Tomsk79

Reviewing Molesworth is a dangerous game. As Philip Hensher points out in his introduction to the Penguin edition, it's all too tempting to try to imitate Molesworth's unique narrative voice. And you only have to glance over at some of the Amazon reviews to see how unwise this is chiz. But the failed attempts highlight what an achievement that voice is: 400 pages of note-perfect schoolboy ramblings that will leave you wondering whether Willans and Searle really made it all up or whether they just pinched an unwitting pupil's exercise books. Molesworth (which I have borrowed from the lending library of Mrs Tomsk) is a collection of four books set in a 1950's prep school called St Custard's ("built by a madman in 1836"). Nigel Molesworth is the self-proclaimed "goriller of 3b", and an acute observer of school life. Naturally he spends much of his time decrying the oppressive teachers (particularly the headmaster Grimes and Sigismund the mad ma

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is the second book I've read by Haruki Murakami, the first being Norwegian Wood . The two share many similarities in style (engaging descriptions of everyday events, mellifluous prose) and characters (easy-going protagonists called Toru with unstable lovers, secondary characters who have only a tangential relationship to the story but provide plenty of colour). But where Norwegian Wood is restrained and cohesive, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is big, messy and very surreal. Toru Okada's story starts mundanely as he looks for a missing cat, which triggers a succession of loosely-connected meetings with curious people. The plot is almost as hard to summarise as it is to understand, but it centres on the fate of Toru's wife Kumiko and her brother, mixed in with grim tales from Japan's troubled history that seem to echo in the present. Toru meanwhile takes the time for some deep soul-searching and his aimless wanderings bag him a peculiar job. E

If you're familiar with the Flashman books you won't need a review of Flashman on the March , just a note that this time our hero is in Abyssinia. If you're unfamiliar with the Flashman books this is maybe not the place to start, as it's the last in the series. Having said that, like all the books it is a fully self-contained story so you could start here if you really wanted to. I started with the fifth in the series, Flashman in the Great Game , and it didn't do me any harm. The order of events in Flashman's life is not the same as the order in which the books were written anyway. But if in doubt, it's worth starting with the first, if only to find out how Flashman's illustrious military career began. Flashman is the bully from the Victorian novel Tom Brown's Schooldays , and Fraser's conceit is to imagine what happened to him after he was kicked out of school for drunkenness. It's not necessary to have read Tom Brown to follow the F

In the run up to the World Cup I was fortunate to be able to borrow my brother's copy of Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics , not that he could have stopped me given that he's currently in a different hemisphere to his books. Anyway it was originally a birthday present from me, so fair's fair. The pyramid of the title refers to the shape of the team on the football pitch. In the early days of the sport, when passing was thought unmanly, teams would generally play with almost everybody in attack. Gradually this settled down into the 2-3-5 formation (2 in defence, 3 in midfield, 5 in attack), still hugely attacking by today's standards. Over the course of the century formations became more and more defensive, to the point where 5-3-2 was a common sight. The pyramid had been inverted. Jonathan Wilson's book tracks this long-term trend along with more detailed looks at tactically advanced teams through the ages. The chapters are divided geographi

Let me indulge myself for a moment to imagine the best of all possible election outcomes: a hung parliament, leading to a government committed to a referendum on voting reform. In this joyous dream world, we then have to decide what system should be voted on. It's no use asking the politicians, of course, as they will only support what serves their own interests. The Conservatives support the status quo, as the split in the centre-left vote between Labour and Lib Dems gives them a huge advantage under first past the post (FPTP) rules. Labour, after many years of dithering that happened to coincide with large majorities in parliament, have undergone a deathbed conversion to the Alternative Vote (AV). Believe it or not, Labour would do handsomely out of such a change. The Lib Dems meanwhile support a form of proportional representation called the Single Transferable Vote (STV). The Lib Dems would more than double their seats under such a system. Fortunately we don't have

I was given Michael Palin's first volume of diaries by my father-in-law and admired them so much that I was inspired (not for the first time) to keep a diary myself. I soon realised (not for the first time) that I'm not one of life's diary-keepers. The secret, if Palin is any guide, is to write up your previous day's adventures first thing the following morning. Presumably this requires an engaged brain at an early hour, so there's no hope for me. I've resisted any urge to try again in the wake of Halfway to Hollywood , Palin's second volume of diaries. This is not a reflection on the book, which is just as admirable as the first volume; quite a surprise considering that the time period covered is, in hindsight, a lull between his great successes as a Python and as a travel documentary maker. Part of the joy is knowing the denouement before the author, the opposite of the normal reading experience. The title is an accurate summation of the contents. As

"What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong measures, we will strive for the wrong things." - Joseph Stiglitz After hearing so much about The Spirit Level over the past year, actually sitting down and reading it was almost an anticlimax. The authors point out that the results of social science research often seem obvious in hindsight, once the evidence has seeped in. Just how obvious the arguments of The Spirit Level now seem is a testament to the weight of evidence that Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have brought to public attention. The book opens with a startling observation: that the rich countries of the world can no longer achieve gains in wellbeing from increasing their material wealth. This is illustrated with a graph of life expectancy versus national income per person. For poor countries life expectancy rises rapidly up until an average income of around $10,000. After that it starts to slow, and beyond $25,000 the curve flattens out. Similar