May 15 2026

Book review: The Historical Atlas of the Celtic World by John Heywood

My next review is of The Historical Atlas of the Celtic World by John Haywood, bought in the same spending spree as Ancient Rome Infographics by Nicolas Guillerat, John Scheid and Milan Melocco. The two books are from the same publisher, Thames & Hudson, and were promoted together but they are quite different. I have to say I prefer this book, the graphics are less varied but the story comes through more clearly than Infographics.

The Historical Atlas is divided into 3 parts: The Continental Celts, The Atlantic Celts (Britain and Ireland) and The Modern Celts. Each part starts with a few pages of introduction followed by double page spreads on a range of topics – often a date range for the action is included. Typically these spreads will comprise a map, and some photos or diagrams. Overall it is a well-illustrated book.

The Celtic World is defined by Celtic languages including languages from Gaul (France), Italy and the Iberian peninsula that have long gone extinct. It once spanned central and Northern Europe, from the North of the Iberian Peninsula, across Northern Europe (including the Great Britain and Ireland) all the way to the Black Sea. Genetic evidence suggests origins as far back as 6000BC but the first archaeological evidence goes back to 800BC with the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures. Now all that remains is Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany and Galicia in North West Spain – largely as a result of a revival of Celtic culture starting in the 18th century.

In terms of settlements, hillforts were popular across the Celtic world, as well as oppidum – fortified lowland towns. The British were nearly unique in preferring roundhouses over rectangular buildings found in the rest of Europe. In the North East of Scotland brochs (fortified towers) and duns (small forts) were popular in the later ancient period (500BC-200AD). It was only as the Roman Empire expanded that parts of the Celtic World started to urbanise.

Trade was long a feature of the Celtic World, going all the way from Ireland into the rest of Europe. As contacts with the Roman Empire increased, local Celtic leaders developed a taste for luxury goods. In exchange Romans took chain-mail, barrels, shipbuilding techniques and legionaries helmets from Celts – the Celts were not technologically backward.

Druidism was an important part of Celtic culture, it was not popular with the Romans since it purportedly involved human sacrifice, although it might be wise to take Roman writings on Celts with a pinch of salt – they were trying to justify invading them.

The first written records of Celts date to 600BC by which point they dominated Western and Central Europe. They sacked Rome in 390BC, and made in-roads into Greece for 20 years from 300BC amongst other invasions to the East, these rarely left any archaeological record. The Celtic civilisation was not centralised in the manner of the later Roman Empire, it was a looser confederation with a shared culture rather than power. This meant that when the Roman Empire expanded it was faced largely with smaller battles against isolated tribes and leaders rather than facing off against another empire.

The Roman’s took over the Celtic kingdoms as they started to centralise, failing in Germany where this centralisation did not really occur. The Roman’s invaded Gaul in the 50BCs, with a brief foray into England, which was not successfully invaded until 43AD. Roman dominion largely wiped out the Celtic languages of mainland Europe, although some culture survived. In Britain the South East became increasingly Romanised and urbanised, further to the north and west life continued largely as before.

When the Roman Empire fell Celtic culture did not make a great revival across continental Europe with the exception of Brittany which retained independence from France until 1532. Great Britain fell into its “Dark Ages” with the departure of the Romans, ultimately invaded by the Anglo-Saxons. Ireland, on the other hand, flourished – driven by Christianity and a system of monasteries that stood in for more traditional urban conurbations. The Irish went on to conquer the Picts in Scotland in the 9th century, so Scotland has an Irish origin. Wales had largely been subjugated by the English king, Edward I in the late 13th century. The Reformation triggered the English to take over Ireland, where they had long had a foothold. Later they would push into Scotland during the Jacobite Rebellion with this the Celtic countries disappeared.

However, in the 18th century a Celtic revival started, perhaps originating in the identification of the Celtic language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707. It fitted with the Romantic idea of the noble savage, and also a desire by the people of Wales and Scotland to make themselves distinct in the newly united kingdom. Celtomania was a Europe-wide movement. The revived Druidism is a modern invention, we know close to nothing of the original Druidism. There was a further Celtic revival in the 1970s. Haywood is somewhat negative about the existing Celtic languages, seeing only Welsh as having a growing future.

I found this an interesting overview, it covers a great deal of time and space with many relatively small players. The double page spreads with maps help make this manageable. I think I was most surprised by the extent of the ancient Celtic world, and the influence of Ireland in the Early Middle Ages.

Apr 30 2026

Book review: King of kings by Scott Anderson

Another result of browsing in a bookshop, this review is of King of kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran by Scott Anderson. For readers of the future – this review was written in April 2026, two months into the what is currently called the “2026 Iran War“.

King of Kings covers the run up to the Iranian revolution in 1979 mainly focussing on the 1970s and ends with the release of the American Embassy hostages in January 1981. The acknowledgements talk about the aim of the book being to capture the Revolution from the point of view of those involved through interviews with them. The book was published in 2025 and those interviewed are in their late seventies and older now.

I think it is inevitable that the focus is on American participants – Anderson specifically calls out Michael Metrinko and Gary Sick as key contributors. Sick was a member of the National Security Council under President Carter, and was the principal White House aide focused on the Persian Gulf. Metrinko was the US consul in the Iranian city of Tabriz in the run up to the Revolution and was one of the US Embassy hostages. However, Anderson also spoke with the Shah’s Queen, Farah Pahlavi who is still alive.

From the revolutionary side, those surrounding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the spiritual leader of the revolution – there is relatively little. Ebrahim Yazdi, one of his closest advisors, gets a chapter and is referenced throughout the book.

King of kings is divided into three parts: the first titled “Towards a great civilisation” provides some background on Iran and the Shah – leader of Iran from 1953 until the 1979 Revolution; the second “The Unravelling” covers the build up to the revolution, mainly in 1978 and “Downfall” covers the revolution itself from the end of 1978 through to the return of the US embassy hostages in January 1981.

The Shah claimed a dynasty for Iran going back 2500 years, in fact one of the key events in the early part of this book was an extravagant celebration of this anniversary at Persepolis. Iran lay at the collision point between the the expanding British and Russian Empires in the 19th century, oil was discovered in 1908 and largely signed away to the British by the ruling Qajar dynasty. During the First World War Iran was a battleground for Russian and German forces, in the process 2 million Iranians died. In the Second World War Iran sought an accommodation with Germany which worked fine until Russia and Britain joined forces to invade Iran; they deposed Reza Khan, the Shah’s father in 1941 and installed him (Mohammad Reza) as monarch.

In the post-war period the country was governed by the Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh who introduced a range of social reforms, and nationalised the oil industry much to the chagrin of the British and Americans who deposed him in a CIA backed coup in 1953 re-instating Mohammad Reza as an absolute monarch.

The Shah ran the country as a dictatorship although he introduced a large set of social reforms in his 1963 White Revolution which upset more conservative Muslims such as Khomeini.

Iran as a country became very wealthy very rapidly in the seventies as a result of the Shah nationalising the oil industry, and OPEC starting to exert itself (1973 is a key year here). At the same time the US essentially entirely opened up arms sales to Iran and the Shah was a very willing customer. But the wealth was very unevenly distributed, Iran urbanised rapidly bringing many young men into cities not prepared for them. These young men were often conservative from a religious point of view.

There had long been opposition groups in Iran but they were subject to arrest, violence from the secret police (SAVAK) or, like Khomeini, exile. Khomeini had been living in Iraq but Saddam Hussein was becoming increasingly unhappy with his presence and he fled to France in October 1978. This turned out to be a fortuitous move because he was much more able to hold court with Western journalists there with his lieutenants he was able to present a (completely fake) moderate face.

It’s difficult to pinpoint a point at which the revolution started, Iran is a Shia majority country and offers a wide range of dates for public displays of mourning which could be readily repurposed to rioting. This started happening with increasing frequency and surprising precision from the start of 1978 following a government sanctioned news paper editorial attacking Khomeini. Precision because very particular businesses and institutions were targeted by well-disciplined rioters. I think this is part of the story is missing something, it seems clear there was significant organisation on the ground of the revolutionary forces and there is no real indication of Khomeini being very actively involved in this.

The Revolution, when it came, followed the departure of the Shah from Iran on 16th January 1979 – having installed Shapour Bakhtiari as Prime Minister – an opposition leader of long standing – with a view to arranging a moderate post-revolutionary government. Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran on 1st February 1979. Outside of Iran he had been making moderate noises but on his return to Iran he resumed his theocratic radicalism, sacking the recently installed Prime Minister and adding his own. The army mutinied in favour of Khomeini’s forces. A number of senior figures from the previous regime were summarily executed within a month of Khomeini’s return. He then set about making a constitution that handed power entirely to clerics (and ultimately himself).

There was possibly a space for a more moderate government but that ended with the US embassy hostage crisis and the US’s botched rescue attempt. The Embassy had been invaded by radical university students and it is not clear whether Khomeini had sanctioned the attack but in any case he supported it once done. Also unclear is whether Ronald Reagan’s campaign team had influenced the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages – it seems very plausible – they were released on the eve of Reagan’s inauguration. Interestingly the Revolutionary Iranians were keen to do arms deals with the Americans since they had a large quantity of US military hardware and needed consumables resupply.

Anderson’s conclusion regarding the Revolution was that the Shah seemed strangely inert as the revolution approached, attributing this to him being a dictator but not of the sufficiently brutal, bloodthirsty type to put a stop to opposition. In common with all dictators he ended up surrounding himself with people that only agreed with him. I can’t help thinking his deteriorating health played a role – he died at the age of 60 in 1980 having fled Iran in January 1979, he had been fairly seriously ill for several years but kept it secret even from his wife.

The US was almost completely oblivious to the tide rising against the Shah, very few of their embassy staff spoke the local language (Farsi) and they were discouraged from speaking to any sort of opposition to the Shah. They were also doing good business with Shah for military hardware, and saw him as a moderate bastion and ally in the area. As the revolution unfolded the institutions of the US government were fairly actively fighting each other.

I found this gripping reading, partly because of its current relevance but also because it is well written. It is clear that the American focus does not capture the internal workings of the revolutionary forces very well but I suspect that is still a hard problem even now, for Middle Eastern writers.

Apr 21 2026

Book review: Ancient Rome Infographics by Nicolas Guillerat, John Scheid and Milan Melocco

There’s no real alternative to a good browse around a bookshop, this book Ancient Rome Infographics by Nicolas Guillerat, John Scheid and Milan Melocco is the result of just such browsing. I’ve been interested in the history of Britain, and the important part the Romans played in it for a while so this was a welcome find. I’m interested in data visualisation, so it’s fair to say this is the sort of exercise I would undertake given data on the Roman Empire!

The authors emphasise several times that the underlying data for these infographics is sometimes uncertain and that there is pretty much no data prior to the fourth century BCE so this period is ignored. They provide an extensive bibliography although it is not referenced at an individual infographic level.

The book is divided into three parts:

  1. The Lands and People of the Empire
  2. Government, worship and social needs
  3. Rome’s military might

The infographics generally span a double page spread, and usually include explanatory text. I’m finding writing a review a bit challenging without reproducing the infographics, the publisher Thames & Hudson have some examples on their product page.

From the first section I liked the visualisation showing the physical extent of the Roman Empire and its growth in both population and area over time. I was surprised to learn that the Iberian peninsula contained a large chunk of the Roman population (5,000,000) compared to 7,000,000 in Italy. The population of Egypt was also significant (4,500,000) although it was absorbed rather later, in 27 BCE. The Roman Empire continued to expand until 150CE.

This section includes quite a lot of detailed information on Rome particularly in terms of the types of buildings in the city, and how the footprint of the city evolved over time. I assume that the Roman remains in Rome have been subject to a huge amount of study hence the large quantity of data. Rome grew to a population of 1.75 million in the 3rd century CE declining to 500,000 in the mid 5th century CE.

Also included are rather complex diagrams of the social and legal classes in Roman society. I must admit I found this less interesting. The authors mention several times that one of the strengths of the Roman Empire was that citizens from all the states across the Empire became fully fledged Roman citizens, as well as citizens of their local state. The social structure was very oriented around voting men, with the paterfamilias – the senior man in a household – essentially holding all of the rights the state bestowed which they distributed as they saw fit to their household. The paterfamilias might also have a patron-client relationship with others outside the household, I suspect this is one of many topics which warrants a whole book to elucidate.

The second section continues with the delineation of roles in society with the focus on the political and government. My favourite part here was the chronology of emperors which also introduced the term damnatio memoriae which is an attempt to expunge an emperor from the historical record. The term, although Latin, was coined in the 17th century. Some emperors had quite long reigns but at other times there were flurries of emperors, or at least those that proclaimed themselves so. This is where the infographic presentation falls down a bit – subtleties are lost because they cannot be presented cleanly. From towards the end of the third century CE there are Eastern and Western empires each with their own emperor and for a brief period there was the “Tetrarchy” – a system of two senior and two junior emperors.

Religion gets a few pages, Romans had a system of public and private “cults” – a city would follow a public cult with its ceremonies and rituals but individuals could also follow their own cult with a shrine and ritual in their home. Later the Christian faith was to spread through the Empire encompassing over half of the population by 350CE.

Also in this chapter is data on the production of grain, and the cost of living. For quite some period the residents of Rome had a “grain dole”, or annona which gave an allocation of grain to selected citizens of Rome (adult male citizens). The cost of living data is so interesting I’m tempted to do my own visualisations! For example 1 rabbit cost 32 as (a small Roman coin) but a pound of wild boar meet was only 8 as. 8 as would also buy you a prostitute but a bath was only 0.25 as. Slaves started at 800 as but went up to nearly 100,000 as for “1 very attractive slave”. A skilled worker could earn 12 as per day, a legionary (a junior rank) 10 as / day, a centurion 165 as / day and a senator 5480 as / day.

The final chapter covers war, I was a bit surprised to learn that the Roman army and navy were not that great but they made good use of local fighters and were good at simply being present. There are descriptions, and infographics of Roman marching orders, camp construction processes and the the evolving equipment of a Roman soldier. I sometimes wonder how accurately such prescriptions were followed, I assume there is at least one documentary source for these processes but how closely were they followed in the field?

I liked the visualisation showing movements of one Roman legionary through his career around Armenia and Eastern Europe. The Social Wars, Punic Wars, conquering Gaul and Spartacus have their own sections in this chapter. I’m assuming these are the most important of the Roman wars.

Overall I enjoyed this book, although I was sometimes frustrated by the complexity of the infographics. It works well as a taster for further investigation.

Apr 07 2026

Book review: Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin

My next review is of Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin. For me it follows on from Pete Wharmby’s autobiographical book on autism, Untypical, and Steve Silberman’s history of autism, Neurotribes.

Thinking in Pictures is comprised of 11 thematic chapters which typically contain a mixture of reflections on the author’s personal experiences with autism, animal handling technology and research into autism and how it is treated. Grandin is very well known in the field of animal handling, one third of the animals slaughtered in the US are processed using machinery she has designed.

The core of Grandin’s experience of autism is visual thinking. She describes having a library of video clips in her mind which she combines in order to think new thoughts – verbal thinking is a second language to her. This makes some tasks easy, like designing animal processing equipment, and other tasks difficult – verbal tasks require her to find the right piece of video to capture the words, and abstract ideas are a real challenge. Similarly arithmetic is challenging for her.

Grandin was diagnosed as autistic relatively young, she learnt to speak quite late, was prone to tantrums and did not like being touched. She was born in 1947, 4 years after Leo Kanner’s landmark paper defining autism. This was at a time when autism was not widely known, and the diagnostic criteria were very strict. Her diagnosis was triggered by her mother who was very committed to getting the best for her daughter – she has written her own autobiography (A Thorn In My Pocket: Temple Grandin’s Mother Tells the Family Story by Eustacia Cutler).

In common with Wharmby, Grandin sees autism as very much a sensory issue. Sights, sounds and touch are often not processed in the same way by autistic people and it is from this their symptoms arise – sensory over-sensitivity overwhelms their brain’s ability to carry other tasks. Sounds may be garbled: their ability to hear frequencies is unimpaired but distinguishing words or separating different voices is challenging. Similar issues can apply with vision.

Grandin talks here about her “Squeeze Machine” a device she invented based on a cattle crush which allowed her to apply soothing pressure to herself – a device later marketed more widely – and to which she attributes the ability for her to empathise with others. She found touch from people stressful, and the feel of clothes very difficult to cope with.

In her early years Grandin was given very intensive teaching based on the Lovaas method which involves a lot of repetition and positive reinforcement. It was sufficient to get her into mainstream school but she was thrown out for misbehaviour and went to a small boarding school specialising in bright children with emotional problems. Here she seems to have clicked with one science teacher in particular who supported her in her interests and odd ways. Interestingly she later ponders the value of online school for some “high functioning” autistic people – as she points out learning to build social relationships with teenagers is not an important life skill outside of school!

Grandin entered the world of work in a crabwise fashion, writing to an agricultural journal to publish an article she had written on animal handling which led on to a regular column in the journal. This was to become a full-time job in designing animal handling equipment. She preferred to work as a consultant since this allowed her to get work without interviews and removed a lot of the social difficulties of a fixed workplace. Grandin felt she needed to learn social niceties explicitly rather than dropping into them naturally. She used her visual thinking both in terms of understanding machinery but also the behaviour/thoughts of cattle moving through machinery. She believes that animals must think visually, as she does. Her record is a testament to how good she is at her job.

Grandin talks in some detail about her use of antidepressants to address her autism related anxiety, this is part of quite a lengthy chapter discussing a wide range of drugs and how they have worked for different individuals.

Grandin says she would not want to give up her autism and lose the skills she has, this leads into a wider discussion of other potentially autistic people (Einstein, Wittgenstein, Van Gogh) and how their genius lay in part in their autism. I think it is common to see these retrospective diagnoses as problematic these days, it is something that Silberman touches on in his book. She also talks a bit about the parents of autistic children and their higher prevalence of autism, anxiety, depression or panic attacks. It seems that autism is very substantially genetic. There is also a chapter on “savant” skills, and how in some senses these might be considered “unthinking”.

The books finishes with a chapter on religion, Grandin believes in a personal God for logical reasons but points out that other autistic people have no personal God or are entirely fanatical about religion. Interestingly she sees the books she writes as her version of an afterlife and finds the destruction of culture very upsetting because it is taking away an afterlife. Thinking in Pictures ends rather abruptly on this point – there is no “conclusions” chapter.

I found Grandin’s descriptions of how she thought and animal handling technology the most interesting, the autism research feels a little dated to me (this revised edition of the book was published over 20 years ago) and have the air of notes transcribed with little synthesis.

Mar 11 2026

Book review: Four Points of the Compass by Jerry Brotton

My next review is of Four points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction by Jerry Brotton. I read his book A History of the World in 12 Maps in 2013,

One might imagine that the history of the four points of the compass was a rather brief affair, and Four points is a relatively short book. However, it packs a lot in because the compass points are more than just geography – they encompass religion, culture and politics.

The book starts with an “orientation” chapter followed by chapters on east, south, north and west and finishes with one entitled “The blue dot”. In this case the blue dot is us; our marker on the map we now find on our phone. A fitting end since Brotton starts by talking about the Apollo 17 “Blue Marble” photograph – not to be mistaken for Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” taken by Voyager 1 as it passed beyond Saturn in 1980. Brotton sees the rise of our blue dot on a phone as an end of the compass directions.

It is easy, particularly for the map obsessed, to think of the cardinal directions of the compass as being almost timeless, and it takes some prompting to recall that the words North, South, East and West have meanings beyond those physical directions. This is highlighted in the “Orientation” chapter.

The other source of direction in the human world is based on our own body: left, right, front, back, up and down. This creeps into the compass direction with the etymology of some languages linked to them, i.e. north is the left of east. The Guugu Yimithirr people of Queensland Australia don’t bother with these egocentric directions, referencing everything to the compass (“please, pass the salt to your west”). The up and down directions rarely feature alongside the compass directions, with the exception of Mesoamericans who for a considerable period added up as a fifth cardinal direction.

The first written references to compass-like directions are from the Akkadian culture from around 2000 BCE. They are compass-like since they relate to prevailing winds and weather rather than magnetic or astronomical dirctions. The second phenomena prompting direction, and probably the primary one is the sun which rises in the east and sets in the west. The invention of compass north and south comes rather later with the Chinese discovering what they called “south pointing stones” around 200 BCE. Magnetic compasses only became common as directional aids in 12th century in Europe. It wasn’t until William Gilbert’s work De Magnete published in 1600 that the earth’s magnetic field was understood in broad terms, and recognised as not aligning with astronomical definitions of direction – the magnetic North Pole is hundreds of miles from the point where the earth’s rotational axis surfaces in the Arctic. The difference becomes important for longer voyages.

From a religious point of view the east was initially important as the location of the rising sun, and represented birth with the opposite direction, west, representing death and sometimes rebirth. The Jewish faith, Christianity and Islam tried at the beginning to break this link to distinguish themselves from earlier sun worship but in the end succumbed to the east being a special direction. Christian churches have long been oriented with the altar at the east, and burials with the head to the west. In Islam the great expansion of the Islamic Empire was along the North African coast which meant praying in the direction of Mecca meant facing east. Geographically medieval maps of the world placed the east at the top. Mercator placed the north at the top of his 1569 map of the world but this seems to have been more a convenience than a matter of principle for him. He was mapping primarily for east-west journeys which fit better with north at the top.

North and south do not appear to have had strong religious connotations, culturally their meaning varied over time. The south represented unbearable heat from the point of view of ancient Mediterranean civilisations and the north every increasingly harsh conditions with fanciful notions as to what happened at the North Pole (which continued through to Mercator’s time at least). Later Thomas More and Francis Bacon would locate their Utopias in the far south.

These days North, South, East and West all have strong political meanings although these vary with context, in the UK the North has been associated with poverty, depravation and decline whilst in the US and Italy the opposite is true. On a global scale we talk about the wealthy Global North and the developing Global South. The West has long been a place of political aspiration, the East represented the old Soviet Union and Japan.

For me the biggest idea in this book was think of the compass beyond physical direction, it also provided a handy supply of pub quiz facts all in all a short yet thought provoking read.