Oct 16 2026

Book review: Hadrian’s Wall by David J. Breeze and Brian Dobson

This review is of Hadrian’s Wall by David J. Breeze and Brian Dobson. Reading this book was prompted by visiting Birdoswald Roman Fort, on Hadrian’s Wall, during a recent holiday to the Lake District. I have also read more widely about the Romans in Britain.

Hadrian’s Wall is divided into seven chapters titled The Concept of a Frontier, The Building of Hadrian’s Wall, The Antonine Wall, The Two Walls, The Army of the Wall, Life on the wall and The Third and Four Centuries.

There is a short conclusion chapter and extensive appendices covering Roman Emperors and Governors of Britain, The regiments of Hadrian’s Wall, The Gods Worshipped on the Wall, The Roman Names of the Forts on Hadrians Wall and The Evidence on the Ground.

Emperor Hadrian’s plan to build a wall at a boundary was a novelty in the Roman Empire, to that point the Roman army had acted on the implicit assumption that the boundary was the end of the land. They fought battles with mobile units with forts to provide over-winter accommodation for the following year’s fighting. Hadrian made boundaries in both Britain and Germany. They were not strictly fortification, they served to control access in and out of Roman control rather than anticipating pitched battles on the line of the wall.

Perhaps disappointingly for the British, the Roman Emperors tended to stage military actions for their own advancement, Britain sometimes provided a useful arena but more often Roman Emperors were looking to the Middle East. The Emperor Hadrian (117-138AD) had pulled back troops from Britain to fight elsewhere and planned the Wall to define the Roman area of interest in Britain.

Construction of the Wall proper started around 122AD. It was built over a relatively short period, perhaps 3 or 4 years. The Wall followed on from the older Stanegate Roman road which followed roughly the same line but a little further south. The wall itself is relatively wide, 3 metres, certainly wide enough for patrolling but not for fighting. It was built to a clear masterplan with regularly spaced milecastles (small forts), turrets and gates. A series of larger forts were added to the Wall include Birdosvald, Chesters and Vindolanda. The system of forts extends beyond the wall at the Cumbria end, down to Maryport and the is some evidence for a few forts on the North Sea coast. Breeze and Dobson include much minutiae of the construction of the wall and forts, trying to identify which parts were built by which of the several military units. The plan changed during the construction of the wall with the width reducing part way through. A “vallum”, a bank and ditch earthwork, was added south of the Wall a few years after initial construction in around 130AD.

Work on Hadrian’s wall stopped immediately on the death of Hadrian in 138AD, he was succeeded by Antonius Pius, his adopted son, who started work on his own Wall, the Antonine Wall. Although there is no evidence it seems likely that the construction was a question of military prestige, most likely backed by local generals bored of simply manning a wall. The Antonine Wall was of turf on a stone base, similarly forts had turf ramparts although might contain, it runs between the Forth and Clyde estuaries and is approximately half the length of Hadrian’s Wall. Hadrian’s Wall was largely abandoned when the Antonine Wall was built.

There’s very little written evidence for what was going on in Britain in the mid to late 2nd century. Hadrian’s Wall was reoccupied in 158AD and the Antonine Wall abandoned by the mid 160s. It seems there was some sort of uprising in southern Scotland in the last two decades of the second century.

There is quite a lot known of the structure and career paths in the Roman army, along with the standards for building forts. In the early years these don’t seem to have been greatly adapted for Northern Britain – they contain verandas to protect from the sun! Most notably Hadrian’s Wall was largely manned by auxiliary units largely drawn from the local population. Members of these units signed up for 25 years of service, with 60% surviving the full term. Auxiliary unit members were rewarded with citizenship at the end of their term. Breeze and Dobson note that promotion was often down to personal recommendations and client/patron relationships. We also know a fair amount about life on the Wall from archaeology, including the famous Vindalonda written tablets. Auxiliary soldiers may well have had wives and children who lived outside the walls of the fort or perhaps even inside in the later period of the Roman occupation.

The early third century was tumultuous for the Roman Empire in the early third century although Britain was largely outside of this, over the years. Later in the century there was fighting with the Picts. The Romans finally left Britain in 411AD, or at least that’s when they stopped paying their soldiers in Britain. It is likely individuals remained in place in the area around the wall after this date. Their departure was due problems closer to home in Rome, rather than being militarily pushed out.

It is difficult to recommend this book to the general reader. It seems more directed to the professional by including a lot of very detailed information on, for example, the proportions of forts whilst scarcely touching, for example, on where troop disposition information comes from. There are no scene building asides referencing the researchers the authors have met which is perhaps unsurprising since that was not the style for books like this when it was initially published in 1974, this edition is from 1999.

Oct 11 2026

Product review: Dwarflab Dwarf 3 Smart Telescope

In a change from the usual service I am reviewing a product today, a telescope. More exactly the Dwarflab Dwarf 3 smart telescope.

The Dwarf 3 mounted on the Dwarflab Mini Tripod

It’s not my first telescope review, I also own a Celestron Nexstar 5SE – a more conventional telescope.

I was interested in a new telescope because we have started home education and my son has an enthusiasm for astronomy. Showing him the ropes on my Celestron was a bit frustrating, the built-in controller uses a tiny two line display and a numeric key pad, and to do imaging requires a rather uninteresting set of random adaptors and connectors some of which need careful alignment. Initially I was looking for something more convenient than my DSLR for imaging but for roughly the same money I could get a whole new smart telescope!

Smart telescopes are a relatively recent innovation. Telescopes have been more and more automated over the years but in the last few years they have broken free from the conventional telescope formats to produce devices like the Dwarf 3 shown in the image above – it has no eyepiece for direct viewing and is entirely controlled by an app.

When buying the Dwarf 3 I looked at entry level smart telescopes below £1000 in price so the main contenders were the Dwarflabs models and ZWO Seestar models. I chose the Dwarf 3 because it was a little more portable than the Seestar models, it explicitly supported wildlife and landscape imaging and it was also a little bit cheaper. Reviews suggested that its software was more flexible. The Dwarf 3 was £459, I bought it from First Light Optics and it was delivered within 24 hours of ordering!

I also bought the Dwarflab Mini Tripod for an additional £73. The tripod is a solid piece of kit with angle scales on the rotational elements in the head, it is best suited to use on a table since it is quite short. It is rather more expensive than entry level tripods but cheaper than premium brands like Manfrotto. I can also use the Velbon tripod I already own – the Dwarf 3 takes a standard camera mount thread.

In the Dwarf 3 package you get the scope, a soft carry case, neutral density filters for observing the sun, a lens wipe, a USB-C to USB-C cable and a very thin manual. The manual tells you how to pair your phone to the scope from which you can use the Dwarflab app to control the scope and that is all. My phone has an NFC reader so I can just “tap to connect”. It seems this connection process has been improved since the Dwarf 3 was first released.

The cylindrical lens housing of the telescope can be twisted, and the whole device be twisted on its base so you can point the telescope without the app but the app is required for everything else including looking through it!

The video tutorials accessible from the Dwarflab app are definitely worth watching, you can find them here.

The Dwarflab app, and the telescope are clearly undergoing rapid software updates. I was prompted to upgrade the firmware of the telescope on my first night-time try so that I could access functionality available in the app. There were two small updates that installed quickly and cleanly. I bought a 2026 third party manual which although very readable and useful is clearly out of date in terms of the details of the software. There is an official manual from Dwarf lab in PDF format here, it is 280 pages long.

The Dwarf 3 has a wide angle and a telephoto camera; you can see a live view from both on the connected phone in “picture in picture” format. It is easy to switch the main view between telephoto and wide angle cameras. The wide angle is equivalent to a 45mm focal length lens on a 35mm film format camera, and the telephoto is equivalent to a 737mm focal length lens and has a focal ratio of f/4.3. For comparison the Celestron Nexstar 5SE has a 1250mm focal length lens with f/10 focal ratio, the 5SE is currently about twice the price of the Dwarf 3.

The wide angle lens makes aligning on the sun and moon ridiculously easy – you just steer towards the appropriate location using the wide angle lens to put your target in the guide box at the centre of the frame and then switch to the telephoto view. I found aligning my conventional Celestron on the sun really hard because the sun nearly fills the field of view, there’s no indication you are getting close and I could not use my guide scope. The results of my first imaging forays with the Dwarf 3 can be seen below, as well as the sun I caught a sliver of moon early one morning.

Photo of the sun through a solar filter, a black background with an orange sun showing sunspots near the centre of the disk
Photo of the sun taken using a Dwarf 3 smart telescope. Chester. 2026-10-07 14:23
Photo of the moon taken using a Dwarf 3 smart telescope. Chester. 2026-10-08 06:35
Photo of the moon (cropped) taken using a Dwarf 3 smart telescope. Chester. 2026-10-08 06:35

I also took an image of Jupiter in the early morning, it was easy to see the disk of the planet but I could not see the banding of the clouds or the Galilean moons, this was probably because it was getting light and the sky was brightening.

I took the sun and moon photos in “Solar System” mode, there are also General, Deep Sky, Milky Way, Star Trails, Auto-capture and Pano (Panoramic) modes. Alignment for the Deep Sky and Solar System modes is automatic, you point the telescope at a starry sky and it works out where it is pointing from the stars in frame – you can then pick your target from the star atlas and it will go to them automatically.

This means the challenge in astrophotography with the Dwarf 3 is optimising your imaging parameters and post-processing rather than setting the scope up or finding the target.

Update 12th October – took this image of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) last night, the exposure time is about an hour. The process was to open up the star atlas and click on the photo button next to M31! It was embarrassing simply but exciting to see the image building up.

Photo of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) taken using a Dwarf 3 smart telescope. One hour exposure. Chester. 2026-10-11 20:30

I took some wildlife pictures in my back garden, these were not ideal since my garden is small, consequently reasonably sized animals more than filled the frame. The telescope cannot move very fast so you need to find focus on a location and wait for wildlife to appear. In theory it will track moving objects but I suspect this will only work for small ones moving slowly close up or larger animals further away. It might be worth a try at my local wetland bird reserve.

Photo of a squirrel (cropped) at about 5 metres range

This review is written on the basis of only a few days use. I think this is probably the best £500 I have spent for a while, to get a reasonable image of the sun, moon and Jupiter was very easy – the work of a few minutes. The Dwarf 3 is just so much fun to use. There is clearly scope to improve these images with the flexible software provided. The Dwarf 3 is as portable as a DSLR camera, so taking it on a walk or holiday is a simple exercise.

Now all I need are clear skies!

Sep 18 2026

Book review: Different Minds by Pete Wharmby

My next review is of Different Minds by Pete Wharmby, it has the lengthy subtitle “How can we help our autistic school children thrive”. I read Wharmby’s Untypical, about a year ago when my son was at online school as a result of Emotionally Based School Avoidance and one year into the waiting list for an autism assessment. One year on, he has just received his autism diagnosis.

Different Minds is divided into 10 thematic chapters entitled How did we get here?, The Mornings, The School Day, The Learning, The People, The Classroom, Socialising, The Behaviour, The Assessments and The Collapse.

Chapters usually start with a quote, a vignette from the life of Joe – an emblematic autistic child, and some bullet points on what is covered in the chapter.

Wharmby describes in the introduction that autistic people are “sparrows living in a world built by moles” which I think is rather beautiful. Neither sparrows nor moles are malicious but their views of the world are utterly different. This is the double-empathy problem, not only do autistic people not understand non-autistic people – the opposite is true too.

The overarching theme of the book is that the school routine as it is currently configured leaves autistic children in a state of almost continuous stress which leads to higher rates of anxiety and depression. These are not an intrinsic part of the autism diagnosis they are a result of the stresses of living in a world not built for autistic people. The proposals for schools and parents in this book are about reducing that stress.

Autistic children are a puzzle for teachers because they are different from their non-autistic peers, Wharmby went through teacher training in 2008 and had just a one hour session on autism. As an example of a teaching related difference, autistic children may have “spikey skill sets” – typically a child good at one subject will be good across a wide range of other subjects but an autistic child might not, furthermore they may be competent academically but unable, for example, to tie their shoelaces.

Wharmby recalls that the first autistic child he taught had notes of “bites other children” and “threw a chair” against his name when he received him into his class. This set his expectations for teaching that child – this is known as anchoring bias. The child turned out to be fine in lessons with Wharmby.

It may be that autistic children complain of the classroom environment because they are unusually sensitive to noise, light, smells, heat, cold and so forth; quite possibly they are finding their uniform very uncomfortable. Often on complaining they are told “Don’t be daft” but these are very real sensations for them.

It goes without saying that if teachers struggle to empathise with autistic children, through lack of training, then their classmates will face an even bigger challenge which can lead to isolation and bullying.

At one point Wharmby ponders whether autistic people fall into the “uncanny valley” for non-autistic people. Autistic children may struggle with appropriate eye contact, small talk, body language, minimal sharing of personal information turn taking, saying goodbye which marks them out as different.

We talked a bit about this as a family and wondered whether that was rather offensive but perhaps gave an insight into how other people interact with autistic people. An observation I made of my probably autistic father, and myself is that we are more charismatic than we give ourselves credit for – perhaps because social interactions are something we have to work hard at. This does not tally well with Wharmby’s account where he says that autistic children can be isolated by their peers and prone to bullying; although he mentions that becoming the “class-clown” is one way autistic children cope.

The very structure of the school day can be a struggle for autistic child who may exhibit monotropism – focus on a single topic – rather than switching between lessons every hour. Autistic children would benefit if their broader education could be linked to their special interests.

Interestingly Wharmby says autistic people often “get it wrong” when trying to empathise with someone by relating similar experiences to their own, apparently it makes it “about you”. This is news to me, if I’m talking to someone who has lost a parent then I’d probably mention somewhere in the conversation that my dad died a few years ago as an indication that I had some insight into how they were feeling – obviously I wouldn’t lead on this piece of information.

On assessments Wharmby talks about Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (RSD) – basically a very strong reaction to criticism often coupled with a struggle to accept praise. Following his guidance I will say that the vignettes of Joe’s school day in the book are a very powerful and compelling technique.

In the final chapter “The Collapse” Wharmby talks about how schools are the number one cause of burnout because of their obsession with attendance – I absolutely agree with this. He distinguishes between a meltdown which is a one off event (although autistic children attending school may have one every day), and burnout which is a longer term utter mental and physical exhaustion.

I found Untypical a bit of a harrowing read and I have to say the same of this book, Wharmby has a nice writing style but the continual state of stress and anxiety he describes for Joe, his emblematic child, is oppressive.

The intention of Different Minds is in part to understand how autistic children experience school but then to change schools to make them more tolerable. I must admit I came away from the book thinking that if school is only half as bad for my son as described in the book I should take him out immediately. Change happens slowly in schools, and whilst the Department for Education may pay lip service to making schools “inclusive” they are still very focussed on attendance and they seem to have more of an eye to cost and the status quo than the needs of autistic children.

To answer the question posed in the lengthy subtitle I fear the answer is “Take them out of mainstream schools”.

Sep 08 2026

Book review: The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence M. Principe

My next review is of The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence M. Principe, this was recommended reading from Alchemy by Philip Ball.

The book consists of seven chapters, the first five of these are chronological covering the Greco-Egyptian origins of alchemy, developments in the Islamic world, and the medieval period; at this point the chronology breaks to cover the 18th century onwards which involves the reinterpretation of alchemy before returning to the Golden Age of alchemy in the Early Modern Period (1500AD-1700AD).

The final chapters are on interpreting alchemical texts, and alchemy in wider society.

My aim in this review is not to repeat comments on the history of alchemy that I made in my review of Philip Ball’s book but rather to highlight what felt new in this book.

The small disorder in the chronology is to highlight how our modern view of alchemy is to a large degree influenced by the 18th century where “scientists” were carefully splitting respectable chemistry from not so respectable alchemy. The “not so respectable” part of alchemy has always been chrysopoeia – making gold from base metals – it has been the symbol of alchemist wasting their life, and frittering away their money on a fruitless enterprise or it has been seen as fraud.

The Victorians adopted alchemy as part of the spiritualist revival adding more mystical elements to it. This coloured the views of early historians of science who tended to write off the whole subject in terms of scientific content.

What excited me about this book early on is that the author went to the trouble of repeating some alchemical recipes in the modern laboratory. In one example he discovers that a reaction doesn’t work as described when a pure starting material is used but does work when the natural ore from the place where the alchemist in question worked because of the presence of silicon dioxide in the ore. In another he discovers that a described reaction works if an iron rod is used to stir the mixture, as specified in the recipe but the products observed are actually compounds of iron rather those that the alchemist believed they had made. This reflects modern laboratory practice; method descriptions that are pretty good but sometimes overlook the impact of apparently minor details and it isn’t unknown for modern scientists to make products different from those they were attempting to make!

These recreations highlight that alchemists could be very sophisticated experimenters not only in terms of the equipment they used but also, for example, observing changes in weight during chemical reactions.

Alchemical experiments were motivated by ideas about how substances are constructed which go back to the earliest writer in alchemy; in 300AD Zosimos of Panopolis was writing about theoretical principles and making observations. He talks about all metals containing a body (which makes them metals) and a spirit which gives them particular properties. Therefore the task of transmutation is to extract the “spirit” of a base metal and replace it with the “spirit” of gold. Later the Arabic writer Jābir ibn Ḥayyān talked in terms of a Mercury-Sulphur theory which evolved into something more elaborate linking with the the Aristotelian classical elements and Galen’s humors. We would now consider these theories utterly wrong but they are the same shape as our modern theories. These types of theories maintained until the late 18th century when our modern ideas of chemical elements were developed.

We also see a leakage of language from alchemy into modern day chemical terms, for example, the Greek God Hermes was long associated with alchemy and glass vessels were closed with “the seal of Hermes” which becomes “hermetically sealed” in modern parlance.

As I commented in my review of Ball’s book, alchemy seems to have been particularly rife with publishing under other people’s names. The Jabirian corpus is one example of this. A couple of items to add to this, Principe comments at one point in this book that in some cases transcriptions of ancient documents mix in works from other authors. For example, ibn-Sina’s text on mineralogy was attached to a translation of Aristotle’s Meteor giving ibn-Sina’s work more gravitas. Secondly, alchemy developed a culture of dispersing information across many small “publications” with initiates into the culture expected to read widely across the corpus to find out what to do rather than find everything in one place.

Obfuscation is a key theme in much writing on alchemy. The mindset was of special knowledge which was available only to initiates in the culture. Understanding alchemical documents was not a simple act of reading, it required wider understanding. The use of Decknamen (aliases used to describe reagents in alchemical recipes) is a recurring theme in the book – these can change through the course of a document.

The case of George Starkey (1628–1665) is particularly revealing because in his case we have his works under a pseudonym (Eirenaeus Philalethes) but also at least some of his laboratory notebooks. We can see an obfuscated alchemical recipe in one of his books alongside the same recipe in plain language in a letter sent to Robert Boyle.

The Early Modern Period encompassed more varied publishing formats, for example each chapter in Michael Maier’s 1617 Atalanta fugiens featured a motto, an emblematic image, a six-line epigram, 2 pages of prose and a piece of music! This is reminiscent of Erasmus Darwin’s epic poems about botany from the late 18th century.

Emblematic images are a recurring theme in the book, they illustrate an alchemical process using allegorical symbols rather than literal illustrations of the process. Principe warns us we need to see them in the context of the text in which they are found – the emblematic image re-iterates the text. So, for example, in Basil Valentine’s 1602 book Von dem grossen Stein der Uhrhalten the text about purifying gold says “take the ravenous grey wolf that on account of his name is subjected to bellicose Mars but by birth is is a child of old Saturn” means to take the antimony ore stibnite to purify gold. Each metal had an associated planet, and Saturn is the planet associated with lead but we are looking for a child of Saturn which is stibnite (an ore of antimony) which at the time was seen as related to lead. The allegory is reinforced because molten stibnite will dissolve gold very quickly – it is “ravenous”. It has the air of a cryptic crossword clue and I would imagine these texts would be relatively easy to read for those in the know.

The final chapter talks about alchemy in wider culture, it appeared in plays and even Shakespearian sonnets. There was also a long standing interplay with religion – the theme of purification appealed both to alchemists and preachers.

I think this may become one of my favourite books of the year, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman is the only one I might rank above it.

Aug 17 2026

Book review: Symbols and Allegories in Art by Matilde Battistini

My next review is of Symbols and Allegories in Art by Matilde Battistini which I discovered is part of a series: Guide to Imagery which looks interesting. I found this book by searching because I was interested in understanding more about allegories in art. I knew from watching various TV programmes that there was more to paintings than their surface appearance.

Symbols is divided into an introduction, and four sections on Time, Man, Space and Allegories, each of which describe twenty or so items. Each entry describes the linguistic and mythological origins of a term and is illustrated with at least one painting or sculpture with parts of the artwork labelled. Sometimes subsequent pages show more related artworks with labels.

Most of the paintings are from the Medieval and Renaissance periods but there are some artworks from the 19th and even 20th century. I think they are all from Western Europe presumably the allegorical language elsewhere is different.

Allegorical content in artworks evolved over time, in the Medieval period it was very much about good and evil, focussed around the Christian faith. Much of the iconography of early Christian art was based on earlier mythology. During the Renaissance there was a greater direct focus on Classical themes and mythology. Later the use of allegories was codified into documents – it was a pity not to see references to an example of this. Within Christian iconography there is an evolution from the Medieval period.

I think this book is intended for the somewhat expert in art history, it doesn’t talk about why allegories appeared in paintings and who made art for whom.

In many cases the paintings helpfully contain the word “allegory” in the title, so the reading is not as blind as you might think.

Since there are a limited number of sections each section is quite broad, so the section on time includes seasons, months, times of the day, ages of man and the world and items representing the flow and circle of time.

The Seasons appear early in the book and are a good illustration of how sets of things are represented allegorically. The seasons are associated with different phases of human life birth (spring), maturity (summer), decline (autumn) and death (winter). They are also associated with animals (ram, lion, bull and snake) and gods (Zeus, Helios, Dionysus, and Hades) in Greek mythology. Seasons can also be represented by women, we can identify which season by their headwear – Spring is represented by a woman with a crown of flowers, Summer with a crown of wheat stalks. More widely figures are recognised by the objects they hold or are close to, Saturn for example is shown as an older man carrying a scythe or hourglass.

The section on man contains entries on key biblical figures like Christ, the Virgin Mary, Eve, the Trinity, angels and Satan. As well as a range of monsters of different types. There are also what seem like miscellaneous entries on eggs and mirrors. The idea of the Trinity was created in 325AD at the Council of Nicea; angels only gained wings in art in the 4th century AD and that the iconography of the Virgin Mary derives from earlier gods such as Artemis and Isis. I was interested to learn that haloes come from Indo-Iranian deities via Roman and Byzantine emperors before reaching Christianity.

One of the pictures for the Monsters entry is Piero di Cosimo’s, Perseus Frees Andromeda which features members of the Medici family – a hidden meaning not otherwise covered in the book.

The section on space covers the astronomical (sun, sky, cosmos, moon), the earthly (garden, mountain, forest, tree) and the religious (Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Limbo). Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed in 1321, is cited a few times as a source for depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Limbo. The representations of Hell stabilised in this period.

The final section on “Allegories” is a bit different from the others, it covers items like The Senses, The Virtues, The Vices but there are rather fewer items than in the earlier sections but each is illustrated by more examples. Love is included in this section where we learn the parrot is a symbol of lust! Young women represent the cardinal virtues: fortitude, prudence, justice and temperance and the theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. The cardinal virtues derive from ancient Greek philosophy whilst the theological ones are medieval.

I must admit this book got me thinking about data. Is there a global database of paintings? How often does “allegory” appear in the title? And the somewhat off-topic question of what fraction of the paintings made in any particular period / place survive?

I found this book interesting and readable although I was expecting more on the framework into which allegorical depictions lay. The parent series definitely seems worth a look.