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Book review: The Islander by Chris Blackwell

11 July 2025
Edoardo
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The Islander by Chris Blackwell

Although it’s subtitled ‘My Life in Music and Beyond’ the ‘Beyond’ gets barely a look in beyond a bit of a plug for Blackwell’s later business interests in hospitality and distilling rum; there’s not many autobiographies which you finish with no idea how many wives the subject has had or how many children. But, really, in this case that doesn’t matter. None of the potential readers are that interested in Blackwell’s personal life (from the odd comment, I suspect that the wives are not mentioned because they rarely lasted for long and probably left with substantial alimony and water tight NDAs); what we want to know about is the gossip.

What was it like to discover Bob Marley? Is Grace Jones as weird as she seems? How can you work with Bono without wanting to smack him? These are the questions we really want to answer and Blackwell, with Paul Morley, doesn’t disappoint. Really, for someone who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, it’s the tale of the soundtrack to your growing up, as well as a memoir of someone who was there when the record industry was still figuring what sort of industry it was going to be.

Blackwell was brought up on Jamaica, the child of wealthy socialite parents whose friends included Noel Coward, Errol Flynn and Ian Fleming. It was a gilded childhood but Blackwell took the best of it, married it with the self assurance produced by a public school education, and set about flogging records, and then musicians to the public. He’s clearly a man who suffers boredom badly. The buccaneering days of the music industry was a perfect fit for Blackwell, and he takes the reader into that time, and the making – and unmaking – of those artists. One of the most moving chapters is devoted to Nick Drake. Blackwell’s commitment to the artists he believed in is commendable. And the artist he believed in above all others was Bob Marley. These chapters are the centre of the book and, clearly, the highlight of Blackwell’s life, marrying his great loves, Jamaica and music, into a single package: one of the very few 20th century artists who will still be listened to in a hundred years’ time.

Book review: The Canterbury Tales retold by Peter Ackroyd

3 July 2025
Edoardo
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The Canterbury Tales retold by Peter Ackroyd

Read the retelling or try the original?

It’s certainly quicker and easier to go for Ackroyd’s retelling, and he brings across the gusto and the sheer vigour of the original well, but he does lose the poetry. Curiously, he also misses out on a lot of Chaucer’s wordplay, putting through one meaning and ignoring the other meanings that Chaucer hints at in his original text.

So if you want a quick, down and dirty (lots of four-letter words) retelling of the original, read this version.

But if you want the poetry, and the vulgarity too with all the double and triple meanings that Chaucer manages to inject into them, then invest in the original and bookmark one of the online Middle English dictionaries to help with the most difficult words.

Book review: Privateer by CaptainWoodes Rogers

3 July 2025
Edoardo
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Privateer by Captain Woodes Rogers

On 1 August 1708, Captain Woodes Rogers sailed out of Bristol on what would become a three-year voyage around the world. The expedition was composed of two frigates, the Duke and the Duchess, and its primary purpose was not to explore but to make money as privateers: essentially, they were government-sanctioned pirate ships that could attack countries England was at war with but not the ships of neutral or friendly countries.

The Duke and Duchess were after Spanish ships and the place to find them was the Pacific. Privateer is basically composed of extracts from the book Captain Woodes Rogers wrote of his voyage, with brief explanatory notes by the editor and, as such, it does an excellent job of bringing the world of early-18th century seamanship to life. Captain Rogers has to deal with mutinies, outbreaks of scurvy when the ships run out of limes (Rogers was unusual at the time for realising that scurvy was caused by a lack of fresh food and took limes with him on the voyage but a long period at sea led to their supplies running out), sailing further south than anyone had done before, capturing a rich Spanish prize, being shot in the mouth in the capture, enduring surgery to remove the trapped musket ball, and eventually returning home with both ships and most of his original crew. It was a personal triumph for Rogers but he probably lost money on the venture.

Perhaps the most noteworthy episode in his voyage was landing on the isolated Juan Fernandez Island to find a shipwrecked sailor, Alexander Selkirk, there. Selkirk had been marooned on the island for four years. Among the many people to read Rogers’ account of Selkirk’s rescue was Daniel Defoe, who used Selkirk as the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.

It’s a short book but it packs a lot of incident into brief length.

Book review: Into the Uncanny by Danny Robins

15 June 2025
Edoardo
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Into the Uncanny by Danny Robins

For those who have not listened to the excellent Uncanny podcast that produced the material that went into this book, Danny Robins always has in the studio with him two experts, a sceptic and a believer, to try to understand the various uncanny events recounted by the witness whose story forms the bulk of the episode.

But what becomes clear from reading this book, as well as listening to the podcast, is that neither side is anywhere near to an explanation or an understanding of the phenomena being recounted. The sceptic side is easier to dismiss: in most cases the sceptic case requires so much special pleading, as well as simply ignoring the more difficult pieces of evidence, that the wielding of Occam’s razor is sufficient to dispense with it.

What is stranger – and more interesting – is that the believer case is just as inadequate as an explanation. Take poltergeist activity as an example. Sounds, knockings, objects being moved and thrown, and other such phenomena which are usually associated with a child or teenager. Yes, this is true, but it’s nothing more an observation: there’s no explanation there.

It’s clear that, in terms of understanding these phenomena, we have only reached the classification stage. There’s not even a hint of an explanation: yes, ghosts might be associated with the dead, but there’s no indication how they are associated with the dead, or why.

In the history of thought, this is like the 15th century, when thinkers were devising a method of investigation that could have easily turned into magic as it turned into science. It’s biology before Linnaeus, geology before Charles Lyell, economics before Adam Smith. As such, it would be an exciting field for a true, original thinker to enter. There’s a universe of strange phenomena happening out there that has been ignored.

Book review: The Art of War in Italy 1494-1529 by Frederick Lewis Taylor

15 June 2025
Edoardo
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The Art of War in Italy 1494-1529 by Frederick Lewis Taylor

There aren’t many academic books that are still worth reading a century after they were first written. Usually, they become outdated, the arguments they address become irrelevant and their conclusions are superseded.

Frederick Lewis Taylor’s The Art of War in Italy 1494-1529 is one of the very few exceptions to this rule. While more recent scholarship has refined and in some cases changed our views of the events during the wars that ended the medieval era and began the modern age, they have not overturned the facts upon which Taylor based his book. Taylor’s arguments are still fundamental to our appraisal of what happened during these wars and his conclusions are still very much worth considering.

It’s also helped by Taylor being an excellent, lively writer, far better than the usual run of academic authors. In fact, as a one-volume introduction to this fiendishly complicated period, there’s few better alternatives.

Book review: Fairy Tale by Stephen King

14 June 2025
Edoardo
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Fairy Tale by Stephen King

In the introduction, Stephen King tells us, his constant readers, how he came to write his Fairy Tale in the middle of the stultifying restrictions of the covid crisis. He says how, when he was trapped in his house, he imagined what would make him happy and the answer was a tunnel from a shed in his garden to another world.

To be honest, that would make me pretty happy too, covid or no covid.

Unfortunately, the story followed and that didn’t make this reader happy. For a start, the other world that we reach through that tunnel isn’t all that wondrous: a few fairy tale tropes – giants, mermaids, etc – but it’s done in the trademark Stephen King style where the fairy tale signatures include elements of 50s Americana such as tram cars and the Wizard of Oz.

The story itself is sadly predictable: our hero, a high-school lad called Charlie Reade who spends most of the story telling the reader that he’s really not as perfect as his actions suggest he is, follows the quest and succeeds in the quest, without too much trouble.

But really, where on earth did Stephen get the idea that a suitable name for the villain of the story, the man who is literally greying out a fairy tale world, should be ‘Flight Killer’? I mean, come on. If the villain was a striking air-traffic controller, maybe. Presumably that’s an allusion to how Flight Killer is busy killing butterflies but, frankly, even ‘Butterfly Killer’ would have been better than ‘Flight Killer’. It suggests someone who delays your holiday, not someone of unlimited depravity and evil, intent on destroying a world and everyone in it.

However, Charlie manages to dispose of ‘Flight Killer’ without too much difficulty – turns out his evil minions, who killed all the opposition previously, can be killed by chucking a bucket of water over them. Just as well they didn’t try to take over the world when it was raining.

I’m glad writing the book got King through the misery of lockdown. Unfortunately, it rather brought that misery back to this reader.

Book review: A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley

14 June 2025
Edoardo
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A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley

This is, by some margin, the most atmospheric book I have ever read.

It’s quite extraordinary. On one level, not very much happens. A young girl, Penelope, at the start of the 20th century goes to stay with relatives in the country to help her health (you can tell it’s set a long time ago as Penelope’s relatively poor family are living on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea!). The relatives live in an old farm house that was once part of a larger manor house.

While staying at Thackers, Penelope slips into the past, meeting the people who lived in Thackers in Elizabethan times. She slips backwards and forwards, between past and present, a traveller but never a settler. She is witness to an abortive attempt to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, who was being held in a nearby house. And that is about it, as far as story is concerned.

But that really is the least of it. In the introduction, Alison Uttley tells how she herself, as a young girl, lived in the Derbyshire valley where the story is set and how, as that young girl, she travelled into the past.

“Many of the incidents in this story are based on my dreams, for in sleep I went through secret hidden doorways in the house wall and found myself in another century. Four times I stepped through the door and wandered in rooms which had no existence, a dream within a dream, and I talked with people who lived alongside but out of time, moving through a life parallel to my own existence. In my dreams past and present were co-existent, and I lived in the past with a knowledge of the future. I travelled into that secondary dream world, seeing all things as if brightly illuminated, walking in fields and woods dazzling in their clarity. I sat on the stone walls in the sunshine of other times, conscious of the difference, knowing intermediate events. The painted room, the vision through the windows of the house, and many another incident came to me in dreams, and I have woven them into this story.”

That is how Uttley describes it in her introduction and, reading the book, we are taken into a past dazzling in its clarity yet suffused with the logic of dream, where none of the characters that Penelope meets are surprised at her reappearances after long absence.

It is a book that cannot be adequately described, only read, but if you too would walk in those times and see everything as brightly illuminated, then read this book: no other conveys better the reality, and the strangeness, of this type of experience.

Catching Fire

22 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Catch a Fire

When the Wailers finished recording their new album, Bob Marley flew to London with the master tapes to present them to Blackwell. Hearing them, Blackwell knew that his gamble had paid off – big time. This was an album to make the world take notice.

His instincts vindicated, Blackwell and the Wailers signed a formal contract: from now on, Island Records would be promoting their career. But while Blackwell, an aficionado of Jamaican music, loved the recording he also knew what would appeal to the ears of the fans of underground rock he aimed to promote the band to. So, at the Island Records studios on Basing Street, Marley and Blackwell set about, as Blackwell called it, ‘sweetening’ the music for Western ears.

Keyboards player John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick added the clavinet and synthesiser sounds to the record, their first use in reggae. But to really sweeten the record for Western ears, Blackwell needed some guitar: Wayne Perkins, from Alabama in the United States, was the man he brought in despite Perkins knowing next to nothing about reggae. But it would prove an inspired choice. Perkins got the solo on his third take. Marley was so delighted he ran into the recording studio and gave the guitarist a thanksgiving spliff.

Those present during these sessions affirm that Marley was very much part of the process involved in preparing the record for the market Blackwell had identified: this was no music-business Svengali remaking a band according to his own designs but a creative partnership, with Marley as ambitious to make it big as Blackwell.

Catch a Fire was released in Britain in December 1972 to a press fanfare and solid although not spectacular sales. To follow up the release, the Wailers went on tour in Britain, starting in April 1973. When they came off stage after their first show, the Wailers were puzzled by all the shouting from the audience: had they hated the show? They did not realise they were shouting for more. Their tour manager had to shove them back on stage for their encore. The tour ended with four nights at London’s Speakeasy club, then the hippest club in the country. The rock aristocracy turned out for the shows: Bryan Ferry, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, various members of The Who and Deep Purple, Brian Eno. They soon realised they were watching something new and revelatory.

The Gemini Missions

20 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: History
Astronaut Ed White during a spacewalk from Gemini 4
The rendezvous of Gemini 6A and 7 in orbit.

The Mercury missions first put Americans into space. The Apollo missions took men to the moon. But in between were the Gemini missions, eight launches which were fundamental in establishing the principles of space flight. It was these Gemini flights that made the Apollo moon landings possible.

Unlike the solo Mercury flights and the three-man Apollo missions, Gemini were two-man rockets, using a repurposed ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) to put the crew into orbit. During the Gemini missions, Nasa learned how to keep men alive in space for the length of time necessary to get to the moon and back, developed Extravehicular Activities (‘space walks’) and, crucially, developed the protocols necessary for two spaceship to rendezvous and dock in space.

It’s actually very difficult for two spaceships in different orbits to rendezvous. On earth, you would get on the same track as the other ship and then increase speed to catch up, slowing down as you neared the target vehicle. But in orbit in space, speeding up means the spaceship goes into a higher orbit where, being in a higher orbit, it will actually be travelling slower than the target spacecraft.

The Gemini astronauts found that the way to do it was to put the spaceship into a lower orbit, which means you will be catching up with the target spacecraft as lower orbits are faster, and then, when you have nearly caught up, slow down, thus pushing the spaceship up into the same orbit as the target vehicle.

This, and much other work, was done by the unheralded but vital Gemini missions.

Book review: The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell

18 May 2025
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell

Whoops! Chalk this one up as a top contender for brilliant marketing idea gone disastrously wrong. Suppose you’re a writer, you’ve set your first novel of paranormal detective fiction in a version of London really quite similar to the London of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. The book has done well but obviously you want the next in the series to do better. Then an amazing possibility presents itself: you meet Neil himself and tell him about your book. You get friendly with him. You think about asking him to read your book and write a cover comment and he’s happy to do that but he’s done that for a fair few other writers and you want your book to stand out.

Then you get that brilliant idea. Your vision of London owes so much to Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Would he…? Might he…? After all, the idea plays into Gaiman’s own use of metafiction. So you ask him and he says, “Yes.”

“Yes!” You are beyond delighted. This will really make your book stand out.

Neil Gaiman has agreed to appear in your novel as one of its characters, a writer navigating on the borders between this world and Neverwhere, dipping his writerly toes into the supernatural world of your own creation.

A more perfect, more arch, tribute to Gaiman’s vision of London that has inspired your own book is hard to imagine.

What’s more, Gaiman doesn’t even ask to be the book’s hero, or even heroic: he’s happy to be a morally dubious figure, skating the boundaries of self-interest and altruism, right in line with your overall vision.

Yes, this is brilliant, this is really going to work…

Then, ten years later, Gaiman goes and gets accused of all sorts of horrible behaviour by various women. He denies it, obviously, but then sues one of the women for breaching a non-disclosure agreement. What was your book’s biggest selling point suddenly becomes an albatross of Me-Too proportions.

The most brilliant selling idea of modern metafiction gets undone by the fiction ceasing to be meta.