I don't think I've ever read a book before where I was struck by such an immediate sense of deja vu - because the chapter headings in Stuart Maconie's The Full English were the same as the ones in a book I'd read only the week before. I had bought J. B. Priestley's English Journey (inspired by a reference to it in another book) in the same batch of shopping as Maconie's latest English socio-travel title without realising that Priestley's book was the inspiration for Maconie's. It's not necessary to read Priestley first... but I did really gain something by doing so. The book retraces Priestley's journey of 1933/4. Maconie is, without doubt, the perfect writer to do this. Like Priestley, he is a northerner who has moved down south. Like Priestley, he has a balance of socialist principles and liking a bit of the good life. And he's a big fan of Priestley's original. But, strangely, there are some problems with the format. It's limitin...

I'm a big fan of murder mysteries, and write them when I'm not working on my popular science titles. The latest (book eight!) in the series of Stephen Capel mysteries is now out, called A Contrite Heart . In it, the election of a new MP for Bath disturbs the village of Thornton Down where two of the candidates have recently moved in. Vicar Stephen Capel struggles with a moral dilemma when his best friend asks him to place listening devices in the candidates' homes for the security service - and things spiral out of control when a would-be MP is killed. What begins as a murder investigation involving Capel's newly promoted wife, Detective Sergeant Vicky Denning, becomes a race against time to save a woman's life.  Writing fiction is a very different experience from writing popular science - I enjoy it just as much and hope that you will find the book interesting too.  What fascinates me about the fiction process is the way that characters evolve as the book is writte...

Having recently been bowled over by the way that Janice Hallett subverted the mystery form in the likes of The Appeal , I found Anthony Horowitz's twist here was also refreshing. I'd admired the cleverness of his Moriarty , and seen the TV adaptation of his Magpie Murders , which involves both a fictional mystery writer and their fiction. In his Hawthorne and Horowitz mysteries, of which this is the first, Horowitz goes one step further by involving himself in the plot. What we get is a book written by Horowitz in the first person, in which a detective, Daniel Hawthorne, contacts him about writing a true crime book about an investigation that he is undertaking. The result is a fictional true crime book - Hawthorne and the crime are fictional, but the 'Horowitz' in the book is a version of the author. If, for example, you've watched Horowitz's TV series Foyle's War , there is double enjoyment in this, as he describes behind the scenes material on his work (at...

On the one hand this is the story of a cult and the damaged people in it - but it also has a science fiction twist (or, rather, science fantasy, as we will discover). The cult's charismatic leader, Sol, claims that when there's a solar eclipse he will be able to take his followers through a golden door to an alternative universe where their life-shattering bad decisions were never made - and that this is based on science, not woo. Beth Lewis structures the book in the mode that's popular with a certain type of novel of having each chapter from the point of view of one of a range of characters - in this case, three individuals. There's James, a newspaper reporter who was supposed to be spending just a week in the cult to write it up - but also has an ulterior motive. Then there's Eve, a former cult member who has left and now wants to find their secret location to take her revenge on its leader. And, finally, there's Root, a six-year-old child, one of a number of...

Sometimes a particular book keeps coming to your attention from different directions and you know that you will have to read it. This was the case with J. B. Priestley's English Journey - in fact I'd bought a copy before I even realised that it was the inspiration for the latest title from my favourite current English travel(ish) writer, Stuart Maconie. Priestley made a journey around parts of England in 1933 - not the pretty bits (apart from the Cotswolds) but more what back then were thought of as that derogatory feeling location 'the provinces'. Priestley was an odd mix for the period - a London literary type, but one from Bradford who still considered being northern a positive. What he is without doubt superb on is uncovering the social conditions of the time. Unlike Orwell's attempt, which feels a bit like someone looking at an alien species through a microscope, this is a picture of the common people by someone who identified personally with their plight (alt...

I have just been subject to the most sophisticated scam attempt I've ever come across. I had a call apparently from BT (my broadband provider) to say that my internet had been hacked. To confirm that it was really them, they sent an email and a text with a PIN. There was admittedly something fishy about it. They weren't able to specify exactly what they meant by my account being hacked, and I was confused about the PIN aspect (more on that in a moment) - so I hung up and called BT myself.  They confirmed that it wasn't them who had been in touch. It was, indeed, a scam. Not only was there not a problem, and they had not contacted me in the last 3 months, the BT operative also confirmed my suspicion about the PIN - the point of a PIN is for me to confirm who I am, not for them to prove who they are. Anyone can send you a PIN and ask you to read it back. BT won't do this when they contact you, only when you contact them. However, it's easy to see how the text and emai...

I read an article about how well the Greens did in the local elections recently and got a bit narked. It wasn't about the main thrust of the article (though I'm doubtful how much council election gains for a small party mean in terms of general elections), but rather as a result of a distinctly painful use of the word 'exponential'. In his article, Peter Franklin says 'the Greens grew exponentially — doubling their council seats from 240 to 481'. There are two problems with this. One is you can't tell if growth is exponential from two data points. And the other is that exponential growth does not mean large growth, as seems to be thought here. For something to grow exponentially, each data point (often with this kind of data, separated over a time period such as a week, month, year or as here election period) has to be related to the original value by the exponent of the number of data points. That sounds far more complicated than it really is. If you have ...

Having read rather a lot of new murder mysteries recently, I thought it would be worth revisiting one of the classics - in this case, one of the Oxford antics of Morse. This is quite a late period Morse from 1994, when the books had been strongly influenced by the TV series: Morse has a red Jaguar, is significantly older than Lewis (rather than the other way round) and is more like John Thaw. However, this doesn't mean the book doesn't have all the usual expectations of Colin Dexter's writing. One thing that's interesting about this as a detective novel is that it's much more a 'how dunnit' than a 'who dunnit'. It is obvious who's behind the killings both to Morse and us from fairly early on. But getting any further is stymied by solid alibis and tortuous possibilities - all excellently handled. Dexter's writing style can take a little while to get back into. He was always a wordy writer, and can intrude in the author's voice rather more ...

For me, almost all the best fantasy has one foot in the real world (I'll make an exception for Lord of the Rings and Terry Pratchett's books). Such books work by juxtaposing the weirdness of fantasy with our everyday lives, meaning authors can deliver far more impact. If asked to name great authors who have written in this vein it would be easy to name the likes of Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman and Alan Garner - but it's somehow easy to forget Robert Holdstock.  Part of the problem with a book like this might be that this type of fantasy is often labelled urban fantasy, but like most of Garner's work, some of the best would be better countryside fantasy - and none more so than Holdstock's Mythago Wood . I first read this in the 1980s and have come back to it a couple of times since, but starting as I did in that pre-internet era, I never realised it was the first of a series of books, so I've re-read it now before getting on to the sequel, Avondiss - and it is still a...