Delays in completing this work are all down to the author and his battle with two different life-threatening illnesses, and in the meantime Katie Hounsome has been busy on other projects: https://katiehcreates.com/

 There will be an e-book edition of this, but only some e-readers will be able to reproduce the art-deco-style colour illustrations to a satisfactory standard, so the plan is for there to be an Amazon print-on-demand paperback for those who want the text with the illustrations in tangible form and for appropriate platforms to carry e-books in a format that will allow colour rendition on I-pads, PCs and similar devices.

On Kindles and other simple e-readers, the text may appear with the illustrations appearing in monochrome. If this doesn't work well, a text-only edition may have to be created. The hope is that readers who appreciate the illustrations, will buy the paperback and those who are happy with the text won't have to.

None of the e-book editions will be particularly expensive. 

It currently looks as if this will be available by Autumn 2026. 

Book Review of The Enemy’s Wife by Deborah Swift

 

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(Fair review based on a review copy from the publisher.)

The second novel in a series about surviving war rather than winning it.

This well-researched story is set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai just before and for several months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (and many other places, including Shanghai’s Western enclave). Two of the central characters are female refugees; one of them a Polish Jewess forcibly separated from her Japanese husband and the other an orphaned teenage Jehovah’s Witness from Austria. From that premise, the author does an excellent job of sustaining the reader’s hope in an ending which is not unbearably bitter, and that hope is not quite dashed, either. But in doing this the author redefines success as someone who has been through the struggle still being alive after it.

There have been many accounts of how brutal the Japanese armed forces were during WW2 (which started in China years before it was happening anywhere else) and most of these are true, but the author here goes the necessary distance to show that this was not a natural behaviour for many, probably most, of the men in question and that the brutality of their training and subsequent harsh discipline conditioned the men to accept that sort of thing as normal -and to do to those weaker than themselves what those stronger than themselves were constantly doing to the soldiers in the middle. The author does not labour the point, but she makes it. The methods described resemble those of the Ottoman Empire as documented by T.E. Lawrence (from his personal experience when he was mistaken for a potential conscript) except that the Imperial Japanese Army perhaps went further in the direction of making the killing of helpless victims a standard TRAINING exercise. But both the Japanese and Ottoman Empires sought to recalibrate the sexuality of recruits towards violence and exploitation. In the present day this is being done by online lifestyle influencers rather than drill sergeants and it is possible to foresee serious trouble brewing, or actively being brewed.

The author also presents the various different peoples and factions as collections of individuals making moral choices, or else acting solely in their own interests or even on their very worst impulses. There is no tarring with the same brush. The most despicable character of all is, ostensibly at any rate, a senior member of the CCP rather than the Japanese Army, but on balance the CCP itself gets a pretty good press, though that’s partly because there’s no other group in Shanghai offering organised resistance to the Japanese. Many of the people helping the resistance are not “members” of any party and that causes them to help others with a degree of impartiality the CCP itself has never been noted for.

And a Japanese officer does win his battle with addiction, even if he loses everything else.

The Enemy’s Wife by Deborah Swift is published by HQ on the 9^th of April 2026

Book Review of Getting the Electric by Louise Hegarty

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This review is based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley of the first story only.

The life and death by scrolling of a young Irish woman.

This is set in the present day and is based on the heroine scrolling her way through life, whilst fretting about illnesses she doesn’t have, although she forgets to tell anyone about the one symptom that actually matters! But the structure is that of a basic text-only role-playing game popular on mainframes and TRS-80 type microcomputers in about 1982. The clue is that a troll keeps appearing and trying to kill her, and this is not a reference to someone posting nasty comments online. And yes, it is relevant that the young woman is Irish because this simply would not happen to anyone who was not.

It’s very funny once the reader gets their head around what’s happening. If the other stories are as good, and and assuming that there are enough of them, then the book as a whole should work quite well. The first installment was released this St Gertrude’s Day.

Getting the Electric by Louise Hegarty is published by Picador (Pan Macmillan) on the 30^th of April 29026.

Book Review of Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami

(Translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio)

  

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(Fair review based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley UK.)

This well-crafted novel is a long and enjoyable read, even though it’s all about alienation, exclusion, poverty and injustice. Hana, of High School age but no longer going to school, has no effective means of establishing her identity, cannot have a bank account, access insurance, medical care, or any of the many things which normal citizens take for granted. And because she has no means of establishing her identity, she has no way of getting any sort of document, or card, which allows her to legitimise her existence. Nonetheless, females in this position can get grey-economy or zero-hours jobs which permit them to exist (and serve the society which excludes them) whereas it’s very hard for males in the same boat to get ANY legal or even gig-economy position without the help of organised crime; the price of which is constant obedience and never-ending obligation.

As ever, in any part of the world and not just in Japan, the existence of a mandatory means of proving your entitlement to be part of society is, first and foremost aimed at the exclusion from society of those whom the rich and powerful despise, or those that they fear. That is a universal truth and it is why this novel will speak to any thinking resident of the United Kingdom in 2026. It will, however, be lost on the unthinking, whether they actually constitute a majority or not.

Having said all that, what makes this an enjoyable read is the relationship which develops between Hana and an older woman, Kimiko, who’s been in a similar bind for many years. Kimiko’s hopeless situation has destroyed any ability she might once have had to scheme her way out of her situation, but at the same time she has no qualms about sharing any resource that she has access to with anyone who needs it. If someone is thirsty, Kimiko tries to find something for them to drink, if they are sad she tries to cheer them up. From a position of being unable to help herself in any useful way, she helps others, especially Hana, even if it’s only to get through one more day.

They get some breaks from atypically generous landlords who fell into wealth and are not hugely worried about IMMEDIATE payoffs, and much more sustained assistance from a seasoned and remarkably cautious gangster who has realised, from the experience of his elder brothers, that ambition and greed are very dangerous things if you are part of organised crime! Organised crime exploits societal greed: its foot soldiers are in mortal danger the moment they cease to be content with what they are given. He helps Hana and Kimiko as far as his own survival permits and is perhaps the only man Hana loves; certainly he’s the only man in Hana’s world worthy of her trust.

One of Hana’s older female friends falls into the hands of a more typical gang member (he mistakenly thinks he is upwardly mobile) and pays the inevitable price, causing a crisis which breaks up the friendship group, perhaps forever, but certainly until the Coronavirus pandemic puts the whole of Japan into the sort of state which has been normal for Hana all her life.

Somewhat ironically, Hana’s greatest financial success (this doesn’t last long) comes from the exploitation of cloned debit and credit cards: the very instruments of her exclusion from law-abiding society! At the end, Hana has lost everyone she loves, but that loss means they are always with her, which is the very last thing Kimiko teaches her. She finds peace.

Sisters in Yellow is published in the UK by Picador on 19^th of March 2026

Book Review of Death Watch Cottage by T. Orr Munro

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(Review based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley UK)

 

 Murder mystery where victims, killers and motives proliferate.

In this novel, there’s no whittling-down of suspects, either for murders or police corruption and attempts to pervert the course of justice.

The heroine is a Cornish crime scene investigator, who finds several pieces of significant evidence to do with a number of possibly separate cases, starting with what looks like an accidental death of an environmental campaigner in the splendidly ambiguous “Death Watch Cottage”, whilst going through an extremely bad time as a soon to be homeless single mother with a teenage daughter and with accusations of professional misconduct and even corruption flying in more than one direction. All of which makes it very hard to correctly understand the true, or the full, significance of anything until it has all been found, and even then the proper context is supplied by a single crucial but not very noticeable fact mentioned outside of the active investigation itself.

And even when the investigator has solved all the known crimes to her own satisfaction and their housing issues to her daughter’s satisfaction, there’s a twist still to come when her thoughts turn to a mystery connected with the same Death Watch Cottage from several years before the killing which triggered her investigation.

The rich list of suspects includes: a property developer, a different sort of environmental campaigner to the deceased, a possible gang of anti-second home vandals, an adulteress, a bullying police inspector, a publisher of illegal voyeuristic pornography and a teenage porn addict with an online handle of “Tate Boy” and a diminishing list of friends. The puzzle is not so much to sort out the innocent from the guilty as to match the offenders to the correct offences, which is really quite absorbing for the reader.

Death Watch Cottage by T. Orr Munroe is published in the UK by HQ on the 26^th of March 2026

Book Review of The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley

  

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The history of a friendship.

 

(Review based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley UK)

The saving grace of any nostalgic novel stretching across the Blair years ought to be that it does not mention Mr B at all, so score one for the author there.

A younger literary woman works, intermittently, for a magazine mostly edited by an older man, with whom she gets on very well. Quite what the magazine “Sequence” actually publishes is never quite clear; what matters is the politics of producing it! Quite why she is so tolerant of and loyal to her erstwhile boss becomes clear as she remembers some of her past relationships, which range from the abusive to non-sinister weirdness. And the (completely unproductive) two-year reign of “Shove” Halfpenny as editor of Sequence will strike a chord with people in almost any industry or other field of endeavour with experience of those born to executive privilege who rise relentlessly up the ladder regardless of the wrecked enterprises they leave in their wake.

The attractive thing about this book is that there’s no real rancour about the bad stuff, merely observation and endurance. The point of this book is that you have to get through the bad stuff because what you value, forever, are the people and places who get you through.

That may even be why the bad stuff has to happen: to smoke out those who actually care.

 

 The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley is published in the UK by Picador on the 2^nd of April 2026.

Book Review of Holy Boy by Lee Heejoo (translated by Joheun Lee)

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(Review based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley UK)

 

Both a thriller and a study of obsession and modern-day idolatry.

This is a novel (based, apparently, on real incidents) about four women (two are young, two middle-aged) with an obsession in common, or as it turns out, different obsessions with an object in common, which happens to be a highly popular young male Korean pop star, who is perhaps a one-hit wonder or very nearly so.

This leads to their working at cross-purposes as they work together. At the same time, almost everyone else with any relationship to the pop idol in question is likewise plotting in some direction or another and most of those who aren’t plotting at all, swiftly fall victim to the plots. Although most of the outcomes in this novel are tragic, the kidnap of the pop idol by the four women does at least save him from what his manager sees as a neat (and very final) solution to the dangerous levels of obsessive behaviour exhibited by other fans, especially when it leads to violence against his colleagues and he could well be next!

The company’s chairman, though, is greatly impressed by the enterprise and inventiveness of the young female fans and thinks they are more talented than their Western or Japanese counterparts and they would be an asset to Korea if they had something more important to do, such as resisting an invasion or overthrowing a domestic dictatorship. And although all this is set in South Korea, more than one of the characters sees North Korea as a possible escape route back towards a simpler way of life, more in keeping with Korean tradition than the present-day South Korea.

This is not an idea likely to appear in any non-fiction published by or for South Koreans, however “free” the country might be according to the official narrative. There are very few countries in the world, let alone the Far East, where the idol of constant change in the name of “progress” can be safely questioned and to worship it is the only really safe course of action in most societies these days. What makes it a fantasy is that the North is just as obsessed with its own version of “never ending progress” as the South.

The boy pop star, is indeed an idol as well as a vulnerable and wickedly-exploited young man, he is also Korea, North and South, and even beyond that, the boy is the wider modern world, secretly desperate for a less frantic direction.

Spoiler alert: he is presumed dead, but narrowly survives and is found washed up on a beach by a young woman who decides a young man with nothing at all, not even a memory of who he is, is just what she is looking for. Obsession destroys, love redeems.

Holy Boy by Lee Heejoo is published in the UK by Picador on the 5^th of February 2026.

Book Review of The Living And The Dead by Christoffer Carlsson

 (Original novel translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson Broyles)

 

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(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

An absorbing chain of consequences mystery novel.

Set in an economic and social backwater in rural Sweden, much more happens than just a murder and it continues to happen across more than two decades. At almost every stage there seems to be a new suspect, or at least a better explanation, but everyone has a slightly-different view of what has happened and each reacts to what he or she thinks has happened when the reality might be a little different or very different indeed. Small details that were once missed can change the way everything looks, but then, after twenty years even the most essential “known fact” in the investigation turns out to be a completely mistaken assumption. And over those two decades almost all of the principle characters do some level of harm to themselves or somebody else based on a flawed understanding of what others had done. The level of harm escalates into a cataclysm for the entire community and it doesn’t even end there.

This is all pleasantly comprehensible, because the narrative is a progression from one character’s point of view to another’s and so on and they tend to see flaws in each other’s logic and assumptions rather than their own. The truth is emerging, but it all seems horribly complicated until a belated admission of error leads to sudden clarity and great danger.

The Living and The Dead is published in the UK by Michael Joseph on the 8^th of January 2026.

The Orwell Nobody Quotes

Since February 2020, it has become apparent to a steadily-growing proportion of thinking people that medical science has fallen into anti-science hands: “I am The Science” is not the statement of a scientist but the shriek of a demigod. To anyone with an interest in miscarriages of justice, this was obviously happening in forensic science two decades earlier at the dawn of the 21^st century, which would suggest that the seeds had been sown even further in the past. In fact, the debasement of science was already being organised in the 1860s, when a “dining club” known as the X-club was created in London so that certain professional “scientists” could, by favourably reviewing each other’s work, promote each other to oligarch if not demigod status within their chosen fields. See a relevant book I reviewed here:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2024/05/book-review-of-popes-and-unicorns-by.html

The more palpable this debasement gets, and as further fields of scientific endeavour are added to the list of casualties, the more people start quoting phrases, passages and whole books by George Orwell. And whilst I don’t disagree with the relevance of these familiar quotations in a way, I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that as a teenager (this was not a recent experience) I read something or other by George Orwell which was even more relevant than “1984” or the more obvious essays. But the mists of time were more like a shroud of thick fog and I could not bring it to mind.

So, I recently decided to invest in the Kindle edition of something billed as “The Complete Works of George Orwell” (which it isn’t because the BBC-related stuff is missing, along with articles written for The Observer about gardening and so on.) But it’s still a huge pile of Orwellisms, so I ignored all the volumes within the collection which I knew not to be what I was looking for, and read the rest. This took a while.

Along the way, I noted that that a lot of the material which Orwell wrote around 1939 to 1941, touched on the way that many English intellectuals who dabbled with fascism, communism (or, quite often, both at different times or even the same moment) appeared to be seduced by the “scientific” nature of the NAZIs and/or the Bolsheviks. H.G. Wells comes up quite a lot within that thread of Orwell’s writings, and elsewhere he names H.G. Wells as one of his favourite writers during his boyhood. He seems to have been much less fond of George Bernard Shaw, who gets mentioned twice and both times Orwell is at pains to remind us that Shaw was not English! Neither was Dylan Thomas, who does get mentioned (favourably) in an essay about the future of poetry on the Wireless (a field which Thomas made his own broadcasting from Cardiff during the war, but Orwell was writing at the start of that experiment so didn’t know how it went). It’s interesting that the only two “racist” remarks Orwell makes should be about the person who went around Europe preaching the “science” of eugenics and recommending the use of poison gas in the euthanasia of the “workshy” and disabled people to receptive audiences including both Hitler and Stalin.

Orwell gives his former literary hero, the “authoritarian” H.G. Wells, much more time than he ever gives to Shaw but he explodes Wells’s excuse for being impressed by Hitler on the basis of the latter’s reliance for “science” by pointing out that all of Hitler’s science was state-approved “German Science” which isn’t science. Science is just science.

{BTW: This didn’t stop the Americans and Russians, upon the defeat of NAZI Germany, going potty about the superiority of the science that had just lost the war and rounding up all the NAZI “scientists” they could find and carrying them off to new lives in the super-powers’ research labs and universities. Most universities in America have now been run by at least two generations of NAZI-trained educators and it is beginning to show: “I am The Science!!” The situation in Russia is less clear, but the current government there is not entirely free of NAZI-thought and there’s something dark and home-grown there as well. In my novel The Farshoreman this is known as “prochnost.”}

Thus far, Orwell has seen and expounded the dangers of authoritarian manipulation of science as well as literature, which one would have expected to be his main concern. But he also sees, across all of his work, a difference between authoritarian regimes, which tend to either liberalise or disappear within a generation or two, and totalitarian regimes which aspire to last forever and might well do so with the help of modern technology. He also sees a difference in the limited number of ways that an authoritarian regime might corrupt science, literature and the other arts compared to what a totalitarian regime would do: it would completely change the meaning and purpose of each.

That realisation comes to Orwell about two thirds of the way through his analysis of a little-known pamphlet written by Leo Tolstoy “no later than 1903” which is a astonishing attack on the works, competence and stature of William Shakespeare, with “King Lear” as exhibit A in Tolstoy’s case against The Bard. Orwell doesn’t seek to defend Shakespeare: he seeks to understand the thinking and motivation behind Tolstoy’s diatribe and that is where George Orwell meets a truly totalitarian mind face to face and he does not like what he sees.

Orwell’s Essay is entitled “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (it’s published in more than one collection of Orwell’s work) and it seems that he had to go to some lengths to lay hands on a good translation of Tolstoy’s pamphlet, though this seems to have been towards or after the end of the second world war when almost anything might have been difficult to get, regardless of political sensitivity. The document seems to have been too obscure (in the West) to attract censorship in any case.

After going in circles a bit trying to understand the logic of Tolstoy’s arguments, Orwell concludes that Tolstoy’s own life story mimics much of the plot of King Lear and that Tolstoy is outraged by this, especially as he made the same mistake: he gave up his wealth, his lands and the copyright on most of his work to move across Russia and live the life of a peasant. Lear gives up being king for a quiet life.

Both Tolstoy and Lear made the mistake of expecting the same care and respect from others they had whilst in wealth and power, after they had given it up. In effect, both of them expected that everything would turn out the way they expected, simply because that was what they wanted to happen!

At this point, Orwell starts to deal with what the pamphlet says about Tolstoy’s view of art and science and it is in fact explicit. This is a brief fair use quotation, that deserves wider attention. Tolstoy sees art and writing as legitimate only as “parables”:

The parables - this is where Tolstoy differs from the average vulgar puritan – must themselves be works of art, but pleasure and curiosity must be excluded from them.

Science, also, must be divorced from curiosity. The business of science, he says, is not to discover what happens, but to teach men how they ought to live. So also with history and politics.

Tolstoy’s vision, in other words, is not simply that the governed may not question their governors, which has been a common belief of governors through the ages, but that nobody may ever question anything, ever. Every branch of learning and discovery is turned into a submissive study of how to live one’s life, but a life without learning, with nothing new, ever, is a life without meaning and not really life any more. This goes beyond anything which Hitler or Stalin did or thought and it excels even King Nebuchadnezzar II. And yet, here in 2025, this is the very direction in which the global elite are taking us. We won’t be able to undo it by following the money because there will not be any money. We won’t be able to spread subversive ideas because there will be no thought. (Many politicians these days have a lot of trouble with thinking and have already largely contracted this nasty chore out to think-tanks, which are all seriously misnamed.) Curiosity becomes a crime, as does pleasure. Tolstoy may even be the source of the conclusion which Gino Giovanni and Benito Mussolini came to between them: private thoughts are selfish and should be banned.

Interestingly, Orwell sums up what Shakespeare is telling us through the play “King Lear” thus (another short fair use quotation):

If you live for others, you must live for others and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself.

That is not going to be a popular message in either Davos or Connaught Square!

Are failures in forensic science and criminal justice a symptom of failings in science itself?

 Below is the text of a comment placed by the blog author on this YouTube video

https://youtu.be/sv7Z6OSF6Tg  which may have a far wider relevance.

The video is embedded at the bottom of this article. 

 

There are two underlying problems [with scientific evidence] which have led justice into error, not just in the Lucy Letby case but many others from the murders of Leslie Moleseed to Jill Dando and beyond:

The first is that we've had sufficient generations of lawyers without any training in scientific thinking (if they had this, they would not need [much] specific scientific knowledge to cross-examine effectively) for a total absence of scientific thinking to have become respectable for lawyers. If you challenged me to name lawyers who excelled at scientific thinking I would nominate Reginald Hine and Jan Christian Smutts, both of whom published books and papers in natural history at a time when that included what are now seen as six or seven different disciplines, all of which have featured in forensic evidence since the 1950s. Robert Hitchens had a good grasp of engineering and navigation, too, and navigation really does require disciplined thinking! Even after Smutts became a field marshal (he never really wanted to be a soldier and for most of his career he wasn't) he was active in the field of international law to the point of helping to draft the UN Charter whilst still authoring papers on natural history. These men seem extraordinary today, but they were not at all untypical of their generations (Hitchens really was the generation after the other two).

The second is that Science itself has been willfully transformed from a community where even the great men listened to lesser known colleagues, into a hierarchy where the strength of one's position and reputation counts for much more than the strength of one's arguments and evidence is selected rather than tested. The dangers this state of affairs extend far beyond the courtroom, but it is in the courtroom that we can see the hierarchy in operation and study it in detail: the nature of modern scientific publishing is such that it's very hard for us to do it elsewhere, especially in the field of medicine and public health policy.

It is no longer the done thing to challenge assertions by any "scientific expert" even though the challenging and testing of assertions and the supporting evidence (on those occasions when that is actually offered) is the true basis of scientific progress! The number of genuine scientific breakthroughs has declined since about 1950 and it's been in freefall since 1972-ish, but the number of "scientific ideas" being reported in the press has grown enormous and bewildering. And that's because we're not allowed to question ANY of it. If the idea comes from someone in authority or someone the authorities endorse as an expert, it must be true, and if it comes from anywhere else it must be misinformation or a conspiracy theory. A forest of ideas, none of which we may test, prevents any new growth in human knowledge because there is no light at all on the forest floor where the seedlings are.

Book Review of Anyone Who Tells You That Doctor-assisted Suicide is Always Dignified and Painless is lying: Here is Proof by Jack King

 

* * * *

A scientifically-informed polemic on an ethical subject.

At 96 pages, this book is an easy read on a difficult subject and it needs to be. Precisely because there’s nothing false or specious about it to allow one to put it down, a longer volume would be dispiriting and a shorter one perhaps glib and unconvincing. The author also admits, to his credit, to having condensed his arguments in order to keep the sale price low. It is not a fun book to read by any means, but it is satisfying in that it conveys information about the current global trend towards assisted suicide that many readers may have suspected or felt in their bones, but either could not prove or articulate.

The title is very long relative to the length of the text, but the book does what it says on the tin and the author, a retired GP with forty years experience, does explain why the impression given to both Parliament and the public, that there’s a well-trusted drug or drugs which people can take which puts them peacefully and reliably to sleep, is completely false. There is no agreed solution to this problem: in none of the countries where assisted suicide is legal, is there a regulatory body checking that lethal drugs work as planned or any truly reliable advice about what to use. Far from being tested and professional, doctors are improvising their lethal cocktails with crushed barbiturate tablets and traumatic outcomes are widely-reported, but also obscured rather than quantified by official data because a death certificate for assisted suicide means there is no investigation and no autopsy, though in the case of execution by lethal injection an autopsy is a legal requirement and the reports do not make pleasant reading for anyone but a vengeful relative of a murder victim. Do harmless elderly patients deserve to be treated worse than convicted murderers?

The author goes to some lengths to make the point that the setting of a time limit in legislation so that people may only be helped to die if they have X number of months left to live, is hopelessly unscientific because such a prognosis is based on guesswork and only accurate when it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and the patient expects to die. (Perhaps the whole time-framing exercise is intended to make the entire population accept the concept of everyone having a set date by which they are expected to go tits-up?)

He has also done what other “dissident” doctors have not dared to do, and he makes it clear that the motive in extending assisted dying to young people whose only illness is mental, is quite simply that the only really desirable transplant organs are those taken from a young and physically-healthy persons who die under controlled conditions in a medical facility. The author does not mention that this requirement is already catered for in Communist China by making political detainees into organ donors (no-one wants to buy organs from criminal prisoners who might have used both narcotics and prostitutes; by contrast innocent dissidents whose only “crime” is religious practice are seen as ideal donors) but the underlying principle is identical.

He further sees a self-reinforcing interaction between the rising cost of worsening healthcare and the positive payoff for government in people dying rather than drawing pensions or needing hospice care. He sees that the worsening care might be done on purpose in order to coerce people towards suicide as an alternative, but he either does not see, or had no space for, the strong possibility that the upwards spiral of healthcare costs and the downwards spiral in healthcare standards are both completely avoidable, because there’s a strong regulatory bias against approving innovative uses for cheap drugs and non-drug treatments whose safety has already been proved over years of their original use. This arises mainly because of vested interests (both financial AND reputational) embedded in both regulatory and scientific research bodies. This is why the book gets four stars rather than five: it isn’t flawed but it’s maybe two subjects and two pages away from being better.

This book is available as a low cost paperback and an even cheaper kindle E-book from Amazon in the UK on this link:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0FJW8FNGT/

  

In the Americas:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0FJW8FNGT/

It was published in the UK by EMJ Books on the 23^rd of July 2025.

Book Review of the Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson

 

* * * * *

An absorbing novel about Viking myths in an ancient landscape.

  

The landscape is that of Orkney and it’s inextricably bound with the surrounding seascape and a past so distant that Viking myth turns out to qualify as modern re-invention.

A Surrey librarian in her late fifties learns that she has terminal cancer and decides that, rather than struggling hard to stay alive, she will die on her own terms after answering some questions about her childhood, in Orkney. “Helen” sells up everything connected with the English life she built for herself after being “exiled” at age fifteen, rents a flat near where she grew up (mostly in the library when things were bad at home) and goes there with the idea that when the times comes, she will freeze herself to death on a hillside rather than submit to what she sees as the pointless torture of end of life care. The only person she actually recognises is “Thorfinn,” who worked as a book-stacker in the library in his teens and once asked her out, unsuccessfully initially but forty-two years have passed and he still has hope.

At some other time and place, which somehow connects to Orkney in the present day, “Hel’” a half-beautiful, half hideous “monster” is betrayed by the Norse gods and exiled to the underworld, to take charge of departed souls who aren‘t going to Valhalla (almost everyone who dies, in practice).

Importantly, the historical site where Hel’ meets and collects souls is a neolithic burial mound which predates Viking culture by several times as many years as Viking culture predates ours.

The Norse gods mostly fear Hel’, but for the wrong reasons. Hel’ and Helen have things to learn from each other and that will be transformative.

And Helen finds that she can tolerate Thorfinn helping her, though it takes her rather longer to accept that he loves her and she actually wants him to love her. Hel’ learns to rediscover her role in really ancient neolithic myth: she is not the cruel and repulsive monster the Norse gods make her out to be.

This is a lovely story about finding peace as well as love, even in one’s last days. After the din and clamour, the sheer orchestrated panic, of the covid years, this is the sort of peace and love denied to so many. Thousands died with no-one allowed to hold their hand or say a soothing word. This is what they should have had.

This book doesn’t so much fill a gap in the market as a gaping hole in modern society’s soul.

The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson is published on the 6^th of November 2025 by John Murray Press.

Book Review of “I Am A Cat” Volume One by Natsume Soseki, translated by Nick Bradley

 * * * *

 

This is a new translation of a Japanese satirical novel published circa 1905.

It is mostly about the relationship between a not-very important Japanese academic and a stray cat.

If we can judge a civilisation by how it treats its most vulnerable members, perhaps we can at least partly understand a nation by how it views its cats. Although the translator has focused on the author’s relationship with English and The English, he does have fun with German tourists too, and that is interesting for two reasons:

In 1905, the slogan which Imperial Germany used to define the role of women was known as the three Ks: Kinder, Küche, Kirche. This was widely but somewhat irreverently extended to: Kinder, Küche, Kirche, Katze.

Two of the female Japanese characters in this novel, the pair who look after “Miss Calico,” certainly see this as a duty. The other female Japanese characters are largely cat-neutral or even anti-cat.

I Am A Cat may be the first Japanese novel of its kind, but there was an English translation of a German novel, from about a century earlier (before Germany was a country, let alone an empire) about an academic’s relationship with a cat, seen in the opening passages as terribly elderly and needing to have his face dipped in a saucer of cream to make him take some nourishment. (The reviewer is trying, but failing, to remember either the German or the English title.) So, this is a genre and a basic premise which was established in German literature before the Victorian cat-craze in England, which Soseki took with him back to Japan.

But the execution of that premise is all Japanese, as far as one can tell: the male academic and his friends are very rude to nearly everyone and especially unkind to women. They enjoy misleading people in a way which makes the victim seem, and feel, extremely foolish. Soseki projects this behaviour upon the character of The Master (of the cat and little else) which is based on himself, but the cat finds it offensive and perhaps so does Soseki.

Some of the shaggy dog stories are simply too long and bullying, but the reason why this classic novel gets four stars rather than five is that the “uneducated” human characters are given Dick Van Dyke-level Edwardian Cockney accents which strike a bit of a bum note. This may, however, accurately convey the way Soseki wrote the original dialogue.

I Am A Cat by Natsume Soseki and translated by Nick Bradley is published in the UK by Vintage Classics (Random House) on the 4^th of September 2025

Film Review of Why Can’t We Talk About This?

A documentary directed by Dean Rainey

 

* * * *

This is a competent and important documentary made by one vocational film-maker in a small town in Ontario, Dean Rainey, about a neighbour and colleague, Michael Oesch, who notably and poignantly (as it turns out) made a film about his own epic walk across Canada. It is important because the subject matter is something that no-one else in Canada would touch, but it’s also a subject which touches everyone in the Western World, although most of us find it easier to ignore the troubling subject of vaccine injuries and even those who are suffering from vaccine injury sometimes find it expedient to pretend otherwise.

Nowhere in the world is the official narrative about the need for, safety and effectiveness of, mRNA Covid vaccines more ruthlessly enforced with sackings, medical licence-removal and legal action enforced than Canada, and one little snippet (it is easy to miss) in the second half of this 80-minute documentary film reveals that the nano-particle mRNA delivery technology itself was developed by and licensed from publicly-funded bodies in Canada! Except that this technology was originally developed as a way of blocking the creation of growth-promoting proteins as a way of fighting cancer, which is pretty safe not just because it’s been carefully tested for some years, but also because blocking the creation of something harmful is usually pretty safe ground. But the mRNA vaccine concept turned that inherent safety on its head, by actively creating a harmful protein in really large quantities in the hopes the body’s immune system would learn to react to it. Despite this reversal of function, most of the assumptions about the safety of mRNA vaccines were based on cancer treatments which worked in the opposite direction! Many vaccine injuries appear to involve an over-reaction to the created “spike” protein.

The main human story here, is that Michael Oesch, a man fit enough to film himself walking impressive distances in an assortment of weather conditions, had two not very serious bouts of actual Covid infection during the pandemic, and accepted the first three of four vaccine shots without obvious incident (AZ, Pfizer and Moderna, that is one adeno-virus vector and two mRNA). Then, on the fourth shot (that is the second booster) which was also an mRNA, the film does not specify which (perhaps because of the legal threat environment in Canada) Michael experienced neurological symptoms within 36 hours of that fourth shot. He found it difficult to pick his feet up when he was walking normally. The film presents expert testimony that neurological adverse effects following Covid vaccines have been most common on the fourth and subsequent doses. Other effects, such as blood clotting issues and myocarditis, were happening on the first and second doses. A man who suffered clotting problems is also interviewed, so this issue is not ignored. But it is significant that a lot of neurological injuries seem to be the product of a policy to keep repeating the vaccinations once it became clear that the protection they offered was fleeting.

The tragedy is that not only is the suffering of vaccine-injured people officially denied and compensation delivered, if at all, with extreme reluctance after the maximum possible prevarication, but that clinicians trying to diagnose and treat vaccine injuries dare not identify anything as a vaccine injury, for fear that their employment will be terminated for so doing. In addition, tests for some of the possible causes of such injury, which are available in the UK, for example (though not very easy to get here unless your doctor is really on your side) are totally unobtainable in Canada and as far as doctors and patients there are concerned those tests, especially for presence of spike protein in the body, do not exist. In reality, such tests do exist and if they were purchased in adequate numbers they might even be cheap! Not only that, but it may be possible to distinguish between spike protein from natural infection and that from mRNA vaccines. None of the Canadians in the film seem aware of this possibility, not even the campaigners.

The significance of that is twofold:

The nearest thing Michael ever gets to an official description of his condition, is “Latent Spike Protein Infection” which allows Canadian doctors, but probably not British ones, to claim that his illness, distressing though it is, might spring from his two fairly mild natural infections. An actual test to differentiate natural spike and vaccine spike would be unwelcome in Canada in 2025!

But the second significance is even more profound: the spike protein is just that: a protein found on the outside of the Sars-cov-2 virus, or (in a very slightly different but apparently distinguishable form) on the outside of human cells stimulated by the mRNA vaccine to produce it. It is not the whole virus, just a protein. And yet the official Canadian description of Michael’s condition promotes that protein to an infective agent in its own right. In other words, the spike protein is a prion! Just like the causative agent in BSE and nvCJD... Should that ever be proved, it would make vaccines based on the spike protein, and all Covid vaccines are so based, regardless of whether they use mRNA technology or not, possibly the worst idea in medical history.

Towards the end of the film, the Ontario healthcare system has effectively given up trying to treat Michael (having long ago given up trying to properly understand his condition) and when visited by an old friend, he tells that friend that whilst his ambition had been to walk again in 2025, his ambition now is just to stand up one more time. The friend helps him to achieve this.

The film ends with an attempt to achieve balance by interviewing a Professor Caulfield who is apparently paid by the Canadian government to put out highly-politicised propaganda vilifying anyone who challenges the official line. Professor Caulfield’s quoted material evokes Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels rather more than Dr Kildare! Caulfield declines to even acknowledge receipt of the invitation.

Embedded below is the link to the film on the film-makers own YouTube channel. Ripped versions also exist, but are preventing Mr Rainey from recouping the costs of making the film, so viewing the embedded link here and perhaps looking at the donation options in the video’s description, would be courteous. The blog author has not monetised, in any way, the blog on which this review was originally published.

In case the description cannot be accessed via the embedded video, Mr Rainey’s donation options are reproduced below (for safety’s sake these are NOT live links, you should copy and paste):

Please Support Our Film via:

E-Transfer: dean_rainey@yahoo.ca

PAYPAL: deanrainey@raineymedia.com

Buy Me A Coffee: "https://buymeacoffee.com/raineymedia"

SNAIL MAIL: Rainey Media, PO Box 5, Delhi PO Main, ON, N4B 2W8 Canada

To book your own screening: deanrainey@raineymedia.com

This is the non-live link to the video film itself; again copy and paste:

"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwjDeRglkwg" 

Book Review of The Hidden Face by M.I. Verras

 * * * *

Using a mythical universe to understand and explain morality in the real world.

(This review is based on a purchased copy)

This novel has been described as “incomprehensible.” Actually, it’s just that comprehension is more than slightly uncomfortable for many when it comes, so they instinctively shy away from it.

When used properly, the mythical universe is a way of simplifying the environment in order to make a complicated (or simply uncomfortable) issue clear enough. The universe in this novel is physically highly simplified, so that only the ethereal plane may be infinite and politics are reduced to moral and immoral, so that intellectual constructs of political ideology cannot be used to camouflage or justify immoral choices. The author seizes and burns a goodly number of intellectual comfort-blankets by doing this.

The details of the simplified universe start with an ethereal “Home” of safety and beauty, where entities may even safely take a rest from fully existing, should they so chose. No-one will stop them from becoming more real if that is what they want or need. To get from there to the physical “World of The Hearths” one has to fall down a “Cathode Well.” The operative word is fall, but there’s an implication of a negative charge dragging particles downwards, too. Each of several “Hearths” (large communal dwellings) has a “Generator Well” ostensibly to maintain the building’s structural integrity, but actually these descend to the third level of existence, which is the “Abyss” a lake of fire. The population of each Hearth is no more than one or two hundred “Inhabitants” so the whole population of the World of the Hearths can only be in the low thousands. The world of the Hearths also has a prison “The Tannery” which is a place of utter misery and eventual execution. “Ministers” have an “Assembly Hall,” from where (although they do not know this) the Abyss can be accessed directly. All of these locations are many hours drive away from each other (there are cars, but only for Ministers and their Guards), and the journey by car is through vast fields of crops; as if the World of The Hearths could easily provide for countless numbers of people, even though it is only permitted to support a small number.

Under the impression that they are running all this, Ministers from all the Hearths attend secret meetings, where they are manipulated by an entity called “Sate.” Every so often all the ministers vanish and fresh ministers are elected. The Abyss contains the souls of countless inhabitants of the Hearths, who have some hope of rescue being innocent victims, and many former ministers, who are not innocent and have no hope of rescue. To escape from the Abyss one has to ascend, not to the Assembly Hall, but to the ethereal Home. This is not easy and it can only be accomplished by a peer of Sate, who would have to risk personal extinction and the loss of all hope for all other souls, in order to fight Sate in his own home ground of the Abyss to set others free.

There is technology in the World of the Hearths, but it is only available to Ministers and Guards for purposes approved of by Sate. And the Ministers have to gather, when summoned, at the Assembly Hall, the existence of which, never mind the location, is hidden from the ordinary Inhabitants.

In our more complicated real world, we might be graciously permitted to pay for and use technology, and we might even be told when our leaders assemble for secret meetings, but we do not get to chose or even know about ALL the purposes which our technical devices perform at our expense, and we’re certainly not welcome to visit a certain Alpine location when our leaders are in their version of the Assembly Hall. There is no Abyss under that place, but a fifty-mile particle collider is planned…

The Hidden Face by M.I. Verras is published by “Palmetto” and available for Kindle from Amazon. See:

https://amzn.eu/d/4nOghc4