{"id":9502,"date":"2017-07-06T11:04:13","date_gmt":"2017-07-06T11:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=9502"},"modified":"2021-12-28T16:42:49","modified_gmt":"2021-12-28T16:42:49","slug":"recent-reading-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2017\/07\/recent-reading-13\/","title":{"rendered":"Recent Reading 13"},"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>Dan Shanahan [2017]: <em>Camelot Eclipsed: Connecting the Dots<\/em>.&nbsp; Independently published.<\/li>\n<li>China Mieville [2017]:&nbsp; <em>October: The Story of the Russian Revolution<\/em>. UK:&nbsp; Verso.<\/li>\n<li>Joshua Rubenstein (Editor) [2007]: <em>The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov<\/em>. USA:&nbsp; Yale University Press.<\/li>\n<li>Henry Hemming [2017]: <em>M: Maxwell Knight, MI5&#8217;s Greatest Spymaster<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Preface Publishing.<\/li>\n<li>Evelyn Waugh [1935]:&nbsp; <em>Edmund Campion, Jesuit and Martyr<\/em>. UK:&nbsp; Longmans.<\/li>\n<li>Alison Barrett [2015]:&nbsp; <em>View from my Tower: Letters from Prague, March 1985 &#8211; May 1988<\/em>.&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.<\/li>\n<li>John O Koehler [2008]:&nbsp; <em>Stasi:&nbsp; The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; Basic Books.<\/li>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<li>Giles Udy [2017]: <em>Labour and the Gulag:&nbsp; Russia and the Seduction of the British Left<\/em>. UK:&nbsp; Biteback Publishing.<\/li>\n<li>David J Garrow [2017]: <em>Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; William Collins.<\/li>\n<li>Yanis Varoufakis [2017]: <em>Adults In The Room: My Battle With Europe\u2019s Deep Establishment<\/em>. UK: Vintage Digital.<\/li>\n<li>Nick Bilton [2017]: <em>American Kingpin: Catching the Billion-Dollar Baron of the Dark Web<\/em>. USA:&nbsp; Virgin Digital.<\/li>\n<li>Michael Howard [1996]:&nbsp; <em>Strategic Deception in the Second World War<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; WW Norton.<\/li>\n<li>Andrew St. George [1995]: <em>History of Norton Rose<\/em>. UK:&nbsp; Granta Editions.&nbsp;&nbsp; This is a history of the English law firm Norton Rose, written for the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1794. &nbsp; The firm grew in the 19th century alongside the railways, acting as a conveyancing firm for the land purchases needed for new railway lines at the same time as lobbying MPs to legislate for the routes of these lines desired by its clients.&nbsp; Its growth was helped by the life-long friendship between young Mr Philip Rose and Benjamin Disraeli.&nbsp; One error in the book:&nbsp; St. Geoge seems to have conflated two of Disraeli&#8217;s confidants and alleged mistresses:&nbsp; Clara Bolton (nee Clarissa Marion Verbeke, 1804-1839), polyglot wife of George Buckley Bolton (the Disraeli family doctor) and Henrietta, Lady Sykes (c. 1801-1846), wife of Sir Francis Sykes (1799-1843), third Baronet of Basildon.&nbsp; Mrs Bolton was also a confidant of <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2011\/03\/the-matherati-alexander-darblay\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Alexander d&#8217;Arblay<\/a> (1794-1837), only son of Fanny Burney and a grandson of&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2014\/08\/charles-burney\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Charles Burney<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Peter Godfrey-Smith [2017]:&nbsp; <em>Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; William Collins.&nbsp; This is a fascinating and well-written account of the intelligence of cephalopodes, drawing on the author&#8217;s underwater interactions with them.&nbsp; The only major blunder in the book is the author&#8217;s mistaken view that the only or even the main form of human thinking is verbal.&nbsp; This belief shows the fallacies possible when generalizing from introspection, and perhaps only a philosopher could believe something so obviously false.&nbsp; Most mathematicians, architects, musicians and visual artists; most engineers, craftsman, surgeons, and machinery operators; and most sportsmen and women, dancers and actors, spend most of their time thinking without using any words, in my experience.<\/li>\n<li>Philip Pilkington [2016]: <em>The Reformation in Economics:&nbsp; A Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Economic Theory<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Palgrave Macmillan.<\/li>\n<li>John Le Carre [2017]: <em>A Legacy of Spies<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Penguin.<\/li>\n<li>Roy Hattersley [2017]: <em>The Catholics: The Church and its People in Britain and Ireland, from&nbsp; the Reformation to the Present<\/em>.&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; Chatto and&nbsp; Windus.<\/li>\n<li>Don Aitken [2005]:&nbsp; <em>What was it all for?&nbsp; The Reshaping of Australia<\/em>. Australia: Allen and Unwin.<\/li>\n<li>Don Aitken [2016]:&nbsp; <em>The Second Chair<\/em>.&nbsp; Australia:&nbsp; Danbee Books.<\/li>\n<li>Mark Singer [2016]: <em>Trump and Me<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; Penguin.<\/li>\n<li>Ian Hacking [2014]: <em>Why is there Philosophy of Mathematics at all?<\/em>&nbsp; UK:&nbsp; CUP.<\/li>\n<li>David Talbot [2015]: <em>The Devil&#8217;s Chessboard:&nbsp; Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America&#8217;s Secret Government<\/em>.&nbsp; USA:&nbsp; William Collins.<\/li>\n<li>Edward Jay Epstein [2013]:&nbsp; <em>Sixty Versions of the Kennedy Assassination: A Primer on Conspiracy Theories<\/em>.&nbsp; EJE Publications.<\/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. Dan Shanahan [2017]: Camelot Eclipsed: Connecting the Dots.&nbsp; Independently published. China Mieville [2017]:&nbsp; October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. UK:&nbsp; Verso. Joshua Rubenstein (Editor) [2007]: The KGB File [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,12,16,25,26,31,35,38,44,64,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-communism","category-concats","category-economics","category-fiction","category-global-economic-crisis","category-history","category-intelligence-and-espionage","category-literature","category-politics","category-recent-reading","p1","y2017","m07","d06","h11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9502","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=9502"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10317,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9502\/revisions\/10317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}