Category: Book Reviews

Reviews of books featuring a summary of the book and links to related material

Apr 08 2025

Book review: Brilliant Bread by James Morton

This is the first time I’ve reviewed a book on bakery, or any other sort of cooking. My review is of Brilliant Bread by James Morton.

I was recommended this book by a friend, I like it because it explains why you are doing what you are doing from the point of view of a scientist (Morton trained as a doctor). So, for example, I always assumed that to get a good crust you needed to bake absolutely as hot as you could but in fact to get a good crust you bake slightly cooler for longer which allows for a thicker, crunchier crust to form. I also learnt to wet my fingers before coaxing dough in a bowl, and not to over-flour my kneading surface.

Morton is explicit that he is writing as an enthusiastic amateur rather than a professional. He argues professionals are likely adapting recipes “down” to work in a domestic kitchen. Morton is a runner-up for the Great British Bake Off, so he is somewhat more than an amateur. His writing is relaxed, and readable. In places his extreme youth shines through which I found endearing.

The book is comprised of 11 chapters, three of which are on techniques (kneading/proving and sourdough starters) and basic materials and equipment. Breadmaking requires remarkably little in the way of equipment, this is where Morton’s recent life as a baking student comes into play. He recommends scavenging in skips for baking stones (only suggesting it is best not to use asbestos!). I did a little better than this, scavenging a limestone floor tile as a baking stone from my own garage. A dough scraper is the only essential he mentions; these cost little more than pennies but are definitely worth having. I made much less mess once I started working with a dough scraper. It turns out I had a suitable sharp blade to cut my dough before baking. I am hankering for a cast-iron Dutch oven though. He is similarly relaxed on ingredients, recommending in most cases that you get the cheapest available.

Morton is a big fan of bread making being being quick and easy to fit in around life (principally by pausing things by putting dough in the fridge) and by using no-knead techniques where kneading to develop the gluten network is replaced with just waiting. I quite enjoy kneading, and it seems to work rather better than waiting. I feel delaying proving in the fridge needs a bit of practice, I suspect I need to allow the dough to warm up fully when it comes out of the fridge.

Sourdough has a technique chapter of its own, and rather dominates the second half of the book. Sourdough is bread that is risen using a homemade yeast concoction (a starter). I must admit to being slightly wary of this. It has the air of Tamagotchi for middle-class people who will bang on endlessly about their starter. I think this came out of the early COVID pandemic period where bread flour and yeast were in short supply. My views are probably coloured by a possible intolerance to sourdough (or rather histamines) as a result of long COVID. Anyway, I will probably keep a sourdough starter as a pet for at least a little bit.

The remaining eight chapters are sets of related recipes: basic breads, breads to impress, breads with bits, advanced yeasted breads, sour, doughs to enrich your life, laminated doughs and nearly breads. The “breads to impress” tend to be those of a different form such as fougasse, bagels, pizza, and naan which have some variations in their process from basic breads. Also included in this chapter is “revival bread” which includes left over bits of bread, I’m not entirely sure why you would do this! Advanced yeasted breads are the trickier ones which use wetter, harder to handle doughs and add sourdough starter as a flavour rather than a raising agent. The “nearly breads” range from tortilla and bannock (similar to Irish soda bread) to outright cake (muffins and banana bread).

At the moment I am working my way through the recipes in the book from the start (I’m making a wholemeal loaf as I write). I feel Brilliant Bread has given me the tools to see where I’ve gone wrong and to improve. On my second attempt at the basic white bread recipe I won the accolade of “Best home-made bread I’ve ever tasted” from my wife, so I’d say I’m happy to recommend this book!

Mar 27 2025

Book review: When the Naughty Step Makes Things Worse by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker

Another book in the parenting thread: When the Naughty Step Makes Things Worse by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker.

The title describes the central theme of the book; some children simply don’t respond to the widespread, traditional punishment / reward method of parenting. If you try to put them on the Naughty Step they will refuse to go, and get ever angrier about it. As the authors highlight a motivated child has a higher stamina for opposing your parenting strategies than you have for executing them! You will typically have other things to worry about; a child can fully commit their energies to opposition.

They describe these children as “pressure sensitive” – they are made anxious when they feel under pressure to do something and their behaviour arises from this – finding ways to avoid the thing, elsewhere this is given a diagnosis of “pathological demand avoidance” (PDA). Their answer to pressure sensitive children is “low demand” parenting with the aim of widening the child’s “window of tolerance” for demands over a long period.

Fisher talks about how parenting was “invented” in the 1950s with the work of Baumrind and their demandingness/responsiveness model. It extends behaviourism, which sees animals trained by a combination of reinforcement (reward) and punishment, to the training (raising) of children with the addition of responsiveness which is trying to meet the needs of the child and being emotionally warm with them.

I sometimes wonder what fraction of animals refuse to be trained under the behaviourism model. When I reviewed Other Minds (all about octopuses) I read about efforts to measure the intelligence of three octopuses:

… two octopuses in their study put in some effort to carry out the tests presented whilst Charles insisted on squirting water at the experimenters and being otherwise uncooperative. It does make you wonder whether measures of animal intelligence are more a combination of willingness and intelligence. 

The authors refer to behaviourism models of parenting, somewhat tongue in cheek, as Good Parenting(TM). It is relevant to highlight the contrast because much of the internal battle for a low demand parent is the opinions of others, and whether they are right: are we here because we are poor parents? what does my parenting look like to other people? What are people thinking? Largely the author’s prescription is to ignore these outsiders except where necessary (other family members and professionals with important roles).

Thinking about pressure sensitive children it is easy to see how they struggle at school where systems of punishment and reward are becoming ever harsher. Furthermore in a classroom environment there is little scope for responsiveness. Therefore schools end up being strictly authoritarian environments which absolutely don’t work for a fraction of children, and greatly stress a further proportion. My experience of schools is that they have little appreciation or understanding of the existence of pressure sensitive children. Many of the children mentioned in the book have been pushed out of the mainstream school system, some are in special schools or home education.

After the preamble chapters talking about the group of children in question, and earlier models of parenting, The authors spend several chapters talking about different aspects of low demand parenting in practice, communication, behaviours, emotions, and screens. They are pretty positive about screens – highlighting that games like Minecraft offer pressure sensitive children a complex world which they control completely and often it is the only thing they will engage in. Most of the practices of low demand parenting are captured in acronyms – REACH, FLASH, JOIN UP. The core is to throw away your previous concepts of Good Parenting(TM) and seek a more equal relationship with your child (rather than trying to force them into conformance), join them with what they are interested in (for a while my wife and I played Fornite with our son), and focus on the necessary (sitting at the table eating healthy homecooked meals without your elbows on the table may be an ideal but sitting in front of the TV eating beige food is actually fine).

It is a bit difficult to judge the age group this book targets, much of the start feels like a discussion of younger children – at primary school and earlier but there are frequent mentions of children going into adolescence. One of the stories in the final chapter tracks that of my now 13 year old son almost exactly – apparently fine and doing very well in school until the demands of secondary school were overwhelming with an exit into online school.

There is a chapter on self-care for parents, a subject touched on earlier in the book in coping with the disapproving looks of other parents. This chapter uses techniques like radical acceptance, visualisation and mantras which I’m familiar with from counselling.

Despite being over 400 pages long When the Naughty Step… is an easy read. The text is broken up with Fricker’s cartoons, personal stories and various tables and exercises. Each chapter ends with a dialogue between Fisher and Fricker (which I found really useful), a bullet point summary and some suggestions for further reading.

I sometimes worry I have joined the cult of Fisher / Fricker, in common with many parents whose children have not been entirely straightforward to raise, I will enthusiastically recommend their books (and webinars). I think the core of their success is that they identify very clearly how our children are, when few others do, and reassure us that it is not the end of the world, when most are trying to convince us it is.

Mar 19 2025

Book review: Africa is not a country by Dipo Faloyin

My next review is of Africa is not a Country: Breaking stereotypes of modern Africa by Dipo Faloyin. It follows a thread of books I have read on Africa and Black people in the UK and elsewhere, this was prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

Africa is not a country is about viewing Africa from an African perspective. It is comprised of 8 parts, the first of which is a thumbnail sketch of the author, and his family, and where he grew up in Lagos. Faloyin is Nigerian with part Yoruba and part Igbo background although he was born in Chicago and now lives in London. He paints a vivid picture of his upbringing very unlike my own, mainly because his family is clearly very sociable and loves cities (or at least Lagos).

The second part goes on to talk about how the 54 countries of Africa came into being, starting with the Berlin Conference in 1884, in which the Western powers agreed to divide up Africa; no Africans participated, despite requests. One thing that struck me was that outside the conference politicians as senior as Gladstone in the UK knew that what they were doing was wrong. The US refused to sign the General Act of the conference, despite being participants. It isn’t clear whether this was a decision made on moral grounds. The 54 countries is something I think I will return to as a number, for comparison Europe has 44 countries, half the number of people and a third of the land area so we might expect Africa to be rather more diverse than Europe.

As a British European I don’t like to dwell too long on the colonial period. This part of the book highlights the preference of the British to out-source the colonisation problem to private companies, in particular the Royal Niger Company, which was taken over by Unilever (a former employer of mine) in the 1920s and only ended its existence in 1987. King Leopold II of Belgium’s subjugation of the Congo (essentially for his own personal gain) is spine-chilling – over the 20 years after the Berlin conference half the population, 10 million people were killed.

The division of Africa into arbitrary countries that did not follow ethnic or any other native pattern had consequences in the post-colonial period; the countries created at independence were naturally unstable so conflict was inevitable. However, the African consensus is that it is best to stick with these countries rather than attempt a wholesale reorganisation. This is not a peculiarly African problem, we can think about the fighting as Yugoslavia fell apart, and the Soviet Union, and the secessionist movements in Spain or Irish reunification.

Many of my early memories of Africa represented in the UK were of Band Aid, and the Ethiopian famine (1983-5). Faloyin sees this as the birth of modern white saviour imagery (I don’t disagree with him). Band Aid projected an image for all of Africa of famine and misery whose inhabitants could only be saved by the intervention of white Westerners – this theme has been repeated endlessly since then. It feels like things are changing though, for the 30th anniversary of Band Aid in 2014 there was a pretty large backlash with musicians with African backgrounds refusing take part. Of the leaders of the Aid/Relief movement Bob Geldof, for his part, essentially said the means justified the ends whilst Lenny Henry was more reflective on the appropriateness of the “white saviour” narrative.

The theme of representation gets a reprise in a later part of the book where Faloyin talks about representations of Africa in the movies which are usually highly stereotypical. This chapter is genuinely laugh out loud funny, as the author says it is a pastiche of Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to write about Africa“. I hadn’t appreciated quite how revolutionary the film, Black Panther, was in terms of it’s representation of Africans. Actors in Black Panther did not act as generic Africans, they took on national or region speech and habits. Somewhat to my surprise Faloyin cites Coming to America as an earlier film in the same vein – sadly from Hollywood this appears to represent the full list of African films.

Faloyin talks about the story of post-independence democracy in seven types of dictatorship: cold war dealmakers, god-playing colonial masters, revolutionary heroes, opportunistic families, civil-war peacemakers, founding fathers and (rarely) unhinged madman with taste for human flesh. He does this through brief sketches of 7 post-independence leaders Siad Barre, Sani Abacha, Robert Mugabe, Paul Kagame, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Obiang Nguena Mbasogo, and Muammar Gaddafi. Some of these dictators have fallen, but others and others like them remain in place. All of them have been supported to some degree by the West or the Soviet Union – sometimes both!

The chapter on looting is perhaps the most shameful for a British European since it is ongoing; the “Scramble for African” in the 19th century is beyond our reach – it happened in at least our great-great grandparents time. But in terms of looted artefacts it is my generation, people like me, in museums in my country who hold a tight grip on the artefacts taken (violently) by British forces during the Scramble with little obvious will to return them. Much of this discussion is based on the Benin Bronzes, these were not just taken, the sophisticated cities that held them were destroyed. Faloyin states that 90% of Africa’s cultural artefacts are now outside of Africa but of the 900 or so Benin Bronzes held by the British Museum, 800 or so are in storage. When Benin Bronzes went on (loaned) display in Cotonou, capital of Benin 275,000 people went to see them.

France, Germany, and Belgium were also heavily involved in looting artefacts – the Germans seem to have a particular enthusiasm for human remains which fed into their race science research.

It is fair to say there has been some progress on the return of artefacts to Africa but mainly in writing reports, with minor organisations returning a few artefacts with great fanfare, and foot dragging. Faloyin estimates that the number of artefacts under discussion for return is around 10% of the total.

Jollof, a rice dish from West Africa is a bit of a recurring theme through the book, clearly of critical importance to West Africans, and the author, but perhaps included for relief from some of the more serious chapters.

The book finishes with some vignettes with modern Africa, through protests in several countries, culture and the story of Botswana who fortunately discovered their diamond deposits after independence from the British and has thrived as a country since. Faloyin is optimistic about the future, he sees a young continent with a lot of positive things going on and perhaps signs of the end of the post-independence conflicts.

Feb 26 2025

Book review: 1666 – Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal

My next review is of 1666 : Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal. The book is centred on London, in the year 1666 with a substantial chunk on 1665 which provides background to the events of the following year. It was certainly a very eventful time, the plague of the title is the Black Death which made a return to London in the summer of 1665. The war is the second Anglo-Dutch War and the hellfire is the Great Fire of London.

It is only a few years after the Restoration. As an interesting aside I learnt of the Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660 which appears to have forgiven all crimes committed during the Civil War, except for regicide. This is relevant since some senior figures in the navy had been involved in Cromwell’s government. John Milton benefited from it too, as someone imprisoned for his anti-Royalist views.

1666 is substantially about the “great men”, such as the king, his brother and the court but it contains quite a lot of rather smaller characters. I was intrigued by the reports from William Taswell, a schoolboy, whose autobiography was published posthumously in 1852.

Also mentioned, amongst many others are Margaret Cavendish, whose biography I read previously, and Aphra Behn – who sounds like a really interesting woman. In this book Behn travels to the Netherlands as a spy, she would later go on to become a prolific playwright. Rather inevitably Samuel Pepys appears frequently, as does another diarist, John Evelyn. Robert Hooke, John Milton and Isaac Newton also gain a couple of pages but it feels a little like they were bolted on for additional colour.

I must admit I read the section on the plague assuming that it was written after the COVID pandemic, and only realised after I’d finished that it was written in 2016. This highlights some of the similarities in pandemics across the years. In contrast to the present day, the 1666 plague led to a mass exodus from London. Those suffering plague were quarantined in their own homes, typically with their families, with fatal consequences for most concerned. At the time there was some discussion as to the wisdom of this type of quarantine. The government took steps to limit public gatherings which seem to have been largely obeyed. The plague was petering out in London by early 1666 but was starting to rage outside the capital. It killed around 100,000 from a population of 460,000 in London.

I have read books on plague, and as a child the Great Fire of London was a regular feature in history lessons. The Anglo-Dutch Wars are something I have not read about before. This thread of the story starts with the accidental destruction of the London in the Thames. Followed by a number of naval engagements where it seemed, to a large degree, that the weather was a determining factor – the navies of the English and Dutch were fairly evenly matched at this point. The English were possibly gaining the upper hand during later Summer 1666 but the Great Fire strained resources considerably. The Dutch successfully attacked the Chatham Docks in the summer of 1667, shortly after a peace was agreed which only lasted until 1672.

The “Pudding” of Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire started, is black pudding, not dessert. Providing a segue from the Angle-Dutch War: Thomas Farriner, the owner of the bakery where the fire started had a contract with the navy to make ship’s biscuit. Farriner was a jury member in the trial of Frenchman Robert Hubert who confessed to starting the Fire, he was found guilty and executed despite being clearly innocent (even at the time). This was an aspect of the Fire I had not appreciated as a child – there was a lot of suspicion, and even violence, against foreigners even as the fire raged on the assumption that the fire could not have spread so fast without help. The total damage was 70,000 made homeless, 13,000 houses destroyed, 87 churches, and 52 livery halls with a total financial loss estimated at £10,000,000 (about £2billion in current figures). Over the four year Blitz campaign during the Second World War around 70,000 buildings were destroyed but the population of London was nearly 9 million rather than several hundred thousand. The fire ran its course in 4 days and obliterated most of the city of London within the Walls.

The official death toll was 6 people, however Rideal highlights this was probably a large under-estimate; many of the elderly and infirm would not have been able to evacuate quickly enough and their bodies would have been completely consumed by the fire. Rideal also talks about the psychological impact of the fire, Pepys writes of his nightmares after the Fire and there are a number of accounts of people clearly permanently changed by the Fire. I can’t help thinking the Plague would have had a similar impact.

The book finishes with an epilogue containing paragraphs on key characters and what they did next.

I found this a very enjoyable read, it is relatively short with quite a narrow scope but it gives a gripping picture of London at the time. The themes of plague, fire and war “work well together”.

Feb 07 2025

Book review: Roads in Roman Britain by Hugh Davies

My next review is of Roads in Roman Britain by Hugh Davies. Davies was a road engineer, and the study of Roman roads is a retirement project for him, which amused me since I am currently contemplating retirement. I don’t mean this pejoratively – I think in Roads he did a great job bringing together his expertise and the existing academic work in the area, as well as his own original research. He gained a PhD in 2001 from Reading University. In addition he has compiled a database of Roman road characteristics which is exactly my sort of thing.

The book starts with some basic definitions of what a road is and how it is structured. Davies focusses on the function of the road as a transport mechanism rather than as a boundary indicator, a navigation system or an expression of Roman power – uses I hadn’t really considered. As a structure a road has a route and a cross-section. I liked the quote from John London McAdam which basically said the function of the road cross-section was to stop the running surface becoming unusable as a result of water coming from above or below!

There is very limited primary documentary evidence for the Roman roads of Britain, there is the Antonine Iternary, tables of routes across the Roman empire which includes some routes in Britain and the Peutiger Tables, a sort of pseudo-map of roads across the Roman Empire of which Britain is only covered in a small fragment showing the far south east of the country.

This leaves us with archaeology, fortunately Roman roads in Britain have been excavated for many years. Less fortunately dating evidence is sparse in roads. Some roads identified as Roman may well date to medieval or even the 17th century when the turnpike roads were the first to match the quality of construction of Roman roads. It’s worth noting that none of the names used for Roman roads (Watling Street, Ermine Street, the Foss Way etc) are original – they are labels dating to the medieval period at earliest. It is not clear if Romans used any sort of naming for roads.

Archaeological practices have improved over the years, it is only really in the last quarter of the 20th century that it was appreciated that Roman roads are structures that were repaired and reconstructed over centuries.

I think the most interesting idea in this book Davis’s proposal for a reason for the straightness of Roman roads. He argues, unlike others, that the Roman’s must have made some sort of map before laying out roads and that the likelihood was that this was some large scale object possibly inscribed onto a floor. Under these circumstances straight road segments are the easiest to transmit to “the field”. It is easy to say “go to this point, build a straight road in this direction until you have gone this distance”, imagine trying to describe a more complex route accurately.

One of the recurring themes of the book is as to whether the Romans built roads to a strict pattern in terms of construction details and width. Justinian codified road classifications in the 6th century AD; an iter is pedestrian only, actus will allow a beast of burden, via will allow a cart however no numerical widths were defined. The Twelve Tables from fifth century BC says a straight section of road must be 8 pedes (Roman feet) wide on the straight an 16 on corners. However, on the ground road widths follow quite a broad distribution with a peak around 20 pedes (which is about six metres). This is wide enough for two-way cart traffic.

Based on the road surface (crushed stone/gravel) and the maximum gradients Davies suggests that Roman roads were designed for heavy carts moving at walking pace rather than fast passenger carriages. I was interested to learn the optimum gradients for carts are based on the rolling resistance of the surface balancing gravity (which becomes larger for steeper slopes). This is to avoid runaway carts since braking technology at the time was poor.

In the past historians have tended to the view that the Romans worked in a very regimented fashion. Davies comes down on the side of a more flexible approach determined by local factors. This is complicated in the archaeological record by repair and reconstruction activities, in some places there is evidence for 9 or 10 cycles of repair/reconstruction – sometimes this is as an addition on top of an older road but sometimes it is a widening of the route.

Davies observes that there is a difference in construction methods between the north and west of the country and the south and east with the north and west making greater use of stone. He attributes this to much more significant military use in the north and west, and better availability of suitable stone.

There is a chapter on Roman town plans which looked like it could be a whole separate book. Roman towns are typically built on a grid sometimes this grid is based around a Roman road alignment – suggesting road predates town and sometimes the road deviates to adapt to the town grid, suggesting town predates road.

Davies covers fairly briefly the development of the network over time, in terms of the military function of roads. The Royal Engineers estimated that the initial road from a Kent invasion landing point to London would have taken 1000 men about 15 weeks, a full version would take 3400 men about 3 years. The Roman road system was not fully developed until into the 2nd century AD – some 60 or so years after the invasion. London was not the transport centre of Britain at the beginning of the Roman occupation but became so over time.

This book is somewhat specialist, I enjoyed it because I’m interested in civil engineering and Roman history. It is short and readable, and I think provides a unique perspective.