Book Review: Disability and the Tudors - All the King's Fools by Phillipa Vincent Connolly


Book cover featuring King Henry the 8th.

Throughout history, how society treated it’s disabled and infirm can tell us a great deal about the period. Challenged with any impairment, disease or frailty was often a matter of life and death before the advent of modern medicine, so how did a society support the disabled amongst them? For centuries, disabled people and their […]

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Book Review: Glass Coffin by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch (Darkwood Book 3)


Book cover. An ornate clock stands at five minutes to midnight.

The tyrannous Huntsmen have declared everyone in one village to be outlaws, since they insist on supporting the magical beings of neighbouring Darkwood. Why won’t they accept that magic is an abomination? Far from being abominable, the residents of Darkwood are actually very nice when you get to know them, even Snow the White Knight, […]

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Book Review: Seeing Like A State - James C. Scott


Book cover featuring an eye trapped in a rigid box.

In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyses failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not—and cannot—be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon […]

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Book Review: Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo


Book cover featuring a Black woman wearing a colourful headscarf.

This is Britain as you've never read it. This is Britain as it has never been told. From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. […]

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Book Review: After Meat - The Case for an Amazing, Meat-Free World by Karthik Sekar


Book cover of a bioreactor painted to look like a cow.

This self-published book is a bit of a mixed bag. There has been a lot of thought put into it but, in the process of explaining the author's theories, they've forgotten that brevity makes a book like this readable and enjoyable. It could really have done with a strong editor to tighten things up. The […]

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Book Review: Professional Practice in Engineering and Computing: Preparing for Future Careers by Riadh Habash


Book cover showing the ascent of man.

Unreadable. Full of grammatical errors and run on sentences. Just incredibly difficult to read. There may be some useful information in here, but I'll be damned if I can find it. Seriously needs to be edited down by someone with a strong grasp of the English language. Here's a typical sentence: "One of the key […]

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Book Review: Cosmogramma by Courttia Newland


Book cover with intricate twirling patterns of colour.

In his sharply crafted, unnerving first collection of speculative fiction shorts, Courttia Newland envisages an alternate future as lived by the African diaspora. Robots used as human proxies in a war become driven by all-too-human desires; Kill Parties roam the streets of a post-apocalyptic world; a matriarchal race of mer creatures depends on inter-breeding with […]

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Book Review: Sexual Revolution - Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback by Laurie Penny


Book cover.

This is a story about how modern masculinity is killing the world, and how feminism can save it. It's a story about sex and power and trauma and resistance and persistence. It's a story about how you can track the crisis of democracy against the crisis of White masculinity, and how the far right is […]

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Book Review: Such Big Teeth - by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch (Darkwood Book 2)


Book cover with a snarling wolf on it.

The Battle of Nearby Village is over, and deep in the Darkwood, Gretel and her friends journey into the hostile mountains of the north, seeking new allies in their fight against the huntsmen. There they find Gilde the Bear Witch, along with a Werewolf named Scarlett and a winged man named Hex. Meanwhile, Hansel and […]

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Book Review: A Teaspoon and an Open Mind - The Science of Doctor Who by Michael White


A book cover featuring a teaspoon.

How do you build a Tardis? What are the secrets of teleportation? Could Cybermen take over the world? Is telepathy possible - even for an alien? Will extra-terrestrials one day visit planet earth on their travels through the galaxy? Can a robotic dog catch a cold ...? Take a journey with the Time Lords as […]

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