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Gladwell doing his Gladwell thing – this time about how underdogs win, and the complexity of assumption which leads you to think that they won’t. Captivating stuff (albeit with some elements that have you thinking “reeeeeeeeallly?” afterwards) and worth a read. My challenge is that now having listened to his podcast a lot I can’t…
Standup Mathematician Matt Parker – who I know of via the old Festival Of The Spoken Nerd shows when I lived in London, and latterly his appearances on the wonderful Numberphile YouTube channel and A Problem Squared podcast – has collected an anthology of maths-related disasters to show how important it is, and what sort…
Superb interview transcripts discussing the conception & production of the first 4 seasons of Black Mirror – detailing not only storyline & production, but also the goings-on-at-the-time in terms of budgetary constraint and the move to Netflix, the actors they were able to get, production design… everything! And all pinned together by the easy conversational…
What an absolute prick. So, this book was the sequel to what was, predictably, an account of the first 3 years of the Trump Presidency. I don’t know where to start. The authors used their credibility to gain access to talk to key players in the saga, to obtain minutes, recordings and transcripts, and collate…
I actually wrote a “proper” blog post on this one… it seemed the thing to do at the time.
A collection of transcripts from John Cleese’s addresses to Cornell University during his tenure (now indefinite) as professor-at-large at Cornell University: a post which, as he describes it, consists of “turning up periodically to stir things up”. It’s probably fair to say that about a third of this book is the transcript of his conversation…
Lovingly assembled collection of bits & pieces from dear-departed comic & human being Jeremy Hardy. He was truly one-of-a-kind and several nuggets in this book really shone out for me. Interspersed throughout were tributes/contributions from other friends & comics, making for a book which was more of a fond & fitting reminiscence, rather than a…
You’d think that a history of a 200 year old company could be a yawn-inducing affair, echoing the tedium of digging through endless ledgers that the author inevitably had to do to look for clues in reconstructing the stories… however in the right hands it is the stories that come to life, and this exploration…
Sorry John… I found this book, whilst small, incredibly annoying. I get that it was meant to be a simple little positive idea – and arguably one that’s very helpful to a lot of people. But how does that make a whole book? The book’s notable for being short and cheerful, which is something its…
Absolute belter of a first novel from one of the “QI Elves” – a dystopian future novel that stands up to John Birmingham levels of excellent, set in a world where the Earth has stopped rotating. Very difficult to put down; I found I finished this in the space of a week. Loved it.