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Book review: Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl

13 November 2025
Edoardo
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Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl

There’s an edge to Roald Dahl, a jagged, slightly nasty edge which is one of the reasons that he is such a great writer for children. Children are not at all sentimental but many of the grown-ups who write for them are. Dahl wasn’t. Villains don’t repent, they get squashed by a runaway giant peach. The witches in The Witches are as loathsome as witches can be and come to suitably gruesome ends – while the hero o the story turns into a mouse and decides to stay a mouse.

It’s this refusal to sugar coat the world, but rather to depict it in the stark shades of black and white that forms the moral imagination of children that makes Dahl’s children’s writing so outstanding. So it’s interesting to see that perspective applied to adults in these stories.

Curiously, it does not work quite as well. Yes, the stories are all well crafted with interesting twist endings. But without the moral starkness of the children’s stories, the retribution on the villains of the story does not have the same satisfaction as it does in the children’s stories because, frankly, the other people in the stories are not that much better than the villain of the piece and, really, it would take only a minor turn for the positions to be reversed in most cases.

So, some interesting and entertaining stories but they don’t carry the weight and the charm of Dahl’s children’s stories.

Book review: Darkfall by Dean Koontz

2 November 2025
Edoardo
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Darkfall by Dean Koontz

This is an early Koontz novel, published in 1984 originally under a pseudonym as Koontz, like Stephen King, was writing books at too fast a pace for his publisher’s marketing strategy. It shows Koontz’s developing interest in mashing up genres, in this case the police detective novel and the supernatural thriller, with a leaven of romance via the lead detectives. It doesn’t really stand out among Koontz’s many many novels but for us Koontz completists it’s interesting in showing his growing interest in orthodox religion which later culminated in him becoming a Catholic.

Book review: Siege Warfare by Christopher Duffy

2 November 2025
Edoardo
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Siege Warfare by Christopher Duffy

There are some books that define their subject. This is one of them. Christopher Duffy’s magisterial study of the first century and a half of siege warfare in the Gunpowder Age is superb not merely for its breadth and depth of scholarship, for its lucid style that makes this abstruse area of warfare accessible to everyone but also for the dry wit that sparkles through the lines. It’s seldom that such a technical book can also be a joy to read but this is one of those rare exceptions.

Book review: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

27 October 2025
Edoardo
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Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The trouble with books written in the first person and entirely from the viewpoint of the narrator is that you have to like the narrator, or at least enjoy spending time in his company, for the book to work. Which is sad because Alien Clay, which is otherwise an excellent book with a brilliant narrative twist, has a narrator whom I cordially disliked. There’s no particular reason for the dislike; it’s the literary equivalent of that person who you just don’t click with.

The narrative twist, or technique (which I fully intend to nick!) was this: the hero and a group of comrades find themselves marooned far from base on a planet which the previous two thirds of the book has established as unremittingly hostile and dangerous. But with no hope of rescue, they decide to try to walk back to camp through the alien jungle, a journey which they estimate will take them five days. Everything in the book so far has set this up as virtual suicide and surely the crux of the story. Adrian Tchaikovsky sets his characters off, walking into the jungle, into danger and doom and… The very next chapter is them arriving safely at camp, five days later, with everyone having successfully survived the walk.

It really wasn’t what I expected. The story then splits. Part of the narrative continues forward, telling what happens after they return to camp, while part of the narrative spirals back to their trek through the jungle. And it turns out that what they do in the camp is the result of what happened to them in the jungle. It’s a very clever narrative trick and, as I said, one I fully intend to use myself.

So, despite a narrator I don’t particularly like, the book is so well written that it deserves a four-star rating.

Book review: In the Shadows of Castles by GK Holloway

23 October 2025
Edoardo
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In the Shadows of Castles by GK Holloway

There’s a singular problem with books about 1066: the bad guys win.

Now, that’s not to say I hate the Normans. One look at Mont-St-Michel should be enough to reveal that they were capable of marvels, and a second look at the extraordinary kingdom they created in Sicily will confirm that. But, in England, they were butchers. It’s possible that William didn’t expect as much resistance as he received. After all, the English had accepted another foreign king, Cnut, with fairly good grace. But William had to pay off the men who had backed him in his venture, and that meant basically stealing the country and doling it out to his followers. Cue twenty years of warfare and near genocide.

Which does, unfortunately, make books set in the aftermath of the Conquest generally depressing. We all know how it’s going to end and it’s not good. However, I’m pleased to say that GK Holloways’ excellent novel isn’t all gloom and dispossession. It does follow the lives of a wide range of characters cut loose by the Conquest, highlighting the difficult choices they have to make, but the author chooses stories that allow for at least a modicum of hope.

If you are looking for a novel exploring the repercussions of the Conquest but one that won’t leave you feeling depressed for a month afterwards, In the Shadows of Castles is an excellent choice.

The Man Who Stopped the Sultan: Gabriele Tadino and the Defence of Europe

19 October 2025
Edoardo
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The Man Who Stopped the Sultan: Gabriele Tadino & the Defence of Europe by Edoardo Albert

My new book! I’m delighted to say that The Man Who Stopped the Sultan is out on 29 January 2026, published by Osprey Books.

Heres’s the blurb:

An extraordinary account of how one man defied the most powerful ruler of his age and in doing so changed the course of European history.

Throughout the 16th century, wars raged across Europe as kings and republics jostled for wealth and power. Yet one man exceeded all these medieval princes of Christendom: Suleiman the Magnificent. As ruler of the Ottoman Empire, he governed 25 million people from Constantinople, his realm stretching from Persia to the Atlantic Ocean. Turning his gaze to Europe, Suleiman attacked Rhodes, the island fortress of the Knights Hospitaller but was opposed by Gabriele Tadino – an Italian who had risen through the ranks thanks to his genius as a military engineer.

This is a fascinating history of crusading knights and gunpowder, of spies and tunnels, and of a crossroads in history when the medieval age gave way to the Renaissance. Delving deep into Italian source material, Edoardo Albert weaves together the story of an ordinary man alive in an extraordinary time and performing extraordinary feats of military genius. Through the lens of his life we discover how military tactics and fortifications rapidly changed thanks to the discovery of gunpowder, and how Europe, divided by power-hungry rulers and religion, almost fell to one of the greatest rulers the world has ever seen, but was prevented by a humble engineer.

I’m very excited about this book and I hope you will be too!

Book review: Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe

18 October 2025
Edoardo
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Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe

The Shadow of the Torturer, the first novel in the four-book cycle that makes up the Book of the New Sun, came out in 1980. I tried to read it not long afterwards – and got stuck. This was a time when I could read almost anything but The Shadow of the Torturer defeated me.

However, it left a shadow mark: the faint wish to return to it some day. Now, 45 years later, I have returned to it and I discovered that it left more of a mark upon me than I had realised. For the hero of the novel, the apprentice in the guild of torturers on an ancient earth orbiting a dying sun, is named Severian – and the middle name of my youngest son is Severian. I had no conscious recollection whatsoever that this was the case, yet my youngest son is named Isaac Severian Albert. Clearly, the book had had a greater impact on me than I realised.

Reading it now, I begin to see why. But that understanding is still only partial; this is a rich, dense, thickly layered book, one that will take many readings to truly appreciate (and I might need to look up some other people’s critiques to pick up on all the allusions). It’s writing that bears the weight of the ancient earth it depicts. Time itself has become thick and dense, while everything else grows more insubstantial, drifting into versions of itself layered into the past.

While I can’t say I understood it, I loved it.

Book review: The Secret History by Procopius

18 October 2025
Edoardo
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The Secret History by Procopius

Well, he really really hated them. The them in question being the Emperor Justinian and his wife, the Empress Theodora, rulers of the Byzantine Empire in the 6th century, with left over bile poured out upon the emperor’s chief general, Belisarius. The writer, Procopius, was a high-ranking Byzantine civil servant who worked first with Belisarius and then with the Emperor and his wife. He knew the people he wrote about and, apparently, came to loathe them with an overweening passion.

I don’t think there’s been a literary revenge more vicious than the history that Procopius wrote knowing that it would only be published after his death. It had to be published after he died as seeing it into publication personally would have ensured a very short and painful period before he did die.

Historically, Justinian is seen as the man who restored the Roman empire to something like its former glory and Belisarius was the general who accomplished this reconquest at the emperor’s behest. But according to Procopius, both men were hen-pecked cowards, completely dominated by their sex-obsessed wives, who cuckolded emperor and general with impunity and competed in contests to see who could sleep with more men.

If it reads like some sort of fever dream, particularly when compared with the actual accomplishments of Justinian and Theodora, then that’s because it must be: no one as incompetent as the Justinian portrayed in the Secret History could have done what the historical Justinian did. But then the question arises as to why Procopius hated them so. And the answer is that we don’t know. Scholars have proposed various answers but none are completely convincing.

Given the viciousness with which Procopius treats Theodora, and Belisarius’s wife Antonina, he seems to have despised women. But then, he claims Justinian was possessed by demons.

Really, he just hated them. If nothing else, this illustrates the maxim, never get too close to your heroes. Perhaps the best explanation is that Procopius entered their service as one dazzled and entranced, and left it as one disillusioned and filled with bile – a bile he poured into his Secret History. There really is nothing else like it.

Book review: A Field Guide to the English Clergy by Fergus Butler-Gallie

10 October 2025
Edoardo
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A Field Guide to the English Clergy by Fergus Butler-Gallie

Writing a light, easy-to-read book is as difficult as baking a light, airy cake. Both must seem effortless in the consumption but require meticulous preparation and execution to produce the required sensation, akin to riding upon a souffle under a sparkling spring sky.

Fergus Butler-Gallie succeeds in producing the required impression with the parade of eccentrics, lunatics and holy fools that march across the pages. It’s a light read, in the best sense of the word, and limited to Church of England clergy, but that produces a cast broad enough for any such compendium.

Perhaps the saddest part of the decline of the Anglican Church in England is that there is no obvious home for men like this any more. While this might come as a relief for their parishioners, many (but certainly not all) of these priests were committed to the welfare of their parishioners – whether those parishioners wanted their ministrations or not.

Nowadays, no doubt, they would all be stuck with some sort of psychological label. As it is, they remain as a glorious parade of the eccentricity for which the English were once famous for – and hopefully will be again.