Not a biography of Dick Emery, but a humorous UK travel book, one of my favourite genres. With Bill Bryson setting the bar and Stuart Maconie managing to better Bryson's approach with a mix of wry observation and genuine affection, Tim Moore had stiff competition. The concept behind the book was to visit places that are widely considered to be awful and see what they are really like - Moore goes the whole hog by making the journey in an awful car (an Austin Maestro) with a soundtrack of awful music, choosing to eat and stay in the dregs of the rating system. There are dangers attached to this approach. Of the six places I've lived, three could well feature in such a book (though, as it happened, only one did - the one that most deserved it - and that tangentially), and I wouldn't be very happy if they got the same sort of treatment Moore gives to, say, St Helens, Rhyl and Cowdenbeath. The good side is that he gives genuinely interesting historical context to the sad state o...

I got a press release the other day which put across a sensible message that people often don't understand what recycling symbols on packaging mean. The sponsors of the survey SaveOnEnergy asked 2,300 people the meaning of various recycling symbols - the infographic shows their results. The percentages are interesting, though not really surprising, apart perhaps from 88% not able to understand the aluminium one. (I certainly had no clue about the financial contribution one.) So far, so good. But the headline of the press release blares Brits Are Spending 54 Hours A YEAR Trying to Recycle . What? Where did that number come from? We are also told that 'Brits can spend up to 14.2 hours a year searching for a recycling symbol and its meaning, before deciding to give up'. Really? The press release gives the following methodology (and full marks to them for telling us what it was - many don't): 1.      SaveOnEnergy averaged a ‘big shop’ every 2.5 weeks, with 60 items brought...

Like a lot of people during lockdown, when supermarket deliveries were like gold dust, we found a number of alternative sources for food. Most of those have now gone by the wayside, but one that is a continued favourite is Wild and Game . This is a non-profit with the aim of making game meat more accessible. Obviously not a lot of interest if you are vegan/vegetarian, but if you eat meat I'd highly recommend giving them a try. Apart from anything else, game has arguably significantly better animal welfare than other meats and tends to be lower in fat. But, to be honest, my main reason for recommending them is their products are so good. We're particularly fans of their brilliant patés, which are up to anything you'd get in a posh restaurant, along with their sausages, burgers, various venison products and game bird fillets. If you're into pies, they also have an excellent range of these. We started with one of their variety packs , but it's we'll worth having a ...

My natural inclination on encountering a self-help book is to cringe - but I have to admit I rather enjoyed How to Be a Well Being by Andy Cope, Jim Pouliopoulos and Sanjeev Sandhu. It's amiable, quirky and doesn't take itself too seriously (a common fault of many such books). Inside we find 22 (a strange number) lessons or rules for life, each getting a short section that gives us some detail, some thoughts on addressing the lesson and often a story of personal experience from one of the authors. Although the authors touch on spirituality occasionally, there is no resorting to woo, mindfulness and other such stuff (despite the dubious term 'wellbeing') but, rather, sensible observations on life. One way to look at these 22 sections is a series of short sermons for those who don't go to church - little contemplations on something important to our lives. It's interesting how many of the rules are obvious. We all really know them. So we get, for example, things l...

I have become very fond of a distinctly niche genre - urban fantasy crime fiction. Books by Paul Cornell (Shadow Police) and Ben Aaronovitch (Rivers of London) combine magic in a present day world with a police procedural to make a fascinating and fun read. Having exhausted their output so far, I was looking for something else on the same lines and came across Sarah Painter's four books (to date) in the Crow Investigations series, starting with The Night Raven . Although not strictly police procedural (the main character, Lydia Crow is a private investigator rather than a cop), this London-set series combines crime and magic with a genuinely original and delightful scenario. There are four 'magical families' in London with special abilities who have used these abilities to further their families fortunes - sometimes legally, sometimes otherwise. Lydia is part of the the somewhat dodgy Crow family, but has been brought up out of the family circle and has just moved back to L...

Photo by  Martijn Baudoin  on  Unsplash On Friday I was in the car from 7 to 9, so listened to two hours of the Today programme. I was getting increasingly irritated as the BBC's economics editor, Faisal Islam  was repeatedly played reporting on the news that the British Retail Consortium (BRC) had stated that a no-deal Brexit would result in £3.1 billion a year in tariffs on EU food. There was no analysis, just the big number and a couple of other shocking figures like a 57% tariff on the import (sic) of cheddar cheese. One of the main rules of good reporting of statistics is that you don't just give a big number, but that you put that number into context - and when dealing with a forecast, it's essential to explain the assumptions that lie behind that forecast. I looked on the BRC website and found the press release that contained all the information in the BBC's report. It also gave no context and no details of the assumptions. Worse, it gave no way to dig into ...

The COVID-19 change in lifestyle seems to have accelerated something that has been coming for a while - we have now entirely abandoned watching TV at the broadcast time, and, for the most part, only stream programmes. The only things we don't stream are any programs we want to watch on ITV or Channel 4 - these are recorded on a PVR (digital personal video recorder) so we can skip through the adverts. But for the rest, which is a mix of BBC iPlayer, Netflix, Britbox and Amazon Prime, it's streaming all the way. This means we spend most of our TV watching time using the excellent Apple TV box - again, it's only for ITV and Channel 4 we have to switch back to the PVR, and currently, in the summer desert of interesting new material, such times are few and far between. There's a wonderful freedom to moving away from the schedules. If we want to watch, say, three episodes of Mrs America on the BBC in a row, we can. Or to simply ignore something for a few days and then c...

Like many people, I suspect, I have been suspicious of HP's Instant Ink service. The idea is that rather than buy replacement ink cartridges when you need them, HP sends them before you need them and you pay per page. I'm not a heavy user of printing and wondered if it would be a bit like gym membership - you get ripped off because you pay every month but don't use it enough. Even so, I thought it was worth giving it a go - and it has definitely proved beneficial. I've opted for a 100 page a month plan, which costs £3.49 a month. Up until now I was typically buying a set of ink cartridges twice a year, which cost about £65 a set - so as long as I don't exceed the limit overall, this means a very significant saving. I do occasionally go over 100 pages in a month as the graphic above from the HP control panel shows - but the system rolls over pages you don't use, so in practice I'm very unlikely to go into the excess, which is charged at £1 for every additio...

This has to be one of the most unusual books I've ever read. Historical fiction author and creative writing lecturer Emma Darwin takes us on the sometimes painful journey of failing to write a new novel. Along the way we meet many members of the Darwin / Wedgwood / Galton (and co.) clan as Emma (my apologies for using a first name, but to say 'Darwin' in this context would be totally confusing) tries to put together a historical fiction story that incorporates members of her family tree. The obvious attraction for potential publishers and readers in such a novel is the Darwin name - Emma is great, great granddaughter of  the  Charles Darwin - however, she quickly dismisses Charles himself as a subject who is far too well known and takes us instead on a trip around a family tree that features a remarkable number of scientists, artists and other notables. In fact, if anything, it might seem that the struggle would be to find individuals who were dull. In reality, though, ...

Like most media outlets, the BBC is obsessed with anniversaries, but they've really stretched credulity with their latest - The Great British Menu features a banquet celebrating '150 years of children's literature' - which is clearly baloney (something I've never seen consumed on GBM). I ought to say first of all that I'm a fan of the programme, not only because my illustrious Christmas University Challenge teammate, Matthew Fort is one of the judges. I'm not knocking the programme itself - I suspect this bizarrely arbitrary number was imposed by hierarchy (I can just imagine an episode of W1A when the planners meet and come up with this pseudo-anniversary). Why is it baloney? Well, clearly children's literature is older than this. The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm , which despite being distinctly dark were certainly intended for children (the original title was Children's and Household Tales ) date back to 1812, over 200 years. Ah, the B...

Short of a cryptic challenge? I've launched a new bonus puzzle on the Conundrum book site - first 3 correct solutions submitted there (not here, please!) win a free copy of my ebook of mystery games, Organizing a Murder - Please share!

I am a great fan of Stuart Maconie's UK travel/music industry books (I confess that, coming from Rochdale to his Wigan, he paints a picture I love). In many ways he has surpassed Bill Bryson, which is saying something. But the one thing I've never been comfortable with is his political alignment. If I position myself as closest to New Labour, he has always felt to the left of this. Of itself it's not a big issue, but I've particularly struggled with his romanticisation of the working class life. My dad's parents were mill workers in Rochdale most of their lives (my grandad had to play professional cricket to make something to live on when they were laid off in the early 30s). And one thing they always stressed to me - the first in my family to go to university - was that they hadn't wanted the same life for my dad and me. They saw nothing romantic and noble in mill work - it was a means to live and no more. It's not to say that I don't share Maconi...

At the moment, many of us have more time to fill than usual. I'd like to do my bit by offering my first three Capel murder mystery novels free to download on Kindle. I'm only allowed to do it for five days: they will be available to download from Tuesday 24 to Saturday 28 March 2020 inclusive. I've provided links below to download from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com. Enjoy - and feel free to mention this to anyone who might be interested. Not got a Kindle? You can download a free Kindle reader for tablets, smartphones and computers. A Lonely Height When Stephen Capel moved to his first parish in a rural village after four years as a prison chaplain he expected a quiet life. Not to discover a drowned man in the ruined tower on top of Glastonbury Tor.  Dealing with an increasingly complicated relationship with the local police, Capel begins to suspect that there is a link between this death and the murder of a famously eccentric photographer in Glastonbury Abbey...

 I know practically everyone else in the world has already read Wolf Hall - but I've come late to the party. Oddly enough, the delay was primarily because it won the Booker Prize. That tends to label a book as literary fiction, and for me that all too often means pretentiousness and a book that is both miserable and a pain to read. However, I saw a review of Hilary Mantel's third book in the series which praised Wolf Hall for its humour. That pushed me over the edge - and I'm glad it did. Admittedly I do enjoy pretty much anything Tudorbethan - it's my favourite musical period, the architecture's great and the whole Thomas Cromwell / Henry VIII / Church of England story is deeply fascinating. I had already read all of C. J. Sansom's Shardlake series set in the same time and place (for example, Lamentation ) and had loved those - and I had quite enjoyed the TV adaptation despite a few moans , though that wasn't as well endowed with humour as the book'...

Like many others, I use Amazon, but feel a bit guilty about it. I know I'm not alone in this, as I regularly get asked why my www.popularscience.co.uk  popular science/science fiction book review site has links to buy books from Amazon. The reason is simple - I get paid a small affiliate fee if someone uses one of the links at no cost to the purchaser, and it's the bookselling site with such an affiliate system that has the widest reach. However, as some people really didn't seem to like me using Amazon, I thought I'd add a second option and now am providing a link to UK bookseller Foyles as well. And here's the thing. Quite a lot of people have clicked through to Foyles... but no one has bought a book from them. The fact is that no one else offers the same combination of low prices and rapid delivery as does Amazon. So, while it gives you a nice warm glow to order from an independent bookshop (and I certainly try to buy from them whenever I'm i...

Erin Morgenstern's first novel, The Night Circus is one of my favourite books, so I was awaiting the infamously difficult second novel with a mix of anticipation and concern. Now I've finished reading it, I think both emotions were appropriate. Although still a fantasy with a partial real-world setting, The Starless Sea is a different kind of book to The Night Circus . As both have something of a period feel (despite The Starless Sea being set in the present day), I would say that the new book is like an Impressionist painting to the first novel's Pre-Raphaelite. In The Night Circus , the attraction of the book was crystal clear - here it's fuzzy and consists more of light than detail. Overall, The Starless Sea is a very clever creation, intertwined in a complex fashion. Most of the narrative has interlaced fairy stories, which initially seem to be little elements on the side but gradually weave their way into the whole. It's a long book - perhaps a tad to...

I was more than a little sceptical of the idea of someone other than Conan Doyle writing a Sherlock Holmes novel, especially one that would prove to be more than a pastiche, but Anthony Horowitz has managed to tread a remarkably fine line and produce an engaging Holmes novel that is very much true to the spirit of Conan Doyle, but has its own distinct nature. While Horowitz makes use of all the dark settings of Victorian London, and language that we expect from the narrator, Dr Watson, he extends the characters of Holmes and Watson to add in significantly more humanity - these are less two-dimensional characters than those that Conan Doyle portrayed. (Don't get me wrong: I love the originals, but these versions have a little more to them.) Even the Baker Street Irregulars become people here, rather than devices to move the plot along. Another advantage Horowitz has is being able to bring in a crime that it is unlikely Conan Doyle could ever have written about - which he ...