Reviews and Comments

It's interesting, though feels very much like someone asked for something as close to the expanse as possible. It's competently written but I miss the voice and spirit of Brookmyre's Earth-bound works.

O'Toole's a very good writer, and it does show in this collection. However, the nature of this collection of newspaper columns means even he can get repetitive, going over the same points over and over again. It's useful as a historical artefact, reminding us of what was preoccupied the UK and Ireland in this period but if you want a book by him on Brexit and the British, go to Heroic Failure first.

Interesting, annoying, frustrating, but challenging. There's plenty in here I don't agree with and some of it has the feel of "old man yells at cloud" but also thought-provoking, especially in the first two sections. The idea that the author and their voice are separate and that we should we more interested in what they say than who they are is explored in different ways and gives you different ways to look at literature, which is one of the purposes of criticism.

My only complaint about this is that it's the last of rhe Wayfarers series. Becky Chambers has an amazing talent for creating characters and I want to know more about what happens to the characters from this and the other three books. This book is a perfect example of how story and plot come from character. There's a big exciting event here, but the main purpose of that is to bring these five characters together and explore how each of them affects the others. However, through these characters - none of whom are human - we get a sense of this universe, how it works, and the frustrations that brings to each character's life. There's even a discussion about politics that captures the realities of it and how people deal with it.
A great read, and eager to see what she does next.

Interesting book, but I suspect the title is more the publisher's than the author's. It is about Oswald, but there's more on his predecessors and descendants, and the nature of Kings and state-building in the seventh century. Lots of detail and discussion of how much we can know from limited and unreliable sources, but an interesting story about how England was formed out of post-Roman Britain.

I knew a rough outline of modern Irish history before reading this but O'Toole brings it vividly to life in this engaging and informative book. I'd mainly read his work on Britain before, so it was fascinating to see his take in his own country. He explores the decisions made in his youth about what the future of Ireland should be and how they had unintended and unexpected consequences in the decades that followed.
His overall theme of what people knew and chose not to know (the "unknown known") captures the ambiguities of this history and the accumulation of hypocrises that had to be accepted and then forgotten about to prosper.
As ever O'Toole writes in engaging prose with a fantastic ability to turn a phrase that explains the situation and reveals his personal view.

There's some really interesting bits in this, and some great pieces of writing but for me it doesn't come together as a whole especially in the "here are my unorganised notes" second half.

Some really fascinating points in this book but it works more as a collection of stories and facts than as a while work. The way Sanghera had collected all these points into a single place is fantastic research, but I sometimes felt adrift from an overall argument helping to make more sense of it.

An interesting book, especially in the light of recent events in the (still just about tied) UK. The two threads of the dtorybweave together in interesting ways in the latter stages and there's an interesting mix of a Ballardian tour through a very British dystopia and the more gritty urban drama happening elsewhere.