I picked up this book when visiting a bookshop with a professional research mathematician. Because of nothing much other than the serendipity, I decided to get it and have a read: haven’t read much popular mathematics in a while. The prose flows well, even if many of the examples the author gives are somewhat familiar even to the interested layman. Malinowski’s Music Animation Machine was an unexpected highlight though. The argument is quite loose though, and I agree with many of the reddit criticisms on his article I no longer understand my PhD dissertation (and what this means for Mathematics Education)....

The pen portrait of a top-of-the-line single sex boarding school rings true to me. The girls, the teachers and the headmaster are all convincing, realistic characters. Of the three reveals, I anticipated one, missed the other and am unhappy with the third. But the clues are just the excuse: it is the atmosphere that counts.

Soon after attending a friend’s wedding in Yorkshire, I found and enjoyed Bill Bryson’s “Body, a User’s Guide” in a few days. So when I saw this Bill Bryson classic on the bookshelf, I couldn’t resist taking it down. I had first come across “Notes from a Small Island” some 20 years ago. I hadn’t visited the UK then; re-reading it now feels very different. I enjoyed Bill Bryson’s sense of humour, which carried the narrative through an otherwise quite drab period of 20th century English history....

Detective novels by a chancery barrister where the hero/heroine is a Professor of Medieval Law: I have been hankering over Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar series ever since coming across the blurb. “Thus was Adonis Murdered”, the first of the series, did not disappoint. In some ways the setting is similar to “Friends”: the central characters are 3 men and 2 women, all apparently single and reasonably successful professionals, and hankering for a bit of romantic adventure....

This work of fiction focuses on the political intrigues around cybersecurity and hacking. The author was a cybersecurity reporter and draws inspiration from the (mostly anonymous) sources she interviewed. There are two main stories. In a fictional NOW bank in America, a serious outage has taken place. The top management, paying attention to the issue for the first time, hired an ex-General to head up cybersecurity operations. But the General was clueless and useless....

Miss Marple is wonderful. After Poirot, it is so refreshing to have a hero that is self-effacing. I also enjoy how the story is narrated by Rev Clement, an elderly clergyman with a young attractive wife. The implicit authority of a COE priest; the slight insecurity of someone marrying a woman 20 years his junior; the gentle self-deprecation of a sensible clergyman; everything is done exactly right.

A friend of mine, also called Isabel, is a fan of Alexander McCall Smith. So when I saw “Friends, Lovers, Chocolate” in a book corner, I picked it up without much thinking. Isabel is an unusual heroine. She is an independent academic philosopher, just like Schopenhauer: inherited wealth permitted her to pursue the busy editorship of the fictional “Review of Applied Ethics” with little pay. In form, “Friends, Lovers, Chocolate” is very loosely a detection novel: Isabel’s pursuit of a puzzle pushes the plot forward....

I read the book on a phone screen, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. Unlike some readers in “Agatha Christie: 100 Years of Poirot and Miss Marple”, I didn’t try hard to work out the puzzle. It felt early on that many of the clues were just too specific to the time and place: they rely on technologies (letters; chemists’ vials) and a society (class divide) that I don’t have an intuition for....

The film was not what I expected at all. There was not a lot of Tetris and a lot of cold war. Every line from the Robert Maxwell character seems to be as obvious as can be. I wonder whether it was deliberate: either way I enjoyed the comic value! The fact that I watched the film with a Tetris enthusiast added a lot of pleasure to the experience. I wonder what corporate/intellectual property lawyers make of the film: what does a “contract” granting the rights to Tetris actually mean, when the government in question is already falling apart?...

I first tried Paradise Lost as a student, eager to dig into all the references and understand the greatness of the great work. That didn’t last very long. The gathering of Demons had too many references and allusions, and soon I was lost in the reeds and lost interest. Yet somehow or other, Paradise Lost came back to my life. One of my colleagues studied English at university and had a habit of making impressive quotations from it in conversation....