While traveling I have found this an intensely interesting book to read on my Samsung. The amazing and astounding information it contains is better suited to bite sized reads. You can only digest the immensity and staggering size and wonder of the Universe a bit at a time. I find myself highlighting section after section, and saying “I didn’t know that” a lot out loud in airports. It’s a book I will never stop reading. What is also amazing, and hilarious, is that it is in parts already out of date! So I can tease Brian in the same way he got me…. Though it is astounding the pace of increase in our knowledge of the Universe, which can only be in response to the great threat to our own survival. It is up to the intelligent to defeat the forces of ignorance which are everywhere….  Survival of the what now? France

Probably the finest book written by and about bi-polar disorder, from someone who both suffered from and studied it, often, ironically, at the same time. She was a psychology student, while undergoing the encroachment of the manic state. The fact that Jamison was a Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a co-author of the standard medical text on bipolar illness, knew the disease as both clinician and patient, her outing of her affliction involved considerable professional risk. Her honesty and her writing skill reveal just how horrendous suffering from this disease is.   Written sympathetically, she tells her whole life story and struggles with this horror and reveals what it is like to suffer from manic depression. But her tale is optimistic since she fought and survived, thanks to intelligence, love of a brother and medication. I also read:

To try and understand how a friend could be in such a position. There have been some bleak times this summer, but at least this book shows there is almost nothing we could have done. Depression is a killer.

A very satisfactory classic who dun it. Somewhere between Agatha Christie and Graham Greene. Lovely book of a man suddenly involved in a police case in the south of France.

I very much enjoyed these wickedly sinister tales from the acid pen of the brilliant Mark Gattis, who brought us Sherlock (and plays his brother) and The League of Gentlemen. What a clever chap he is.

Not just one of the best history books, but one of the best books I have ever read. A brilliant narrative history of the hubris and arrogance of Hitler’s Panzer drive into Russia, and the fearsome consequences and the terrible price paid by both the Russians and the Germans in one of the greatest military disasters of all time. Perhaps worse than Napoleon’s equally hubristic attack on Moscow. It also shows the frightening indifference of Stalin to Soviet losses; a man equally as monstrous as Hitler. It changed the course of the war while I was still in the womb. From this point on the war was lost as even the Wehrmacht knew. Of course the insane megalomaniac continued to cause the deaths of millions of more humans. He would fight until the last German. And he wanted that to be him. Beautifully written it reads like a novel, but is sadly all true. Lest we forget.

A friend gave me this interesting book about the problems of service men coming home after World War Two. He knows my sad tale. I wish my father had been demobbed…. Nicely told and with many insights into the problems of absent fathers and husbands, returning after four or five years to complete strangers of wives and children.