For me, P. D. James’s Dalgleish mysteries are always slightly compromised by the original TV series. With its hauntingly beautiful theme music and Roy Marsden’s sympathetically approachable if intellectual Dalgleish as a model, the original books can feel a little long, and James’s original Dalgleish a little too cold and unapproachable. Having said that, Death in Holy Orders  from 2001 is definitely one of her best. Set in a wild Suffolk seaside location (one that the theme tune seems ideal for), the book takes Dalgleish to a small Victorian theology college, initially to investigate an ordinand’s apparent accidental death on the beach, but soon to be followed by a murder. James is great at sense of place, and gives an impressive feel for the college, its resident priests and the assorted others that are thrown into what amounts to a traditional country house murder in a much more interesting setting. The book is unnecessarily long at over 500 pages, but I hardly ever felt it was ...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from September 2015 In the book I was writing when this post was written ( Dice World ) I considered the relationship of the arrow of time to entropy, the measure of the disorder in a system that comes out of the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy can be calculated by looking at the number of different ways to arrange the components that make up a system. The more ways there are to arrange them, the greater the entropy. As an example of why this is the case, I was talking about the letters that go together to make up that book, and the very specific arrangement of them required to be that actual book. Assuming that there will be about 500,000 characters including spaces in the book by the time it's finished, then there are 500,000! ways of arranging those characters. That's 500,000 factorial, which is 500,000x499,999x499,998x499,997... - rather a big number. It's not practical to calculate the number exactly, but there are approximation ...

As a big fan of UK-based urban fantasy, I'm always on the lookout for something new:  Fiends in High Places promised to deliver that difficult combination of urban fantasy and humour. It has some engaging points - but on the whole doesn't quite make it. In D. C. Farmer's world there is a small establishment that tries to operate as an immigration control for fae - creatures from other intersecting realities, often with magical abilities. The central character Matt Danmor is thrust into this unseen world when he witnesses an attempt to sacrifice one of those in control of immigration and gradually discovers that he is, himself, not just an ordinary person on the street (after falling in love with the would-be sacrifice's niece). Unfortunately, the humour is heavy handed. At one point, for example, our hero (accompanied by a sweary talking vulture) travels to an alternate world where shops include Bloops (the apothecary), Harpy Nix, Herods, Starstrucks, Mage & Septre...

It is somehow appropriate that I read this as as result of listening to a podcast where two of the contributors debated whether the BBC was biased. The book stresses both the need for the Beeb to change in the face of a changing media landscape, what that change should be, and how the BBC should be funded. Like most books comprising a whole list of essays from different contributors there is inevitably both conflict and overlap. And a handful of the contributions were dull corporate speak. Nonetheless there was plenty of genuinely engaging content for anyone who wants the BBC to exist but realises it needs fundamental change. It was certainly interesting to see how the same problems could result in very different suggested solutions as pros and cons were discussed of subscription and taxation, hybrid or otherwise, and even some genuinely original suggestions like building a BBC AI that would act as the interface to its material. The only major irritation I had as an older person who o...

Sabine Hossenfelder is a theoretical physicist who has primarily moved into science communication. I've personally found her helpful (if sometimes critical of popular science writers) and good at highlighting where the science community needs to think more about exactly what they are doing, and whether it is science at all.  To be balanced, Sabine is vigorous in her commoditisation of her communication. She started with a simple blog (which I think is the best thing she's done, because I don't like watching videos), but now she runs a heavy-duty commercial operation. This is not in itself a bad thing, but I have seen it suggested she is intentionally controversial, as that gets your videos more views. From my viewpoint as a more traditional science communicator, I'm all in favour of anything getting the message of science across and think she's a very useful addition to the field. In a video  entitled I can't believe this really happened (which has already rece...

It's very rare I pause the book I'm reading because another one has come out - but when it's a new Janice Hallett I really have no choice. And it was well worth the interruption. As we've come to expect from Hallett, the book is made up of forms of communication - in this case texts, WhatsApp group messages and emails, plus transcription of some police recordings. At first sight this is a simple crime setup. We are introduced to Sue and Mal Eastwood who are relatively new at running a pub - central to the story is their pub quiz, where we get introduced to a whole cast of characters in the regular teams before a sinister new team joins and wipes the floor with everyone else. Things are shaken up when a body is discovered nearby. However, being Hallett, there are also some huge twists along the way. We quickly find out about links to a major kidnapping case in the past involving key characters... and things get more and more twisty from there. As someone who write murder...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from September 2015 Roger Bacon is a misty figure in the history of science. Over the years, this thirteenth century friar has been portrayed as a mystic, magician, scientist ahead of his time and second rate collector of other people's ideas. It doesn't help that he often gets confused with his unrelated (as far as we are aware) Elizabethan namesake Francis Bacon. But it is in part because of the messy way that Roger has been reported over the years (even starring in a play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries) that he is a fascinating subject. My book on Bacon and his science  has an intentionally provocative subtitle. I ought to make it clear that in many ways he clearly wasn't the first scientist. Apart from the impossibility of coming up with a 'first' and the argument that you couldn't have a scientist before the word was coined (a terrible argument to my mind - you might as well say there weren't dinosaurs befor...