The title isn’t strictly accurate; just as often people hear, smell, feel or sense angels as they see them. What’s fascinating is the range of experiences, the way they have affected people and how often they contradict traditional ideas of angels and how often they confirm those ideas. However, none of the experiences reported in here match the deep strangeness that the Bible reports of angels, where they can appear in human guise but equally can take the form of vast creatures covered in eyes and fiery wheels, also eye covered.
As a curious aside, the author of this book, Emma Heathcote James, went on to found a successful soap company, called the Little Soap Company. It’s not clear whether she has kept up her interest in angels.
These are three different books but I would urge you to read them all, one after another. It won’t take long; so far as text is concerned, you can read each book in less than an hour. But you will take longer because you will want to take time looking at and lingering over the exquisite line drawings that illustrate exactly how people in the past built a Roman city, and a medieval cathedral and castle.
I don’t think they are still in print but it really is worth hunting these down in second-hand bookshops. I think I learned more about classical and medieval architecture than from any other books – certainly so far as the practical aspects of building a city, a cathedral or a castle is concerned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A short (60-odd pages) history of the Gunpowder plot. A good place to start if you want to learn more than the Wikipedia entry but you’re not sure if you want to embark upon a full-on history of the conspiracy and its aftermath.
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!
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.
