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 ...