Brian Clegg's Blog, page 9

If Only They Didn't Speak English - Jon Sopel ***

Teamed up with Emily Maitlis, John Sopel was for several years host of by far the best of the BBC political podcasts, Americast - most tend to be painfully worthy, including Americast post Sopel and Maitlis.  The pair left to set up their own Newsagents podcast, but this has been uninspiring - it has only been since they've done a US spinoff that the pair have once again recaptured their magic.

One of there reasons I read this book from 2018 was my enjoyment of the engaging approach taken in the podcast - the other was the comment by Bill Bryson on the front, which made me think this would be like of one of Bryson's books - wry humour, underlining the differences between the US and the UK. In reality, If Only They Didn't Speak English is very different.

I'm glad I read it, but it was significantly harder going than I expected. Sopel's writing style has none of the verve of his podcasting persona - this is a serious book, examining a range of ways that American culture differs from British, whether it be attitudes to race, patriotism or guns. Although there are plenty of anecdotes from Sopel's time as BBC correspondent in the US, there is a surprising amount of historical material, some from the early days of the country and more from the first half of the twentieth century. Although the subtitle tells us these are 'notes from Trump's America' (the first time around), there's a lot about Obama's America too, as Sopel contrasts the then new and the previous president and their actions.

It's a shame Sopel didn't bring in more of his personal experience and cut back on the historical context a bit: the way the book is written feels  like he was trying to make this more of a weighty tome than it really is. It would also have helped if the material had been broken up more - the 364 pages are split into ten chapters which have no subheadings or section breaks. This makes reading it quite heavy going. However, it was genuinely interesting to take in a view from the first year of Trump's first presidency as we are about to start his next one. 

You can buy If Only They Didn't Speak English from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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Death Comes at Christmas - Marie O'Reagan and Paul Kane (Eds.) ****

A full-blown murder mystery would overload a short story, but for some reason Christmas crime works well in short form, as witness the series of classic books that recently tailed off with Murder by Candlelight . It's refreshing to have a chunky new collection, some from high powered modern thriller writers - and the vast majority of the stories are well worth reading.

I think it's fair to say that few come up to the really great classic Christmas mystery shorts, but I very much enjoyed, for example, C. L. Taylor's How to Commit Murder in a Bookshop - I think many published authors would quietly identify with the targeting of agents, publicists, marketing people and the like (leaving readers and booksellers safe). Russ Thomas gives us a dark old Christmas house scare with The Red Angel, and there's amusing murderous fluffiness in The Wrong Party. Some good twists too - for example in Samantha Hayes' dark Frostbite, while Sarah Hilary's Marley's Ghost gives us a very satisfying ending in true Christmas Carol style.

There's only one story that was an out and out turkey. Alexandra Benedict revived her unlikeable characters from last year's Christmas Jigsaw Murders. The story's one redeeming grace is its very clever title - The Midnight Mass Murderer. However, the mass murder in question - the killing of a whole midnight church congregation - wouldn't work. The murderer's threat (to kill 'just under two hundred people') is far too accurate a prediction as no one can accurately predict a congregation size, but more importantly the method (carbon monoxide poisoning) is far too slow and variable in impact to take out a whole group of people in one go with no survivors. Most hilariously inept, though, is Benedict's attempt to take out our amateur detectives. Again carbon monoxide is the mechanism - but quite how this was emitted by 'storage heaters' - which are electric - is not made clear. 

It's perhaps too much to expect every story in a collection to be a good one (though I'm not sure what the editors were playing at including that one) - but you still get 17 satisfying reads, which is an impressive success rate.

You can buy Death Comes at Christmas from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Murder at Holly House - Denzil Meyrick ***

In a mystery, things are often not what they seem - but usually a book cover is a fair indication of what a book is. In this case it isn't. You'd think this was a cosy Christmas murder mystery. No, it's not. You would think it would centre on a murder at Holly House. It doesn't. Admittedly there is a murder in the said building, but it's a marginal part of the plot as a whole. Of itself, this isn't necessarily bad, but there were other elements that put me off too.

The book is supposedly the memoir of a failure of a detective inspector, sent in the early 1950s to a village on the North Yorkshire moors as punishment for a misdemeanour. The village, Elderby, itself is decidedly reminiscent of the village setting of the old TV show Heartbeat, but somehow this village supports a police station with an inspector, a sergeant and a couple of constables. Inspector Grasby is faced with an increasingly complex situation as death follow death, aided or hindered by a female American intern at the already overcrowded police station, a narcoleptic sergeant, a landlady out of a gothic fantasy with a raven as a pet, and a clergyman father who seems to detest our hero.

It would give away too much to say how the plot develops, but it is definitely not in the cosy murder mystery vein. There are certainly some interesting developments, but I was never gripped by it. This in part was because of the nature of  the main character - Grasby is weak and self-serving, only becoming a hero by accident. His first person narration sounds more like that of a lesser P. G. Wodehouse character than a 1950s detective. The humour is heavy-handed. And, to add to the detachment from engagement, a lot of the characters have silly names, such as Superintendent Juggers, Lord Mitch Parsley, Mrs Gaunt, Lord Damnish and Sergeant Elphinstone Bleakley. 

The cover tells us that the feel good factor is off the scale and it's a wonderfully entertaining mystery. I'm amazed they thought this if they were reading the same book. It was okay. I didn't give up on it. But it was the worst Christmas mystery novel I've read in quite a while.

You can buy Murder at Holly House from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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Ho, ho, ho!

It's that time when sensible people take a break from the internet. There won't be any blog posts next week, but I'll be back soon. Meanwhile, there's a great carol below...

For those of us who celebrate Christmas, have a great one - and an excellent 2025 to all.

Having sung in choirs pretty much all my life, I'm a huge fan of good church music. Here's one of my favourite carols, Arthur Oldham's setting of Remember O Thou Man, which I first discovered when singing at the Oxford Physics Department carol service (don't ask) - it's not very well known, but well worth a listen.

If you like a bit of musical history (source The New Oxford Book of Carols), the words date back to the early seventeenth century, appearing as 'A Christmas Carroll' in Thomas Ravenscroft's 1611 Melismata: musical phansies fitting to court, citie and country humours to 3, 4 and 5 voyces. It's not known if the tune Ravenscroft used was original or a traditional one. It also has a small starring role in Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, when the choir has trouble singing it. As one character says 'The first line is well enough, but when you come to "O, thou man," you make a mess of it.' Oldham's setting bears no resemblance to Ravenscroft's and is far more challenging to sing, but haunting:

Image by Andreas Kretschmer  from Unsplash

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Connected green thinking

The problem with much of our approach to the environment is that it's driven by fuzzy feelings, rather than logic and connected thinking. This has come up recently in respect to missing links in the renewable energy grid, but can also be seen in our approach to electric vehicles, the knee-jerk environmental reaction to nuclear, the way environmentalists embrace organic food and much more.

Way back, I wrote a book called Ecologic to try to address this lack of clear thinking. It won a prize, but didn't have much impact other than getting me labelled a 'green heretic', which I have accepted as a badge of honour. Sadly, though, bringing logic to green issues continues to be a problem.

The example that brought this to mind was the news that the massive Scottish Seagreen offshore wind plant has only been able to provide one third of its potential capacity this year - it sold 1.2 million gWh to the grid, where it could have provided 3.7 gWh. The reason for the disparity is that the the connectors carrying energy to England can only handle 6.3gW - nowhere near enough. And even with new connectors planned by 2030, there will still be far more produced than Scotland and the connectors can make use of - literally a lack of connected thinking.

I ought also to briefly revisit organic food: I recently saw a questionnaire designed to measure your environmental effectiveness. It asked if  you encouraged people to use food at home that is LOAF (Locally grown, Organic, Animal-friendly, Fairtrade). Locally grown is good environmentally (as long as it's not, say, tomatoes in hot houses). Animal-friendly and Fairtrade are both ethically positive, but don't necessarily have an environmental benefit. But organic methods are simply not an environmentally sustainable replacement for conventional farming on large scale - organics are emotional-sell products, primarily used as a marketing tool.

It's time we focused on results, rather than feel-good in the move to be green.

This has been a Green Heretic production. See all my Green Heretic articles here.

Image by Eduardo Aparicio  from Wikipedia

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A mirror to Life on Mars

Watching the mildly entertaining Man on the Inside on Netflix, I was struck by a painful mirror image of the bad old days. In the series Ted Danson plays a bored, retired engineering professor who takes on a job as an undercover investigator for a PI to investigate a theft in a retirement home. We get some stereotype old people behaviour, but also some embarrassingly hypocritical sexism.

I'll come back to that in a moment, but to put it into context, I've also recently been rewatching the excellent 2006/7 TV series Life on Mars. In the show, the 2006 detective Sam Tyler played by John Simm hallucinates himself into a 1970s Manchester police team after a brain injury, working under the wonderfully unreconstructed Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Something Tyler constantly attempts to battle is the casual sexism of the male detectives, which (allegedly) had changed significantly by 2006.

Now back to Man on the Inside (made in 2024, not the distant past). Two female inhabitants of the retirement home are blatantly sexist, commenting on the body of a young man in a video, then getting a young male worker to plug something in, so that they can look at his rear end. Just imagine this had been the mirror image and old men had been discussing the body of a young woman - it would be absolutely creepy... and so was this.

Some might argue that it's okay because men got away with it for so long - but that's pure 'two wrongs don't make a right' territory. I do see this quite a lot where somehow it's considered okay for women to make remarks about men's looks that (rightly) would be totally unacceptable the other way round. At least Life on Mars was critiquing the 70s. But surely we've moved on since then?

Image by Brendan Church  from Unsplash

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Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Thefts of Christmas - Tim Major ***

As a fan of Sherlock Holmes on the lookout for a Christmas mystery, this seemed an ideal purchase - and it's not bad. But it's not great either. There have been some excellent modern Holmes ventures - think, for example, of Anthony Horowitz's House of Silk , and even more so his brilliant Moriarty . And on the whole Tim Major makes a reasonable effort of fitting with the characters as we know them - but there are two issues with the way the book's written.

To give it some context, this is a story featuring Irene Adler (who the TV show Sherlock demonstrated well was ideal for taking Holmes in something of a new direction), who is setting Holmes a series of puzzles, starting with an odd sounding vocal performance which he studies at some length as sheet music. All the puzzles, it appears, are to be thefts with no theft - perhaps the cleverest these involves a stolen painting that never existed. And there is some entertainment as Holmes and Watson attempt to get a grip on these, while also trying to reconcile an apparent murder with Adler's supposedly light-hearted intentions. But there also some problems here.

Major's writing style drifts too far from Doyle's - this is particularly apparent in the behaviour of Mrs Hudson, who seems to have lost her wits (and sometimes uses wording more suited to the version in the current-day TV show). And Holmes is both ridiculously incommunicative and given to strange behaviour. Of course, the original could be intentionally obscure, but this Holmes is downright obstructive to Watson. As for the 'twelve thefts', while a few of these are clear, many of them are vague references that we never really are sure have anything to do with the plot, in a book that ends in a way that Doyle would not have countenanced.

I got through the book, and enjoyed it in part, but the author neither had Doyle's style nor his ability to weave a plot without ending up with a messy tangle of threads.

You can buy Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Thefts of Christmas from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder.

An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree. This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has.

The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Carter Dickson and Dorothy L. Sayers. But the remainder, while most quite good only just touch on a winter connection (if at all), let alone having the Christmas setting. To make matters worse, the longest story in the book is the dire The Mystery of the Sleeping-Car Express by Freeman Willis Crofts. This plodding train-based locked room mystery is dull in the extreme. It might have been rescued a touch by a clever twist at the end - but the solution is pedestrian.

As a whole it's not a disastrous book, but unlike all its predecessors it's going on the 'dispose' pile rather than my shelves for re-reads. Don't be put off from the series, though, if you like this kind of thing - there are plenty of delights in all the earlier volumes.

You can buy Murder by Candlelight from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org but you'd be better off with the likes of Murder under the Christmas Tree, also  from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Don't put magicians on pedestals revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 

An edited post from December 2014

Over the years, magicians like Harry Houdini and James Randi have shown time and again that they have ideal skills for spotting and debunking fraudulent claims of magical abilities and mental powers. In the Telegraph newspaper, though, Will Storr had a go at 'debunking the king of the debunkers', demonstrating that Randi himself, now 87 (according to his article, or 86 according to Wikipedia), was not all he seemed. [Randi died in 2020.] For me, this was a wonderful example of entirely missing the point.

Storr made three main accusations. That Randi has at some point been doubtful about the science behind climate change, that he was intolerant to drug users and that he had lied about replicating Rupert Sheldrake's dog experiments, in which Sheldrake claims to have shown that at dog was able to predict when its owner would return home.

The first two, frankly, are hardly worth considering as they are classic type errors. Being good at debunking fraudulent psychics does not make you a climate change expert. Why should it? And some perfectly respectable scientists have doubts about some aspects of climate change science. It's the nature of science - it's not a belief system where you have to sign up to everything it says in the big book. As for Randi's attitude to drug users, again, so what? So that leaves us with the strange incident of the dog.

It seems likely, if we take Storr's article at face value, that Randi did indeed claim to have replicated an experiment when he hadn't done so. This isn't good. But in a sense it is the inevitable reverse face of the reason that Randi has done his job so well in the first place. Randi has always argued that scientists are not very good at devising tests that prevent those with a stage magician's skills from cheating, or at detecting such cheating in action. What you need, he says, is a magician. And he has proved time and again that he is right. Scientists don't have the expertise of a magician. Well, guess what? Magicians don't have the expertise of a scientist either. Randi isn't a scientist. So why are we surprised when Randi fails to operate in a proper scientific fashion over the Sheldrake business?

In fact, in his own writing, Randi has made scientific errors. In his book Film Flam he comments 'Jack van Impe, a TV evangelist who perspires and preaches his version of science regularly to millions of believers, recently gave us an Easter message that reflected his ignorance of science. He referred to the preposterous "Jupiter Effect" so beloved of some nuts, which is supposed to cause wonderful catastrophes in 1982. The Earth should be a mess at the end of this claimed alignment of the planets, and I can hardly wait to see the show. Said Jack, "The Earth will be seven times hotter." Codswallop. The term has no meaning. "Seven" is a number, Jack. If you take the normal temperature to be 70 degrees Fahrenheit, that makes the new reading 490 degrees Fahrenheit. If you're in Europe or Canada, that same temperature is 21 degrees Celsius, giving the other folks a break with 148 degrees C, which is equal to only 298 degrees F.' 

Yes, of course seven is a number - but that doesn't mean that something can't be seven times hotter than something else. Temperature is a measure of the mean kinetic energy of the atoms or molecules in a substance, and one thing can have seven times as much energy as another. So something can be seven times hotter than something else. (Or the world can be seven times hotter at one point in time than it is at another.) What Randi is really identifying is the arbitrary nature of the temperature scales he uses in his illustration. (And the stupidity of the prediction, which not surprisingly never came true.) If Randi had used the Kelvin scale, the numbers would be fine. But the way he phrased his attack shows that he too can get it wrong when working outside his field of expertise.

I'm not defending Randi in any way for what he is accused of doing. If his claim of replicating the Sheldrake experiment wasn't true, it was bad science, the kind of thing that gets a scientist kicked out of his job. But it doesn't in any way detract from the useful service Randi has provided over many years in devising tests and pointing out the flaws in scientific studies of ESP and the like. Has Storr shown that Randi is sometimes a liar? Quite possibly - and that's why he's good at his job. All magicians are liars by trade, even if they don't always use words to do it. More precisely, they indulge in Brainjacking - you'll find a lot on the work of magicians in my new book of that name. Deception is their business. Perhaps the problem is the fuzzy nature of Randi's skeptical foundation JREF, which gave the veneer of science to what never really deserved that label. Since Randi's death the foundation seems to have largely faded away - the last post on their website is from 2022.

When I read Storr's article, I got the impression of reading the words of a fan who discovers his idol has feet of clay. The same as those who discover their favourite singer has an unpleasant private life. Or that a Nobel Prize winning scientist had unacceptable views on other topics. Welcome to the real world, Mr Storr.

Image by Eduardo Aparicio  from Wikipedia

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Snow Crash reread

Back in 2016 I belatedly reviewed Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash - it seemed a good time to revisit and dive into it a little more than was possible in a straightforward review. Back then I commented 'If you like the kind of science fiction that hits you between the eyes and flings you into a high-octane cyber-world, particularly if you have an IT background, this is a masterpiece.' That certainly holds true of the first half.

Perhaps the closest parallel here is the 2010 Christopher Nolan film, Inception.  Both are scintillatingly delightful, but tail off at the end. The movie, still one of my favourites, loses it somewhat when it turns into a sub-Bond action movie and then ends oddly. By contrast, Snow Crash gets distinctly bogged down by an interminable section where main character Hiro is doing the metaverse equivalent of library work on a convoluted theory that combines the Babel story and some Chariots of the Gods-like uber-speculation, which becomes somewhat tedious. 

As is the case with Inception, the final denouement doesn't feel a good fit to the rest, with the treatment of the other main character, Y. T. reduced for much of that section to damsel-in-distress mode - jarring when compared with her intelligent and resourceful nature when armed with a skateboard. I was even more struck than I was when first reading the book in 2016 that Y. T.'s brief relationship with a psychotic killer was worryingly paedophilic. 

It's impossible, though, not to admire the imagination that Stephenson deployed in Snow Crash. First there's a totally deregulated USA, where the only 'laws' are those enforced by corporations - a future that feels worryingly closer now, given recent political changes in the country. And second, there's the whole concept of the metaverse. There had been many other stories of virtual reality worlds, but Stephenson gives us one that is based not on the purely imaginary technology of something like The Matrix, but where the realities of his understanding coding shine through.

Of course there are limits to that imagination's ability to probe the future. Where Stephenson's metaverse is far more sophisticated than anything we have now, his characters still carry calculators alongside their basic phones. But bearing in mind that in 1992 major computing corporations still had very little interest in the internet, and the web had only been opened to the public one year before and was still primarily text-based, this remains extremely impressive.

I'm sure that most tech entrepreneurs have read Snow Crash - and given Meta's name, its concepts are hard to avoid. But perhaps those with political inclinations should also take note of the less than savoury aspects that come through in Stepehenson's book when they think of the future.

You can buy Snow Crash from Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

Image by UK Black Tech from Unsplash

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