The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order.

• Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo [2015]: Murder in Cairo: The Killing of David Holden. Biteback Publishing.

• Gareth Russell [2025]: Queen James: A New History about the Life and Loves of Britain’s First King, James Stuart. William Collins. A well-written account of the public and personal life of King James VI and I. What I had not appreciated was how violent regal and aristocratic life was in Scotland in James’s time, even in comparison to that in England. As King of Scotland, he developed and exercised a canny intelligence in playing aristocratic and clan factions off against one another, and, even despite this, still endured kidnapping and assassination attempts. The Gunpowder Plot (the truth of which some Catholics still question) was mild in comparison to affairs north of the border.
  

• Philip Shenon [2013]: A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination. Little Brown. This is a compelling and well-written account of the Kennedy Assassination, told through the experiences of the staffers on the Warren Commission, whom the author interviewed later in the lives. The staff were a very bright group of lawyers, in teams of two – a senior lawyer and a bright recent graduate. Most of the recent graduates went on to have illustrious careers in the law, education or politics.
  

  I came away from this account more convinced of both the Single Bullet and Single Gunman Theories than I had been. But it is clear that the Commission did not properly investigate the medical evidence, nor interview everyone it should have interviewed (eg, LBJ, RFK). On the other hand, according to Shenon, the Commission was able to send a senior staffer who happened to know Fidel Castro for a long secret meeting with Castro on his yacht in Cuba. Nor was the Commission provided with complete and honest evidence from either FBI and CIA about the involvement of others. In the case of FBI, the Bureau hid or obfuscated its own interactions with Lee Harvey Oswald in the second half of 1963, most likely due to embarrassment over its incompetence in not preventing the assassination.

  In the case of CIA, the Agency did not disclose what it knew or suspected about Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in September 1963, where he visited the embassies of the USSR and Cuba. It may be, if one is charitable, that CIA wanted to ensure their methods and sources in spying on Oswald in Mexico were not revealed. If one is less charitable, it may be that foreign involvement in the assassination was far greater than CIA wanted to acknowledge. The Agency also did not disclose anything about the Kennedy administration’s many attempts to kill Castro.

  As an example of something that should have been investigated was that Oswald shared a hostel with Cuban emigres with whom he became friends when he was a defector living in Minsk, Belarus, USSR. Was he still in contact with these people later? At any time in his life, it is still not yet clear just who Oswald was working for or working with – not when when he became friendly with Japanese communists while still a Marine, not when he defected to the USSR, not when he returned to the USA, not during the summer and autumn of 1963 in Texas and Louisiana, not while in Mexico City, and not in the assassination.

  As I have argued before, intelligence agencies have not only to decide what to believe, but also what to be seen to believe, and these two may be very different. Indeed, to be credibly seen by an enemy to believe something, an intelligence organization may also have to pretend to believe it. This may require high degrees of organizational secrecy and deception, both external and internal, and even, apparent organizational schizophrenia. Jim Angleton, CIA’s head of counter-intelligence, has generally suffered a bad press for his secrecy and supposed paranoia, but to my mind (from what I have read that is in the public domain), his actions were entirely rational.

• David I. Kertzer [2022]: The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler. OUP.
• Philip Shenon [2025]: Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. Knopf. This is an engrossing summary account of the Catholic Church since the last days of Pope Pius XII. It seems clear to me that the Church leadership is divided into informal factions, which I have blogged about separately.
  

• Simon Goldhill [2016]: A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain. University of Chicago Press. This is a fascinating account of a late Victorian/Edwardian family, containing an Archbishop of Canterbury, a son who became a Catholic priest, and several writers. Perhaps only the extended Hollis family, with its Anglican and Catholic Bishops, and its Anglican divines, produced such a diversity of ecclesiastical opinion.
  

  I had not realized that the Anglican Church in the 19th Century was consumed with arguments over the most trivial matters, as indeed it was in the 20th Century and has been in the 21st. Archbishop Edward White Benson’s 1889 determination in the “Lincoln Judgement” (arising from accusations of Catholic ritual practices undertaken by the Bishop of Lincoln, Edward King) that candles in Anglican church services were not acceptable if they were lit as a part of the church service, but were acceptable if they had been lit before the start of the service for purposes of illumination was solomonic in its subtlety.

  The Benson family also appears to have experienced a great diversity of sexual attractions. Even for a family of prolific writers (of diaries, poetry, biographies, memoirs, novels, and non-fiction books), it is difficult to actually know what people then thought or believed or desired. Part of the reason for this is that the Victorians and Edwardians lacked the language to talk or even to think about sexual orientations, even if they had wanted to do so privately. We now have the language — and an underlying ontology — to talk about the diversity of human sexual desires and orientations.

  However, I think we moderns, despite our widespread complacent self-satisfaction, still lack a language or an adequate ontology to think about the diversity of types of friendship we may experience. The dimensions of friendly attraction to another person and romantic attraction to another person are not the same. And yet they are are also not necessarily orthogonal. We may desire to be with someone, which might be a physical attraction (tending even to lust) or it might be a desire to “visit with” the person, in the American phrase. That is, to share confidences with one another, which is a something that can happen even when the two people are not in the same physical space. It is not only external observers who may not be able to tell one of these desires from the other, the participants themselves may have difficulty distinguishing them. The American writer George Fowler, in his memoir, Dance of a Fallen Monk, talks about his own confusion in this regard.

• Simon Goldhill [2025]: Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History. CUP.
• Patricia Ludgate [2016] Butterflies of a Brief Summer: Memoires – Les souvenirs sont faits de tels moments. MoshPit Publishing. This is a very personal memoir by the wife of pianist Roger Woodward, who traveled the world, mostly as a member of the Australian diplomatic corps. The detail of the narrative in places could only be possible if she had kept a diary at the time, but there are large gaps in the story and much is omitted. For example, how exactly did she come to join the Foreign Service? Is it really true that she just wrote a cold letter to the Department of Foreign Affairs and the next thing was being posted overseas? I wonder if she had some intelligence role. I had not realized until reading her account that even junior Australian foreign service officers traveled first class when flying on business. When I read Mr Woodward’s memoir, I was disappointed that he had said so little about his relationship with Ms Ludgate, but her account has too much information about her relationships. I would have preferred she had said less.
  

• Roger Woodward [2014]: Beyond Black and White. ABC Books. This book is in two parts, with the first being a memoir of the author’s fascinating life as a concert pianist. Not many Australians spent the decade from 1964 in Poland, for example. The second part of the book – and just as interesting to me – is an account of his relationships with various contemporary composers. These accounts are riveting, even though the author tries to be fair in his recounting of events.
  

  Mr Woodward does, it seems, like a good list, an affinity I fully share. The editing might have been better (eg, we find composer Pascal Dusapin listed twice in one list).

• Tess Livingstone [2024]: George Cardinal Pell: Pax Invictis, A Biography. Ignatius Press, Second edition (originally published in 2002), revised. Kindle Edition. Foreword by George Weigel.
  

  Both the author of this biography and the author of the foreword let their admiration for Pell colour their judgments of his writing. Both praise his Prison Journal for its spiritual content when that content – as distinct from its content about religion – is almost zero. Weigel says that his journal is “now regarded as a modern spiritual classic.” (page 14) I would like to ask, Who precisely regards it thus?, and In comparison to what other spiritual writing? I bet no one apart from Catholic Church apologists are impressed by it, and even they would perhaps object to the strong Protestant Evangelical influence Pell exhibits. Livingstone says “some of these works, [of Pell] including his three-volume Prison Journal, will be studied for a long time.” (page 19) I bet not. At least, not by anyone interested in the spiritual aspects of life. Perhaps future historians of our period interested in Pell and his times may read these bland, non-intellectual and unreflective jottings, but no one else will.

  I write about this because it angers me that such intellectual firepower as otherwise exhibited by Mr Weigel and Ms Livingstone should be deployed in such specious argument, argument that can be refuted by anyone who actually reads Pell’s diaries.

• Nikki Mark [2023]: Tommy’s Field: Love, Loss and the Goal of a Lifetime. Union Square. This is a moving account of the loss and aftermath of the author’s son, Tommy Mark, who died in his sleep in 2018 at the age of 12. Tommy Mark was apparently mature beyond his years and a gifted soccer player, and the family decided to honour his life and achievements by raising funds for a dedicated soccer pitch in a park in Westwood, their home suburb in Los Angeles. Despite the proposed field in the park being in poor condition and mostly unused, they faced intense opposition from some other people living near the park.
  

  Her son had played in teams in different parts of LA, in a sport which was more popular among young Spanish-speaking Americans than any other. From the comments she cites of opponents of the proposal, the opposition was strongly centred on the race of the children who would use the soccer field. The book gives a detailed and fascinating account of the local public consultation and lobbying of local government bodies she undertook, and the opposition she faced at every step. Ultimately, she was successful and Tommy’s Field was inaugurated in Westwood Recreation Center on 26 September 2021. It can be viewed here.

  The book is also an account of her transformation from a vague secular agnosticism to a strong overt belief in an after-life, underpinned by her frequent experiences and dreams of communication, direct and indirect, with spiritual entities. Of course, as I have argued before, any such experiences we have may be the result of delusion, and even self-delusion. But this is not how these experiences are felt by those who have them. Ms Mark’s account of her experiences is honest and strongly compelling. I was reminded of the account of Mary Le Beau (pen-name of Inez Travers Cunningham Stark Boulton) of her conversations with spirits of the dead published in 1956 (Beyond Doubt: A Record of Psychic Experience), which is also very compelling.

• David Vaiani [2024]: Jeremy Catto: A Portrait of the Quintessential Oxford Don. Unicorn. An interesting but repetitive account of a medieval historian who seemed to know everybody (academics, politicians, rock stars), and get everywhere. The book could have done with better editing, but it would then have been shorter. One factual snippet I did not previously know: Catto was apparently the person who informed the lawyers defending the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet that Law Lord Leonard Hoffman had links, through his wife, to Amnesty International which he had not declared when hearing the appeal case in the House of Lords. I doubt anything good that Catto may have done in his life would compensate for that one single act of complicity with great evil. I wonder how he lived with himself afterwards.
• Kim Carr [2024]: A Long March. Monash University. This is a memoir by former Australian Labor Party Senator and Minister Kim Carr. The book contains almost nothing of a personal nature. Once, Carr refers to his children without telling us anything about them, not even their ages, nor about his marriage. I understand his need to keep his personal life private, but the effect is to lessen the impact of his memoir.
  

  I had not realized that Carr had long held a vision of a renaissance of Australian manufacturing, reinforcing and extending the country’s presence in sophisticated and complex manufacturing by linking it to advanced research in science and technology. His vision for manufacturing was akin to that of John Button, also a Victorian Labor Senator and Minister, although they were from different party factions of the ALP. What a pity for Australia’s future that this Victorian vision was annulled by the anti-manufacturing bias of Australia’s other states.