I like a good murder around Christmas, preferably with a Christmas theme. When I got these six murderous short stories by P. D. James, I was only expecting some good writing, but in practice a couple of them do have Christmas themes, notably the longest entry in the relatively slim volume, The Murder of Santa Claus , which also includes a traditional country house setting. It makes a fitting companion to the four stories in The Mistletoe Murder (though I do feel Faber were rather tight in splitting these into two - both books together would make a good length for a single volume). These mostly aren't murder mysteries in the traditional sense, in that they tend to be seen from the viewpoint of protagonists rather than detectives, but each story features a killing (probably - one is not entirely honest with us), and each is both a beautiful piece of writing and takes us into the working of a dark mind. My favourite was the most gut-wrenchingly powerful, The Girl Who Loved Gravey...

Each year I attempt to find at least one Christmas murder mystery - after all, what would Christmas be without a good murder? I thought I had hit the jackpot with A Christmas Railway Mystery - not only a Victorian Christmas setting, but the location of the murder was the Great Western Railway village in my home town of Swindon. And there is no doubt that the book had its enjoyable elements, but it also had some severe limitations. Perhaps the best bit was the evocation of the Railway Village, built by the GWR adjacent to the railway works where it built its rolling stock, reflecting the mix of benevolence and patronising control that seemed to accompany some of the better Victorian employers. Edward Marston evokes the detail of the village and its life well, apart from the oddity of describing the (still existing) buildings as red brick - they aren’t. Marston also gives a satisfying mix of strands, with the main murder investigation in Swindon set alongside developments in the...

The 'affordable' Zoe There was a discussion on today's Today programme about the pros and cons of introducing green numberplates for electric cars , enabling their owners to use bus lanes, park for free and such, to encourage us all to buy electric cars. There was rightly some doubt expressed that this would do the trick. But I was amazed there was not a single mention of the electric car elephant in the room - pricing. I want an electric car - I really do. I would have one tomorrow. But I simply can't afford one. I can get a new petrol car at prices starting around £7,000. The cheapest mainstream electric car, the Renault Zoe, would cost me £21,000 - three times the amount. And that's for a silly short range. If I want an electric car with a range that is suitable for journeys other than commuting (which I do) there's nothing under around £35,000. But the cheapo petrol car can manage that range and more. There it is, quite simply. Fiddling around with ...

There's quite an industry these days in art/science crossovers, which can often be seen from one of two directions - as trying to make science more accessible or trying to make art more relevant in a scientific world. Mary Peelen's collection of poetry is not really trying to do either of these things - and as a result does a much better job than any of the other, often over-earnest, attempts I've seen. The title might suggest that quantum physics is a linking theme, but though physics is perhaps involved more than the other sciences, even within physics Peelen brings in a wide range from thermodynamics to string theory, while her poems often also are entangled with mathematics (who can resist a poem titled dx ?), chemistry and medicine. Most of the poems are spare, frequently only taking up a single page and consisting of ten non-rhyming couplets. I liked the approach - it felt like it was giving me thinking space to absorb the words. Despite titles such as Superno...

This week’s Labour Party conference has put forward a proposal to radically restrict private schools. In essence, the policy seems to have three strands - remove the beneficial tax arrangements, restrict the entry to universities from private schools to 7% of the entry and, at the most extreme, to get rid of the private schools entirely, taking over their assets. The first of these seems eminently doable. Most commentary seems to suggest the last is just rhetoric and is unlikely to happen. But what interests me with a statistical hat on is that 7%.  Because it makes no sense at all. While it is true that only 7% of children attend private schools, this isn’t a sensible number to apply here. If you want a flat attendee number, then what’s important is the number of students taking A-levels, where the percentage is more like 15%. But even this figure is misleading. The problem is that far more private schools are selective than are state schools. It would be ridiculous to exp...

This article first appeared on the Popular Science website, but was lost when the site was moved. I'm now reinstating it in a more suitable location. My maternal grandmother, Annie Clegg (nee Pickersgill) was an enthusiastic story-teller, and I don't doubt the tales she spun for me inspired me to start writing myself. She was greatly influenced herself by the vicar from her childhood, the Reverend G. R. Oakley - and was responsible for my reading his melodramatic account of the ghost of Clegg Hall, and for a fascination with the Hall that has stuck with me over the years. In the feature below you can find out more about: Clegg Hall's history  Clegg Hall today  Visiting Clegg Hall  The Reverend Oakley  The Legend of Clegg Hall (an extract from In Olden Days)  The history  The 'Clegg' in the name of the current hall refers to the location (Little Clegg or Great Clegg) rather than the family - the house was built by a Theophilus Ashton in the ear...

This is an odd one. Scientists are used to giving the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle a hard time - almost all of his science was wrong, and in some cases, his ideas misdirected scientific thinking for nearly a couple of thousand years. Worse was his apparent ability to ignore easily obtained evidence when it contradicted his ideas - infamously, he proclaimed that women have fewer teeth than men. Yet Craig Adams is clearly a huge fan of Aristotle and makes a reasonable case for the importance of his contribution to some of the more useful aspects of philosophy. We're not talking navel-gazing here, but rather practical thinking on how to reason and understand better. The 'six secrets' that Adams mentions are deduction, induction, analogy, reality, evidence and meaning. While scientists will be familiar with many of these, they may not be totally clear on how they are used in practice (rather as many English speakers don't have technical knowledge of English gramm...

It's around 20 years since Naomi Klein's book No Logo was written (it was published in 2000). As it's generally regarded as an influential piece of writing, I thought it would be worthwhile revisiting it. At the time, I thought it was an interesting book, if naive and painfully overwritten. Coming back to it, there were two immediate responses. One was to really be aware how much it would have benefitted from a serious edit - it's 490 pages of tiny print and probably only has the content of around five magazine articles. The rest is words for the sake of it and repetition. It's still worth reading, but it's unnecessarily hard work. The other is an element of plus ça change etc. Inevitably part of the fascination of looking back is what has changed - although some of the big brands remain, others such as Virgin Megastores, Blockbuster, Benneton and Staples have disappeared or diminished, while the likes of Google weren't on the radar then. And neither K...

I was recently in Lille, and the most entertaining thing there was watching a pair of rats fight each other. While that statement's true, it's rather unfair to Lille. I am biassed, as I had no intention to be in Lille (other than passing through). To be precise, I was on the Eurostar train from Brussels to London. Things didn't start brilliantly, but at Lille they went spectacularly wrong. We had left Brussels about an hour late, allegedly because an electrical problem meant that the check-in went down for a few minutes. (It wasn't clear why this fault, which happened when most of the travellers had already checked-in, should stop everyone boarding, but that's how it went.) But we were soon in Lille, where we were joined by a bunch of people from Disneyland Paris (so quite a lot of young travellers) and expected to be whisked off at 200 mph any time soon. Only, we weren't. Waiting on the platform after being turfed off We sat in the train for some ti...

Cobblestone in the wild These days I stream most of the music I listen to, which leaves me with a bit of a quandary. I can listen to music on my computer or TV soundbar with reasonable quality, or my phone or Echo speakers with so-so quality. But I have a perfectly good old hi-fi system with really rather nice Monitor Audio speakers that sits there doing very little. I used to use an Apple Airport Express, and then a Neet Airstream , which joined my network and allowed me to play music from iTunes on my computer to the device - but the Airstream has given up the ghost, and it was always a restrictive way of operating. Now, though, I've picked up a Cobblestone and couldn't be happier. It's a rather elegant device, shaped and textured like a flat pebble. In principle it's very similar to the Airstream - it connects to the Aux In of my hi-fi and music gets to it via wi-fi. (There's a lot of -fi around.) However it's much clever in its support of the techn...

To Primephonic or not to Primephonic... that is the question. Like many others, while generally impressed with Spotify, I have struggled with some aspects of it when it comes to playing 'classical'* music. Spotify is totally oriented to songs, where much classical music is in the form of a piece consisting of several parts or movements, which are usually provided as separate tracks. Similarly, in classical music, the composer is a key part of the information - more so than the performer - where in Spotify's songs it's very much performer to the fore. In fact, some of these issues aren't even limited to traditional classical music - I am very much a child of prog rock, and prog rock albums are made to be played as albums, not individual tracks. I was, therefore, really please when a Facebook query by Emma Darwin brought to my attention Primephonic - a streaming service specifically oriented to classical music. I've had a two month free trial and I'm v...

There is no doubt that Alan Garner is a remarkable writer, for whom a sense of place is absolutely central to his writing - so it's not entirely surprising that in this memoir of his childhood up to the age of 11 (with a couple of short articles from later years), the location where he was brought up - Alderley Edge - plays as much as part as his childhood friends and relations. This was not the Alderley Edge of the modern football star - the village from mid-1930s to mid-1940s was a typical large rural village of the period with the familiar combination of eccentrics and everyday occurrences. Garner was a sickly child, whose illnesses also have a major influence on what we read. For such a sophisticated writer, there is a deceptively simple style, relating events in a way that seems not much different to the way the young Garner himself might have related them - relatively little pastoral description, far more on what happened, with a casual attitude to time that enables him...

A good British crime novel is a wonderful thing, and I felt fairly confident coming to Dead Simple because according to the cover it has sold 14 million copies. But, for me, it was a huge let down. Peter James manages a couple of interesting twists and turns along the way, which I presume accounts for those sales. But the characters are mostly two-dimensional, the plot is incredibly far fetched - and this is a world where mediums can solve crimes. There are a couple of interesting ideas in the plot line, but the trouble is that James piles coincidence on unlikelihood to produce a ludicrously infeasible string of events. Add to this a deus ex machina ending dependent on a psychic's ability to exactly locate a missing person using a pendulum and a map (why do we bother with the police, when psychics could just solve all the crimes?) and the result is a book that convinces me not to take another step in the Roy Grace series. I usually put links to Amazon at this point - but I...

We are bombarded with statistics all the time in the news, on social media, from government and science. Sometimes they are very useful. At other times they are simply wrong. But there's an in-between way to use statistics - deliberately or otherwise - that is both accurate  and  misleading. I just want to give two examples, though there are many more out there. If you want to find out more about the use and misuse of statistics, I'd recommend my book  Dice World   on the impact of randomness, probability and statistics on our lives and David Spiegelhalter's book  The Art of Statistics  to get an introduction to how statistics are created, used and misused. The first example is a deliberate attempt to mislead. The graphic at the top right has been circulated on Facebook. The idea is the this demonstrates the problem with Brexit by showing how important the EU is to us an export market. It doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with Brexit, the issue ...

Purely by coincidence, I asked Father Christmas for two sort-of travel books with a social conscience, so it's handy to be able to review them both together. The first I read was James Bloodworth's Hired . Rather like a modern version of Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier , Bloodworth's book describes six months 'undercover in low-wage Britain.' Bloodworth takes on jobs in an Amazon warehouse in Rugeley, as a care worker (sort of) in Blackpool, in a call centre in the South Wales Valleys and as an Uber driver in London. His experiences provide valuable insights into the life that goes with these low wage jobs. The workers face two huge problems - not being paid enough to live on and oppressive working conditions, including zero hours contracts. The low pay was potentially the case in all the examples (in principle, the Uber driving could have produced a better return), while the conditions varied from the extremely iffy at Rugeley to pleasant enough at the Admiral ...