It’s not easy to cram four hundred years of military, religious and political endeavour into less than 50,000 words but Christopher Tyerman does stirling work. In particular, he works hard to disabuse the reader of many of the false ideas about the Crusades that have become common currency: that they were a land grab by European nobility, that they should be viewed through contemporary political lenses and that the Crusaders were uniquely barbaric.
The main problem with writing about the Crusades is that Steven Runciman casts a long shadow. His books became the source of almost all popular views of the Crusades and it’s only now that his legacy is slowly being unpicked.
Tyerman acknowledges that he is not the writer that Steven Runciman was, but he sets out to gently correct many of the myths that Runciman promulgated about the Crusades. Unfortunately, Runciman was a writer with an eye for the telling detail and no compunction about employing these details to bolster his own rhetoric. Tyerman is nowhere near his equal as a writer, but he is a much better historian.
So read this book for a more staid, but more truthful, account of the Crusades.
Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, the shadow of war hung over us in a way that it’s very difficult for people born after 1990 to understand. There really was a constant sense that the missiles might start flying, whether by intent or mistake made little difference, and the world, well, end. With the vast nuclear arsenals both sides had, that really would have been it.
But then, it was all over. I remember watching it on TV. Solidarity in Poland. Glasnost. Then, marvel of marvels, the Berlin Wall being pulled down, brick by brick, on live TV. The old Soviet order vanished with barely a whimper and hardly any lives lost and… it was over. The confrontation that had defined the half century since the end of World War II was done, basically without a shot being fired.
Or so it seemed. In reality, there had been a series of proxy wars, low-level conflicts, and ideological confrontation throughout the Cold War and, in this book Robert McMahon does a fabulous job of lifting those perilous times out of the memory hole into which we seem determined to cast them.
I don’t really know why that is the case. Looking back, it still seems little less than miraculous that we got away with it. Indeed, so miraculous was the escape that it seems to me that we have almost deliberately forgotten about it, as if to really remember those times would be in some way to acknowledge the irruption of the totally unexpected in human affairs. In most cases when this happens it’s a catastrophe but this was, as Tolkien termed it, a eucatastrophe, the unexpected turn where everything turned out all right. We humans, we are uncomfortable in the presence of the miraculous; we turn away from it. In this case, we have turned away from the history of those years.
McMahon’s short book does a great job of bringing those years back into focus, maintaining the consistent excellence of these Oxford Very Short Introductions. An excellent book.
This was not really what I expected. Having read Geoffrey Wellum’s peerless First Light, and knowing that Kingcome was a member of the same squadron, I had expected something similar. However, reading the introduction, it’s clear that Kingcome died having written only a first draft of the book. It was then polished for publication but Kingcome’s death prevented him adding further material.
As a result, the book is actually much more a memoir of Kingcome’s life than an account of the Battle of Britain, or indeed the Second World War. In fact, there’s surprisingly little on the battle and not too much more on the war. However, Kingcome’s life was fascinating, and the insight into the training and preparations for the war are well worth reading.
There are places where the book suggests it might have become one of the great memoirs of a pilot’s life if Kingcome had been given more time to work on it. As it stands, it’s a valuable insight into the milieu of the sort of man who ended up flying planes in the Second War, and a tribute to a fine man, but it’s not the book it might have been.
One of the great joys for a bookish father is to have a son who’s willing to read your book recommendations – and most of the time he’s even liked the books I’ve suggested he read.
So when Matthew asked me to read a book that he had read, I obviously had to read in kind. The book was Red Rising and he had loved it.
Reading it myself, I could see why he loved Red Rising so much. It is the perfect book for a young man setting out in life and ready to take on the world. But for an old man beaten down by the world, it resonates somewhat differently. For me, it’s a book suffused with regret for the passing of the vigour and energy of youth which, at the time, I thought was mine forever rather than loaned to me at my start. Now, the energy I have left is leavened with thought; something to be held onto and spent wisely.
The struggle of Darrow is the struggle of a young man against a foe that he does not even realise yet can never be beaten; it gave me great satisfaction to read and be, for a while, young again.
A glorious journey through early-medieval Britain in a story that brings the many different cultures of the time to vivid life. Artemis is a splendid heroine who highlights the many roles women played in these societies.
The Eisenhorn novels were the very first Warhammer 40k novels I read about twenty years ago now. Since then, I’ve read many more and, rather improbably, even written some. So I decided to go back to my original door to the 40k galaxy to see how they would read coming at them with the eyes of a writer of these stories as well as a reader.
The answer, of course, is very well. Dan Abnett is a very, very, very good writer, with an unmatched ability to coin words that not just fit into the 40k universe but with a single word engage the reader more fully into that universe.
But now, working from a 40k writer perspective, I’m pretty sure I know how Dan pitched the idea of these novels originally: this was James Bond in 40k. But James Bond with a 40k twist – which means that there’s no sex but even bigger guns. What the Eisenhorn novels and the Bond films share is a breakneck pace with a huge range of exotic locations: unusually for 40k, the stories escape the usual round of polluted hive cities to take in a far wider range of planets, some of which seem like they actually might be quite pleasant to live on (so long as you have money).
In another Bond trope, there’s an unusual emphasis on fine food and drink, with many meals described in loving detail. As an Inquisitor, Eisenhorn unfortunately couldn’t really have an interest in gambling, which is a shame as I’d have loved to have read Abnett’s take on a 40k casino.
As the stories progress, the tie to Bond lessens as the story and characters grow into themselves, but, yes, I still think that’s how they began, when Dan emailed the editors at Black Library and said, “Let’s do Bond in space!”
Ten years ago, I was at the London Book Fair for the launch of the first of my novels about 7th-century Northumbria, Edwin: High King of Britain. I was particularly pleased with the book because it was a fascinating period of British history and no one else had written about it. I had the market all to myself.
Only, I didn’t. At pretty well exactly the same time, Matthew Harffy published The Serpent Sword, the first in his Bernicia Chronicles, telling the story of kings Edwin, Oswald and Oswiu through the eyes and actions of a sometime member of their warbands, Beobrand.
I was, I must admit, pretty gutted. But then I realised that Matthew was going the independent route with The Serpent Sword while I had a proper publisher. I settled back to count my royalties while I let Matthew eat the dust of my sales. With that backing, surely my books would win the battle for Northumbria.
Only, they didn’t. Matthew’s Bernicia novels have sold by the bookshelf, shifting over half a million (!) copies in total. Mine have sold respectable amounts but nothing like as many as his.
So when Matthew put out this book (with Steven McKay, who’s also sold many more books than me) I bought it because, frankly, I wanted to know how he did it.
And that’s exactly what they tell you. With no froth, no spin, no filler: it’s a book to read in an afternoon but with the distilled experience of a combined twenty years in the trenches of writing, publishing, marketing and selling books. As such, it’s invaluable, and I will be putting their ideas into practice. Maybe, just maybe, I might begin to then start catching up!
There aren’t many boys today who grow up with the ambition to fight in a war – but that’s what Roland Bartetzko always wanted to do. Growing up in the old West Germany, there was the chance that he would have to do exactly that, should the Soviet tanks roll West. So Bartetzko enrolled in the German army, training as a paratrooper. But then, in a miracle that was so unexpected we have pretty well ignored it ever since, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War ended without a shot being fired.
Great for the rest of us, bad for a young German who desperately wanted to test his mettle in a proper war. But in the aftermath of the dissolution of the old Eastern bloc, the old tensions that had been suppressed under communism rose to the surface again, first in what had previously been Yugoslavia. War broke out there, the first war in Europe since the end of World War II. Now Bartetzko had his chance.
Signing up as a volunteer for the Croatian Defence Council, Bartetzko got to taste war at first hand. And not just taste it: he dived in head first. Because this is the strange truth that it’s important we recognise: for most people, war is hell. But there is a small sub group of men for whom war is not life: never do they feel more alive, more energised, more vital than when their lives are on the line. Bob Crisp, South African cricketer, WWII tanker and, according to Wisden, ‘one of the most extraordinary men to ever play cricket’ was one. Crisp later told his son that he “loved the war. He enjoyed it. He thought it was fantastic“.
Another was Adrian Carton de Wiart whose Wikipedia biography famously begins: He served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War. He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; was blinded in his left eye; survived two plane crashes; tunnelled out of a prisoner-of-war camp; and tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them. Describing his experiences in the First World War, he wrote, “Frankly, I had enjoyed the war.”
Now we can add Roland Bartetzko to that list. For with the Croatian war over, Bartetzko did not go home to Germany but instead volunteered for the even more shoestring Kosovo Liberation Army, fighting a guerilla war against the Serbs, seemingly against impossible odds, until NATO came to the rescue of the Kosovans.
But this is not a book about why Bartetzko wanted to test himself in battle – he barely touches on that. Instead, it’s actually a manual of what to do and what not to do if you should find yourself fighting as a guerilla against a vastly more powerful enemy. It includes how to set up an ambush, what to do when pinned down by a machine gun, the importance of foot care and many other aspects of practical war craft from a man who knows it better than most people. It’s laconic, clear and honest.
Bartetzko is still the war dog. Too old, he says, to fight against the Russians in Ukraine, he is still near the front lines, bringing supplies and equipment to the soldiers there. It’s a remarkable book from a fascinating man – but a man who appears oblivious or unwilling to ask questions as to his own fascination with war.
There was once a man who became famous throughout the realm for his wit. He played with words, leavening them into the lightest of souffles such that they tripped off the tongue of the players, or wrought them dark and hard as people read of the corruption of innocence. He became a byword for world weary cynicism and any man might quail upon whom the writer turned his tongue.
Yet in his other works, this apostle of abandon and philosopher of despair told tales of the purest innocence, with not a hint of irony nor a soupcon of cynicism; tales of the purest, self-sacrificial goodness, tales to make the hardest man cry and the bitterest woman weep.
Which was the real man? Read them and weep, weep tears of a joy so sharp it hurts.
The mystery is why this was my first reading of James and the Giant Peach. I am 61 years old. The book was first published in 1961 so it’s actually two years older than me. It must have been on the book shelves of the children’s library that was my favourite place to go as a bibliophilic boy. As a child, I read. In fact, reading was pretty much all I did do! My favourite days were the Fridays before bank holiday Mondays because then you could take two books out on a library ticket rather than the usual one, which meant I could borrow eight books rather than the usual maximum of four. But to give you an idea of just how much I would read, I’d normally have finished all eight books by the end of the bank holiday weekend.
Yet in all that time, and among all those books, there were none by Roald Dahl. Now, trying to visualise the library (since closed) in Archway where I went for my books, I am pretty sure there were some by Roald Dahl there. But, for some reason, I must have picked them up, read the blurb, and then put them back again. The only reason I can think of for why I did this is that it was Quentin Blake’s illustrations. I suspect that, as a rather serious-minded boy, I would have found his caricatures off putting. I preferred the more realistic drawings to be found in Enid Blyton books. And then, as I got a bit older, I began to disdain books with pictures. So I think that Roald Dahl fell into the gap between my artistic appreciation and growing taste for more ‘grown-up’ books.
However, the plus side of this is that I can read his books now and come to them completely fresh. And what a delight James and the Giant Peach was. I read it in a morning, while staying at a friend’s house in the country, with everyone else recovering from a surprise birthday party and me settling down upstairs with a book plucked from the children’s (all now grown) book shelf, as the sun shone over the fields.
In particular, the story is a masterclass in drawing characters with a a few words, as exemplified by the caterpillar announcing, “I am a pest,” to James with evident pride. The story is wild, the aunts whom poor James is sent to live with are truly vile, and the giant creatures who travel with him in the giant peach are each marvels of imagination and the writer’s craft. A wonderful book – I will have to read Dahl’s other books!
