Book Review of Love in the Blitz, by Eileen Alexander

The contents of this book might be of interest to a wider readership than it is going to get, due to the title and marketing.

This is a compilation of letters from a young woman to her young man, mostly in wartime, and ordinarily that would relegate it to the “social document” or romance shelves. But Miss Alexander tells her beloved, Gershon Ellenbogen, all sorts of anecdotes from a social circle that included cabinet ministers, senior military officers and captains of industry, as well as important academic figures. Having got a first in English at Cambridge University, Miss Alexander has an endless supply of quotes (often very funny indeed), not only for her letters, but for everyday conversation. Although it was the air raid precautions minister, Sir John Anderson, rather than her studies, who supplied her with “shut that book, Mary and pay attention to the air-raid.”

She admires the Labour politician Arthur Greenwood, who “spoke for England” in September 1939 when urged to do so by Conservative backbencher Leo Amery. (Less publicly, it was Greenwood, too, who swung Churchill’s cabinet behind Churchill and fighting on after the disasters of 1940. Greenwood’s position being that Britain did not have any choice other than fighting on, because any deal done with Hitler at that stage would be hugely disadvantageous from the outset and very easily broken at any moment that suited the Nazis. As Vichy France soon found out, on both counts.)

Her first wartime job is to work as third PA (which she translates as “Public Adorer”) to the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, another historical figure who perhaps deserves more attention than he gets. There is an irony here, because the book opens with Miss Alexander in hospital recovering from a road traffic accident, in which Gershon was driving -and the law he fell foul of was probably introduced by Leslie when he was Transport Secretary.

She is less fond of Michael Foot, who was still a prominent politician in my own lifetime, with a habit of rubbing an awful lot of people up the wrong way but occasionally putting into words what the nation thought and felt, as at the outbreak of the Falklands War. When, as editor of the Evening Standard, Foot responds to the King of Denmark’s announcement that he and the Royal Family would all proudly wear the Star of David (in response to the German occupiers imposing this on Danish Jews), Miss Alexander is impressed and thinks that Foot’s call for the world to show their appreciation of the Jewish contribution to world culture, came from deep conviction.

She also makes friends with Orde and Lorna Wingate, telling Gershon that Captain Wingate is a genius who will either be court-martialled or promoted to general (in a later letter she substitutes “Field Marshal”) and that would equate with what many people expected of him at the time. But she also shows great empathy with Lorna Wingate, who shares her own anguish at not being with the man she loves, only it’s worse for Lorna because her man is famously leading prolonged operations deep behind Japanese lines. To study Miss Alexander’s social circle is to study history in the making, so this collection of letters is not just a love story.

To some in the 21^st century, Miss Alexander’s standards of sexual conduct will seem antiquated if not absurd, but she sees a reality here: that women who try to exercise unusual sexual or social freedom are at risk of ending up in the hands of predatory men best described in modern idiom as “sociopaths”. This happens several times in her own 1940s social circle and I’ve known it to happen to several 21^st century women of my acquaintance. Some of the abusive conduct she describes would be outrageous and indeed criminal, even now, and it might provide some food for thought. (Modern studies suggest that as many as 9% of the male population are sociopaths and that proportion is not inconsistent with the number of Miss Alexander’s female friends who come to grief.)

Love in the Blitz is published by William Collins on the 30^th of April 2020

Book review of “Chassepot to FAMAS” French Military Rifles 1866-2016

“Chassepot to FAMAS” French Military Rifles 1866-2016

(English-language reference and popular history.)

This is the first book from the author, Ian McCollum, who is a mechanical engineer and firearms historian with both a popular blog and an equally popular YouTube Channel. (Proving the old adage that mechanical engineers study weapons and civil engineers study -and build- targets.)

Yann Carcaillon and Jonathan Ferguson are also contributors, James Rupley did the majority of the (uniformly excellent) technical photography, and the Editor was N.R Jenzen Jones. Following its crowd-funded launch, this book is published by Headstamp Publishing (2019) and is now available from them at this link.

This is a collector’s reference book and also a more popular history book on a slightly niche subject, which has already aroused sufficent widespread interest to justify itself. It is well-crafted in every sense of the word, in that it functions well as a reference book in addition to being absorbing to simply read through, and although the gilt page edges are unusual in a book of this nature (the crowd-funding was very successful indeed) in general the money has been spent on practical quality and durability rather than cosmetics, which is exactly what one might expect from a military firearms historian.

A reference book is only as good as the index and this one shows signs of careful thought rather than computer-driven auto-assembly. Some books this size have a forty-page index, this is four pages but, coupled with the way the actual text flows, you can use it to navigate to the section of text, if not an individual page, which should answer your questions. The index does not reference inside the data tables (it would drive everyone potty if it did), but these follow a standard format throughout and once you’ve found the one you want in one chapter, it’ll be in an identical form in a similar place in another. The book has its own logic in some ways, but it sticks to this consistently. Copious endnotes for each chapter are also a possible bane of reference works and here there are very few. Nearly everything the reader needs to know is in the text itself and doesn’t need an explanatory note. The chapter on the FR series precision rifles has exactly one endnote.

Most chapters contain some peripheral material: a one-page history of a particular arsenal, or a short article on a gun falling outside the main scope of the book but perhaps a parallel development to the main subject of the chapter. Some of these are written by the contributors. It is possible to skip these, but I found that they didn’t really break my concentration on the main issue of any particular chapter: rather, they added a bit of context. So I found the best thing to do was to take them in my stride as I read.

There is plenty of tabular data, which is what the specialist gun collectors will be here for, but it is presented at the point in the story of each rifle where someone reading out of a more general interest might also benefit from it. This isn’t going to do the collectors any actual harm.

Other information is available in a handful of appendices, such as directors of the various arsenals through the period covered by the book, or details of the cartridges used.

NB: cartridges are dealt with in a way consistent with a general historical approach and nowhere is there anything resembling loading data! Given the age and extremely varied condition of most of the rifles under discussion, publishing detailed data of this nature would be a pitfall rather than a public service. There is some guidance on decoding the headstamps for 7.5x54mm ammunition, however: this is published by Headstamp Publishing, after all!

Review Copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 23^rd of March 2020. Updated 19th of December 2020.

Review of Collateral’s Eponymous Debut Album

Collateral is a fusion of subtly-different Rock genres, rather than a fusion of Rock with anything that isn’t Rock. This at a time when many in the music industry are busy trying to promote other things. Quite uncowelled, the lads have decided to give the Rock-loving public what they want rather than what the hidden hand of market manipulation thinks they should have and I can see this being very successful.

Most of the tracks are new, but “Midnight Queen” is included, having been previously internationally successful as a single and I think it’s likely to not only remain a favourite with the band’s existing fans, but go on to make new fans as this album succeeds.

The new tracks deserve more than one hearing before you make up your mind about them: give that mind of yours a chance to cue into what’s actually going on and you’ll like them too! A good album from a band that are determined to make their own luck.

It is available from the official website, many online retailers and hopefully the surviving High Street ones as well.

Book Review of "The Paris Library" by Janet Skeslien Charles

This is an historical novel, about Paris just before and during WW2 and Eastern Montana in the Cold War of the eighties. It’s a shock for a reader of my generation to realise that, in 2020, not just children, but parents of children, probably do need to know what the early to mid eighties were like. There are both similarities and differences in the two threads, of course: Paris was occupied by the NAZIs, but the thousand nuclear missiles buried in the American plains never flew and Soviet Communism turned out to contain the seeds of its own destruction. The Montana characters are geographically isolated, those in Paris are isolated by their circumstances and their (fully justified) fear of letting anyone know just what those circumstances are.

Lily, a Montanan teenager is fascinated to learn about the Paris that her new friend, Odile (older than Lily’s parents) knew, even though it was Paris in her darkest hour. It all sounds so chic, if not “cool” that she wonders why Odile ever left and that’s not a tale that Odile wants to tell. The central message of this book is that everyone has something they’d prefer others not to know and it’s essential to respect this.

The author does a good job of portraying escalating oppression and declining nutrition in occupied Paris, without pretending that Parisians knew about everything that was going on elsewhere in Occupied France, let alone the rest of Europe. The NAZIs kept everyone in the dark, unless there was a news story which would take spin, in which case it was put on posters everywhere in Paris.

She also does a good job of showing how important “Crow Letters”, anonymous letters denouncing people to the French police or even directly to the NAZIs, were in that oppression. {It is beyond the scope of this book, of course, but in Germany the NAZIs made a rod for their own backs by offering a reward of 1,000 Reichsmarks to anyone who denounced neighbours or even relatives to the Gestapo. By early 1944, the Gestapo was fully aware (there were memos about it) that most of the people they were arresting were good Germans denounced out of spite, but to stop doing it, or to stop paying out the bounty, would have been to admit that the NAZIs were fallible and had perpetrated a great injustice, so it continued. The 610 Office in Communist China may have the same regrets, one day.} She also shows us that immediately upon being liberated, some Parisians behaved as vindictively towards anyone thought to have been friendly to the occupiers, as the writers of the Crow Letters had been to their neighbours. Almost certainly, none of the Crow Letter writers were amongst those publicly punished after the liberation, because nobody knew who they were: they went for the women who’d had babies instead.

This is a very well-researched book and I have only two gripes:

French characters refer to the Germans as “Krauts” even before America enters the war, and I wonder how accurate this is? Also, the lethally-poor treatment of captured French soldiers forced to do manual labour in Germany, is put down to the Germans not caring whether they lived or died. In fact the Germans did care about this issue: Heinrich Himmler’s official policy on forced labour was called “death through exhaustion.” The slaves were meant to die and the only reason why fewer French prisoners died than Russian or Polish ones was that the Germans needed the French economy to go on working as long as the occupation lasted, and that meant letting the working population still in France believe that their loved ones might one day come back safely. Had the Germans won, this would not have happened.

“The Paris Library” is published by John Murray Press on the 2^nd of June 2020.

Book Review of “The Ninth Child” by Sally Magnusson

This novel, set in mid 19^th century Scotland and the Isle of Wight, is an absorbing tale of stalking and child-theft in a landscape where myth and superstition are never far away from becoming reality, even as technological progress improves the lot of mankind. The author does not flinch from showing the reader either the dangers of civil engineering, as far as the Navvies are concerned, or the utterly dreadful, disease-ridden conditions in the city of Glasgow which an unprecedented civil engineering project is designed to address. Men do difficult and dangerous work, because it is needed desperately.

Where the author finds fault with the ethos of the age where many such improvements are made, is that women were not supposed to play much of a part in the enterprise. The preview of this work said that it was a great age for innovation but a bad time to be a woman. In fact, The Ninth Child shows us that the mid 19^th century was the time when even that began to change. There are some scenes involving Queen Victoria and it would be quite impossible to write an accurate portrait of the changing role of women in 19^th century Britain that did not refer to her! But the author shows us other, strong-willed Victorian women as well, both high and low.

This is a thriller, too, and it keeps up the tension until the end. Well told -and the author chooses the tensest part of the drama to show us why there is no word for “manana” in Gaelic, because there is no need for such indecent haste. 

The Ninth Child is published by  John Murray Press (Two Roads) on the 19th of March 2020.

It is available from Amazon, Waterstones and other retailers.

Book Review of The Billionaire Murders by Kevin Donovan

For the most part, this book skillfully interleaves the background and circumstances of the murder of Barry and Honey Sherman, with an in-depth exploration of their history and character. This makes reading the book enjoyable, in a very bittersweet sort of way, because you get to know, understand and mostly to like, the victims, even though the reader is never allowed to lose sight of the fact that they were murdered in a particularly hate-filled manner. I think it was necessary for the author to do things this way, because it’s very obvious that the world was told, in the wake of the murders, a lot of things about Barry Sherman in particular which were either not true at all, or a very unfair representation of the truth. This misrepresentation -and the misunderstanding by police of what had actually happened- can only have worked to the benefit of the murderer(s) and this simply has to be put right.

I say “for the most part” because towards the end, the narrative repeats itself, perhaps unnecessarily, -as if edited in some haste- and there is a significant logic hole in the carefully-limited conclusion which the author allows himself to reach. That is, the author, having been able to reconstruct the approximate sequence of events of the double murder, decides that Honey and then Barry were individually ambushed as they returned home separately -and then, most probably, murdered together. His conclusion is that only someone in the family circle would have been privy to the information required to achieve this. The problem is, when you factor in what is revealed about the two leather belts, found around Barry and Honey’s necks and presumably used to strangle them to death, just before the book reaches its limited conclusion, it is obvious that whoever carried out the murders actually knew more than any member of the family circle could have known, unless they had been able (for quite some time?) to eavesdrop on the victims’ conversations, not only at home, but at the offices of Apotex and other divers locations. As an electronics engineer with a background in acoustic measurement and air to ground data-links, I am unable to conceive of any efficient and effective means of achieving this other than spyware on either or both of Barry’s Blackberry and Honey’s Cellphone. Every time you consider other means of doing this, sooner or later you come across a necessary piece of information that the murderer(s) could not have come by, by means other than spyware on something the victims carried with them, everywhere.

What would make me inclined to look within the family circle for the murderer is not the information which the murderer(s) had, but the level of fury which was expressed in the details of the double murder. And this fury might have been fed, rather than diluted, by being able to hear the victims’ conversations, day after day for however long it was.

Any kind of traditional bug in the house would have been swiftly detected, if not by the police search then by the more detailed search commissioned by the family’s lawyer, but spyware would only be detected if somebody really quite expert looked for it, and the Toronto Police, initially at least, appear to have been neither expert nor even looking for that kind of thing. If those failings have since been rectified, the murderer(s) may well prove to be living on borrowed time.

This review is of the Kindle edition of the book, purchased from Amazon.co.uk

Book Review of “The Liar’s Daughter” by Claire Allan

Strictly speaking, this novel is a “whodunnit” but it takes an unusual form. The deceased is not the victim: the suspects are his victims. Claire Allan has done a lot of research for this novel, but I believe it also draws on her journalistic experience of reporting what happens in secret in the real world -as it finally comes out, usually in court. So, in this novel, quite a lot has to happen before ANY of the characters admit what actually has happened, even when they are not to blame. They also spend a lot of time focusing anger and blame in the wrong directions -and this tallies very well with my own knowledge of what abuse victims do: not through any fault of theirs, but as a consequence of the manipulation they have invariably been subjected to. Manipulation leaves its own scars and since abuse almost never occurs without manipulation of the victim, investigators need to understand that even when the victims come forward and attempt to tell their story, their actual abuser may still be holding the reins and what comes out at first may be skewed to their advantage. This is not the same thing as fabrication -even though victims may have been prosecuted for perjury- and a wise investigator would persist awhile and try to untwist things rather than dismiss the whole story as false, if some bit of it does not ring true.

This book is at times confusing, because it is painting an accurate picture of victims not being able to communicate what has happened, even to each other. This book also paints a picture where the manipulation and emotional and psychological abuse that accompany sexual abuse do more lasting harm than the sexual abuse itself.

This is a very good book, but reading it is not a picnic and it is not as entertainment that I recommend it. 

"The Liar's Daughter" is published by Avon Books UK.

Available from:

Waterstones

Amazon.co.uk