Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Finished the introduction & taking a pause for some fiction before I move on to the meat of the book. The final chapter of the introduction set out what evidence he used & how he interpreted it, so the “methods” section of the book. Essentially he went through the literature for all seven civilisations and compiled a list of their features so far as we know – from archaeological data and from documentary evidence. A lot of the chapter talked about how the data is of necessity incomplete, there’s a lot we don’t know about any of these cultures but the missing parts aren’t consistent so you can still do comparisons of the ones where you do have good data. He also spent time on talking about the biases of scholarship in the various fields, and noting that he can’t claim to be unbiased either.
• “The Mercy of Gods” James S. A. Corey
  This is a new book by the authors of The Expanse series. Quite some mental whiplash reading this after a couple of Adrian Tchaikovsky books that made me think of The Expanse, coz this book made me think of Tchaikovsky. It’s a far future non-Earth setting with aliens (and the humans don’t remember how they got to the planet, there’s some sort of catastrophe in their history, but they know they’re alien coz of the different biology).

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics Leading
  
  • Interview with Ai Weiwei.
  • Interview with Sarah McBride.
• Talk 90s to Me
  
  • Interview with an actress who played a long running character on Eastenders, which I’ve never watched. She was a kid in the 90s when she started on the show.
  • another episode about something I’ve never watched – a TV drama called This Life which I don’t think I’d even heard of.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • More on the Mandelson scandal, where they both have clearly lost respect for Starmer. Plus more on the Iran war, and a short bit of a reminder about the atrocities happening in the Sudan civil war.
  • Q&A episode, covering stuff including Trump v. the Pope and how weird it is to be telling the Pope he’s doing theology wrong if you’re a Catholic (which Vance is, not Trump)
  • an episode from a month ago plugging Dominic Sandbrook’s new podcast about books, with a bit of chat with Alastair then an excerpt from their episode about 1984.
• The History of Egypt
  
  • Interview with Campbell Price about Khaemwaset.
  • Brief overview of the history of the GEM and what museums are left in Cairo.
• Empire
  
  • Back to the Mao series. This episode covered the disastrous famine caused by the Great Leap Forward.
  • and the next episode was the Cultural Revolution (which tied in well with the Ai Weiwei episode of The Rest is Politics Leading), and then through to Mao’s death & legacy.
  • Starting a series about the Arab-Israeli wars in the 60s, 70s & 80s, as a useful background to the current war.
• The Rest is Science
  
  • an episode about infinity, paradoxes involving infinity, and calculus.
  • an episode about cancer, and cutting edge research that is being done on new ways to treat or prevent it (like there’s a vaccination in development for lung cancer, and there’s methods in development for taking someone’s T-cells out, inserting new instructions for what to target, then putting them back in the body, basically vaccination done in vitro with someone’s own cells)
  • another episode about infinity, mostly focusing on different sizes of infinity and the work of Cantor.
• The History of Byzantium
  Some counterfactuals about how the history of Byzantium could’ve gone differently, and some listener questions.
• The Bunker
  
  • An episode about Canada, MAGA and the Albertan Seperatists, and how worried Canada should be (the interviewee was a bit on the fence between very and not so much so long as you start to do something to push back).
  • An episode about Orwell & things being “Orwellian” prompted by a new film called “Orwell: 2+2=5” which is part documentary part biopic about Orwell & his work (1984 in particular).
  • Weekly Wrap Up, obviously focusing a lot on the Mandelson scandal, but also a bit on the Iran war.
  • Start the Week, a bit on the Trump assassination attempt (dwelling mostly on how deadened to it all we seem to’ve got), and a bit on whether or not Keir Starmer lasts much longer as leader (they thought post locals at least).
• Oh God What Now
  
  • More on the Mandelson scandal from the perspective of what happens next in the Labour party, also a section with a guest who has written a book about how to prompt AI better (I was pleased to hear one of the panel say she was an AI refusenik, and also pleased to hear the guest say that the point of the book was that he doesn’t think people realise how little you can rely on the answers you get, but less pleased that he seems to’ve bought into the idea that these things have some sort of agency (e.g. referring to them being manipulative)).
  • The Trump assassination attempt, and the King’s state visit, plus a look at Reform’s promise to make school history lessons patriotic again.
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • Obviously about the Iran war, and also about the sackings of a variety of senior military people. And a bit about the Democrats redrawing constituency boundaries in a particular state (this whole redistricting/gerrymandering thing feels weird as a non-US person, and like cheating).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  An interview episode, also with the co-writer of this series (Karyn Lai), as a celebration of reaching 50 episodes of the series. Looked at the schools of thought they’ve covered so far as a whole – Daoism, Confucianism & Mohism – talking about things like how much they were schools, how they overlapped or did not, and also about how looking at philosophy from other cultures not just one’s own broadens the mind even of a professional philosopher.
• The History of England
  After the Treat of Dover Charles II takes England into war against the Dutch again on the behest of the French, it goes poorly and not only do the English lose the war but Charles loses the respect of his people.
• Origin Story
  Recording of the live event they did a week or so ago – first half was a takedown of Matt Goodwin, both his career & his most recent book (which Dorian reckoned wasn’t completely written by ChatGPT as it would’ve been blander then which isn’t a compliment). Second half was films that have similar themes to the overall themes of the podcast & then a Q&A.

TV

• Egypt with Dan Snow
  
  • Travelogue rather than Egyptology, and really rather shallow even taking that into account. But pretty enough that we’ll watch more than just this episode (which was about Luxor & environs).
  • A bit of Nile cruise, and a bit around Aswan including going south to Abu Simbel, it remains rather shallow but pretty. Of particular amusement was them highlighting a cartouche while talking about the Emperor Hadrian as if it contained his name … it did not. It said “per-aa” which is the Egyptian word that has turned into Pharaoh in English, so not a specific king’s name at all!
• Arts Most Satanic
  Devils in art, and the evolution of the representation of the devil from fallen angel to demonic presence. A little taken aback by him using the Egyptian deity Bes as one of his examples of devils from other cultures, as Bes isn’t coded evil in ancient Egyptian religion.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Opened up Torment II, and got ourselves up to a Tier 26 Pit. Ticked off a few low hanging bits of the Season Journey but we were too busy & this season was too short for us to’ve got far. Think I enjoyed it more than J as I’d lucked into a character type that suited the season gimmicks.

Talks

• “The Arabic Excavation Archive from Qift: Digitization, transcription, and translation of the Arabic Diaries from the Harvard-MFA excavations in Egypt and Sudan, 1913-1947” Arabic Diaries project team
  The Egyptian foremen who worked for Reisner whilst he was excavating in Egypt and the Sudan in the early 20th Century kept extensive records in Arabic of the excavations they led. These diaries were rediscovered in the early 21st Century and this team is working on making them available to the public & other archaeologists as a resource and on getting what information they can about the workers etc that is recorded in these diaries.

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Got to the end of chapter 2, where I’m taking a break. This was about comparative studies and how he’s used them in this work – for modern cultures you can do statistical analyses of factors across a decent sample size. So you can say things like cultures who feed themselves with a hunter/gatherer method don’t have hereditary monarchies with some degree of statistical significance. For early civilisations there aren’t many you can use so he can’t do as much stats. But he argues that if he can categorise his seven examples into a small number of types then the sample is probably large enough (but if they are all different then it definitely isn’t). Also discussed how he’s picking his examples, which are: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Shang Dynasty China, Classic Maya, Late Aztec, Inca, Yoruba/Benin. Basically there have to be both archaeology and historical records available as you can’t tell everything you need from only one source. So for some this means there’s a narrow window between Europeans starting to write about them & Europeans changing their cultures, but for others they wrote themselves so there’s a wider timespan. This requirement meant he hasn’t got a civilisation from the Indian subcontinent (which he’d like to have) because we can’t read the language of the people who lived in the Indus Valley. He’s also picked civilisations where he can argue that the culture has evolved in place with little outside influence.
• “Eyes of the Void” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Sequel to “Shards of Earth”, and picks up pretty much where that one ends and is still reminding me a lot of The Expanse books in flavour.

Podcasts

• The History of China
  The Opium War continues to escalate from the initial skirmishes – first the Chinese bring in reinforcements but they get defeated, then the English reinforcements turn up and are much more effective.
• The Bunker
  
  • An episode about the Iran war from about a month ago (I guess I didn’t notice the topic when it came up in the list). The take home then from the guest was that the thing that’s not been particularly noticed is that it’s already spreading regionally, and even tho that is noticed we’re still not talking really about what’s going on in Lebanon.
  • An episode about the actual currently existing AI harms that we should be worried about, using the then recent Grok creating illegal content fiasco as a jumping off point to think about the sorts of things that are already harmful.
  • Weekly Wrap Up. Which obviously covered the Iran war & the cease fire situation, but also covered Kanye West being kept out of the UK.
  • Start the Week – including the Orban defeat, but also more on the Iran war as well as some domestic politics.
• Empire
  
  • episode 4 of the series about Mao, covering the first decade or so post the Communists taking over China right up to just before the Great Leap Forward.
  • an episode I’d missed putting on my playlist a little while ago – covering the historicity of Homer & talking about what we can & cannot glean from it.
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • Rory Stewart replaced by Dominic Sandbrook this week, so a bit more leaning on history as that’s his thing. All about the Iran war, and recorded after Trump threatened genocide but before the ceasefire. Included some chat about Trump’s mental state, about if he’s fascist or not (Sandbrook still says no but does think other parts of the Trump regime are, like Miller).
  • Q&A, still with Dominic Sandbrook, talked about NATO, the World Cup, amongst other thing.
  • a short extra bit reacting to the news that Orban lost.
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • a livestream recorded just after the ceasefire was announced, so all about that.
  • More on the Iran war, talking about how fragile the cease fire seems, but suggesting it will hold so long as the Chinese want it to. Also talking about how the Democrats have done well in recent special elections, but mostly because the swing voters who hate everyone are more anti-Republican at the moment as the Republicans are in charge.
• Oh God What Now
  
  • A bit on the Iran war, some on the rise of the Greens and some on the Kanye West fiasco.
  • Mostly covered the Orban defeat, talking about what it means for Hungary but also to Europe & to the far right groups who saw Orban as the leader to imitate.
• The Rest is Science
  
  • a Q&A episode, but also a bit of a chance for Hannah to plug the series she’s just made for the BBC that we’re actually watching right now (so being a month out of date on these made it dovetail nicely), so a decent chunk of the episode discussing AI psychosis and how we’re all susceptible to at least a mild form of it.
• The History of Philosophy in China
  An interview with an expert on the Zhuangzi to round off those episodes. Mostly a compare & contrast with Confucianism but also at the end a note on the similarities with Legalism.
• Literature & History
  An episode covering the Hadiths.
• History of England Shedcasts
  Part two of the history of duels, this one covered duels during their heyday and the slow dribbling out of the custom. I hadn’t realised the final death knell was really the First World War, so much death that courting it by duelling people seemed ridiculous.
• The History of England
  An episode tying in with some nationwide project about objects that are quintessentially English, so Crowther & a friend talked about the 10 they’d pick (which included everything from Cadbury’s chocolate to the Putney Debates).
• Journey Through Time
  The downfall of McCarthy, in large part precipitated by the fact he wasn’t good in the new age of TV – his ability to manipulate how the print press reported on him didn’t help when the hearings began to be televised.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  An interview with the Prime Minister of Spain.

TV

• Hunt for the Oldest DNA
  A programme about a project that eventually sequenced DNA fragments from a soil/sediment sample that was over 2 million years old and provided an vision of what the ecosystem was at the time. A story of breakthroughs (first this guy had shown that you could get DNA from dirt at all, then subsequently pushed it back beyond the 1 million year old mark), but also it sounded like his insistence on chasing this had driven several PhD students out of science as they’d been assigned the project then failed to get anywhere with it.
• AI Confidential with Hannah Fry
  
  • This episode had a couple of examples of the ways that driverless cars have gone wrong – a crash where a self driving Uber killed a pedestrian whilst it was being tested, and a crash where a Tesla failed to stop at a stop sign, failed to turn a corner and drove straight off the road into a parked car killing one of the occupants. Fry made the point that developing new tech comes with mistakes, but that this class of mistake was avoidable and the companies should bear a significant amount of responsibility for the accidents – in the Uber case the car hadn’t been trained to recognise pedestrians who weren’t on pavements or crosswalks and also didn’t track or take evasive action when it didn’t know what an object was, so how was that remotely ready for real roads. And in the Tesla case it just didn’t do the sorts of things that the advertising said it would, so the logs show it recognised all the things it needed to recognise but didn’t do anything (and the driver was distracted looking for his phone that he’d dropped coz he thought the car capable of driving itself).
  • The final episode used the killing of the United Healthcare CEO as the jumping off point to talk about the use of AI algorithms in healthcare (but with nods to the wider use). The specific one that seems to’ve triggered the murder (or at least that everyone talks about as the thing the United Healthcare do wrong) is there’s an algorithm that United Healthcare use to determine when people get discharged from hospital – and there’s little to no flexibility so if you’re not well enough you get kicked out not well enough (and it’s systematically recommending discharge dates earlier than the patient is well enough). Fry also talked to someone with a startup that lets you select among IVF embryos for the “best” ones by sequencing the whole genome of the embryo then using AI to predict things like disease risks, but also eye colour, height, IQ. He was unconvincingly anti eugenics.
• Art’s Most …
  A series on art presented by Waldemar Januszczak, each episode of which is Art’s Most something, and this first one was Art’s Most Erotic. Covered a pretty wide-ranging selection of explicit art from prehistory through Pompeii, India, Japan, France & England. Some of which was spiritual or about love, some of which was very much not.
• Rick Stein’s Australia
  Episode 5 was another inland one, in an area between two rivers so nice & fertile for farming – settled mostly by Italians (at least in the places he visited). Most entertaining section wasn’t Italians, it was on an emu farm, where the emu chicks were a bit over-friendly. Nice sounding beef ragu recipe to try.
• The Roman Empire by Train
  This episode covered some of northern Italy (Parma, Turin) and Nimes in France. We’ve been to Turin, about 13 years ago, so it was kinda neat to see bits of the place that we recognised (as well as a bunch of stuff we didn’t as we were there to see the Egyptian Museum).

Music

• “Don’t Bore Us, Get to the Chorus” Roxette
• “Scissor Sisters” Scissor Sisters

Talks

• “Coffins as Magical Machines: Visualizing Ancient Egyptian Funerary Texts in 3D” Rita Lucarelli
  This wasn’t quite what I expected – more about the way she’s using 3D models & VR to bring the study of the texts to life, than about the texts themselves. This is in part a pedagogical exercise – involving students in creating the models, so they photograph & measure the object, and add the annotations to the model or translate the texts. All of which makes them engage with the object & all the knowledge we have about it. It’s also a way of bringing all this information to a wider audience (there’s a website https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~bookofthedead/ ). And it’s a way of investigating how the texts worked in practice rather than analysing them solely based on looking at the text in isolation.

Books

• “Shards of Earth” Adrian Tchaikovsky
  Finished Tuesday 31 March 2026. A far future space opera, that feels like it's genre-friends with James S. A. Corey’s Expanse series – external existential doom isn’t anywhere near as important to humanity as bickering about internal politics and who gets to be in charge of whom. It being Tchaikovsky there are also aliens in this universe who are also threatened by the existential doom (but I don’t feel like we’ve had as much alien perspective as I’d expect from Tchaikovsky, it’s more different flavours of human perspective). This is the first book in a series, so whilst there’s a sense of closure at the end it’s the sort of closure that is clearly setting up book 2 (which we don’t yet own) – so I’ve no real idea where the overall arc is going but I’m beginning to have suspicions. I enjoyed it, a good read.
• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  Only just started this, it’s bit of a weighty tome so I’ll likely split it into chunks and read fiction in between.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Science
  
  • A Q&A episode that covered stuff like what experiment would you like to go back & see (and Michael said he’d choose the Little Albert experiments so he could stop them, which was an unethical experiment I’d not heard of before where the researchers instilled a random fear into a 9 month old child to essentially prove that Pavlov’s findings worked in people then left him like that rather than try and reverse the process). And Hannah brought in a bit of insulating tile off the space shuttle, which is essentially air encased in very small amounts of silica fibres so it’s solid.
  • Why do we sleep & why is it such a problem if we don’t – the problems actually seem to be (partly? I’m not sure) caused by our immune systems over-reacting to the build up of chemicals that the brain is releasing to try to get us to go to sleep.
• The Bunker
  
  • Monthly column round up from February, which was just after the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
  • Monthly column round up from March (which I remembered to listen to on the day it landed), some stuff about how various columnists have handled the Iran war but also some lighter weight material.
  • Weekly wrap up – suggested reforms to political funding in the UK (crypto being the current big problem), also the Iran war.
  • An interview with the author of “Reviving Our Republic”, talking about how the US could get back on a more right track.
  • Discussion of Reform’s “lets have a UK ICE” announcement last month, in terms of both why it’s so repellent and how to best push back against normalisation of this sort of thing.
  • Start the Week – quite a bit about the Iran war, of course.
• The History of English
  He’s up to c. 1630, and in this episode talked about how the letters i & j and u & v were just becoming distinct at this point, and about the settling of New England by people who mostly came from East Anglia and how you can see that influence in their accents (tho it’s dropped off a lot more in the last century or so, so you have to go back to old recordings).
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • The Iran war, and whether Trump can get himself out of the corner he’s backed himself into, and the Assisted Dying Bill which has been killed in the Lords by a minority of the peers using technical means to force the discussions to go on so long it can’t be passed.
  • Question Time included how the UK government is cutting international aid, the Islamophobia of the right of UK politics these days, whether the vibes around Brexit are getting to the point where we’ll try & reverse it.
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Finishing off their episodes about the Zhuangzi by talking about how it does not believe in One True Way to do anything, that there is more than one way or one perspective, and fluidity is a key part of behaving in accordance with the Dao.
• The History of England Shedcasts
  Part one of a pair of episodes on the history of duelling in England & Europe from the early modern period onwards.
• The History of England
  Continuing on the story of Charles II’s reign, with the aftermath of defeat by the Dutch and Charles looking for someone to blame. Also the story of Frances Stewart who didn’t want to be the king’s mistress (she is the model for the image of Britannia that is still on some coins today). And some material that’s also in the Shedcast I listened to just before, which seemed an odd choice (not having the two be complementary, but that some material was a direct repeat).
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • Obviously focused on the Iran war, and on the trading on the stock market & betting markets around Trump’s various pronouncements which made somebody a lot of money.
  • Another episode focused on the Iran war and how Trump has painted himself into a corner that’s going to/is hurting all of us.
• Oh God What Now
  
  • Talking about whether Trump has killed off Trumpism, are we ready for a new cost of living crisis.
  • Audio from the live Zoom they did for Patreons this week, covering the ranking of countries by happiness & what sorts of underlying reasons there might be for who ranks where. Also a Q&A session.
  • A guest episode with Sven Beckert, the author of Capitalism: A Global History. Essentially talking about how we both have too narrow a sense of capitalism (it existed before Adam Smith but was a more eccentric way of organising your economic life in the past) and too broad (it is, after all, something we made up and thus we can choose to shape it). He sees us as in a transition from one way of ordering capitalism (a neo-liberal one) to something new that we haven’t yet figured out.
• Journey Through Time
  Third episode of the series on McCarthyism is where McCarthy himself first takes centre stage – but quickly becomes the name of the phenomenon.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Gavin Newsom.
• Empire
  
  • start of a series about Mao Zedong, the first episode was about his childhood & youth in the dying days of Qing China.
  • second episode takes us through the 20s & early 30s, when first the Communists (where Mao is prominent tho not officially in charge) and the Nationalists (where Chiang Kai-shek was in charge) are working together, and then it all descends into a bloodbath and the Communists are “purged”. And through to the end of the Long March and Mao’s rise to the top of the Communist Party.
• Origin Story
  A bonus episode on the idea of introverts & extroverts, which is a Jung thing originally. Possibly the episode we’ve paused most often to talk about in the middle of it – as they were saying in the episode it feels so intuitive so we all have opinions even tho simplifying it into a binary is obviously nonsense.
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An episode looking at the effects of the Iran war on oil supplies – laying out the reality on the ground that means the repercussions from this are only just beginning to be felt (20% of the world’s crude oil goes thorough the Strait of Hormuz, and the last bits that were already in transit before the Strait was shut are just getting to their destinations …).

TV

• The Roman Empire by Train with Alice Roberts
  The first episode was almost entirely in Pompeii with a little bit in Naples, showing us how much you can glean of everyday life from the ruins of the city.
• The Age of Uncertainty
  

  Finished off the last longer episode, which ended with the Soviet guy & Kissinger discussing various nuclear issues, and the others chipping in occasionally. Interesting what was and wasn’t the same now – worries about potential accidents for instance which heavily leant on the idea that everyone involved would be rational & thoughtful and communicative. Which wasn’t even entirely the case then (this is post Cuba but pre Able Archer), let alone in either Russia or the US today. Less worries about nuclear terrorists now, but if anything more worries about other states getting nukes.

  Overall a good series, interesting to watch. Definitely was opinionated but never pretended otherwise, and despite being nearly 50 years old there were only a couple of bits that really made me wince (the episode on colonialism which was rather more pro than is common nowadays, and some asides in other episodes which betrayed a belief that somehow one’s character was formed by one’s race).

• Rick Stein’s Australia
  Third episode continued up the coast towards Brisbane, this time visiting (among other things) Sikh banana growers, a Chinese-Australian artist and finishing up with a banoffee pie recipe (which I am unlikely to cook as it looks like the cream is an integral part of it).
• Stonehenge: Secrets of the New Stone
  A bit gee whiz, but not as shallow as the surface dressing suggested. It looked at where the “altar stone” at Stonehenge may’ve come from – ruling out Wales & bits of England, and settling on the very north of Scotland. Backing up this idea they showed that the whole of the British Isles shared some cultural connection and some interactions by looking at similarities in house layouts from near Stonehenge & Orkney, and at pottery types associated with Orkney turning up near Stonehenge.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Ticking off bits of the Rank II Season Journey. We also moved the difficulty up to Penitent which is where we need it to be for the Rank II dungeon, and went from finding it a bit tough to it being OK (mostly coz we got better gear, as well as levelled up) so that dungeon is now approachable I think.

Exhibition

• Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals
  This was an exhibition at Tate Britain, and was essentially a compare & contrast of the two artists. They were born in adjacent years (1775 & 1776) 250 years ago, and exhibited their art alongside each other and were both well known & respected in their day. The exhibition positioned them both as radical at the time they were working – for Turner that feels quite obvious, he gets more & more abstract over time and always seems to be painting feelings (and light) rather than detail. Constable was a bit of a harder sell, but I think it was both the subjects he chose (real landscapes in England not epic narratives in a fantasy place) and the detailed way he represented a particular moment in time rather than a generic “sunny day” or whatever.

Books

• “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World” William Dalrymple
  Hinduism spreading into south Asia after Indian culture in a less religious sense already had a strong foothold, and both taking strong root there (Angkor Wat is the biggest Hindu temple built and is not in India) and only partially being taken up (the caste system doesn’t really make it into this new cultural arena). Then moving on to look at how mathematics spread, from deep roots in India where they are first to make the jump to treating zero like a number that you could use in mathematical operations (rather than just a placeholder to indicate a lack of something), and also come up with the concept of negative numbers. Then it spreads to the Caliphate via a particular family who are prominent under the Abbasid Caliphs but were originally part of the Buddhist community in Afghanistan with links to Buddhist scholars in India.

Podcasts

• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  More on the Iran War, including pointing out that it’s hard for Trump to declare victory by fiat coz unless both Israel & Iran stop fighting he looks silly & impotent. An older episode about cryptocurrency & the threat posed to UK politics by how it can be used to funnel money into political parties in ways that obfuscate its source.
• Journey Through Time
  More on the Chernobyl disaster, continuing the immediate & short term aftermath (and the main take home for me is that we were really very very lucky it didn’t get a lot worse; oh and apparently the USSR had plans for how you keep on fighting after the nuclear bombs go off, but no plans for how to deal with a power station going wrong, which says a lot). And the next episode was about the containment of the site – which first needed the roof cleared in a very risk operation before the sarcophagus was built (in a typical Soviet hurry with ludicrous arbitrary deadlines). And finally finishing up the series with a look at the legacy, including how it was a factor in the breakup of the Soviet Union.
• The Rest is Science
  A Q&A episode, where the Principia Mathematica was brought up which is beginning to feel like a theme of the last few months of my media consumption, and also a selection of mathematical limericks. An episode on large, finite, describable numbers (mostly with some interesting hook, like just how big 52! is, given that it’s the number of ways you can organise a pack of cards and so it feels like it ought to be within our mental grasp). Another Q&A episode, including talking a bit about zero (which I listened to just as my book got to that part too), and also talking about the evolution of the anus as part of a discussion on topology & how many holes does a human have.
• The Rest is Politics
  More on the Iran War.
• The Bunker
  Greenland again, with respect to its rare earth resources and why there is a strategic significance to them (China currently controls 95% of that market). Weekly wrap up (the latest stuff about Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador, the lack of off ramp for Trump in the Iran war). US foreign policy (recorded around the time of Greenland being thing du jour) and how much is ideological and how much is the whim of Trump. An interview with the author of Fast Food Nation, talking about how things have & haven’t changed in the 25 years since he published that (the takeaway was that if anything it’s got worse). Start the Week (almost entirely about the Iran war). An episode about Wuthering Heights (the book, mostly, as this was released before the film was out).
• More Jam Tomorrow
  Decimalisation in Britain in 1971, which was fascinating to listen to as it happened a couple of years before I was born so by the time I knew what money was it was normal to everyone. Also the other planned metricisation of units which didn’t go the whole way as it got turned into a political wedge issue by the Tories.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who stood in the presidential elections in Belarus in 2020 and is now in exile in Lithuania after Lukashenko was declared victor. Interview with a former head of GCHQ.
• The History of Philosophy
  About Antoine Arnauld, who was both a Jansenist theologian (think Calvinist, but Catholic) and a Cartesian philosopher, contemporary of Pascal (who was also a Jansenist).
• The History of England Shedcasts
  The last of the Birth of Britain series, “The Age of Tyrants”, basically the bit between the Roman Empire leaving Britain & the Anglo-Saxons properly taking over.
• Oh God What Now
  More about the Iran war (from a domestic politics perspective, mostly about Farage & Badenoch saying stupid things about joining the war), the Government’s proposal to reduce the number of cases that are tried in front of a jury. And the extra bit was about nepo babies in politics. A guest episode with the author of the book “Centrists of the World Unite!” which is about how liberalism & liberal democracy is under attack from populists & argues that it’s possible to fight back. Plus a bit about Mandelson at the beginning.
• The History of England
  More of the aftermath of the Great Fire, and also the way that Charles II was once again back looking for more money to prosecute the war against the Dutch (and how that war was going).
• The History of Egypt
  A tour of Nefertari’s tomb telling us about the reliefs.
• Talk 90s to Me
  Calvin Klein, in particular the CK One advertising campaign (but also the rest of the 90s ads).
• Starship Alexandria
  About “A Sword of Bronze and Ashes” by Anna Smith Spark, which I haven’t read but the book sounds good so perhaps I should.
• The Rest is Politics US
  More about the Iran war, mostly focused on how no-one thinks it’s going well now, and how it seems to’ve been a collection of unforced errors by the US administration. And another episode on the Iran war, continuing to look at how the President is stuck and also how it’s going down with the rest of the world.
• Empire
  Starting a series on the Bronze Age Collapse with a discussion of what the world pre-1177 was like – more modern than we think, an interconnected world of superpowers & “global” trade. Next episode was looking at Homer’s epics to see what they tell us of the world of this period.
• The History of China
  The Opium War begins to actually kick off, with a vote in Parliament to go to war almost simultaneous with a battle in China where the British ships win.
• The History of Byzantium
  Q&A session for the final part of the narrative covering the fall of Constantinople.
• Origin Story
  Bonus episode on Stephen Miller, who he is and how he’s influencing the politics of the US.
• The History of Philosophy in China
  What the Zhuangzi has to say about death, which is mostly that is it just another transformation in one’s life and should be accepted as one accepts all change.

TV

• Newcastle v. Barcelona (1-1)
• The Age of Uncertainty
  We’re splitting this last episode into multiple chunks as it’s very long, only watched one part so far. The basic premise is that Galbraith got a whole bunch of senior people from politics & business and got them to talk about the issues raised in the series, ranging from Ted Heath to a Soviet chap who was an advisor on American affairs for Brezhnev to the owner of the Washington Post (Katharine Graham) to a former Thai PM. A bit of an odd mix of being very much of its time and timeless, some issues felt pertinent today but others did not, like a bit where Shirley Williams was discussing how the problem of people being given grants to go to uni then dropping out after one year was something that was going to need massive intervention to solve. Terribly condescending at various points too.
• Rick Stein’s Australia
  Starting in Sydney, and a lot about the Chinese-influenced food in Sydney. Two recipes, neither of which I’ll cook (I’m not keen on the idea of fish cooked purely in lime juice rather than with heat, and stir fried crab still in its shell is to neither of our tastes).
• The Great Philosophers
  Finishing here with Wittgenstein as afterwards they would be discussing living philosophers & there’s always less consensus on those. Wittgenstein had two totally incompatible ideas about language – initially he thought of words as analogous to pictures, their meanings are tied to the thing they represent, but later he decided he was wrong about that and put forward the idea that the meaning of words is tied to how they are used and it makes no sense to talk about them as if they were independent of the context they are used in. He came up with the idea of language games, not in the sense of trivial pursuits but in the sense of constructing your sentences according to an agreed set of rules, and there are different rules for different games (in this case an example would be science being a separate way to use language then religion or either different to philosophy) so the meanings of words shift depending on the game.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Start of a new season, time to find out what bugs they’ve introduced this time. I’m playing a Druid this time, and at the moment planning to head down the bear shapeshifting path. Which kinda fits with the season theme which is about turning into the Butcher. It has the shortest seasonal quest story ever, so we’ve finished that and it’s just a case of working our way through the ranks (and killing stuff as the Butcher) now.

Music

• Starlight Express

Books

• “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World” William Dalrymple
  Buddhism spreading into China, first via an Indian monk being taken to China, then later at the beginning of the Tang Dynasty by a Chinese monk travelling to India at a point where Buddhism was fading in India, and moving on to the Empress Wu Zetian.

Podcasts

• The Rest is History US
  Trump’s tariffs, the violence in Mexico (from a US domestic politics perspective), still more optimistic that Trump is essentially over than anyone else is. Epstein files and speculating what’s in the bits that aren’t being released, State of the Union address. Special as a reaction to Trump’s new war with Iran.
• The Rest is Science
  Mostly a Q&A, the bit that stuck in my head was a discussion of a psychology experiment where the point was to see if people would be whistleblowers, and the answer was very no (tho I immediately started wondering if the people who took the “job” they thought they’d taken were more likely to be desperate enough for the money to not rock the boat). Also another episode, boredom and can you be bored to death (no, but it can have some seriously bad effects if you’re isolated without stimulation for long enough), as a throw away they mentioned that if you put hamster/mouse wheels in the woods then wild mice will run on them – it’s a sort of irresistible but pointless way of getting stimulation. A bit like the internet.
• The Bunker
  The new rules around food advertising (which isn’t as strong as it first looks, blocking junk food ads on tv before 9pm affects essentially no kids). Weekly wrap up (mostly State of the Union ramble). The Donroe Doctrine, including putting the Monroe Doctrine in its historical context. The use of “Wine Mom” and “AWFULs” as a way of putting down the “wrong sort” of white woman (recorded in the aftermath of the two murders in Minnesota, and it feels like that was a long time ago not just over a month). Start the Week (a lot on the new war, but also the upcoming Spring Statement from Rachel Reeves).
• The Rest is Politics
  A special on the situation in Ukraine right now, marking the 4th anniversary of Putin’s full scale invasion (with Alastair in Ukraine talking to people). Special as a reaction to Trump’s new war with Iran. Another special reacting further to the new war once we knew that Khamenei had been assassinated.
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  Special on the Ukraine war, also marking the 4th anniversary. Special on the new war in Iran.
• The History of England Shedcasts
  Penultimate Birth of Britain episode. The winding down of Roman Britain, from how Diocletian’s reforms affected Britain to the rise of Constantine from Britain to being Emperor. And the sort of dribbling on of Roman Britain ceasing to be quite so Roman.
• Oh God What Now
  Peter Mandelson’s arrest, the potential ban on social media for under 16s. The Gorton & Denton by-election (extra episode). A cross over with This is Not a Drill, about the new war in Iran. More in depth look at the Gorton & Denton by-election.
• The History of Philosophy
  Interview with a scholar who’s studied Pascal’s Wager in depth.
• Journey Through Time
  Start of a series on the Chernobyl disaster, the first episode was about the flaws in both the design of the reactors and the way Soviet society was organised, and the second was the day everything went wrong.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  The second half of the Neil Kinnock interview.
• Talk 90s to Me
  Posh & Becks’s wedding.
• Empire
  More on the Indian Uprising of 1857 – the British retaking Delhi (which in part happens because the Indians are freaked out by a lunar eclipse and so think they are doomed and depart), and the atrocities afterwards.
• The History of Byzantium
  Interview episode with Leonora Neville who argues that we shouldn’t silo off the Byzantine Empire into its own thing with that language, it’s much more truthful to think of the long Roman Empire and this as the eastern part thereof.
• Origin Story
  Bonus episode on 15 minute cities, both the actual concept and its history (and very nice in this bit to get a bio of Jane Jacobs who I’ve seen referenced before but knew little about) and the nutjob conspiracy theory that’s completely poisoned the well.

TV

• Newcastle v. Qarabag (3-2, 9-3 aggregate)
• Empire with David Olusoga
  The end of the Empire, from being at its largest post WW1 to going pop just a generation later. Drew out different stories to usual – Partition in India is mentioned but not dwelt on, instead he focuses more on Kenya.
• Digging for Britain
  A bit of an animal theme here, with Norman war horses (more like war ponies, and their small size & manoeuvrability was the point), many dogs (some of which were clearly pets) on an Iron Age & Roman site. Plus plant fossils from 300 million years ago, a fossilised forest in North Wales in amongst the coal seams that their contemporaneous plants turned into.
• The Age of Uncertainty
  Cities, their development and the current (late 70s) problems – 4 types coming roughly in sequence: Royal Household, Merchant City, Industrial City and Polyglot Metropolis. Plus the “camps”, i.e. the suburbs which is where the more affluent flee to once cities stop being beautiful places. One of his points was that as each wave of migrants enters a modern city they’re seen as the other & tensions rise but this is a transient phase not the end of the world.
• The Greatest Philosophers
  The American Pragmatists – the three philosophers they talked about here were all interested in knowledge and meaning and clarification of meaning, which made it all the more bizarre that the guest (Sidney Morgenbesser) seemed not to want to be particularly clear (nor to be clarified by the host). I was particularly struck by the discussion of how they saw science as fallible, in contrast to the mainstream opinion of the scientists of the 19th Century, but in agreement with mainstream opinion of today (in that we see science as putting forward a hypothesis which is discarded in favour of a new one when evidence is found to contradict it, rather than science as putting forwards truths).

Games

• Diablo IV
  Only 9 days till the end of the season & we’re not playing loads at the moment so we mostly had a run around in a Helltide for fun (oh, and a dungeon with Treasure Goblins where J had a Mythic drop).

Talks

• “New Research on the Making of the Narmer Palette” Kathryn Piquette & Mick Oakey
  Another update from Kathryn Piquette about her Narmer Palette research (this is the fourth time she’s spoken to the EEG over the last 11 years). This time the focus was on the experimental archaeology that she & Mick Oakey have been doing – he is a stone carver who’s made some replica Egyptian pieces with modern tools, so this was him using his expertise to work with replica ancient tools (flint & copper chisels) to see what techniques worked and what sorts of marks they left on the stone to compare with the real object.

• “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World” William Dalrymple
  Introduction sets out that the book will look at three aspects of Indian culture spreading in turn, Buddhism across China & further east, Hinduism across Southeast Asia and mathematics into Arabia & further west. So the first part of the book opens with the early history of Buddhism.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics US
  Bad Bunny playing at the Super Bowl, the effects of Trump’s corruption on national security. More on the Epstein files, including discussion of Lutnick who’s been caught blatantly lying about cutting off all contact with Epstein.
• The Bunker
  Is there any truth to the idea that the UK is heading for imminent civil war (no.). Weekly Wrap Up.
• Literature & History
  The Umayyad Caliphate, which begins with the events that lead to the permanent Shia/Sunni split and ends at the transition to what we now call the Islamic Golden Age.
• Oh God What Now
  Guest episode with Ian Hughes, who has written a book about how dangerous personalities are destroying democracy (tho despite that being his book’s subtitle I thought his thesis was more that people like Trump were a symptom of how our democracy’s guardrails have eroded and then they of course accelerate it). Normal panel episode, Keir Starmer and is he safe, plus the story of the second referendum campaign as their guest has written a book about it.
• The History of Philosophy in China
  The stories about skills & ordinary people doing skilled work in the Zhuangzi. And the idea that mastery comes through direct experience and can’t be taught, and that it is a matter of the dao not of skill.
• The Rest is Politics
  Avoiding Labour & Trump, so a bit about Japan, a bit about Bad Bunny (so not a great job of avoiding discussing Trump), planting trees (Rory’s obsession).
• The History of China
  The Opium War is still not quite started – this episode was about Lord Napier coming to China and bullheadedly saber rattling until he had to slink away with his tail between his legs (and shortly after died of disease so faced no consequences). Both sides take the wrong lesson: that they should do just what they did this time but harder.
• Journey Through Time
  The fifth episode of their series on the Spanish Civil War which takes us from Guernica through to the end. Characterised by Hitler trying out new tactics to use later in other wars, and the Republican forces wasting men & effort by using WW1 tactics to gain flashy victories of no strategic importance that looked good to Moscow.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  First half of an interview with Neil Kinnock.

TV

• Spurs v. Newcastle (1-2)
• The Age of Uncertainty
  This episode was about poverty, and his thesis is that it is fundamentally down to land, and ownership thereof.
• Digging for Britain
  The south of England (sort of), including amongst other things an excavation at Trinity College Oxford, ship building in the time of Nelson in the New Forest, and some practical archaeology recreating a bone flute.
• Empire with David Olusoga
  Slavery was one of the threads running through this episode – the transport of Africans to slavery in the Americas by the British, the freeing of & evacuation of “loyalist” black people who fought for the British during the American War of Independence, the replacement of slaves by “indentured” Indian workers once slavery was banned. Another thread was the treatment of the poor & the indigenous people during the colonisation of Australia – those that got shipped out as prisoners, and the awfulness of how the Tasmanian people were treated (which was the example he chose rather than the only example).
• Aston Villa v. Newcastle (1-3), FA Cup 4th round

Exhibitions

• Hawai’i: A Kingdom Crossing the Oceans
  At the British Museum. The history of around a century between the unification of Hawai’i at the end of the 18th Century and the takeover by the US around the end of the 19th Century (plus a bit of modern looking back at what’s been lost). An interestingly different story of interactions between Britain & another culture – the Hawai’ians ended up as allies of the British, with their sovereignty respected. One of the key events the exhibition focused on was a trip by the Hawai’ian king & queen to visit George IV, on which the royal couple sadly died of measles.
• Nordic Noir: Works on Paper from Edvard Munch to Mamma Anderssen
  At the British Museum. A fairly large collection of prints from the 19th Century through to now, by Scandinavian artists including some who are members of the indigenous Sami people. A bit hit & miss for me, and although they were grouped into sorts it felt rather incoherent.
• Samurai
  At the British Museum. Really liked this exhibition, it covered the history of the Samurai in Japan from the 12th Century through to the abolishment of the class towards the end of the 19th Century, plus modern retrospectives & mythologising. Three main sections to it, first the origins of the Samurai class as warriors during an unsettled period of Japanese history, then the evolution of this class into the bureaucracy that ran the unified and peaceful country under the 250 years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and lastly the many ways the Samurai are represented today (including Darth Vader). Lots of elaborate suits of armour but all functional (after all no-one knew the peace would last so even if you only needed it for ceremonies now it was best to be prepared).
• Sufi Life & Art
  At the British Museum. A small selection of objects picked out to give an overview of Sufis and how they fit into Islamic culture. I found a set of three modern paintings of Sufi dancers the most striking part of the exhibition.

Music

• Various “Now 12”
• Pure Reason Revolution live at the Islington Assembly Hall
  As always PRR rocked, one of my favourite live bands and we managed (due to Paul & Avi getting in the queue earlier than us) to get right near the front. This tour is celebrating the 20th anniversary of their first album, The Dark Third, so they had their original female vocalist and original drummer back to join the line up for the tour. No support act, and they played two distinct sets. The first was the whole of The Dark Third in order, and the second set covered all the other albums with at least one track of each of the five. And we got two of my favourite songs when they play them live – Deus Ex Machina & Fight Fire. So I was a particularly happy Margaret.

• “I Am a Strange Loop” Douglas Hofstadter
  Finished today. It’s about consciousness and what it is, and I enjoyed reading it. His central argument is that consciousness, our sense of “I”, is an emergent property of the brain and is essentially an illusion, a stable pattern of perception that arises from how our minds work but doesn’t “really exist”. It’s a product of a particular perspective – the one we usually use when thinking about ourselves and other people (and the world in general), where we engage only on the level of concepts and symbols. But underneath those concepts and symbols of the mind are the firings of neurons and when you describe a brain at that level the “I” vanishes. He totally rejects dualism, the idea that there’s something “extra” that’s non-physical and makes a conscious being conscious. Instead he’s saying that as a mind develops into a more and more complex system that models its perceptions of the world with more & more rich & sophisticated concepts then one of the things it models is also itself and its workings. And this feedback loop of self-modelling is what generates a stable pattern that feels like it is the self.
• “His Face is the Sun” Michelle Jabès Corpora
  A bit of a change of pace. YA secondary world fantasy in an analogue of ancient Egypt (New Kingdom in feel thus far). I’ve barely read any of it, but I did like that I recognised which myth the prologue was a retelling of, and I’m a bit unnecessarily narked that the map on the endpapers turns Upper Egypt into Low Khetara and Lower Egypt into High Khetara.

Podcasts

• The History of English
  The nautical terms that entered the general English language during the 1620s (plus the history of England in that decade).
• Empire
  The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, a pioneering artistic photographer of the 19th Century. The start of a series on the First Indian War of Independence (also known as the Indian Mutiny), setting up the context of 1857 and the triggering event of sepoys forced to bite bullets coated in grease that was rumoured to be pork & beef fat.
• Journey Through Time
  The last of the series on A Christmas Carol, on how it changed the world and brought Christmas back into fashion. Start of a series on the Spanish Civil War and how it was an important prelude to the Second World War, this episode covered in high level terms the political situation in Spain in the run up, and the political situation in Europe in the run up.
• The Rest is Politics
  Mark Carney’s speech at Davos as a jumping off point for talking about the state of the world, Starmer preventing Burnhum from standing for election. Minnesota, Suella Braverman’s defection, the new centre right movement Prosper, the problem of technology enabled child sex abuse & what could be done about it.
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An interview with Samir Puri, talking about how the world is changing from a unipolar world focused on the Transatlantic region to a multipolar world focused on the Indopacific region (with minimal reference to Trump because he is not the only reason things are changing).
• The Rest is Science
  Modelling crowds using fluid dynamics, non-standard dice & non-standard shapes of standard dice (suffered a bit for me only listening rather than watching, first episode where that’s really been the case). Magnetism, what is it, how the Earth is a magnet, how robins seem to see the magnetic field (as an actual visual thing).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Animal stories in the Zhuangzi and how they look at the world through other perspectives (and a compare & contrast with the Confucian dismissal of everything not human as not important).
• The Rest is Politics US
  An interview with the Prime Minister of Norway about Nato, Greenland, Trump. The further release of the Epstein files, what the outlook for the 2026 midterms is.
• Oh God What Now
  The Burnhum debacle, the Braverman defection, how media censorship works in our modern age, the middle class spending squeeze. A single issue guest episode about what’s going wrong with UK universities.
• The History of England
  1665-1666, the plague and the continuing war with the Dutch.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
• Talk ’90s to Me
  Pulp Fiction.
• Origin Story
  Q&A episode for after their season on Socialism.
• The Bunker
  A look at how UK domestic politics sit and what Labour needs to do to turn things around (catching up, in world political terms this was post Venezuela but before the height of the Greenland stuff around Davos), Weekly Wrap Up, Start the Week, What Will Elon Musk Ruin Next? (which is actually about the AI hype cycle)
• The History of Byzantium
  This podcast has finished the chronological run, and now the episodes are sort of wrap up/overview episodes – this one covers 5 people who were influential in the East Roman Empire who didn’t come up as much in the political historical narrative.

TV

• The Age of Uncertainty
  This episode was a bit of an odd historical artifact – a look at the Cold War from the perspective of someone still inside it, first aired in 1977 and containing a lot of his reminiscences of being involved in the US administration. His analysis was that the Cold War had moved from a religious moral crusade to a pair of bureaucracies whose status & prestige were entirely down to reacting to the perceived threats from each other and creating ever more weapons. A trap that kept the military capability ratcheting up as each reacted to what it thought the other was doing (and often creating the thing they thought they were reacting to).
• PSG v. Newcastle (1-1, so they’re in the playoffs for the Champions League rather than going straight through to the next phase)
• Digging for Britain Season 13
  Scotland & the North West of England, the archaeology of Glen Coe (digging up the houses where the massacre occurred), Roman burials near Penrith (rescue archaeology before the M6 is improved), Roman bathhouse & temple in Carlisle, Somali “village” in Bradford (c. 1904, pretty appalling, these people were an exhibit essentially like they were in a zoo), and a 1970s skate park in Scotland somewhere I’ve forgotten (that was weird to see archaeology being done on something younger than me (it opened in 1978) and I’m also not sure why it was being done).
• Liverpool v. Newcastle (3-1)
• The Great Philosophers
  This episode was unexpectedly entertaining (the others have been informative rather than entertaining), as Bryan Magee started off in his introduction by explaining that he himself had written the best recent book on Schopenhauer, but he could hardly interview himself so he had invited Frederick Copleston who had written one of the other books. Which set the tone for the rest of it, it was quite a spiky conversation and they clearly had significant disagreements on how to interpret Schopenhauer and his ideas.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Up to a Tier 65 Pit but we failed that, plus ticked off all the Andariels and all the Azmodans. Did not do so well with an Infernal Horde on Torment IV, but did have a good run around in a Helltide.

Talks

• “Looking up! Uncovering histories of Egyptology on a journey through Paris” Angela Stienne
  A trot through various bits of Paris that have Egyptological connections, some obvious (the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre) and some less so (a house where the first director of the Louvre lived etc). She’s got a book out (in French) that covers more of this.
• “Animal cult in Tuna el Gebel: the animal necropolis and the priest settlements in Ptolemaic times” Mélanie Flossmann-Schütze
  A look at the development over time of the animal necropolis at Tuna el-Gebel, linking the various phases of building/burials with the phases of building at nearby Hermopolis Magna. And a discussion of the settlements nearby where the priests & other cult workers lived in 5 storey tower houses.

• “I Am a Strange Loop” Douglas Hofstadter
  
  Delving into the paradoxes that Gödel demonstrated exist within mathematics, despite Bertrand Russell’s best attempts to develop a formal system that eliminated them, which is relevant to Hofstadter’s broader point because they are strange loops. And then turning back to link this in to the discussion on levels of abstraction, and to explore how our sense of “I” arises from how our brains work without having a structure that is clearly where the “I” resides.

• The Rest is Politics US
  
  The whole let’s invade places thing, the ICE thing, Trump flipping the bird at a factory worker, will the Republican party ever return to its pre-Trump conservative roots, more focus on Greenland, is there a developing split between Joe Rogan & Trump (they think not really, it’s about tactics). Katty Kay was away for two episodes, and the guests were both ex-Republicans so there were two episodes of despair at what has been done to their party.


• Empire
  
  V. S. Naipul, who I knew nothing about before, Heinrich Hoffman (who photographed Hitler), Karsh (who photographed Churchill amongst others)


• Journey Through Time
  
  More on Black GIs in Britain during WW2 (where apparently one semi-official strategy was to try & persuade the British to be more racist, so as not to upset the white GIs), includes actual gunfights between parts of the US army in English villages and cities.


• The Rest is Science
  
  Binary, error correction in barcodes & QR codes, what planet would you like to live on if not earth; are we made of stardust, cosmic rays; drawing ellipses, planetary motion, which famous scientists (alive or dead) would you invite to a dinner party.


• Starship Alexandria
  
  The Royle Family, Greenwing, Invincible, Black Sails, The Thick of It, Arcane, The Leftovers, The Good Place, Avatar: The Last Airbender (animation), Blake’s 7


• The History of Egypt
  
  The colossal statues of Ramesses II (including the one that inspired Shelley).


• The History of Philosophy
  
  Two 17th Century CE resurrections of the idea of atomism as a break from Aristotelian ideas of how the universe was constructed (and pushing back against Decartes too).


• The Bunker
  
  Charles James Fox (a late 18th Century populist politician with some parallels to Farage or Trump but with a nicer attitude), Weekly Wrap Up, how & why the last 25 years have been full of chaos in British politics, Tommy Robinson in the context of his pivot to Christian nationalism, Start the Week, the Chinese biotech/biomedical boom.


• The Rest is Politics Leading
  
  John Swinney.


• The Rest is Politics
  
  Right wing attack on Rory Stewart, Minnesota, not visiting the US.


• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  Iran, and how it isn’t necessarily about to fall apart (it’s not a binary).


• Oh God What Now
  
  How the Tories keep defecting to Reform (entertainingly dropped just after Jenrick defected but they’d recorded it before Badenoch sacked him), corruption in the UK political establishment; another episode which was supposed to be entirely about leaders of the Labour party, but in light of events it was half about Jenrick’s defection.


• The History of China
  
  How China is primed to decline during the 19th Century. Which mostly boils down to being too successful to adapt easily, including in producing people who are highly enough educated for the bureaucracy in numbers that exceed the available jobs (which leads to corruption and dissatisfaction).


• Talk 90s to Me
  
  Stay Another Day, and East 17 in general (I had no idea this song was actually about the writer’s brother dying).


• Literature & History
  
  The Rashidun Caliphate (the current season of the podcast is early Islamic literature and he’s leaning heavily into the history angle at the moment).


• The History of Byzantium
  To mark the 1000th anniversary of the death of Basil II an episode about evidence about his sexuality.


• In Our Time: On Liberty
  
  First one hosted by the new presenter, Misha Glenny, which was promisingly had the same feel as the Melvyn Bragg ones (tho obviously not entirely the same). About John Stuart Mills, and the essay On Liberty that he & his wife Harriet Taylor Mills wrote in the mid-19th Century.


• More Jam Tomorrow
  
  Changing attitudes about women wearing trousers (it only became illegal to force women to wear a skirt to work in 2010 – well, you still can but you have to force everyone you employ to wear a skirt).


• The History of Philosophy in China
  
  About the differences between the Mohist & Daoist approaches to language. Interesting juxtaposition with the book I’m reading – the Mohists try to do something akin to Bertrand Russell’s systematisation of mathematics but to language, whereas the Daoists are more comfortable with the paradoxes & fluidity of categories.

• Newcastle v. Man City (Carabao Cup, 0-2)
  


• episode 4 of Guitar Heroes at the BBC
  A selection of music performances from the BBC, themed around having good guitarists (tho sometimes rather tenuously). This episode was nearly all from the 70s, so there was quite a lot of “what on earth is he wearing‽”.


• episode 6 of The Age of Uncertainty
  
  The Rise and Fall of Money: what money is, why we use it, how it moves from metal coins to bank deposits with the addition of paper money, how it all goes wrong when everyone realises the bank doesn’t have enough money to give everyone what they “have” in their deposits, and how the central banks attempt to control that.


• episode 4 of The War Between the Land and the Sea
  
  We’d dragged our heels on getting back to this despite ep 3 having ended on a cliff-hanger last time, but were sucked back into enjoying it. I do think it likely won’t bear much prolonged thought, it’s something to enjoy on a surface level.


• episode 2 of Valley of the Kings: Secret Tomb Revealed
  
  Good series overall, the archaeology of KV11 was interesting, but a bit padded (particularly the segment stuck in about Howard Carter half-inching stuff from KV62, which didn’t seem to link in to the overall programme anything more than tangentially – there was a bit of oooh could Carter have hidden stuff in KV11, but that was resolved really quickly as “no.”).

• Yard Act “The Overload”

• Diablo IV
  
  Did a Tier 60 Pit so we’ve attained Rank VI of the Season Journey, also ticked off killing Bartuc in the Infernal Hordes and did a bunch of Chaos Rifts so now we’ve ticked off that chunk of the Season Journey too. Some stuff on the way to Rank VII looks vaguely plausible, and we maybe have enough time to get to a Tier 75 Pit to finish up that rank.

• “The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World After an Apocalypse” Lewis Dartnell
  One of my Christmas presents. The conceit is answering the question of how would you rebuild a technological civilisation in the wake of an apocalypse, so it’s explaining how a lot of the tech that underpins life actually works. I’m near the end of the book, so currently reading about thing that would come later on, like photography (where you don’t actually need terribly complex chemicals or resources, you more need to know it’s a thing you could do).

• The Rest is Politics
  End of year wrap up, looking forward to next year and an extra episode after Trump derailed their predictions for 2026 by invading Venezuela (certainly not the reason, but it makes as much sense as anything). Depressing.


• Empire
  Two episodes on Rudyard Kipling, covering his early life & works.


• Starship Alexandria
  Several of their advent calendar episodes, all will be TV shows so I’m listening but not keeping track.


• The Bunker
  One about Peter Thiel. Also depressing. And their Start Your Week for this week (not exactly cheering).


• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An older couple of episodes about the Russia/Ukraine war & that awful “peace plan” that the Russians handed Trump. Plus one about the Venezuela invasion, which gave quite a bit of background to Venezuela.


• Origin Story
  End of season 8, wrapping up the story of Socialism with a look at where it is now.


• The Rest is Politics US
  Two episodes, covering the Venezuela invasion. They are oddly less horrified than the rest of the stuff I’ve listened to about that.


• Journey Through Time
  Last of the Harriet Tubman episodes (I had no idea she worked for the Union Army in the Civil War).


• The Rest is Science
  An episode that used the story of Ramanujan as its jumping off point (also, amongst other things, their favourite & least favourite elements).

• Diablo IV
  Closing in on completing all the chunks of Season Journey in Rank 6 (except the stretch goal ones).

Non-fiction

• "The Making of the Middle Sea" Cyprian Broodbank - a look at the history of all the way around the Mediterranean from before there were Homo sapiens through to the beginning of the Classical World. Obviously it's pretty high level overview, but full of information and things I didn't know. Also a reminder that the world has always been interconnected, even if the scale differs.
• "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" Douglas Hofstader - a book about logic and philosophy and music and mathematics and illusions and computers and how we think and how they might think. A formative book of my adolescence, I think I read it every year in my teens.
• "SPQR" Mary Beard - history of Rome from the founding through to the early 2nd Century CE. I particularly liked the way she looked at what the stories they told about themselves tell us about their values etc.
• "Thomas Cromwell" Diarmaid MacCulloch - a very thorough biography of Thomas Cromwell. Although I do enjoy them I tend to find MacCulloch's books a little too detail oriented but in this case I have a good enough grasp of the big picture to keep track of the details.
• "She Has Her Mother's Laugh" Carl Zimmer - a book about inheritance (in the biological sense) and the history of our understanding of the subject. And about how it's all so much more complicated than it looks on the surface. An odd mix, for me, of stuff I know already and stuff that has been discovered since I stopped working in biological sciences. I kinda inhaled this over Christmas at my father's house, very readable.

• "The Curated Closet" Anushcka Rees - I'm not enough of a fashionista to actually work through the programme in the book to cultivate my own signature style, but I did find a lot of useful ideas and got myself out of the rut I felt I was in with how I dressed & did my makeup.
• "Do I Owe You Money?" Georgina Wistow - Ian Mosley's memoir written by Wistow. He's the drummer in Marillion, hence why we had the book, but I think it would be a lot of fun to read even if you've not heard of Marillion. Lots of anecdotes about working in the music industry and living as a rockstar.
• "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying" Marie Kondo - I several times came across people who said don't dismiss this book without reading it, the idea you've picked up through cultural osmosis is likely wrong. And, well, they're not wrong but equally still too full of woo for me.  Mind you, I did refold the contents of my underwear drawer into half the space so at least one useful thing ;)
• "How to Be Right in a World Gone Wrong" James O'Brien - mostly a long form boggle at and attempt to engage with the ideas & people on the other side of many issues to the author. An enjoyable read (presumably only if your politics are congruent with his tho).
• "Deep Work" Cal Newport - one of those books I've seen referenced a lot, so thought I should read it and see what I thought. Some useful ideas about focus, and about how to achieve it.
• "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck" Mark Manson - I've read a few of his blog posts and liked them so thought I'd get the book out of the library. A modern rendition of the bits of Stoic philosophy that are palatable to modern people (at least as far as I understand stoicism ...). So a fairly straight-forward bloke-aimed self-help book (self-help type books for women are full of inner goddesses, self-help type books for men are full of stiff upper lips, I prefer the men's ones). But I find his writing style entertaining so I didn't begrudge the time reading it.

Fiction

• "The Raven" Ann Leckie - my only e-book of the year. Liked it, tho it felt a little short. It was a thinky book, and writing this post now I'm thinking it might bear a re-read soon in part to see how it reads when I know how it'll come out.
• "Arrival" Ted Chiang - J had watched the film and it's based on a Chiang short story, so I got the compilation that it's in out of the library. My recollection now at the other end of the year is that all the stories were quite clever but some of them suffered from only being clever.
• "Making History" Stephen Fry - I'd read a review of this (the reviewer wasn't fond) but thought it sounded interesting enough to read. I actually rather liked it - the initially unsympathetic protagonist had a good arc over the book and it was an interesting take on the "if you could kill Hitler would you?".

• Stephen Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen plus 2 novellas in the same world - mainline sequence from Midnight Tides (the others before that were in 2018). Most of these were new to me, I'd not kept up as we were buying them. I still love the beginning of the series, but I felt it fizzled a bit towards the end with a side order of what felt like gratuitous violence in the last couple of books. Decided not to buy any more of the other books that fit around this series, at least for now.
• Raymond E. Feist's The Riftwar Saga - this is the first series in this great sprawling universe, and the only ones we own. Fun reads but I still don't really feel the need for any more of them to keep (I've read more in the past from the library). They feel quite generic, tho there are bits & pieces that make them unique but not enough to make them special.
• a handful of Dick Francis books - I like these, he's got a knack for character that makes each protagonist feel like a unique individual even though there's clearly an underlying formala to the books. As the 5 I own span 30 or more years you can also see that Francis was capable of adapting his plots as technology and society changed etc (like mobile phones show up in the most recent one I own c. 2000 and alter how the story plays out).  Candyfloss for the brain, but sometimes that's just what one needs.
• a whole collection of Neil Gaiman books - I've always found Gaiman a bit hit & miss, but I was pleased to see the ones we own are more hit than miss. I particularly appreciated the Egyptian references in American Gods this time round, and Neverwhere was also more compelling than I remembered.
• a selection of Alan Garner books - The Owl Service is the one I partly remember from childhood, embedded somewhere slightly beneath my conscious mind (a deeply creepy story of Welsh mythology embedded in a modern (for the time) setting). More famous are The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, and we recently bought the last of the trilogy (which was only published in the last few years and is Not A Children's Book). I like Garner's stuff, he's unsettling and creepy but compelling as well, and it holds up well for an adult reader.
• "Legend" David Gemmell - the only Gemmell I own, not quite sure why I never got more, except I re-read this and liked it but still didn't really fancy picking up more. Perhaps a tad generic? But then again it was definitely critiquing the genre so not really that generic.
• a selection of books by Mary Gentle - this is the author I'm in the middle of. I was really looking forward to re-reading "Ash: A Secret History" because it's only of my favourite books, and having re-read it it still is. I like what she does with the framing device, I like how she merges several genres, I like the big two fingers up at "you can't have women in medievaloid military fantasy it's not realistic" nonsense. It's got themes about how to be a woman, about nature vs. nurture, about free will. It's also an epic story. So far I've also read Ilario (which is set in the same world and has a lot about gender and gender roles in its themes as well), and 1610 (which isn't the same world, and has a lot about free will (but also a relationship I found a bit unsettling)). They are all good stories too, it's just they're also the sort of books that make me think about things, and I like fiction that does that.