London: Portrait of a City – Roger Hudson (Comp)

On August 25, 2026August 23, 2026 By bookramblings142In UncategorizedLeave a comment

It is not a pleasant place… It is only magnificent…
Henry James 1881

James went on to say much more about the city but I think these ten words capture the essence of London possibly better than anyone else, certainly London as he knew it was at the height of its powers in the late Victorian age. This is the final volume in my August 2026 reading theme of which the first three books have been part of a logical set published by the Folio Society, unfortunately they only produced three books in the series but after bouncing around the UK for the rest of the month at the end I’m going to concentrate on this selection of writings and pictures focused on the capital, London, also using a Folio Society publication.

This book follows a similar structure to the other three with various paintings illustrating the city as the centuries pass with contemporary texts selected by Roger Hudson to complement them. The first chapter deals with Roman times until the reign of Richard III (died 1485) which is a massive 1540 years, but as Hudson explains there is little in the way of writings about London during that period and the only substantive passages are both from the reign of Henry II (1167-1189). These are by William Fitz-Stephen, a Londoner, and Richard of Devizes who despite his name was a monk in St Swithen’s at Winchester which previously had been the capital, and still hoped to be again, so had no love for London. The contrast between their two passages is fascinating.

The Thames and The City from the terrace of Old Somerset House – Canaletto 1750

The next chapter covers the Tudor period (1485-1603), which is when London sealed its dominance as the capital and a poem written by the then ambassador from Scotland in 1501, William Dunbar, flatters the city.

London, thou art of towns A per se,
Sovereign of cities, seemliest in sight,
Of high renown, riches and royalty;
Of lords, barons and many a goodly knight,
Of most delectable lusty ladies bright;
Of famous prelates in habits clerical,
Of merchants full of substance and might,
London, thou art the flower of cities all.

Hudson quotes the whole poem but I think the first verse gives an idea of how it goes and I was also thrown initially by the strangeness of there being an ambassador from Scotland, but of course back then it was a separate kingdom.

The book continues in chronological order through the Stuarts and of course the revolution and the impact the Protectorate had on the capital with the march of The New Model Army in 1648 into the city to demand back pay, London alone owed £100,000 around £15 million in today’s money. I didn’t know anything about this aspect of the revolution before reading this book, for more about this period of English history see another Folio Society book ‘The Trial of Charles I‘ which I reviewed in 2020.

Smithfield Market in the early 1800’s – aquatint after Thomas Rowlandson

After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the city saw a flowering of culture and the great fire in 1666 gave an opportunity for a major redesign of the cluttered streets. This period is largely covered by extracts from the diaries of John Evelyn and of course Samuel Pepys, I really must read his diaries again, its been over twenty five years since I last did so and the sections quoted reminded me of how very readable he is. The book also includes a double page spread of Wenceslas Hollar’s famous prospects of the city before and after the fire showing just how extensive the destruction was.

Later on we are introduced to the dark side of the city in a chapter entitled Hogarth’s London 1700-50 which not only includes cartoons by Hogarth but Gillray as well despite him being an artist of the 1800’s but he also deflates pomposity so belongs here. The texts in this chapter are from John Gay, the writer of the Beggar’s Opera, and Jonathan Swift amongst others which add to the expression of deprivation both in standards of living as the city grew as well as in moral standards.

Trafalgar Square by Moonlight – Henry Pether 1860’s

By the time we reach the 1800’s properly London was the capital of an empire and whilst the poor were still oppressed, as vividly shown in the writings of Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew, the city was becoming more and more wealthy with monuments and great squares and parks being constructed. This affluence was satirised by Lord Byron in his great poem Don Juan particularly in the section quoted in the book.

There stands the noble hostess, nor shall sink
With the three-thousandth curtsy; there the waltz,
The only dance which teaches girls to think,
Makes one in love even with its very faults.
Saloon, room, hall, o’erflow beyond their brink,
And long the latest of arrivals halts,
‘Midst royal dukes and dames condemn’d to climb,
And gain an inch of staircase at a time.

St Paul’s in the Blitz – Herbert Mason 29th December 1940 (incorrectly dated as 1941 and without photographer citation in the book)

I don’t know what I expected from this book but it has provided a vivid history of the city expressed in the words of the people who were there at the time. I think it would make a great gift for any Londoner, I lived and worked there for a few years in the 1990’s so am familiar with many of the aspects covered both in the chosen paintings and texts and greatly enjoyed revisiting the city if only vicariously.

Travels of a Victorian Photographer – Selected by Roger Hudson

On August 18, 2026June 25, 2026 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

The third and last of this brief series by The Folio Society turned the original concept on its head. Whilst the first two were in turn a book and then a collection of writings both were illustrated by contemporary photographs. This time it is the photographer that is featured and the images are illustrated by selected texts. For me despite the fact that this is supposed to be a book of photographs there simply aren’t enough of them and they are somewhat overwhelmed by the text presumably in an attempt to match the balance of text to images from the first two volumes which is somewhat unfair to the great Francis Frith. With that in mind I have selected six images that I think show what Frith was doing and why he is was important not just for photographing so much that is now lost but for his impact on the developing tourism industry and indeed without ever knowing it, the postal service.

Fortunately I knew the name of Francis Frith many decades before I read this book as I was a deltiologist (a collector of postcards) from a child and as I got older and took it more seriously was a founder member of The Potteries Postcard Society in Stoke of Trent back in 1983, so I was really looking forward to this book when it came out in 2001 as Francis Frith was a pioneer in the field of souvenir images. Firstly may I apologise for the reproduction of the pictures, the book really didn’t want to lie flat so the sharpness of Frith’s work is sometimes not as I would like with these handheld pictures of the quite glossy pages. Oddly this is in tune with the book itself as despite it being ostensibly a book about him, Francis Frith is only mentioned in the introduction and it is the texts by twenty nine different writers such as Beatrix Potter, Charles Dickens, Francis Kilvert and Henry James that makes up the bulk of the contents so I would like to right that wrong in the next paragraph or two.

Francis Frith was born in 1822 and started his career as a wholesale grocer in Liverpool which was so successful that he could sell the business at the age of 34 and effectively retire as what would now be the equivalent of a multi-millionaire. On the proceeds he started to travel and went to the Middle East and the Holy Land where he indulged his new hobby taking advantage of the very early days of photography which had only been invented in 1839. With the success of selling prints from his work he decided to set up the worlds first photographic business F Frith & Co.and started supplying shops with high quality photographs of their local sites for them to sell as souvenirs, this new business also went on to be wildly successful with Frith employing numerous photographers to travel the UK taking photographs and by 1886 the catalogue listing the images available ran to 670 pages not just of British locations but selections from around the world which Frith bought in to increase the available range. Sadly Francis Frith died in 1896 so never saw the fame his business would achieve when international regulations changed on the layout of postcards in 1902 to allow writing on the same side as the address and the resulting explosion in sending postcards from wherever you went which Frith & Co. were ideally placed to take advantage of with their vast archive..

Frith & Co. were one of the leading UK companies in postcard production and there was a good chance that a seaside view postcard sent up until the 1960’s would have the name Francis Frith on it, I know I still have lots. But in 1970 with no family members still involved, and the then managing director about to retire, the decision was made to close the company and that might have been it, indeed the factory was due to be demolished in 1971 and the priceless historical archive of over 300,000 images, a lot of which were on glass plates, destroyed; but fortunately it was saved with just a week to spare before the bulldozers went in and we can still admire the work of Francis Frith to this day, as just ten years ago (2016) the digitisation of this enormous body of work was completed. The last 200,000 photographs were scanned in just two years and they are being cleaned up as and when somebody orders a print which is obviously a more practical way of prioritising the work and photos were still being released to the online archive up until 2023. The physical collection is now housed near Salisbury but the website is available to everyone.

Stratford Upon Avon – Shakespeare’s birthplace circa 1850 before its extensive restoration

As I said the book barely mentions Francis Frith and certainly doesn’t give the prominence due to his work. It is split into counties and Dorset for example occupies thirteen pages on which there are just five photographs and none of those are quite the size of a half page. The rest is mainly given over to sizeable extracts from the novels of Thomas Hardy, apart from a couple of pages quoting from the diary of William Allingham regarding a trip to Lyme Regis with Alfred Lord Tennyson and Francis Palgrave. What it did do though is introduce me to the works of authors I had heard of but never read before and I particularly enjoyed yet another Francis, The Reverend Francis Kilvert, who was a clergyman based near Hay on Wye just over the Welsh border but in this extract from the 1870’s he was down in the farthest south west of mainland England.

After dinner Cept. P. took Miss Lewis and me down to Land’s End, a little triangular point of rock reached by passing round to the seaward side of a tall upright shaft of cliff. The accomplishment of an old dream.
Coming back we met a noisy rabble of tourists, males and females, rushing down the rocks towards the Land’s End as if they meant to break their necks, and no great loss either. The rest of the insufferable snobs had of course been endeavouring to insult the ladies and Capt. Parker suggested that a kicking might tend to mend their manners.

I’ll definitely have to read more of Kilvert’s Diary, it appears to be a lot funnier than I expected, it’s a great pity he died so young.

I suspect that the lack of focus on Frith despite what the average reader would expect from the title is partly what ultimately killed off this short series from The Folio Society after just three volumes and I have greatly enjoyed reading the first two J B Priestley and Sir John Betjeman but I was disappointed by this final volume. So I will finish with a view of The Lake District in north west England as a carriage which had been converted into a mobile darkroom by Frith & Co can be seen, it was probably also temporary living quarters in some of the wilder parts of the UK for the luckless photographer assuming he could squeeze in with the dangerous chemicals and bulky equipment which would take priority for space.

Kirkstone Pass – The Lake District – with one of the Frith mobile darkrooms on the road

Next week I’ll be exploring the capital in another collection of writings selected by Roger Hudson for The Folio Society.

Betjeman’s Britain – selected and edited by Candida Lycett Green

On August 11, 2026June 8, 2026 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

This is an excellent companion volume to last week’s English Journey by J B Priestley. Whilst Priestley was covering the depths of the depression and concentrates largely on the people he encounters on his journey around England in 1933, this book is a selection of Betjeman’s writings between the late 1930’s and the mid 1970’s selected by his daughter, Candida, and ruminates mainly on landscape and architecture. The photographs that illustrate the book are also literally lighter in tone being sepia renditions rather than the harsh black and white of the Priestley volume. Earlier this year I read ‘Trains and Buttered Toast‘ which was also a collection of Betjeman’s talks and essays but there are very few duplications between the two books, in fact I can only think of one, which is the 1937 BBC talk entitled ‘Cooke of Cookesborough’ which is so well written and amusing it was certainly no hardship to read it again. Trains and Buttered Toast is mainly drawn from his BBC talks but Lycett Green has chosen far more widely so we get newspaper articles and longer sections from books he wrote, such as the 1958 ‘English Parish Churches’ and, of course, the Shell county guides several of which he edited along with artist John Piper and others with both of them contributing heavily to the text and photographs. The first book in the series was written by Betjeman and was dedicated to his beloved Cornwall and the West Country represents the first 79 of the 318 pages in this book, Priestley was a novelist and playwright and wrote beautifully but Betjeman was a poet and you can tell by his love of words.

Stepper Point from Polzeath, Cornwall by John Gay

I just want to quote a passage from his 1949 BBC talk about Port Isaac in Cornwall:

Can it really be that a town is half a mile away? I have walked between high Cornish hedges from St Endellion, once the parish church of Port-Isaac. The tower dwindles. The land winds. The slate of the hedges is overgrown with grasses, bedstraw and milky-pink convulvulus, pale-purple scabious and here and there darker valerian. From several places, standing on a hedge of looking through a gate, I can glimpse the sea. The sea is there all right, the great Atlantic, emerald green, wrinkled, glittering, sliding streaks of water, spotted dark blue here and there with reflections. It was a full tide, tamed and quiet for the moment, sliding around this inhospitable coast of North Cornwall, with white crescents of surf floating close inshore. From here on these high up fields, where blackthorn is sliced by the sea wind and leans inland, I can see all along the rocky cliffs to Tintagel Head. Behind me is even grander coast to the Rumps Point and Pentire. Cliffs and ocean are fine to watch, from these high windy fields as cloud shadows race over them. But where can there be a town? Less than half a mile and still no sight of it!

Eventually he does see his destination, but the beauty of the description of that short walk almost puts me beside him on the way to it.

St Pancras train shed, London by John Gay

Betjeman is probably best know for his enthusiasms for railways and churches and there are many lovely descriptions of both throughout the book, the chapter on London illustrates this perfectly as it consists of seven pieces, three of which are railway stations, two churches along with two others:

Westminster Abbey – from his preface to the eponymous guide published 1972
Paddington Station – Wheeler’s Quarterly Review, Spring 1968
King’s Cross Station – Wheeler’s Quarterly Review, Autumn 1969
St Pancras Station – Wheeler’s Quarterly Review, Winter 1969
Middlesex – Daily Telegraph, 12 August 1963
Bedford Park, Chiswick – Daily Telegraph, 22 August 1960
St Paul’s – Daily Telegraph, 25 May 1957

The article on Middlesex bemoans the encroachment and eventual swallowing up of what was once a fertile county by the ever spreading London conurbation, whilst Bedford Park is a purpose built Victorian suburb of the city which is largely praised for it’s overall plan. But it is his descriptions of the abbey, cathedral and magnificent railway stations that Betjeman really comes into his own.

May Day punting on the River Cherwell, Oxford by Thurston Hopkins

The other big difference to last week’s book is that this time we get out of England, visiting Wales, Scotland, Ireland and even the Isle of Man where he seems perfectly at home in a tiny country that always feels slightly more foreign than it’s location would suggest, enjoying the ceremony of Tynwald Day and the unspoilt countryside and of course the trains away from the crowds of holidaymakers in the capital, Douglas. It was a really fun read, even more enjoyable than ‘Trains and Buttered Toast’, the choice of longer articles than in that other book, especially the ones from Architectural Review, gave Betjeman more room to express himself and the selection by Lycett Green was impeccable letting her father’s writing shine through and including several of his poems.

The final picture in the book shows Sir John standing on the dunes at Trebethrick where he had a home and where he died in 1984. He was the only Poet Laureate to have already have been made a knight of the Realm before taking on the role, gaining the honour in 1969 before becoming Laureate in 1972.

John Betjeman at Trebethrick, Cornwall by June Brown

English Journey – J B Priestley

On August 4, 2026May 13, 2026 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

It’s time again for my August themed books and for this year I’ve chosen to feature some titles from The Folio Society starting with English Journey by J B Priestley. Annoyingly for a month that requires four entries the society only produced three books in this short series from the 1990’s so I have added a logical fourth to round them out as the books themselves deserve attention. Especially this first title ‘English Journey’ which is a classic analysis of the state of England in the depression years and particularly the year 1933 when Priestley undertook his travels across the country. The photographs used in this Folio Society edition are from the 1984 Jubilee publication by William Heinemann Ltd although eight pictures from that version could not be obtained due to changes in copyright. The photos are all contemporary to the text, so from the 1930’s

Halifax Townscape by Bill Brandt 1936 – From the chapter ‘To the West Riding’

The book begins and ends in places largely untouched by The Great Slump which had decimated the industrial north and was triggered by The Great Depression in America from 1929 to 1933. Priestley set off to find out how England had been affected by the economic collapse without realising he was seeing it probably at its worst and he started off in the south of the country where he saw some economic decline in Southampton and Bristol, far less in The Cotswolds but then as he heads north through Birmingham and The Black Country and then into The Potteries and Yorkshire poverty increases along with the dirt and grime of industry both past and present. A quote from his chapter on The Potteries and that nebulous new city of Stoke On Trent which doesn’t have a city centre that can be recognised and still doesn’t to the confusion of anyone who visits there. Priestley keeps struggling to work out where he is.

But the general impression is of an exceptionally mean, dingy provinciality, of Victorian industrialism in its dirtiest and most cynical aspect. The look of these places bears no relation to the work that goes on in them. It seems to me to be monstrous that good craftsmen, whose families have been working for generations perhaps with Wedgewoods or Adams or Spode, should be condemned to live in such miserable holes as these.

In the next chapter ‘To Liverpool and Manchester’ the great wordsmith finds himself lost for words when trying to describe what he found in Liverpool and the deprivation he found in the slums there and determines that “Miserably I decided that somebody else must give a plain fair account of this great city, the task, in the time, was beyond me”

Notts County v Nottingham Forest – Nottingham Guardian newspaper 1931 – From the chapter ‘To Leicester and Nottingham’

But it’s not all doom and gloom, Priestley manages to attend a football match, has great fun making very poor attempts at creating pottery items in Stoke, goes to Nottingham Goose Fair and even see rehearsals for one of his plays being put on at The Palace Theatre in Manchester, He admires the Bourneville district of Birmingham along with Chipping Campden and Boston on market day But its in the dark oppressive places that he really comes into his own and I don’t think I’ve read such a powerful text on squalor and deprivation largely caused by the decline of industry in the early years of the 1930’s

Phoenix Passage in Dudley photographer unknown circa 1930 – from the chapter ‘To the Black Country’

The longest chapter is describing a trip to the West Riding of Yorkshire, specifically to Priestley’s birth town of Bradford where he had arranged to attend a gathering of survivors from the First World War of his old regiment. Priestley himself was invalided out of the front lines in 1916 when the trench he was in was hit by a mortar shell and very few of his old comrades from that time were still around and able to attend the reunion but he did meet some and according to his account of the event a good time was had by all. But it is in this section that Priestley’s anger at the conflict and loss of life which had ended just seventeen years earlier is most on display, and for me some of his best writing in the entire book is in this chapter, a small section of which is shown below.

This is not a hugely positive book, how could it be when it is dealing with the early part of the depression and the waste of skilled men desperate for non-existent jobs to earn money to feed their families or the still ongoing aftermath of WWI with broken men struggling to cope with mental and physical issues. I refer to men as this was still a time when the roles of the sexes were largely differentiated, yes Priestley encountered women at work, largely at repetitive manufacturing such as he found in Birmingham and The Potteries, but the heavy industries in the north were on their knees and it was men that were employed there bringing in the income. I encourage everyone to read this book, especially now as who knows where AI and robotics are going to take us. A lot more unemployment looks to be not that far ahead as manufacturing increasingly replaces humans with machines that can work twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. I had not thought of Priestley as a social commentator before, for me he was a playwright and novelist, but he is a powerful writer especially when he rails against injustice.

A History of the World in 47 Borders – John Elledge

On July 28, 2026July 2, 2026 By bookramblings142In Reviews2 Comments

I should admit up front that the very title of this book is misleading. It contains 47 chapters – but some are concerned with multiple borders

Elledge’s introduction does include the above admission, however that only applies to the hardback, this is the paperback which has 48 chapters as there is an extra bonus one concerning Poland in this version.That it should count chapters not borders is immediately clear as many of the chapters deal with multiple borders although usually in the same geographical vicinity. In fact the subtitle “The stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps” is probably better as I would argue that the chapters concerning The Prime Meridian, The International Date Line and time zones do not deal with national, state or even county borders, but do cover lines on maps which can be very different things. As somebody who loves history and geography I knew I was in for a treat with this book and I definitely wasn’t disappointed.

Each chapter is effectively a stand alone essay of around 2,500 to 3,000 words with twenty three maps where they are needed to clarify the points made,. This makes the book easier to read and digest than might be expected from a roughly 360 page factual volume (excluding index) as you can pick it up, read a couple of chapters, and then put it back down again having gained some insight into what caused a particular group of borders to coalesce where they currently are, or were when dealing with historical examples. The first twenty two chapters are grouped as ‘Histories’ and these cover such diverse subjects as the probable boundaries of Upper and Lower Egypt, The Roman Empire, Charlemagne’s short lived empire, how borders were created in Africa by white men who never went there, right up to the partition of Ireland and the Berlin wall in the twentieth century. Part two, entitled ‘ Legacies’ covers such oddities as the town of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau which changes its name depending if you are in the Dutch or the Belgian parts or the Dutch bits in the Belgian bits in The Netherlands, yes it’s a mess, crossing the road can mean changing country and in some cases just walking across a room can do the same. One of my favourite youtubers The Tim Traveller has recently done a video covering the current state of the town but bear in mind it used to be far more confusing. Also in this section is included the far less amusing Israel/Palestine borders, China’s nautical nine-dash line, and bits of Switzerland that aren’t in Switzerland, which turns out to be a less complicated version of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau but further south. The book continues with ‘Externalities’ where you will find the time zone and Prime Meridian chapters, but also how Antarctica is split up, how maritime and airborne boundaries are determined, Eurovision, and other oddities that didn’t really fit in the first two categories.

Elledge manages to inject a little humour in his writing where appropriate, it really isn’t when discussing Israel’s borders, or the partition of India, so he writes those in as deadpan factual a manner as possible, but the general lightness of touch especially when discussing downright odd accidents of history was much appreciated when reading the book and yes it is very readable. I was particularly amused reading about the multiple accidental invasions of Lichtenstein by its neighbour Switzerland as troops and more worryingly artillery crosses the border with surprising frequency. You can also make use of the further reading suggestions, which every chapter has and which usually includes the books cited in most chapters as source material, it really is very well researched and documented and if you want to know more then you are given suggestions as to where to look. As implied in the few examples I have given in this blog the breadth of issues covered is impressive but I’m equally certain there is more than enough material to produce a second volume is Elledge wanted to and I for one would be front of the queue to buy a copy.

Meanwhile I’m off to stake my claim to Bir Tawil, the bit of Africa nobody wants, see you next week.

The Four Corners of Mathematics – Thomas Waters

On July 21, 2026July 20, 2026 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

My second book from A K Peters recreational mathematics series is unlike any other maths book I’ve read as it attempts to explain mathematical development in a historical context. Now mathematics goes back over multiple millennia and is so diverse a topic that a comprehensive historical treatise would be impossible so Waters instead looks at four distinct topics and tries to show how they developed over the centuries, these four being Geometry, Algebra, Calculus and Topology. The examples used are considerably more advanced than the first book I read and reviewed from this series, Jun Mitani’s ‘Everyday Life is Full of Math‘, this time you need at the very least A-level standard maths and probably first year undergraduate to really follow what is being explained, now I did physics rather than maths at university and A-level maths, at least for me, was over forty years ago so I confess to struggling in places but it was a great mental workout as I tried desperately to remember basic calculus during the hot weeks of this summer. The way the book is split up into roughly sixty page sections on each of the four topics is neatly summarised by this chart at the end of the book.

The great genius that is Swiss Leonhard Euler and French Polymath Henri Poincaré are the only people to be sufficiently significant and wide ranging in interests to appear in all four subjects and mentioning Euler here is an example of his work in the section on complex numbers, part of the chapters on algebra, although e isn’t a complex number it is logical to be here as part of the discussion on possibly the most famous and beautiful equation in mathematics which combines e, i, π, 0 and 1.

One of the features of the book which I particularly like is the inclusion of famous parts of mathematics in their original form, so we get an extract from Riemann’ Uber die Hypothesen in the original German and the opening page of Liebniz’s classic on calculus Nova Methodus from 1684 in Latin as almost all scientific papers were at the time, Along with possibly the most famous throwaway line in all of mathematics Fermat’s last theorem where Pierre de Fermat claimed to have found a proof that although there are lots of solutions where the sum of the squares of two whole numbers equals another whole number squared there are no examples where the power is greater than two and that he couldn’t write this proof down because the margin he was writing in was too small. Something that was not finally proved for several centuries and utilising mathematical techniques that were not available to Fermat so nobody to this day knows what proof he was referring to.

Interestingly the only mathematicians in the entire book to have their portraits included are female, in an attempt to at least partly redress millennia of male control over who could do research or publish papers and not be ‘pushed’ into the background or have their work misrepresented as somebody else’s (i.e. a male). A small number of female mathematicians have managed to be acknowledged in the past, and those are celebrated here along with several of the ones who didn’t get their due recognition at the time. Academia is fortunately not so male dominated nowadays but it is nowhere near 50/50 representation. One of the mathematicians so featured is Mary Somerville and specifically her work in translating the ‘The Mechanism of the Heavens’ by French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1831.

Somerville did get recognition in her lifetime and posthumously gave her name to Somerville College, part of Oxford University, which was founded as a women’s college.

The book can be obtained from the Routledge website and is well worth reading, the historical development is fascinating and, for me at least, a novel way of approaching the subject. The maths, although tricky in places, especially after four decades of not doing some of it, is definitely understandable and frankly you need the examples given in order to follow the way the subject has evolved over the years. Thomas Waters is Associate Head in Mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Portsmouth and this is his first book.

Carnival – Compton Mackenzie

On July 14, 2026July 14, 2026 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

I finally reach the last of the ten books published by Penguin Books in July 1935 and we are back to authors I have heard of, although in this case have never read. Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie to give him his full name is probably best known for ‘Whiskey Galore!’ a tale of a shipwreck in the Scottish islands but the ship is carrying fifty thousand cases of whiskey and the islanders are determined to hang onto as much of their surprise windfall as possible, the book was written in 1947 and turned into a film in 1948 and is great fun. He also wrote ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ which became the basis for a long running TV series between 2000 and 2005. Both of these, and indeed quite a lot of his output, are set in his beloved Scotland but this, his first stand-alone novel, written in 1912 is based mainly in London and tells the story of a rising ballet dancer who goes by the stage name of Jenny Pearl. Mackenzie was familiar with the stage as he came from a line of actors and theatre managers a lot of whom used the name Compton as their stage names.

Unusually the book starts with the birth of Jenny Pearl Raeburn in Islington and we follow her through childhood as she discovers a love of dance from around the age of two dancing by a barrel organ being operated at the end of her street. She continues to dance at every opportunity until one of the lodgers in her house, the family wasn’t well off by any means, suggested that she would benefit from formal training and knows just the school from his own days on the stage. So Jenny starts learning and we see her moving up through the various skill levels until, after a few years, she is deemed capable to go on tour with some older girls from the school and she has her first taste of independence from the family home.

I really enjoyed the ‘whole life’ telling of Jenny’s story, you get the highs and the lows, the tedium of the schooling and the first paid job, first boyfriend and the standoffish way she treats most of the men who hang around the stage door looking for pretty girls to take out. You really feel that you know her and the trials and tribulations she has with her family especially her parents as her father descends further into alcoholism and her mother gets more concerned regarding how Jenny presents herself in public. By part way through the book and as it is very well written, especially for a first novel you can get immersed in the story and the various friends she makes some of which turn out to be far less good for her than others. I’m not going to give away any part of the plot but simply say that this is a book that is well worth seeking out and 114 years after it first came out it’s still in print which is more than can be said for several others in this group of ten books

The book has been made into films three times, an American silent movie ‘The Ballet Girl’ from 1916, now believed lost as no archived copies appear to exist, then in 1931 came the first British adaptation ‘Dance Pretty Lady‘ starring Ann Casson and finally in 1946 came ‘Carnival‘ starring Sally Gray. This last one, despite retaining the novel’s original title, made several changes to the plot, especially the ending which is a lot happier than the one in the novel.

I’ve greatly enjoyed reading these first books from Penguin, with Susan Ertz and E.H. Young being delightful surprises as I’d never heard of either of these two ladies before tackling their books. As ninety year old paperbacks, and so never expected to still be around for more than a handful of years, these are all remarkable survivors and I’m definitely going to dip into more from the early days of Penguin. The reviews for all ten can be found here:

The Martian – Andy Weir

On July 7, 2026June 30, 2026 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

I’m stranded on Mars.
I have no way to communicate with Earth.
If the Oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate.
If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst.
If the Habitat breaches, I’ll just kind of explode.
If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.
I’m screwed

The above quote is from the rear cover of the book and it sets the premise of the story so well that I knew I was going to enjoy it. Yes I know the film starring Matt Damon came out in 2015, but I’ve never seen it. This is also my first time reading an Andy Weir book and with the release of smash hit film Project Hail Mary earlier this year he is difficult to avoid at the moment, so I thought I would go back to the beginning and his first novel. There are one or two scientific errors (see spoiler alert at the end of this blog) but it appears to be largely accurate, I’m not a space expert by any means so I could largely ignore the plot devices I knew wouldn’t work as the plot is so well told, and what I did know would work is properly explained. It is also very funny, which I wasn’t expecting.We start with Mark Watney realising he is alone on Mars as the rest of the crew of Earth’s third manned mission to Mars have taken off without him during an emergency evacuation of the planet as they believed he was dead in a sandstorm that had potential to destroy both their habitat and also the craft ready to take them back to orbit. They did attempt to find his body but couldn’t see anything due to the sand and had to give up as the lander was starting to lean to an degree that would have prevented take off. Watney however was injured by a flying radio antenna which pierced his spacesuit and took out his communication to the Mars Ascent Vehicle which was why they saw no vital signs from him.

The style of the novel is interesting as we don’t follow Watney in real time as he does things but in retrospect as he writes up his log, so when things go wrong the first clue is often a gap in the date at the start of the next log entry. My first impression whilst reading was that was going to be the entire structure because after all who else can he talk to, the habitat radio equipment was destroyed in the storm. But on page forty nine I finally got a chapter which wasn’t Watney’s monologue, entertaining as that was. and it was somebody on Earth realising that Watney was alive. Mindy Park had looked at satellite images of the Ares 3 landing site and spotted that the pop up tents were deployed and the rovers weren’t where they should be, that then lifted the story to two parallel tales, the day to day survival of Mark Watney and the NASA conversations as to what they could do to help, which frankly initially at least, looked like very little.

The story develops at Watney solves one problem after another, often whilst inadvertently causing another. He was originally picked as the mission botanist, but as that would have involved little work other than experiments in growing a small number of plants to see how they would cope he was also trained as the maintenance engineer, both skills that would be vital for his survival. He quickly realised that if he could wait it out until the next mission was due then he had insufficient calories to keep him going, so planting food would be essential. But Martian soil didn’t have the nutrients or bacteria needed to successfully grow anything so he needed to solve that, he also didn’t have enough water for crops as well as himself so that needed to be fixed somehow. Weir had obviously done a considerable amount of research around the various issues and how to get round them with the resources Watney would reasonably have to hand helped of course by the fact it was supposed to be a six person mission on the surface for a month and five of them had left after just six days leaving a lot of food and water to keep Watney going for months whilst he figured out how to create more starting with the handful of potatoes he had.

It’s really well written and an entertaining read and now I’m tempted to watch the film and definitely read more by Andy Weir.

Spoiler alert – do not read beyond here if you haven’t read the book or seen the film

The massive dust storm that forces the crew to abandon Mars leaving Watney behind could happen but wouldn’t have the life threatening implications given in the story, the Martian atmosphere is too rarefied to cause that sort of damage to equipment, especially something as heavy as the launch craft or the Habitat and wouldn’t blow an antenna across to Watney with so much force as to penetrate his spacesuit and almost kill him. But I know why it is written that way as Weir needed a plot device to plausibly abandon Watney. The sandstorm later on in the book, which causes him to make a massive diversion, is a far more accurate depiction in that several days after entering it he still hasn’t realised anything is wrong.
What would kill Watney however, and well before a rescue could get there, would be cosmic radiation, there is simply no way he would survive that long especially with the number of EVA’s he performs.

With those caveats, and I believe there are more issues with the film which aren’t in the book but which presumably were changed to make it more dramatic, in the book the science is pretty good especially the chemistry and the botanical solution for growing potatoes.

The Hollow Man – John Dickson Carr

On June 30, 2026May 10, 2026 By bookramblings142In ReviewsLeave a comment

‘Harrumph. To begin with gentlemen! Having been improving my mind with sensational fiction for the last forty years, I can say -‘
‘But, if you’re going to analyse impossible situations,’ interrupted Pettis, ‘why discuss detective fiction?’
‘Because’ said the doctor, frankly ‘we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader, by pretending we’re not.’

That has to be one of the most self-aware statements of any character in a book that I’ve read in a long time, and comes in the concluding third of the novel, page 186 in this edition to be precise, which I’m certain the good doctor would want me to be. I first wrote about amateur detective Dr Gideon Fell back in November 2020 so I thought, almost six years later, I should read another of John Dickson Carr’s excellent novels featuring him, especially after I found this copy whilst looking for something else and remembered how much I’d enjoyed ‘The Mad Hatter Mystery’. Carr doesn’t fetishise his detectives and like that previous book we don’t really learn much about Gideon Fell, he is a large man and happily married to his unnamed wife, she remains without a name through all twenty three of the Fell novels and the short stories, and he is interested in writing although quite what isn’t clear and that’s about it. His address is given in this book as Number 1 Adelphi Terrace which implies that he has a certain amount of wealth as that was a particularly fine row of houses on the Thames riverside sadly demolished in 1935, which is also the year this book was first published which I don’t think is coincidental. We’ll come back to interesting streets later in this blog…

The first mystery is the death of Professor Grimaud in an attic room which is locked from the inside and no possible way for a murderer to exit as the walls are too high and sheer and there is deep snow on the ground, and roof, that proves that nobody went out through the window as there are no footprints anywhere and the snow had stopped falling before the gunshot was heard. John Dickson Carr is a specialist in locked room mysteries and indeed chapter seventeen is a very interesting lecture on just such cases by Dr Gideon Fell where he examines the various types of of locked rooms and just how a murder can be committed in them and the assailant manage to escape, or preferably not be in the room in the first place. Needless to say the particular solution in this case isn’t one of the ones explored by Fell in his lecture.

The second mystery is how the prime suspect, an illusionist called Pierre Flay who had appeared in a public bar to threaten Grimaud a few evenings earlier, came to be killed at pretty well the same time. Shot in the back at very close range in the middle of a wide snow covered street with no attacker visible to the three witnesses and by the same gun that killed Professor Grimaud which was found ten feet behind him.

The third mystery is the significance of the three graves in the painting purchased by Grimaud after encountering Fley and the reasons he might have bought it. There are other oddities such as the chameleon overcoat, was it black or was it yellow tweed and where were either of them? Carr has written another great story here and the American title of the novel ‘The Three Coffins’ alludes to the mysterious and it turns out highly significant graves. It is the sixth novel he wrote about Dr Gideon Fell and I’m going to have to search out others as I’m rapidly becoming a fan of this nowadays less well known amateur detective.

I promised at the beginning to explore another street and here we see Carr thinking hard about something that could easily pass the casual reader by and that is the name of the dead end road where the body of Pierre Fley was found, and that was Cagliostro Street. Unlike Adelphi Terrace and indeed Russell Square where Grimaud and his family lived which are, or at least were, real places in London Cagliostro Street doesn’t exist but looking up Alessandro Cagliostro who lends his name to the place is fascinating and his life certainly adds a certain background to various characters in the book, even if you don’t really understand why until the very end.

Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman

On June 23, 2026April 17, 2026 By bookramblings142In Reviews1 Comment

First written in 1855 and constantly revised and added to throughout Whitman’s lifetime, I have two very different versions both published by Penguin Books USA. One from the Drop Caps series published in 2014 which is a selection from the original volume (see above) and a complete edition from the wartime Penguin series (see below) printed in New York initially to avoid shipping across the very dangerous Atlantic in WWII. But by 1943, when this book was published, most of the titles were not in the UK list at all and were aimed at the American domestic market. Indeed Leaves of Grass didn’t appear in the UK lists until 1986 when it was published in the Penguin Classics series. I’m glad I also have the over eighty year old copy, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have realised that the Drop Caps copy is seriously abbreviated, even though its title implies it is extended, in that it apparently consists of ‘Leaves of Grass and other Selected Poems and Prose’ although interestingly it does include the preface to ‘Leaves of Grass’ which is missing from the earlier edition I have. There are over two hundred poems in the complete edition as opposed to twenty five in the Drop Caps version although that does include the longest works.

The first poem in the Drop Caps edition is ‘Song of Myself’ which doesn’t appear until poem 26 on page 22 of the complete edition published during the war, but I like that the Drop Caps edition starts with this although it is easily the longest poem in the collection at 79 pages in the Drop Caps and 55 pages in the wartime version due to the much smaller font in that edition, because as a compete beginner with Whitman’s poetry it gives a good introduction to his style. Of particular interest in this poem is the use of repetition to give greater emphasis, here is section seven of the poem to give an idea of what I mean:

  Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
  I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.

  I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and
      am not contain’d between my hat and boots,
  And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good,
  The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.

  I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth,
  I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and
      fathomless as myself,
  (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)

  Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female,
  For me those that have been boys and that love women,
  For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted,
  For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the
      mothers of mothers,
  For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears,
  For me children and the begetters of children.

  Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,
  I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,
  And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.

The end of the ninth line and the five consecutive lines after it starting with ‘For me’ are by no means the longest run of repeats in the poem, indeed section fifteen has 44 lines starting with ‘The’ and listing various jobs out of the 62 lines that make up this section and of the eighteen not to have ‘The’ followed by an occupation at the start most have it within the line itself. The constant repetition builds a pleasant rhythm, especially if you read the poem out loud.

The fact that there are multiple versions of even ‘complete and unabridged’ editions depending on which version by Whitman the publisher uses makes it quite confusing for instance in the Drop Caps edition and also the version on Project Gutenberg there is a poem entitled To a Common Prostitute’ but that is missing from the wartime ‘complete’edition along with many other poems on Project Gutenberg. If it wasn’t for the other poems left out I would have assumed prudishness from the editors of the wartime edition. Prostitution is one of the occupations listed in part fifteen of ‘Song of Myself’ mentioned above and there are seven other references to prostitution in the Project Gutenberg version. The poem is short and insightful as to Whitman’s easy going and non self-censorish nature so to conclude this introduction to his works let’s have To a Common Prostitute’ as it again illustrates his use of repetition:

  Be composed—be at ease with me—I am Walt Whitman, liberal and
      lusty as Nature,
  Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you,
  Not till the waters refuse to glisten for you and the leaves to
      rustle for you, do my words refuse to glisten and rustle for you.

  My girl I appoint with you an appointment, and I charge you that you
      make preparation to be worthy to meet me,
  And I charge you that you be patient and perfect till I come.

  Till then I salute you with a significant look that you do not forget me.

The cover of the book above has the first and third verses of ‘One’s-self I sing’ which is the first poem in ‘Leaves of Grass’ in the section entitled ‘Inscriptions’ and is left out of the Drop Caps edition. The entire poem reads:

  One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
  Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

  Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
  Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse,
      I say the Form complete is worthier far,
  The Female equally with the Male I sing.

  Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
  Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
  The Modern Man I sing.