The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order.
- Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo [2025]: Murder in Cairo: The Killing of David Holden. Biteback Publishing.
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
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Recent Reading 20
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order.
- Peter Godwin [2024]: Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars. Canongate Books. A very moving, well-written and intensely personal account of the death of the author’s mother and the break-up of his marriage. How poetically Godwin writes. The feeling of being sick for “home” on three continents – Zimbabwe (Chimanimani in the Eastern Highlands), Britain and the USA (Manhattan and his weekend house at Indian Orchard in north-western Connecticut) – is all too familiar to me.
- Tim Tate [2024]: To Catch a Spy: How the Spycatcher Affair brought MI5 in from the Cold. Icon. A well-written reprise of what we now know (which still is not everything) of the Spycatcher Affair. Despite the assurances of this author and many others, I remain unconvinced that Roger Hollis was as innocent as he claimed of espionage for the Soviets.
Recent Reading 19
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order.
- Bill Browder [2022]: Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, Murder,and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath. Simon and Schuster.
- Bill Browder [2015]: Red Notice: A True Story of Corruption, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice. Bantam Press. A gripping and very well-written autobiography of William Browder, son of mathematician Felix (he of Browder’s Fixed Point theorem fame) and grandson of Earl Browder, onetime President of the CPUSA.
- Duncan Mavin [2022]: The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal. Macmillan. An account, mostly well-written, of the Greensill Capital affair. The company, started by Lex Greensill from a farming family of Bundaberg, Queensland, was based on the clever idea of reverse factoring of supply-chain invoices: lending against invoices from suppliers, not to the suppliers as in regular factoring, but to the receivers of the goods and services being supplied. The receivers are generally larger and more reputable, so the risk to the reverse factoring company should be less than for standard factoring.
The book ends very quickly, without the depth or detail of the earlier chapters, as if the author suddenly became tired of writing.
Recent Reading 17
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order.
- Gautam Raghavan (Editor) (2018): West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White. Penguin. Fascinating accounts from a very diverse group of people who worked in the Obama White House, diverse in terms of ethnicity, religion, background, and role.
- Geoffrey Elliott and Harold Shukman (2013): Secret Classrooms: An Untold Story of the Cold War. Faber and Faber. A fascinating account of the British Government’s Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) which trained selected national servicemen (conscripts) in Russian and a few other languages between 1951 and 1960. Many graduates went on to illustrious careers across society, including the two authors. I have met several graduates of the US military’s similar school in Monterey, CA, which started with teaching Japanese in November 1941, and they were all very bright people. How short-sighted that the UK Government does not continue with such training.
Recent Reading 16
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order.
- Leo McKinstry [2019]: Attlee and Churchill: Allies in War, Adversaries in Peace.
- Isidor F Stone [1947, this edition 2015]: Underground to Palestine: And Other Writing on Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East (Editor: Mark Crispin Miller). A superb first-hand account of the Bricha (or Bericha) Movement, the Jewish underground railroad in Europe immediately following WW II, spiriting Jews from the USSR and Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, to the Middle East. For most people this was illegal, and was completed against a British blockade of Palestine. In Stone’s account, Czechoslovakia was the most friendly of the EE governments towards Jewish citizens and displaced persons in transit. (HT: JG)
Clive James RIP
Clive James (1939-2019) has just died. He was a poet, novelist, writer, TV critic and TV showman famous as a wit and a humorist, although I never found him to be very funny. Strangely, not actually being funny is apparently not a barrier to acquiring a reputation as a comic writer, as the careers of Howard Jacobson and Saul Bellow demonstrate. Jacobson, an Honorary Life Member of the UK branch of the Expatriate Australian Mutual Admiration Society, praises his fellow Society member in today’s Grauniad.
Recent Reading 15
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order.
- Michael Ovitz [2018]: Who is Michael Ovitz? A Memoir. USA: WH Allen. This is a fascinating and well-written autiobiography by the co-founder and driving force behind Creative Artists Agency. CAA grew from nothing to dominate the agency business in movies and TV, and then entered M&A consultancy and advertising. I always admired the chutzpah of this strategy and marveled at its success. The book explains how CAA’s creative bundling of the products of its writers, actors, musicians, directors and producers enabled it to grow as an agency, and also enabled the diversification: the expertise gained in strategizing and financially evaluating creative bundles was used to value Hollywood studios (with their back catalogues) as potential acquisition targets. Likewise, the creativity in bundling and the access to diverse talent was used to design successful advertisements. What surprised me reading this book was that the diversification ended after just two acquisition assignments and one advertising project (Coca Cola’s polar bears). The key reason for this seems to have been the opposition of Mr Ovitz’s partners and colleagues at CAA, despite the handsome and arguably unearnt rewards his efforts brought many of them. No good deed ever goes unpunished, it seems. // The book also presents his experiences as President at Disney. Although of course we only hear his side of that story, he does seem to have been undermined from before he even began work there. // Overall, the writing is articulate and reflective, and he seems to have grown personally through his career and his apparent failures. I greatly admire his continued desire and willingness to learn new things – new skills, new businesses, new industries, new cultures, new hobbies. Doing this requires rare, personal courage. Few people in American business were as willing as he was to immerse themselves in Japanese culture when doing business in Japan, for instance. One characteristic Mr Ovitz does not ever display is smugness, and this absence is admirable.
Recent Reading 14
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books. The books are listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recently-read book at the top.
- Kate McClymont and Linton Besser [2014]: He Who Must Be Obeid. Australia: Random House. The life and fast times of Eddie Obeid, perhaps, despite the strong calibre of the competition, the most corrupt person ever to be a Cabinet Minister in NSW.
- Bob Carr [2018]: Run for Your Life. Australia: Melbourne University Press. A memoir mostly of Carr’s times as Premier of NSW (1995-2005), running a government which was, untypically for NSW, seemingly uncorrupt.
- Aldous Huxley [1931]: Music at Night and Other Essays. Flamingo reissue.
- Keith Gessen [2018]: A Terrible Country. Fitzcarraldo Editions. Writing as smooth as a gimlet, and extremely engrossing.
Recent Reading 13
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books. The books are listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recently-read book at the top.
- Dan Shanahan [2017]: Camelot Eclipsed: Connecting the Dots. Independently published.
- China Mieville [2017]: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. UK: Verso.
- Joshua Rubenstein (Editor) [2007]: The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov. USA: Yale University Press.
- Henry Hemming [2017]: M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster. UK: Preface Publishing.
- Evelyn Waugh [1935]: Edmund Campion, Jesuit and Martyr. UK: Longmans.
- Alison Barrett [2015]: View from my Tower: Letters from Prague, March 1985 – May 1988. A fascinating series of letters from wife of the British Ambassador to members of her family about her time in Prague, in the period of stasis just before the Velvet Revolution.
- John O Koehler [2008]: Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police. USA: Basic Books.
Honesty of intention
Some people I have encountered in this life have impressed me with their integrity-of-purpose, the coherence, sincerity and compellingness of their objectives and mission. Sometimes these objectives have been political, as in the case of Don Day and Bill Mansfield. In other cases, they have been spiritual or religious, as in the case of Jes Albert Moeller, whom I first met in 1984. There are other people whose purposes are both political and spiritual, something which seems to have been true for Vaclav Havel.
In my experience, this human attribute is rare. And I have never seen or heard anyone else talk of it, until now. In Judith Wright’s autobiography, she speaks (page 234) of her partner and later husband, the philosopher Jack McKinney, meeting her father:
That my father was grieved by my relationship with Jack is undeniable but, once they met, he gave in to Jack’s obvious honesty of intention and the needs of my own that Jack was filling. . . . “
Judith Wright [1999]: Half a Lifetime. Edited by Patricia Clarke. Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing.