2019
From a Certain Point of View (Star Wars)
Bit of a baffling one this – it takes the chronological run of Star Wars (or, if you’re hung up on such things, “Episode IV: A New Hope”) and then each chapter of this book is a short story written from the point of view of a bit-part character. A sort of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern…
The Cruel Stars
John Birmingham’s latest dramatic fiction, told in a similar style to his Axis of Time trilogy but this time the setting is a future space colonial civilisation, where aristocratic family corporations run planetary systems, and they come under attack from a deep space movement of insurrectionists thought previously banished from the galaxy. Birmingham’s writing is…
Rather His Own Man: In Court With Tyrants, Tarts and Troublemakers
The trouble with trying to be objective about Geoffrey Robertson is that I can’t do it. The man’s an absolute legend and hero. This autobiography covers his entire life to date, from growing up in suburban Sydney – to the move to England via his Rhodes Scholarship – through to his burgeoning legal career and…
Whoooooosh!*
While surfing about and reading a bit about task estimation, I stumbled on a couple of things in Wikipedia which gave me pause for thought – you could arguably dismiss them as baseless aphorisms, but for the qualifications of the sources. The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of…
The True History of the Blackadder: The Unadulterated Tale of the Creation of a Comedy Legend
Jem Roberts dives into the story & circumstances of the genesis and development of one of the finest British sitcoms ever produced, and one which taught me most of what I know about British history (I won a game of Trivial Pursuit once on the strength of the answer “a groat”). Being such a core…
