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Forgot I was reading this… It’s good stuff.

Two chapters on Marchamont Nedham? Hurrah! I was pondering doing a PhD on him at one point...

A solid follow-up to Lucy Hughes-Hallett's book on the Duke of Buckingham, skipping 20 years of the chaos of the personal rule and civil wars (the details of which I've never really been that interested in) to the political, philosophical and psychological innovations of the Commonwealth and Protectorate.

Rich people getting even bloody richer by dint of being part of a rich boys' network and being in the right place at the right time and basically spread betting rather than any real skill or insight. This book makes me angry, even as it fascinates.

Reading as a Jewish-focused follow-up to Nur Masalha's book Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History. It so far seems to be basically a more in-depth (and, TBH, engagingly-written) version of Masalha's final two chapters. Which is kinda what I was looking for.

With the long overdue promise of a Gazan ceasefire (we'll see if it even happens before we worry if it'll last, with the Israeli cabinet set to vote today and Netanyahu already claiming it's been broken before it's begun), I thought it was time for another big book on the region. So far, this is proving fascinating - and deliberately provocative.

Goodreads is telling me this is only 400 pages, but it's actually 680, including notes and index, with the body to page 628.

It's also really rather good.

Christmas present to myself...

So I carried on. The India section was *very* dated, admiring in a patronisingly paternalistic, really kinda racist way - that would nonetheless have been remarkably progressive for the 1930s... Now on to China, out of a grim fascination to see what a 1930s American author made of the revolution - and because a pre-Pearl Harbor Japan section follows...

This is very good. Not sure why I'm taking it so slow beyond just enjoying it.

This is a big, long, wide-ranging book that sometimes feels extremely dated, other times surprisingly progressive for something originally published in the 1930s. Is it telling me much I didn't know? Not really. Will I persevere with it? Hard to tell.

Listening to this on Audible as it's dropping out of the free inclusions at the end of the month, and I'm kinda intrigued. So far have just got through the conceptual scene-setting, and it does feel pretty dated - much talk of "savages" and the like - and fairly simplistic, though not as bad as I'd feared. Would probably work better in physical form, given the frequent quotations. Hard to keep track of what's what.

Too many people called Henry, William, Louis, Phillip, Matilda, and Geoffrey - but well done so far

I've been properly mainlining this in audiobook form while on dog walks, then returning to my physical copy to refresh my memory and check spellings, as the narrator is an American doing an impersonation of Winston Churchill, and often gets pronunciation wrong...