ResoluteReader

It must be pretty tough sometimes when you're writing in an over-subscribed arena like crime fiction, to come up with an original story....

Antonio Gramsci is one of the most important revolutionaries of the crucial inter-war years. He’s also almost forgotten, perhaps because his...

The twentieth anniversary of the accident at Chernobyl has led to much reflection on the dangers of nuclear power. While figures are hotly d...

I’ve said elsewhere how much I liked Poppy Z Brite’s earlier works. They combined dark, fantastical plots, with Vampires, erotica and New O...

I have to admit that I took this to Italy with me, because I quite liked the idea of sitting reading an ancient historian in some pavement c...

A few months back I reviewed Paul Theroux’s book about travelling from Cairo to Cape town overland – Dark Star Safari , since I enjoyed it s...

Thomas Pakenham’s monumental book (my copy weighs in at 680 pages, excluding indices etc) documents the inglorious ‘scramble’ undertaken by ...

Life as a worker in the early part of the 19th century in the UK was short and horrible. Those working in the new industries of Manchester, ...

On the surface this classic novel is about what happens to an individual who decides to allow fate to intervene in their daily life. But act...

Surely it must be a basic rule of archaeology and history that you can’t generalise from one small archaeological remain, one single excava...

Ah, the wonderful Inspector Morse – with his love for real ale, opera and good literature, what else could you want? This 1992 mystery st...

When David Irving was sent to jail in February 2006, for statements he had made denying the Holocaust, there was a mass of debate in the pr...

At the start of this review I’d like to offer an award. It’s very simply an award for best imagined universe. In The Algebraist, Banks’ late...

I’ve always thought that Asimov’s Robotic Laws were a bit of a cop out. Perhaps it’s my computer programming background, but I always had th...

One of the things I’ve discovered about fighting election campaigns is that fiction helps. Preferably fiction that doesn’t feature elections...

While thinking about this review, I looked up the Wikipedia entry for Dead Air , and found to my amusment, that most of what I thought had ...

The end of 2004 saw something remarkable happen in Antarctica. For the first time, extensive meadows of grass appeared in an area of the w...

Famously, Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” had a plot so complex, that when it was originally filmed the producers telegraphed Chandler ...

One of the amusing things about Theroux’s travels across the continent of Africa by land (and at a couple of boats), is the way that when...

C L R James’ work “The Black Jacobins” was once described to me as the best piece of history ever written. Certainly it is one of the best t...