{"id":9447,"date":"2018-07-30T12:21:39","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T12:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=9447"},"modified":"2021-12-28T16:41:04","modified_gmt":"2021-12-28T16:41:04","slug":"recent-reading-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/recent-reading-14\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Reading 14"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The latest in a <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/category\/recent-reading\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">sequence<\/a> of lists of recently-read books. The books are listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recently-read book at the top.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Kate McClymont and Linton Besser [2014]: <em>He Who Must Be Obeid.<\/em> Australia: Random House.&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.<\/li>\n<li>Bob Carr [2018]: <em>Run for Your Life<\/em>.&nbsp; Australia:&nbsp; Melbourne University Press. A memoir mostly of Carr&#8217;s times as Premier of NSW (1995-2005), running a government which was, untypically for NSW, seemingly uncorrupt.<\/li>\n<li>Aldous Huxley [1931]:&nbsp; <em>Music at Night and Other Essays<\/em>. Flamingo reissue.<\/li>\n<li>Keith Gessen [2018]: <em>A Terrible Country<\/em>. Fitzcarraldo Editions.&nbsp; Writing as smooth as a gimlet, and extremely engrossing.<\/li>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<li>Hayden Eastwood [2018]: <em>Like Sodium in Water: A Memoir of Home and Heartache<\/em>. South Africa: Jonathan Ball.&nbsp; A well-written but very sad memoir of growing up in Harare, Zimbabwe following Independence, by a member of the family mentioned <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2009\/12\/heroes-the-underground-railroad-in-rhodesia\/\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>David Margolick [2018]: <em>The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. And Robert F. Kennedy<\/em>.&nbsp; USA: Rosetta Books.<\/li>\n<li>Naveed Jamali and Ellis Henican [2015]:&nbsp; <em>How to Catch a Russian Spy<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; Simon &amp; Schuster.<\/li>\n<li>Geoffrey Robertson [2018]:&nbsp;<em>Rather His Own Man: In Court with Tyrants, Tarts and Troublemakers<\/em>. UK: Biteback Publishing.&nbsp; Is there anyone Robertson does not know, from Malcolm Turnbull to Prince Charles to Julian Assange?<\/li>\n<li>Edward Wilson [2018]:&nbsp; <em>South Atlantic Requiem<\/em>. UK:&nbsp; Arcadia Books.&nbsp; The latest in the Catesby espionage series, as always very well-written and dancing recklessly across the border between fact and fiction.<\/li>\n<li>Philip Toynbee [1954]: <i>Friends Apart, A Memoir of Esmond Romilly &amp; Jasper Ridley in the Thirties. <\/i>UK:&nbsp;Sidgwick and Jackson Ltd.<\/li>\n<li>Roland Philipps [2018]: <em>A Spy Named Orphan: The Enigma of Donald Maclean<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Vintage.<\/li>\n<li>James Comey [2018]:&nbsp; <em>A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership<\/em>.&nbsp; USA: Macmillan.&nbsp; Superbly structured and well-written.&nbsp; Engrossing.&nbsp; Bam&#8217;s best choice for head of the FBI.&nbsp;Would make a very good AG.<\/li>\n<li>Pat Sloan (Editor) [1938]: <i>John Cornford: A Memoir<\/i>. UK: Jonathan Cape.<\/li>\n<li>James McNeish [2008]:&nbsp; <em>The Sixth Man: The Extraordinary Life of Paddy Costello<\/em>.&nbsp; UK: Quartet Books.&nbsp; Many have argued that Costello was a Soviet agent, not least MI5 in an&nbsp;international campaign which ended his New Zealand diplomatic career and made it difficult for him to secure other posts.&nbsp; But the person running the anti-Communist division of MI5 and then MI5 itself at the time himself later came under suspicion &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2017\/08\/roger-hollis-and-elli\/\">very plausibly<\/a> &#8211; of being a Soviet agent, so the case against Costello, to my mind, is not at all decisive. The MI5 campaign against Costello may well have been a diversive smokescreen from chasing genuine Soviet agents.<\/li>\n<li>Charlotte Bingham [2018]: <em>MI5 and Me: A Coronet among the Spooks<\/em>. UK:&nbsp; Bloomsbury Publishing. An amusing memoir of working for MI5 as a secretary.<\/li>\n<li>William D Cohan [2008]:&nbsp;<em>The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Fr\u00e8res &amp; Co<\/em>. USA:&nbsp; Penguin.<\/li>\n<li>Timothy Garton Ash [2015]: <em>The File: A Personal History<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Atlantic Books.<\/li>\n<li>Richard Davenport-Hines [2018]: <em>Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain<\/em>.&nbsp; UK: William Collins. An attempt to position the Cambridge spy ring in the context of its culture and time.<\/li>\n<li>Fyodor M. Burlatsky [1992]: <em>Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring<\/em>. USA:&nbsp; Charles Scribner&#8217;s Sons.&nbsp;A fascinating inside account of the reformist thinking and actions of Nikita Khrushchev and Yuri Andropov in the 1950s and 1960s.<\/li>\n<li>William Taubman [2017]: <em>Gorbachev: His Life and Times<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; Simon and Schuster.<\/li>\n<li>Tom Mangold [1993]: <em>Cold Warrior:&nbsp; The True Story of the West&#8217;s Spyhunt Nightmare<\/em>. USA:&nbsp; Simon and Schuster.<\/li>\n<li>Jefferson Morley [2017]: <em>The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton<\/em>. USA:&nbsp; Macmillan. Oddly, Morley mentions Teddy Kollek knowing both Angleton and Philby, but not that Kollek was a guest at Philby&#8217;s wedding to Litzi Friedmann in Vienna in 1934.<\/li>\n<li>Robert Graves [1960]: <i>Goodbye to All That.<\/i> UK: Penguin.<\/li>\n<li>Richard Pipes [2015]: <em>Alexander Yakovlev: The Man whose Ideas delivered Russia from Communism<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; Northern Illinois University Press.<\/li>\n<li>Charles Hamblin [2017]:&nbsp; <em>Linguistics and the Parts of the Mind<\/em>.&nbsp; (Written ca. 1968. Posthumous edition prepared by Phillip Staines) UK:&nbsp; Cambridge Scholars Publishing.&nbsp; Remarkably prescient of Belief-Desire-Intention models of autonomous agency.<\/li>\n<li>Masha Gessen [2012]: <em>The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin<\/em>. USA:&nbsp; Granta Books.<\/li>\n<li>Masha Gessen [2017]: <em>The Future is History:&nbsp; How Totalitarianism reclaimed Russia<\/em>. USA:&nbsp; Granta Books.<\/li>\n<li>Daniel Ellsberg [2017]: <em>The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear Planner<\/em>.&nbsp; USA: Bloomsbury Publishing.<\/li>\n<li>Jacques Pauw [2017]: <em>The President&#8217;s Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and out of Prison<\/em>.&nbsp; South Africa: Tafelberg.<\/li>\n<li>Anne Goldgar [2008]: <em>Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; University of Chicago Press.&nbsp; Why would I be reading this in this time of ICOs, I wonder?<\/li>\n<li>Artur London [1970]: <em>The Confession<\/em>.&nbsp; UK: Morrow.&nbsp; A famous account by one of the defendants in the <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2010\/08\/stalinist-justice\/\">Slansky Trial<\/a> in Czechoslovakia in 1951.<\/li>\n<li>Hubert Ripka [1950]: <em>Czechoslovakia Enslaved: The Story of the Communist Coup d\u2019Etat.<\/em> London: Victor Gollancz.<\/li>\n<li>D J Taylor [2010]: <em>Bright Young People:&nbsp; The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918-1940<\/em>.&nbsp; UK: Vintage.<\/li>\n<li>Edith Olivier [1989]:&nbsp; <em>Edith Olivier: From Her Journals, 1924-1948<\/em>. Edited by Penelope Middleboe. UK:&nbsp; Weidenfeld and Nicolson.<\/li>\n<li>Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah [2017]: <em>The Knowledge we have lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; Oxford University Press.<\/li>\n<li>James McNeish [2003]: <em>Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in Exile in the Time of Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung<\/em>.&nbsp; UK: Vintage.<\/li>\n<li>Francis Wheen [1992]:&nbsp; <em>Tom Driberg:&nbsp; His Life and Indiscretions.<\/em>&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Pan.&nbsp; This book is riveting reading, spoilt by its too-strong sympathy for its subject.<\/li>\n<li>Sheila Fitzpatrick [2017, 4th edition]:&nbsp; <em>The Russian Revolution<\/em>.&nbsp; UK: Oxford University Press.<\/li>\n<li>Oliver J Lodge [1916]: <em>Raymond, or Life and Death: With Examples of the Evidence<\/em>. USA:&nbsp; George H Doran Company.<\/li>\n<li>Launcelot Cranmer-Byng [1947]: <em>The Vision of Asia<\/em>. UK: John Murray.<\/li>\n<li>Sam Dastyari [2017]:&nbsp; <em>One Halal of a Story<\/em>.&nbsp; Australia:&nbsp; Melbourne University Press.<\/li>\n<li>Hilary Rodham Clinton [2017]:&nbsp; <em>What Happened<\/em>.&nbsp; USA: Simon and Schuster.&nbsp; Indeed!<\/li>\n<li>David Burke [2009]: <em>The Spy who came in from the Co-op: Melita Norwood and the Ending of Cold War Espionage<\/em>. UK:&nbsp; Boydell Press.<\/li>\n<li>Alan Vaughan [1974]: <em>Patterns of Prophecy<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; HarperCollins.<\/li>\n<li>Tom Bower [1996]: <em>The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War, 1935-90<\/em>.&nbsp; UK: Mandarin.<\/li>\n<li>Jenny Hocking [2016]: <em>The Dismissal Dossier: Everything you were never meant to know about November 1975<\/em> (Updated Edition). Australia: Melbourne University Press.&nbsp; Sadly, even after this account, I feel we do not yet know all the duplicity around the events of 11 November 1975.<\/li>\n<li>Anna Thomasson [2015]: <em>A Curious Friendship: The Story of a Bluestocking and a Bright Young Thing<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Macmillan.&nbsp; A wonderful account of the December-May friendship of Edith Olivier (1872-1948), later a writer, and artist Rex Whistler (1905-1944), who first met in 1924.&nbsp; Given their ages at the time of meeting, it would be more accurate to describe this as an August-March friendship.<\/li>\n<li>Evelyn Waugh [1964]: <em>A Little Learning: the First Volume of an Autobiography<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Chapman and Hall.<\/li>\n<li>Edith Olivier [1945]:&nbsp; <em>Four Victorian Ladies of Wiltshire<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Faber and Faber.<\/li>\n<li>Edith Olivier [1938]:&nbsp; <em>Without Knowing Mr Walkley<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Faber and Faber.<\/li>\n<li>William Sturgis Bigelow [1908]: <em>Buddhism and Immortality<\/em>.<\/li>\n<li>Garry Wills [2014]:&nbsp; <em>Making Make-Believe Real<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; Yale University Press.<\/li>\n<li>Garry Wills [2017]: <em>The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power<\/em>. USA:&nbsp; Open Road Media.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.&nbsp;&nbsp; The life and fast times of Eddie Obeid, perhaps, despite the strong calibre of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,26,35,38,44,64,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-fiction","category-history","category-intelligence-and-espionage","category-literature","category-politics","category-recent-reading","p1","y2018","m07","d30","h12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9447"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10316,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9447\/revisions\/10316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}