Book Review of The Cornish Campsite Murder by Fiona Leitch

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The latest novel in a series of “cosy murder mysteries”

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

 

A twice-retired detective sergeant attends, mainly in order to sell meat pies, a music festival site accompanied by her teenage daughter, her mother, her dog, and her fiancé who is a serving detective chief inspector. The festival is well-described and comes across as a cheerful Cornish parody of the larger, grander, much more earnest and hippy-infested, Glastonbury festival in neighbouring Somerset. It is almost certainly meant to and has much gentle fun with this theme.

There then ensues a murder (of course) a drink-spiking, a kidnap and unlawful imprisonment.

There are some (very) faded rock stars, adults bravely taking an enlightened view of teenage soft drug consumption whilst consuming rather more meat pies than enlightened medical opinion would countenance these days, an obvious suspect whom no-one really wants to be guilty and a motive hidden in the mists of time and on the other side of the Atlantic. These are good ingredients for a good story, and this is.

The Cornish Campsite Murder by Fiona Leitch is published by Harpur Collins on the 28^th of June, 2024.

 

Book review: “Of Popes and Unicorns” by David Hutchings and James C Ungureanu.

 

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How the “Conflict Thesis” threatens both Christianity and Science.

 

 (The review is based on a purchased copy.)

The authors set out both the history of the Conflict Thesis and the historical reality behind the version of history behind that thesis (that Christianity is, and always has been, the regressive enemy of Science and all progress, enlightenment and freedom) and they do this by researching and publishing rather more actual facts than the authors of that thesis, Draper and White, ever did. In doing so, they find (and go a long way towards proving) that not only did Draper and White misrepresent Christianity to the modern world, they also sold the world’s intellectuals a version of history itself that is not only untrue, but ludicrous. To take just one example of this: the idea that when Christians ruled in the Middle Ages, the streets were all ankle or even knee-deep in human and animal excrement. As George Orwell (who kept a lot of farm animals and planted a lot of fruit-trees in his time) would probably observe: to believe that one you really do need to be an intellectual and not a farmer. Because not even Hutchings and Ungureanu seem to fully grasp just how idiotic that “factoid” which so many clever people believe and endlessly repeat, actually is:

Prior to the invention of super-phosphate fertilizers, human and animal excrement (and bones) were too important to agriculture to be wasted in this manner. Even in the 19^th century, there were dung-piles near the Glasgow tenements, so that the dung could be efficiently collected and removed to the fields outside the city where it was needed! And the great clean Victorian clean-up with all its undoubted health benefits, of the Glasgow dung-heaps and the river Thames in London, only happened AFTER the availability of industrial fertilizers allowed it. If it had happened prior, too many nutrients would have been lost and there would eventually have been crop failures. This is also why we do NOT find huge numbers of graves full of bodies from great historical battles before about 1840: the dead went into mass graves until they had rotted to bones and bones were dug up again and ground to fertilizer. (French local authorities sold licences to mine the battlefield of Waterloo for bonemeal.)

That factoid is just one of a whole barrage of non-truths which Draper and White (and, importantly, their supporters) laid down to sustain their thesis. Actually, they did this so systematically and consistently that it is hard to believe that they had very many actual truths at their disposal to support their case! Now, Draper and White were not actually working together as such and they had different motives for doing what they did. The consistency comes from those who chose to support them, to recommend and promote the books that they wrote and the talks that they gave.

The determining factor behind the consistency was (and still is) an agenda, which both philosophies and institutions were created to serve.

Of Popes and Unicorns is Published by Oxford University Press, 2021.

Book Review of The Giant on the Skyline by Clover Stroud

 

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Memoir of a real-life decision influenced by the spirit of a landscape.

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

Initially at sea in (not-very) rural England where she is driven by the need for affordable living space, Clover has adapted to the life, even though her partner is largely absent, travelling abroad and increasingly working in the United States, to pay the bills incurred by bringing up their five children. One might note at this point that a house-price boom which consistently outpaces even the cost of living crisis is the G7’s version of the Chinese Communist Party’s demographically-catastrophic “One Child” policy, now abandoned as one BILLION unlived-in apartments are being blown up to make space for new building which is also not needed by the dwindling population.

Clover’s partner, Pete, finds himself unable to make a good-enough living to support his partner and offspring outside of a corporate setting in Washington DC (only those in elite jobs can afford to reproduce) so he wants Clover and the children to abandon the life they have, in order to join him in making a new life there. Clover has come to love the landscape of the English-Welsh borders which she initially found very alien, but she’s still desperate to live with Pete full-time, so she is torn and even frightened by his plans to move the family to America.

The thing is, in that landscape she is surrounded by people making very much less money than Pete, who somehow manage anyway: mostly by doing things of such direct practical value to others that the others are willing to pay cash-in-hand for them! The gulf between Pete and the people Clover deals with on a daily basis is a great deal wider than the great circle route from Swindon to Washington DC.

Not only does he feel that he needs much more money, he can only hope to earn that money within a business model that separates him from most contact with or awareness of those at the base of the economic pyramid: the people who help Clover every day and care for her and about her.

Just as Pete cannot make his way in rural England, it is very unlikely that Clover’s friends who can manage that without much complaint, would last long in Pete’s world. Perhaps Clover’s friends and neighbours cope by lacking the same sense of entitlement which Pete NEEDS in order to survive in a more privileged, but cut-throat and rule-bound, corporate environment?

Clover manages to say goodbye to the landscape she has come to love and takes her youngest children to be with the man she can’t stop loving. The two older children seem to be left to make their own choice and make their own way.

The Giant on the Skyline by Clover Stroud is published in the UK as of the 9^th of May 2024 by Random House

Parliamentary Petition to "review" the MHRA: it isn't just about Covid!

 Firstly, here is a link, not just to the petition to request a review of the MHRA's performance and fitness to meet the nation's future needs, but also to the Government's infuriating mandatory "response" to that petition once it reached the first milestone of 10,000 signatures.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/652008

The response manages to be arrogant, smug, dismissive, amazingly complacent and alarmingly ignorant, all at the same time! Gentle Reader, if, previously, you weren't convinced of the need to at least review how well the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority has been working in recent years (even ignoring the pandemic era as some sort of special case even though emergencies tend to punish rather than reward shortcuts) then simply reading the government's official response, and afterwards considering that this is how the UK government sees the MHRA after a long and steady stream of healthcare scandals with medicines, other products or procedures all regulated by the MHRA, might very well cause you to have another think, if for no other reason than to test whether even the government really believes its own position!

Failures of healthcare product regulation in the UK go back to the nineteen seventies and the contaminated blood products scandal, the origins of which predate the MHRA in its current form, but the cover-up and fallout from that scandal overlap with the MHRA as it is now constituted and the government is still determined to delay compensation to the victims until such time as nearly all, or perhaps even every last one, is dead.

In the meantime, numerous other dangerous products (pelvic mesh implants, for example) have slipped through the MHRA; there probably are too many instances to list them all. However, and this is crucial: no-one is publishing any data which links all the separate victim-led campaigns and class-action lawsuits together in a statistical manner which might allow Parliament or the public any insight into how well the MHRA does its job. Which begs the important question: if there is no data available to Parliament and the public allowing the performance of the MHRA to be scientifically measured in terms of how often patients are harmed by products it has approved, how can the UK government possibly know that everything is rosy in the MHRA garden?

Book review of Expired: Covid the untold story by Dr Clare Craig

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This a self-published, deeply-researched book which this reviewer purchased out of the household cat-food budget on the recommendation of Dr John Campbell. 

It can be found at this link:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0C9FNHYTV/

Dr Craig communicates, with evidence, the failings of those who took decisions without it.

This is a SOLID book, in the sense that everything the author says is backed up by something! It is also compelling. The way the elite managed, first of all, to redefine an outbreak as a pandemic, and then to turn that outbreak into a global panic before inflicting massive social and economic damage whilst actually making everyone less healthy in the name of public health, makes for an hypnotic read.
I can sum it up in pretty well one sentence:

In order for a grave situation to be graspable by "the masses" the elite feel compelled to simplify it to the point where they themselves fail to understand it well enough to make ANY right decisions, legislating instead to make their many wrong decisions unchallengeable.

But for you the reader to see the truth both in my summary and in Dr Craig's presentation, it will be necessary for you to read the book itself and not just my review. 

Here is a link to this review on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2CXN8NLWCTK00/

Book Review of My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor

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Historical novel in which an Irish Priest seeks to outwit a senior NAZI official with a fascination for the Roman Emperor Caligula.

 

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

This sort of thing, which fictionalises real events and real people, using their real names, needs to be done with care and in this novel it is. The subject matter has been covered before, but not as well, and most treatments keep well away from the way that the NAZI official, Paul Hauptmann, placed in charge of Rome when the NAZI’s occupied it in late summer 1943, turned a museum dedicated to archaeological discoveries connected to the Roman Emperor Caligula into his own private palace, guarded by crack troops and indeed minefields. The author of this novel does not give the issue undue prominence, but he doesn’t let the reader escape knowing that there were two important mirrors in the story:

Hauptmann and the Pope both had private enclaves guarded by private armies, which they tried to hold inviolable. And the struggle between the Irish priest, Hugh O’Flaherty and Hauptmann in Rome and the Vatican City in the modern age could be read as a re-enactment of the relationship between the early Christian Church and Caligula, who wasn’t the only Roman Emperor to resemble the Antichrist but he could have won handsome prizes for doing so, were any to be handed out.

This isn’t prominent enough in the plot to trouble the atheistic reader in the slightest and it enhances, rather than distracts from the adventure inherent in a good man and his loyal friends taking on a very powerful man who isn’t even friends with his own wife and children and is friends with his Fuhrer only in his dreams. This is an adversary who personifies evil by standing alone, but O’Flaherty and his friends simply serve good and certainly don’t presume to personify it.

The author is well equipped to put a lot of interesting language in the mouths of his Irish characters: “rats you could saddle” and “drunk as a boiled owl” do tend to stick in the memory, but his English characters are as good and the Italian ones nearly so.

It is all about an escape line for prisoners of war who managed to slip out of their prison camps, but this only comes about because O’Flaherty is forbidden, by the Pope himself, from interfering in the inhuman way those prisons were run. That prohibition stems from the Pope’s fear that, if provoked, the NAZIs will indeed return Rome and the Vatican: the heart of Christianity as the Pope sees it, to the days of Caligula or Nero and the reign of the beast. The rift between the Pope and O’Flaherty, who recognises the Pope’s authority and understands his reasoning, comes about because O’Flaherty realises, especially after his first personal encounter with Hauptmann, that the man does not need to be provoked before he will commit the most appalling crimes!

The title comes from the promise which Jesus made to his disciples “in my Father’s house, there are many rooms” (in some translations it is “mansions” rather than rooms). The Vatican City, where O’Flaherty hides his escapees and his own activities, is a vast, crumbling and untidy collection of forgotten rooms and passages crammed into a very small geographical space. Hauptmann’s own private Arcadia is tidy, uncluttered and expansive. Order prevails, on pain of death. O’Flaherty, living and operating in his Father’s house, simply tries to muddle through and live. Their methodologies are as opposed as their beliefs.

 

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor is published by Random House on the 26^th of January 2024.

Book Review of Munich Wolf by Rory Clements

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

An excellent murder and survival thriller set in Munich while Bavaria was still the centre of NAZI power.

The author has set several novels before, during and after WW2 and this is one of his best so far. Partly because the hero is trying to avoid heroism at all costs.

A criminal detective and a political policeman find themselves in conflict with each other even before either knows who the other is, then they are required to work with each other whilst being alert to every opportunity to destroy each other. (This really is the way NAZI Germany worked, right up to the top. Even within Hitler’s inner circle, his preferred method was to make his associates fight each other until a clear winner emerged. This selects the plan with the strongest advocate rather than the strongest plan and the chances of success dwindle with each reiteration of the challenge process.)

Neither Inspector Sebastian Wolff nor Sergeant Hans Winter have any intention of challenging the regime as such: they are both really only trying to survive but it takes a while for them to perceive each other correctly. Constant manipulation of their actions and the general situation by those so disproportionately more powerful than their actual superiors creates a storm that they can only survive by helping each other -and in a fascist State that’s actually more subversive than blowing up railway lines.

What makes this well-researched and well-written novel most interesting is quite nuanced, in that Hitler isn’t shown as holding power by being the most extreme candidate (at least, not in 1935 when the story is set); there are others in or close to the party MUCH further round the bend, but all in one particular direction or another. This story revolves around the Thule Society, but there were other factions and sects within the Party. Even in an “extreme right” party there are left and right wings and in terms of economic policy the National Socialists were actually the hard left. In such a situation, powerful individuals oppose the rival they fear the most. The left-leaning ones fear what the right-leaning ones might do and the right-leaning ones fear what the left-leanings might do. So they agree on someone who’s not clearly right or left. The problem is that the centre-standing candidate might do almost anything and he often does. Both Stalin and Hitler came to lead their respective parties through the same mechanism.

The neo-pagan murderer in this story turns out to be so deranged that the “highest authority” in Germany comes to regret trying to cover for him. This raises the unsettling idea that the Third Reich contained and could even have been led by such a person rather than Hitler. There was potential for evil beyond even the Holocaust.

Munich Wolf by Roy Clements is published by Bonnier Books UK on the 18^th of January 2024