You’re welcome.

5 Books: All time favourites

• 1066 and All That by Sellar & Yeatman (1930): the first of its kind and never bettered, a long-time favourite of my grandfather’s. The original anti-history history text book (aeons before Horrible Histories and replete with exams ordering candidates ‘to write on both sides of the paper at once’ etc), this is the perfect summary of British history right up until the point where “America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a .” That beats Fukuyama hands down.

• Tragically I was an only Twin: the Complete Peter Cook (2003): a compilation of his writing over a lifetime of ingenious bawdy whimsy and absurdity. The one-legged Tarzan sketch was written when only 18 - but the humour just poured out of him.

• The Complete Yes Prime Minister by Lynn & Jay (1993): a bit of a spin-off this from the pair’s original TV series of Yes Minister and Yes PM. The likes of Hawthorne, Eddington and Fowlds so inhabited the parts that it is a joy to read these literary adaptations. Political satire NEVER bettered.

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979): Adams started this with John Lloyd as a radio play but he was the one to make it soar astronomically into an unprecedented trilogy in 5 parts. Such sidesplittingly effortless invention (or so it seemed) but with occasionally serious purpose. Just wow.

• Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene (1958): Greene is in my top 3 writers - his novels split between serious books and entertainments (of which this very much the latter). A brilliant take-down of the self-importance of British global power and its intelligence services, set in Cuba over a decade before it really was the setting of a nuclear confrontation.

5 Books: Comedy Classics

• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749): I was introduced to this by the sublimely funny 1963 film with Albert Finney and was no disappointed. What a brilliant, pacey romp through 18thC English society. Who can ever forget the households of Allworthy or Western, especially the likes of Rev Thwackum or Mr Blifil. One of the real greats.

• The Diary of a Nobody by the Grossmiths (1892): we’re now in suburban London (although Holloway hardly feels like that these days). the brothers George and Weedon (weird name) Grossmith created their character bank clerk Charles Pooter for Punch Magazine and this diary accounts for 15 months of his absurdly self-important life and vexations. Just marvellous.

• Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932): ashamed to say I'm new to this (we discussed it in a Triptych episode) but it is now a firm favourite. Precociously young but opinionated and mildly terrifying Flora Poste descends on the fixed certainties of an English farming family and sorts everyone out. Promising material? In Stella Gibbons, it’s pure gold.

• Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse (1934): the problem with Wodehouse is that he could quite easily have occupied all 25 slots on this list. And that’s just the Jeeves stories. I’ve tried to restrict authors to one mention each. But Wodehouse is the perfect antidote to all that is wrong in the world, as is his Jeeves. If only he offered his services to all and sundry. This book chosen for the sheer wonder of witnessing an inebriated Gussie Fink-Nottle giving out the prizes at Brinkley Court school.

• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938): a simple case of mistaken identity—two journalists on the books by the name of Boot—results in William Boot, the most hopelessly unqualified man ever to be sent into a war zone, going instead of John Courtney Boot. But Lord Copper is pleased with his decisiveness and Boot (William) is tossed about on the fortunes of war. A perfect novel and IMHO Waugh’s best (closely followed perhaps by Decline and Fall).

5 Books: Hilarious Fiction

• The Tin Men by Michael Frayn (1965): Frayn is another whose titles could feature several times here. He’s still going in his 90s and is unfailingly hilarious. So here’s his debut novel, a wonderful take down of the British boffin world of PM Harold Wilson’s era of the ‘white heat of technology’ as the team nervously await an official visit from HM The Queen.

• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving (1990): two school friends and their lives in the US East Coast. They’re not especially impressive of heroic - and yet there’s something about Owen Meany that John Wheelwright can never forget. This is such a surprising novel that touches on big issues of faith and determinism and hope while never losing its wonderful capacity of laugh-out-loud funnies.

• What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe (2014): a biting postmodern satire of the Thatcherite 1980s but it’s never heavy-handed or preachy. It contains all the ingredients of farce and evokes the old Carry-On films (the title comes from the 1961 Carry-on style film with Sid James and Kenneth Connor), while exposing deep fissures in contemporary society. A work of genius.

• Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer (2002): the author is a Brit born to Hungarian parents who fled the Soviet clampdown in 1956, and this novel fictionalises their experiences in a darkly comic way. A brilliant expose of the absurdities of totalitarianism but sustained by real joie de vivre.

• Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (2002): Kurkov is a recent favourite writer - try to get everything he writes (especially now, after Russia’s insane invasion of his native Ukraine). This is set in the madness around the collapse of the USSR in which proto-oligarchs are dividing and conquering and our hapless protagonist finds himself given charge of a penguin when the Kyiv zoo is forced to shut down.

5 Books: You can’t believe it’s NOT Fiction.

• Never Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda (2005): This is sage advice from the actor who made his name in MASH and latterly The West Wing. An extraordinary life told in admirable self-deprecation and wit. Just loved it.

• Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (1995): Bryson has created an entire genre with this sublime, midlife retracing of his arrival in Britain as a penniless American student. He delights in the paradoxes and oddities of the country in which he subsequently spent most of his life. Unputdownable.

• Bossypants by Tina Fey (2014): I loved this even though I was not hugely familiar with her work (apart from 30 Rock). She’s got a brilliant turn of phrase and has worked with everybody in the business. Takes no prisoners, though. As the title might lead one to believe!

• Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks (1998): I made the mistake of reading this during a weekend when I did my back in and had to spend most of it lying on the floor. But I couldn’t help it. Once begun, couldn’t stop. An idle pub bet results in the comedian having to hitchhike the circumference of Ireland with, um, a fridge. Will he succeed? Only one way to find out.

• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (2016): the South African comedy phenomenon is a megastar, but the person who shines in this book is his incredible mother! I don’t think I'll ever forget Trevor’s account of being dragged round the various churches she was part of each Sunday in her clapped out VW Beetle. So great. Or who could fail to be charmed by his Soweto dance troupe’s visit to a posh Jewish girls’ school in Johannesburg? Quite a lot of people, as it happens!

5 Books: In a League of Their Own

• Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson (1990): OK I said I don’t like to include authors more than once on these lists. But I feel it’s ok if they’re in different genres. And this is Bryson’s popular history of the English language. And you would not believe how funny it can be… until you read this. And his chapter on English surnames is out of this world.

• Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss (2003): And now for a book about English grammar; or to be more precise, punctuation. But never has the Oxford comma incited greater mirth or quirks of meaning been more entertaining. It’s a MUST.

• The Meaning of Liff by Adams & Lloyd (1983): the 2nd rule breaker of the list; Douglas Adams again, this time in a collaboration with John Lloyd that actually lasted. The premise was simple: there are all kinds of experiences for which there are no words. So they use meaningless placenames. At last we can now define aboynes, glasgows, belpers and bodmins.

• Molvanîa by Cliaruo, Gleisner & Sitch (2003): travel books (esp. those catering for student budges like The Rough Guides) are asking for lampooning and this Australian trio nailed it. Leading the unwary to ‘the land that dentistry forgot’, this ‘Jetlag Guide’ to the fake post-soviet state advises on life in the capital, Lutnblaag, and the like. Politically incorrect probably, but still fun as it mocks the travellers prejudices more than those they visit. Perhaps.

• The Timewaster Letters by Robin Cooper (2005): if you are in the habit of ranting against inbox spam and snail mail directmail then this is the book for you. Robin Cooper (aka comedian Robert Popper) gets his own back by engaging in extended correspondence with the customer relations departments of various organisations and corporations. Just for the hell of it. And the result is eye-wateringly funny as hapless employees get dragged deeper and deeper into pits of bureaucratic horror.

The Masterpieces

1. Midnight Mass (Mike Flannagan, 2021)

Midnight Mass is a 7-part Netflix series that came out in 2021, created by horror aficionado Mike Flanagan. Which, for many of us is not exactly the greatest selling point. But bear with this, since there was method in Sophie’s madness for suggesting we watch this. For the purposes of the episode, we focused just on the first two episodes: Genesis & Psalms (click image right for full list of intriguing episode titles).

A remote island, cut off by weather and failed ferries to the mainland, is the setting, a small community that revolves (for better or worse) around the island’s Catholic Church. This has beeb led by the elderly priest, Monsignor Pruitt, for years, but he is away on sick leave. The compelling but somewhat mysterious Father Paul stands in his place.

This is a beautifully depicted community. But the most striking thing about the whole conception, as we discussed in the pod, is that none of it feels clichéd.

2. Green Mountain Falls Skyspace (James Turrell, 2022)

James Turrell (1943– , USA) is a brilliant American artist who works with light. Green Mountain Falls is a remote town in Colorado and Turrell’s SKYSPACE was installed there in 2022 as part of a local arts project.

The principle is very simple. A windowless cube of a room, with seating up against each of the four walls up in the mountains. But in the roof, there is a retractable door. Beyond that, only sky. Within the cube, sophisticated lighting can transform the atmosphere at the touch of a programmable button.

Find out more here.

3. Who Are We Fooling (Brooke Fraser with Aqualung, 2010)

Brooke Fraser (1983- ) is a singer fr

om New Zealand and, for years, was associated with Hillsong Worship. But she has built a successful global career in her own right. The song Who Are We Fooling? is taken from her Flags album from 2010 and was written with the British singer Aqualung (aka Matt Hales).

As Joel notes in our conversation, the song is unusual in being a genuine duet, rather than just a tune sung together. This is a musical dialogue that cuts right to the heart in the most affecting way.

Here is a live version with a different singer, TEEKS, and the Auckland Philharmonia from 2024.

Other Mentions

Opening Gambit: Fave Pop Culture Moments

• Sophie: John Travolta’s 

• Joel:

• Mark:

I don’t think I can remember a time of not doubting stuff. Is that weird? Perhaps. But it’s not really been something I’m able to prevent. Like breathing. There’s also perhaps been a sub-tectonic strain of cynicism within me that, if anything, has grown over the years not diminished.

So my challenge has not been one of IF but HOW.

On August Thursdays, our church in Maidenhead has a series of random talks, and I was asked to offer some thoughts on this. It was actually helpful for me to do it, especially because of some clarifying questions during the Q&A.

So here it is:

In case useful, here’s the handout:

Stmm Handling Doubt (jul 2026)

167KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

And a link to the Os Guinness book I found especially helpful, later published under the title God In The Dark.

1. President Putin’s Christian Framing

2. Patriarch Kirill’s Christian Framing

3. The Ironies of Ukraine’s History

4. Nabokov’s Prophetic Insight

1. President Putin’s Christian Framing

When Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 (in fury at the Ukrainian people-power rejection of his puppet President Yanukovich in the Euro-Maidan protests), he deliberately makes grand historical justifications. Despite decrying Ukraine as an artificial country He cites NATO expansion as a provocation (but then one just as to ask why other countries would want to join) and the need to denazify Ukraine (and yes, there is a far right elements in parts of the Ukraine military—as there is more or less everywhere, including Russia). How ironic then that Ukraine is led by a Russian-speaking Jewish president from Ukraine’s east, one who lost many family members in the Holocaust? But more than that…

• Putin explicitly invokes the Kyivan Rus leader Vladimir the Great, said to have been baptized on the peninsula in the 10th century and converted the medieval Slavic state to Orthodox Christianity—at which point, Moscow did not even exist. It is, of course, ‘obvious’ that Kyiv must return to Russia (despite the fact that the opposite conclusion could early be drawn). But for those who know and love Russian history, this move apparently makes complete sense.

• Incidentally, according to the article just linked, a poll in Russia conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation, found that just 25 percent of Russians surveyed were able to recall that the conversion of Kievan Rus to Christianity took place under Vladimir the Great. So he’s clearly really important to people.

The invasion began in Feb 2022. There are many points before and since at which Putin outlined his casus belli. But two are significant here. Later that year, in September, Putin gave a speech to herald the signing of the Donetsk and Lugansk accession treaties into Russia.

• These regions have joined Russia on the basis of citizens’ right to choose who governs them (and, of course, they’re desperate to secede from Ukraine ). But what about the rest of Ukraine. He’s discussed the historical grounds for this on many occasions: it’s definitely worth listening to the Rest is History episodes on the Vikings in the East (to learn both why he claims this and why it really doesn’t hold up). But that’s not the only justification.

• In this speech, he gets all theological. The invasion is necessary because

  Ukraine is being lured away from the Russian sphere (Russkiy Mir) by the conspiring western countries. Representative of this evil influence is the pervasive confusion about sexuality, gender, parenthood. So he declares that this influence must be resisted:

Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” These poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, and not only in our country but also in all countries, including many people in the West itself.

He cites the presence across Europe and N. America of like-minded people who are equally concerned about these seismic cultural shifts (he’s not wrong about this, of course). His point, though, is that the only hope for the world is push back, territory by territory, and that means preventing Ukraine becoming even more westernised. Which is why invasion is the ONLY course, completing what he began in 2014 in Crimea. How grimly ironic to draw on the Sermon on the Mount at this point, do you not think?

But Putin’s rhetoric doesn’t even come close to what his pet Patriarch, Kirill, has said.

2. Patriarch Kirill’s Christian Framing

6 March 2022: Just days after the invasion began, on Forgiveness Sunday (of all days), Patriarch Kirill preached in Moscow’s Cathedral of the Holy Saviour (in translation here).

• As far as he is concerned, the invasion just days before is quite explicitly linked to, and partly justified by, Gay Pride.

For eight years there have been attempts to destroy what exists in the Donbass. And in the Donbass there is rejection, a fundamental rejection of the so-called values ​​that are offered today by those who claim world power. Today there is a test for the loyalty to this new world order, a kind of pass to that “happy” world, the world of excess consumption, the world of false “freedom.” Do you know what this test is? The test is very simple and at the same time terrible—it is the Gay Pride parade. The demands on many to hold a gay parade are a test of their loyalty to the new world order; and we know that if people or countries reject these demands, then they do not enter into that world order, they become strangers to it.

• Now, there are many things one might say quite legitimately about such events; for example, the domineering cultures of the likes of Stonewall UK have been exposed and resisted recently (for example, at the BBC itself). But at the very least, in a democracy, one can disagree with what a pride march represents or promotes at the same time as accepting its right to take place.

• To suggest that this is why Donbas’ Russian speakers would secede is bizarre. But apparently, they have suffered for eight years because of this desire and thus Putin’s ‘special military operation’ was designed to rescue them. Even though it is now well known that the Donbas resistance was a classic false flag operation with the notorious ‘little green men’.

But a full-blown theologising comes 2 years later (at a point that we now realise was not even half-way through the war). In a decree from the World Russian People’s Council (chaired by Kirill) on 27 March 2024 (entitled The Present and Future of the Russian World), it is stated that:

special military operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people are defending the single spiritual space of Holy Russia, [against] the West, which has fallen into Satanism.

In previous statements, Kirill declared that death on the battlefield in Ukraine washes away all sins and that Russia opposes the Antichrist and global evil. Naturally others in the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) echo such views. And when the invasion commenced, the patriarch ordered that the Prayer for Holy Rus for victory in the war should be mandatory in all church services. In this prayer the war is presented as a fight for the survival of the so-called All-Russian nation. In his mind, as this article says, he sees this as a zero-sum game.

The WCC (World Council of Churches) was, in its rather feeble way, quite unimpressed. Which is something, I suppose. But neither this, nor countless other protests, have made the slightest difference. According to catholic scholar George Weigel, the patriarch has doubled down on his heretical position in a recent book in which he claims this ‘war as a salvific action: a duty to God and a Russian service to a corrupt world’ ($).

Such are my briefest of forays gleaned from cursory Google searches. I confess to not really having the stomach for much more. But there’s no doubt that some regard this conflict as a holy war, and even crusade, that’s being waged against the Satanist West in its humanist secularism that casts of all constraints from common sense and tradition. Ukraine just happens to be the flash point. You can just feel the waves of pity emanating from the Kremlin as night after night Kyiv and other cities are bombarded.

But what really gets me is that Christians in the west who certainly have a few thoughts about culture wars and church decline are swallowing the lines from both president and patriarch whole.

The Ironies of Ukraine’s History

(i) Ukrainian persecutors?

Something that gets picked up from time to time is the subject of religious freedom in Ukraine. It’s a hot button issue for the right, and for good reason. It IS a problem all over the world, and it’s rarely the kind of thing flagged by human rights activists. Organisations like CSW and Release International do vital but often thankless work. But the case is occasionally made that President Zelenskyy is, in Tucker Carlson’s words, ‘a persecutor of Christians’ because of its suppression of the ROC within Ukraine. Far from being legitimate, it actually bears the classic propaganda hallmarks to exploit an existing grievance or concern in the west for anti-Ukrainian purposes.

At stake is the status of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP, formed around the country’s independence in early 1990s). This is inevitably complex and there is much that I don’t understand. But during wartime, all sides tend to exploit whatever means they have to gain the upper hand. As I understand it, there is little doubt that the Kremlin uses the ROC for its own ends, and because UOC-MP is affiliated to Moscow, it’s not hard to see why it has been regarded, and used, as a fifth column. This is in part what led to the historic schism when the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) broke away in 2018/19. Christianity is not proscribed in Ukraine. Nor is Orthodoxy. But the UOC-MP is problematic at the very least. No wonder there have been legal consequences, as this fairly recent research paper by Mark Elliot, the eminent church historian of the region, investigates.

However, it should be clear by now that the UOC-MP is a unique case. No other religious organisation or denomination has been affected by this kind of legislation. So the suggestion that there is religious oppression in Ukraine is frankly absurd, as is the claim that there is no free speech.

For all its problems with corruption, agitation and extremists, they are nothing compared to those of Russia where even carrying blank pieces of paper in a protest can lead to imprisonment. What amazes me about corruption in Ukraine, is not that there is a lot of it (which there is) but that it is still actively and successfully hunted down, despite cases coming desperately close to the presidency. Even during wartime. Can you see that happening in Moscow? Or for that matter in Washington DC?

(ii) Ukrainian humanists?

The roots of Christianity in the Slavic world is traditionally traced to the Baptism of Rus in Kyiv in AD998, which is why Kyiv’s Pechersk-Lavra has been such an icon of Ukrainian and Slavic Christian identity. So what’s going on with Putin’s bombing of it? If this really is a holy war, it’s a very peculiar way of going about it.

Furthermore, during the USSR era, Ukraine was an outlier.

• As far as Orthodox believers were concerned, c50% of all ROC parishes across the entire Soviet Union were in Ukraine. And in fact, 25% of all USSR ROC parishes were found in just 4 Ukrainian oblasts (counties)!

• What about Protestants? Ukraine actually had a reputation for being the country’s ‘bible belt’. The USSR’s Baptist church had 1.5 million registered members; over half lived in Ukraine. That made it the largest Baptist community in Europe!

• Then there is the anomaly of the Ukraine Greek Catholic Church, found predominantly in western Ukraine around Lviv and other hubs (the reason, if you’ve ever watched major Vatican ceremonies like conclaves or papal installations, why a bunch of cardinals wear orthodox-looking kit). In the Soviet era after western Ukraine was annexed by Stalin (it had been part of Poland), the UGCC was prohibited. (You can see more about the ban at the Lviv Sobor/Synod here) Prior to that, it had 3.6 million members in nearly 2400 parishes across the region. The church then had to exist underground for the next four decades or so.

How darkly ironic then that Moscow deigns to invade, bomb, and brutalise Kyiv in the name of a holy war when Ukraine was far more ‘Christian’ than Russia (however that might be quantified)?

Nabokov’s Prophetic Insight

I’ll close with an extraordinary paragraph that I read only this afternoon. It comes from an important but chilling book by Russian investigative journalist Andrei Kolesnikov, titled The Closing of the Russian Mind.

The eclectic essence of this ideology, which has been reproduced at various stages of Russia’s historical development, was described astutely by the writer Vladimir Nabokov in the short story “Conversation Piece, 1945,” published in The New Yorker in June of that year. In it, a former White Army colonel - an immigrant living in America - says:

The great Russian people has waked up and my country is again a great country. We had three great leaders. We had Ivan, whom his enemies called Terrible, then we had Peter the Great, and now we have Joseph Stalin. I am a White Russian and have served in the Imperial Guards, but also I am a Russian patriot and a Russian Christian. Today, in every word that comes out of Russia, I feel the power, I feel the splendor of old Mother Russia. She is again a country of soldiers, religion, and true Slavs.

This was an exceptionally precise observation by Nabokov, who abhorred such an ideological combination. Soldiers, religion, and true Slavs: nothing has changed in decades. A militarized empire that considers itself sacred and sanctified by God, blinded by the most vulgar nationalism... (Closing of the Russian Mind, p67)

And still it continues. And still the missiles, drones and bombs continue to fall on a beautiful and inspiring country (destroying thousands of lives and hundreds of religious sites). Make it stop.

Kyrie Eleison

The Masterpieces

1. Leif Enger's I CHEERFULLY REFUSE (2025)

We start with a very up-to-date masterpiece this time: Leif Enger’s 2025 novel I Cheerfully Refuse. Enger is perhaps not so well known on this side of the Atlantic, but he deserves to be. His writing is lyrical and evocative, and the world he creates for this novel is fascinating. It falls within the genre of dystopia but it wears that lightly. For example, we never discover the nature of the cataclysm that transforms the world, only that it has occurred at some unspecified moment prior to the story. The fact that Enger wrote it during the Covid lockdowns (a bit like Amor Towles’ A Gentleman In Moscow) is not incidental, however!

Set in the Great Lakes of North America, Enger’s characters wrestle with the challenges of this new environment, struggling to create a sense of order and community against the odds, while constantly trying to preserve their humanity. Recently widowed when his beloved wife Lark dies, Rainy befriends Sol, a young tearaway who joins him on his Orpheus-like journey.

Despite coming from an essentially Christian foundation, the book is far too well-written and brilliantly conceived to descend into crude tub-thumping. Instead it is a moving and ultimately hope-filled testimony to reslience and wonder (not a million miles away from Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven).

For more, listen to the conversation Russell Moore had with Leif Enger soon after the book came out – it’s full of fascinating and intriguing insights into the book and its meanings.

2. J. M. W. Turner's THE FIGHTING TEMERAIRE (1838)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was one of Britain’s greatest painters and of all his myriad works, The Fighting Temeraire is perhaps his most beloved. In polls purporting to identify Britain’s greatest/favourite/best (etc) painting, this frequently comes out on top (whatever that means). It is certainly one of the main attractions in the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square.

This is a painting about transition, about the end of one era overlapping with the commencement of a new one. It depicts the final journey of the Temeraire (which had seen glorious service at the Battle of Trafalgar itself), as the ship is towed from Sheerness in Kent along the river Thames to Rotherhithe in south-east London, where it was to be scrapped. For various reasons, this painting is an impossibility, a fiction to portray a greater truth. But it is one of those paintings that mesmerises the viewer, because the more you look, the more you see. Turner adored painting grand landscapes (in the manner of Claude) with the gorgeous wide colour-spectrum so characteristic of dawn and sunset. But it is no accident that this moment of high nostalgia is bathed in a pre-dusk light.

It is unsurprising then that this image means so much to a nation prone to nostalgia about past, so-called glories! And therefore, it was the perfect setting to a James Bond reaching the end of his usefulness…

3. U2's 3 Songs from NO LINE ON THE HORIZON (2009)

It was only a matter of time. U2 had to make it onto Triptych at some point, for reasons that regulars to my blog will know all too well. I’m only hoping that you were all impressed by my self-restraint in holding it back to this stage in the second season.

Instead of taking one song, or one album, we’re doing something a little unorthodox but there is actually method in the madness. And no, this is NOT the album U2 foolishly gave away to the world for free if they had an iPod or iPhone or whatever it was at the time. That was definitely a misfire.

This album is the one before that one, and came out in 2009. It’s quite hard to pin down as a whole, but after the opening title track, it does seem to be formed of three little groupings. And this is the first set. They are the most explicitly theological of the album’s tracks, and they each do intriguing things. You can go into a lot more depth if you wish by reading this longer engagement that I wrote some years’ back. But for now, read the lyrics (r) and listen to the episode!

Other Mentions: 3 'Slappable' Characters!

• Joel: Yoda from the Star Wars franchise

• Sophie: Uriah Heep from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield 

• Mark: Kenneth Widmerpool from Antony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (esp when played by Simon Russell-Beale)

I don’t quite know what to do with myself now. Of course, I have no illusions about its future, recognising how few novels actually come within spitting distance of a publisher let alone a bookshop, so we’ll see. If I put anything else about it here, it’ll be about lessons from the process more than anything else.

So I thought I'd just mention here how it all began. After all, writing a novel set within a very specific timeframe during the Cold War — we’re in East Berlin between February 1968 and some time in the middle of 1969 — is hardly my natural habitat. I don’t speak German, have only visited the country a handful of times, and have never lived in a communist society. But such impediments never stopped the likes of Mary Renault from inhabiting in Ancient Greece, Iain Pears in Restoration Oxford, or in colonial New York (or any others I've mentioned).

It all began with of a bit of graffiti.

The walls belong to the State library, and stands just a block or two away from Friedrichstrasse Station and its infamous Palace of Tears. In August 1968, 2 students had scrawled the name of the new Czechoslovak leader, Alexander Dubček. For this they were imprisoned and thereafter struggled with state-backed harassment right until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

This triggered a whole bunch of random thoughts. In particular, I was very struck by the thought that people throughout the Warsaw pact countries had been watching Czech events with bated breath since Dubček kicked off the Prague Spring. What was Moscow going to do? When the tanks finally went in, the world looked on in horror… including the citizens of East Germany.

That got me pondering about ordinary lives and how on earth one might need to navigate the horrors of totalitarianism.

Sacred Treasure

• Love this poem by Bethany Besteman: In The Belly (HT Victoria Emily Jones)

• Ian Paul gives historical background to the business of clerical robes

• Want to learn ancient Greek through classic texts (including Koine Greek through the NT), then this looks like a great website: Kevilex

• Fascinating piece about being a Polyvocal Church (and I had no idea about that thing about birdsong!) And while we’re on that kind of subject:

  • How to help a church becomore interculturally aware from EA’s Israel Olofinjana

  • Does contemporary missiology need an adversary? Harvey Kwiani on characteristically insightful form

• Bet you can’t guess which continent’s donors are the most and least generous? Quite shocking…

• These 4 conversations from the Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts are fascinating (esp with Christopher le Brun, whom I interviewed for my DMin).

Topical Treasure

• As my 25s prove, I love reading around the world. This website is a brilliant aid to that: just click on the country and see the books. Epic (HT Chris Howles)

• Fascinating but long read about J-P Sartre’s ground-breaking 1945 lecture in war-shattered Paris, ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’

• A devastating poem: 82 final sentences from people executed in Texas, by Joe Kloc

• A huge archive of negatives from the Idi Amin era was discovered a decade ago in Uganda Broadcasting Company

Quirky Treasure

• Life in a bygone age: Edward Bawden’s English Village prints, evocative of holidays in my grandparents’ village as a child

• Robin Williams, the master improviser: lines that made it into his movies

• Love street art, and murals in particular. This is particularly spectacular from Fene, Galicia:

And finally, here’s another type of street art: drop in on the views from windows all around the world.

So here goes: a highly amateur selection of favourites.

5 Quirky Histories: PLACES

• AFRICA: John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of A Continent: Read while living in Uganda, Reader covers an entire continent throughout the entirety of human history. So not really an ambitious book at all. But he does a brilliant job. And especially important is his dismissal of the absurd notion in some quarters of Africa ‘not really having much history.’

• ULSTER: Martin Doyle’s Dirty Linen: The Troubles in my Home Place: Very much closer to home, Doyle’s study is just one Catholic parish in Armagh, Northern Ireland during the 25-year ‘Troubles’. Every murder and atrocity caused spirals of grief, and Doyle is remarkably even-handed and empathetic as he meets the survivors bereaved from all sides. Heartbreaking always, but occasionally hopeful too.

• VIENNA: Frederic Morton’s A Nervous Splendour: This is one of a pair of unique books that delve into a 12-month period in the life of Vienna (the other is Thunder at Twilight). Everyone was there: Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Herzl, Lenin, Hitler, Trotsky, Stalin!! The first leads up to the murder-suicide of the Crown-Prince and his lover at Mayerling in 1889, the second up to the assassination of the next Crown-Prince in Sarajevo in 1914. Both superb, but the first is (only marginally) better (for reasons I can’t decide!).

• BRITISH PALESTINE: Tom Segev’s One Palestine, Complete: After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, much of it was divvied up between Britain and France, with the newly formed League of Nations mandates. Eminent Israeli journalist and historian writes about the 3 decades in Palestine under British rule before the formation of the Israeli state. Fraught, complex, tragic. A brilliant account.

• COMMUNIST EUROPE: Ben Lewis’ Hammer & Tickle: I love communist jokes. And I'm fascinated by the Communist east. Lewis’s ingenious idea is to trace the history of both through the telling of (often illegal) jokes, many of which can be dated very specifically. Very funny and informative.

5 Quirky Histories: MOMENTS

• 1776: Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: I was sceptical when I heard about the concept (that many aspects of the modern world can trace their origins to this one year). After reading it, I was fully convinced and actually jealous! I surprising and utterly compelling narrative, making for superb cultural history and a profound contribution to Christian apologetics.

• 1893: Joseph Horowitz’s Dvořák’s Prophecy, the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music: I love Dvořák’s music but I had no idea about his impact in the USA (everyone knows his New World Symphony, even if only from Hovis Bread adverts). He was brought over from Czechia to New York by a philanthropist with a vision for creating truly American music. He came for only 3 years, but his legacy was profound, especially on African Americans. It’s a legacy that white America has really taken another century to acknowledge.

• 1940-44: Lynne Olson’s Last Hope Island: as the nations of Europe fell into Nazi hands like dominoes, many governments in exile retreated to the last redoubt in the region: Britain. In 1940 there was no guarantee, of course, they would be safe there either. But this fascinating account looks into how these various administrations operated, both with or without British support.

• 1966-76: Tania Branigan’s Red Memory, The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution: I’ve never been to China so it somehow feels inconceivable to me. Too huge, too weighty and historic, too alien. And yet it holds a clear fascination. The Cultural Revolution was seismic and terrifying, a phenomenon which even 50 years on is still hard to grapple with (esp. with official censorship). Branigan does a remarkable job of digging, sifting, and reconstruction. Unforgettable.

• 1985: David Hoffman’s The Dead Hand, Reagan, Gorbachev & The Cold War Arms Race: How close did we come to Nuclear Armageddon? More to the point, why on earth didn’t we? A gripping account of the key players at the end of the Cold War and the 100s of others on all sides who played their part.

5 Quirky Histories: IDEAS

• Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind: this has rightly won plaudits and been widely read. Unputdownable and thrilling, Holland explains why the modern west owes far more to its Christian roots than even Christians recognise. This is a vital, and inspiring, record.

• James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science: When Newton said he could see so far because he stood on the shoulders of giants, the enlightenment propagandists assured us that he was referring to the Ancient Greeks. Not a bit of it. Hannam shows how significant, let alone advanced, Mediaeval science was, not in spite, but as a result, of its theistic framing.

• Ferdinand Mount’s Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality: Ferdinand Mount has a brilliant, eagle-eyed erudition that draws threads in the most surprising ways. Why anyone might want a history of sentimentality was beyond me, until I read this and it makes perfect sense. Surprising and eye-opening, he makes a compelling case for empathy for others, in part by exposing the consequences of its rejection (through a classical indifference and disdain).

• Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science This is one of my favourite history books of all. I’d always assumed the Romantics rejected science as integral to their rejection of Enlightened reductionism. Not a bit of it. The likes of Coleridge and Wordsworth were fascinated by science and regularly attended public lectures at The Royal Institution by Faraday et al. All of which makes much more sense of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

• Tobias Hürter’s The Age of Uncertainty: how the greatest minds in physics changed the way we see the world: I am no scientist. And much of this book went over my head when it was describing the crazy world of subatomic science. But the human story I very much appreciated, learning a lot about the interactions of the biggest names of the century, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Curie, Bohr, Planck. Just wow.

5 Quirky Histories: ARTS

• Holbein: John North’s The Ambassador’s Secret: The story of one painting in the National Gallery, Holbein’s Ambassadors. How can one painting warrant an entire book. Well, the painting is a puzzle that triggers a myriad interpretations and decodings. It reads like a real life detective novel, opening windows into the continental earthquake that was the Reformation. Brilliant.

• Shakespeare: Jonathan Bate’s The Soul of the Age: I love Jonathan Bate’s books. He has made the study of Shakespeare his life’s work and here makes a convincing case for the grammar school Stratford boy being the playwright by simply combing through all the cultural and educational influences that someone of that background would encounter. He examines school curricula and common ideas in circulation. These are all then mapped onto the plays and poems with precision. What a great way to be immersed into the life of late Tudor England.

• Gauguin & van Gogh: Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House: Two very different artists who tried to make a fruitful artistic partnership in Arles, in France, but which was perhaps doomed from the start (temperamental differences, contrary expectations, the intensity of their labours, a natural competitiveness). Martin Gayford plots out each day of the 3 months that would be the most productive of both men’s lives.

• 5 Slade Artists: David Boyd Hancock’s A Crisis of Brilliance: The Slade School of Art in London has had a remarkable influence over its 150 years of existence. This book studies 5 Slade contemporaries (Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington) who became war artists in the First World War and assesses the war’s impact on their work and lives. Devastating and inspiring in equal measure.

• Modern Classical Music: Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise—Listening to the Twentieth Century: Why did Classical Music shift from being popular and populist to niche and avant-garde? More to the point what music was being written and what was it seeking to do? Alex Ross is the long-standing Music Critic of the New Yorker and he makes 20thC music wonderfully accessible and interesting. There’s loads you will want to check out for yourself as a result.

5 Quirky Histories: REAL QUIRKS

• Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World: I’ve known Peter for decades and was stunned when this came out. He has astonishing breadth in his knowledge, understanding and scope; the result is a book that realigns impressions of global history especially for those with a Western/Eurocentric bias. I’d never have known he had it in him!

• Theodore Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity: One of the first books on this list that I read. Truly quirky, but again grappling with history on the grandest scale. How has society changed, how do men and women relate to one another, what matters to different cultures, etc? Fascinating questions all. But what makes the book genuinely surprising is that each focus is told through the lens of a different historical woman.

• Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War: Another war and its impact on creative people, but this time musicians after the Second World War: Shostakovich, Britten, Schoenberg, and Strauss each wrote music to respond and/or memorialise. Precisely what quirky history books should do, opening up a corner of life and experience that one would never think to explore.

• Lewis Baston’s Borderlines: A History of Europe Told from the Edges: Unlike many of the post-colonial regions of the world (that often have completely bonkers borders drawn on a vast scale), Europe has scores of borders that are bonkers at the opposite end of the spectrum. Soooo interesting and explains so much about the region.

• David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories: the role of Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History: Aaronovitch takes the 20 most influential conspiracy theories of the last 100 years and analyses their roots, commonalities, and dangers: from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Princess Diana’s death, via JFK and the moon landings. So helpful and needed now more than ever.

A decade ago, I wrote a handful of posts about the Brexit Referendum that took place in June 2016: two were written before the vote; another 10 months after it.

• 14th April 2016: Some Random Bremainer Thoughts

• 14th June 2016: Some Brexit Questions Before It’s Too Late

• 8th April 2017: So Remind Me Why We’re Brexiting Again

It felt like a seismic shift had taken place, one whose consequences are still vague and unclear. I vividly remember taking the Eurostar for some meetings in Paris a week or so after the vote. The French conductor rather pointedly announced:

Welcome to the Eurostar service for Paris, from London St Pancras (rhyming it with gone-bla!) to Gare du Nord, in Paris, France, EUROPEAN UNION.

As I made clear then, I wasn’t a huge fan of the EU as an institution per se, but I was definitely a fan of staying in it. So I re-read what I wrote then and have been trying to figure out what to make of it all now. I wasn’t getting very far, so I politely asked Claude.ai to sift through them to see what arguments still stand up now. The result was quite interesting.

These points hold up strongly

• Your core claim — that leaving meant years of uncertainty and economic cost, not the promised prosperity — is well supported. The pre-referendum forecast of a ~4% long-run GDP loss proved close after five years but too optimistic longer-term; recent work estimates that by end of 2025 Brexit had cut UK GDP by 6% to 8%, investment by 12–13%, and productivity by 3–4%.

• Your named culprit was right too: leaving generated a persistent increase in uncertainty, weighing on investment in particular.

• Your prediction that new trade deals wouldn’t compensate held — the OBR judges new non-EU deals will not have a material impact (offsetting the loss by ~0.2%).

• Your point that migration wouldn’t actually fall was prescient: the OBR now assumes net migration settles at 340,000 a year, far above the near-zero originally modelled (though the mix shifted from EU to non-EU).

• Your verdict that both campaigns were dishonest — the £350m/week NHS bus especially — is now uncontroversial

• Your theological and cultural arguments (kingdom over union, welcoming the stranger, nationalism as danger) aren’t testable by outcomes. But the rise of populism exploiting a real democratic deficit lends your instinct some retrospective weight — but that may reflect your priors as much as vindicate your reading.

This is gratifying at one level bearing in mind that I'm no PolSci/Econ expert by any stretch. But that’s hardly encouraging.

This point partly holds up

• Your union warning was half-right: Scotland did vote Remain and constitutional tension followed — but your “rump state of England and Wales” scenario hasn’t materialised. The Supreme Court blocked a unilateral referendum (2022), the SNP lost 39 seats in 2024, and by 2025 the SNP had reportedly dropped its referendum demand. Still genuinely open, though — the SNP won a fifth Holyrood election in May 2026 and keeps pressing.

OK, fair - but Claude doesn’t take into account the terrible consequences for Northern Ireland and the real risk that there would be a return to violence with the restoration of a hard border with the Republic. The Windsor Agreement did something to alleviate it, but it has exacerbated the Union’s inherent instability. It is surely not incidental that the regional administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are ALL now led by separatist parties.

We’re definitely not out of the woods yet.

Then Claude pulled together some more contentious aspects

Where you were overcautious or lucky or unverifiable

• Calling the economics “reasonably evenly balanced” in 2016 now looks too even-handed — the Remain economic case was stronger than you allowed.

• Your “UK would become the EU’s biggest economy” line rested on a speculative projection and is now moot.

• Brexit’s defenders would still argue: the counterfactuals are unfalsifiable and absorb Covid and the energy shock; sovereignty and self-government are real goods invisible in GDP; migration control was regained in principle; and the 2020s exposed EU fragilities a member UK would have shared. Whether that outweighs a multi-percent GDP drag is the honest debate — still argued largely on the terms you set.

• Every figure rests on a counterfactual (the UK that never was), which is inherently uncertain, and Covid plus the 2022 energy crisis blur the picture. Treat specific numbers as approximate; ranges run from ~4% (OBR) to 6–8% (recent studies).

At the time, I couldn’t help feeling that the biggest winner in it all was Vladimir Putin. And that was before we knew more about the FSB’s troll-farms etc. A divided Europe is a marginalised Europe and that could have desperate consequences for everybody. I can’t help thinking that Putin would have been delighted with the ways in which his disruptions have gone, starting with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It’s only in recent months that the quagmire that his Ukraine campaign has become is obvious to all. The problem is he only needs to persevere in pummelling the country and feeding countless troops into the meat grinder in order to win. Ukraine has to win the battles and most of the skirmishes every time.

Looking back now

I remain no unalloyed Europhile. I was profoundly glad we never joined the Euro. The Brussels machine still needs a good kicking. But I said in 2017 that we — and the EU, and the world — were better off with Britain in, and nothing in the decade since has shifted me off that.

If anything, I'm sorrier than ever to have been right about the bits I got right. It’s one of those occasions when I just wish I had got it wrong.

• William Styron’s Darkness Visible: This was the first book that really helped me grapple with depression (having read far too many that merely annoyed or crushed (or both) me. Styron became suicidal at the peak of his literary career. How he got through that is astonishing, hearbreaking but inspiring.

• Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart: I read this soon after going to live in Uganda. A scion of the Malan dynasty that did so much to create South Africa’s apartheid system, Rian fled to the US. He would have to come to terms with his own racial prejudice despite his liberal values and abhorrence at apartheid. A brave book.

• Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight: Fuller grew up on a farm in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe at a time of civil war. Ian Smith’s white minority rule had declared UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) from the UK and was clinging. At times poignant, at times hilarious, a very moving childhood memoir.

• Stephen Johnson’s How Shostakovich Changed My Mind: I’m a Shostakovich fanboy. This book is like no other and is truly remarkable. A BBC Radio 3 musicologist who always has interesting things to say found that the composer’s work uniquely helped him in deep mental illness. He sets out to find out why.

• Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s Nobody’s Girl: I was in two minds about this, but she was undoubtedly one of the most courageous women of recent times. A terrible sequence of events leads to her becoming one of Jeffrey Epstein’s possessions. She is unflinching and honest, never claiming virtues that were not hers. Heartbreaking that in the end she couldn’t live with the pain of it all any longer.

5 Memoirs: Creative Lives

• Toby Ferris’s Short Life in a Strange World: A strange quest, this one: to see every extant painting (there are 42) by Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in situ, soon after his father dies. It evolves into a unique amalgam of life musing, art criticism, travelogue and family history. Inspiring and gorgeous to look at.

• Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap: This has similarities with the Ferris. Laura Cumming is a popular art critic and she reflects on her artist father’s own death by exploring that of the artist Carel Fabritius (of The Goldfinch fame), killed at 32 in Delft’s terrible explosion in 1654. Again a deeply insightful and beautiful book.

• Michael Symmons Roberts’s Quartet for the End of Time: This time a contemporary poet discusses meaning, grief and belief with contemporary composer Sir James Macmillan, through the lens of Olivier Messiaen’s haunting wartime composition Quartet for the End of Time. A rich and profound book, it hits hard. I suspect I will have to reread it at some point to glean all its treasure.

• Bono’s Surrender: 40 songs, our story: OK, I’m a U2-fanboy too and have been for decades. So I was obviously going to love this. But I was also a little nervous about it, because dear old Bono can come over as a bit preachy and full of it all. But this is full of self-deprecation; and what is particularly special about it is that it is not about him so much as it is about all the others who made him what he is. It is an act of generosity in itself.

• Nick Cave & Seán O’Hagan’s Faith, Hope and Carnage: This was the biggest surprise of recent years. It got right under my skin, as rock star and rock journalist discuss all kinds of things but, above all, the raw beauties and profound griefs of our humanity. It’s inspiring and unputdownable.

5 Memoirs: Second World War legacies

• Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man: I read this at university and have never forgotten it. Levi survived Auschwitz (quite how he explains in this and other books). It is searing writing and simply one of the most important books written in the 20th Century. It is a remarkable act of witness and should be studied by every generation. It is, weirdly enough, a suitable companion to the Styron above (they became good friends).

• John Hackett’s I was a Stranger: A British paratrooper’s account of being protected and hidden after escaping from being wounded and captured by Nazi forces at Arnhem. A wonderful account of immense courage and friendship with the Dutch de Nooij family. They hid their secret guest right under German noses but shared their lives and faith with Hackett. So hopeful.

• Geoffrey Wellum’s First Light: This memoir was written years after the war, and only made it into the public domain through the eagle eyes of historian James Holland. Wellum was barely old enough for recruitment into the RAF in 1939 and would fly Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. Vivid, gripping and very affecting.

• Philippe Sands’s East-West Street: I included this in the Ukraine 25 list, it is a powerful account of some of Lviv’s Jewish survivors, including members of his own family as well as the legal minds who would influence the Nuremberg Trials and the consensus about international law. He travels to Lviv to learn more of them, but it is agonising to remember that Lviv (Lwów as it was) was one of Europe’s greatest Jewish cities pre-Holocaust.

• Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad: Even more personal, this story about both sides of Finkelstein’s family is astonishing and barely credible. Testimony to resilience, luck, determination and integrity. What a family. I couldn’t put this one down either.

5 Memoirs: Unusual People (ie isn’t an obvious category!)

• James Lees-Milne’s Another Self: One of the key players in the creation of the UK’s National Trust, Lees-Milne’s upbringing in the lower echelons of the aristocracy is nothing if not unusual. He always felt a bit of an oddball outsider as a result, but it meant that he had a sharp eye for the absurd and hilarious. And I found myself regularly laughing out loud.

• Richard Cobb’s A Classical Education: Richard Cobb was a lifelong Francophile and scholar but this memoir is utterly unexpected. He goes to visit an old school friend from Shrewsbury after he’s been released from a Dublin asylum after murdering his mother. Cobb then tries to uncover exactly what had led to the tragedy, including the time of their friendship in which he had experienced something of the mother’s tyrannical behaviour. Weird but gripping.

• Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis: Marjane has only very recently died in France which seems far too soon. This graphic-novelised account of her childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran, the experiences of her dissident family during the Islamic revolution and her subsequent escape are all the more poignant for being stylised as cartoons. It led to a remarkable animation too.

• Matthew McNaught’s Immanuel: I only discovered this because of the BBC World Service investigation into the cult that grew around Nigerian megachurch pastor TB Joshua. It is McNaught’s honest account of losing faith and trying to understand what happened to him and several friends who fell under its spell. A salutary warning but also a beautifully written book.

• Sandy Balfour’s Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose: I just love British cryptic crosswords (they’re not like American crosswords and they are an acquired taste; I just wish I was better at them!). And so does Sandy Balfour. He came to Britain from South Africa and tells his story through the discovery of cryptics and love! [The title is a clue: REBELLED = Pretty Girl (ie BELLE) placed inside Crimson (ie RED) results in Rose (RE-BELLE-D); marvellous]

5 Memoirs: Faith in Action

• Lamin Sanneh’s Summoned from the Margin: Sanneh was a remarkable scholar from The Gambia, who became Yale’s Professor of World Christianity. His start in life couldn’t have made that less likely - born into Muslim royalty, he encountered Christians who took him seriously as an older teenager. There were some things that left me scratching my head a bit about this story, but there’s no doubting his profound impact in global missiology.

• D. A. Carson’s Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: Don Carson was due to speak at the Oxford Christian Union the day after news of his father’s death in Canada came through. He kept the commitment before flying back; I'll never forget the talk as he ditched the notes and simply talked about his dad. Tom Carson was a senior pastor for a short while and thereafter never held senior positions. But his life impacted 100s of people in a deep but unassuming way. Inspiring.

• Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor: There is something slightly uncomfortable about a minister writing an autobiography. Peterson gets round this by giving an account of all the teachers and most important lessons learned in a lifetime of ministry. So far from being a catalogue of achievements (as such things could too easily degenerate into) he deflects and points to many others. Found this sooo helpful.

• Anna McGahan’s Metanoia: A memoir of a body, born again: Anna McGahan is an Australian actress who had really begun to hit the big time. She became a poster child for sexual liberation and modern fulfilment — all while her body was taking a pummelling and her heart was desperately searching for the good life just around the corner. And then she encountered God… an incredibly moving testimony.

• Jonathan Bryan’s Eye Can Write: born with severe cerebral palsy, Bryan was imprisoned in a broken and uncontrollable body and unable to communicate. Until his mother noticed that he could move his eye. He was remarkably liberated and showed the world that he had an irrepressible humour and active mind. Not only that, he was someone who trusted in Christ implicitly despite the terrible limitations. A super book. Sadly he died last year at only 19. But what a legacy.

Some have asked for the details and the handouts for it all, so the easiest is simply to put it all here. So here goes, whether you like it or not.

Handouts for Keswick @ Portstewart Colossians Talks 1-5

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You can get the audio as a podcast here, and the videos on YouTube below:

• I think there might be something in this. A long-term worker in Rwanda suggests helping people to face reality while perhaps avoiding burnout by adopting a theology of surrender rather than a theology of suffering.

• My father-in-law was involved in the setting up and board of this Christian development agency Five Talents, but has been long retired now. He sent us this newsletter about the impact of 2 years in South Sudan. Truly Astonishing.

• My old friend Ross Hendry on What happens to those who lose elections.

• Ian Paul argues we should use physical rather than phone/digital bibles. He may have a point.

• I rather love this: a Chasing Wonder Photo Bingo challenge.

Topical Treasure

• Gordon Corera writes a moving tribute to former boss of MI6, Sir Alex Younger.

• Life in 1950s Soviet Moscow as sneakily photographed by an American diplomat.

Quirky Treasure

• 5 Islands around the world that you absolutely CANNOT and WILL NOT visit (despite any curiosity or interest)

• Anthropeum: A fun daily game for museum geeks/archaeologists with 10 objects from around the world that need locating.

• A Walk Through the East End in the 1960s (the era of the Kray Twins etc).

• Why Picasso hated picture frames. And How to use an index as a WEAPON.

• I adore James Turrell’s work. Who knew that constructing artificial holes in roofs would really get people looking. I mean, seriously looking. Here’s his latest project, in Aarhus, Denmark.

• This is pretty epic: thought to be the first aerial photograph (of Boston) from a balloon in 1860

5 books: Nazi-era History

• William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: this is the granddaddy of them all. First published in 1960 it has never gone out of print. It’s a hefty tome (coming in at roughly 1250 pages) but then it’s a big subject. But it’s not without its critics (esp. in Germany) and it is journalistic more than scholarly.

• Martin Gilbert, however, was a scholar (in particular of Winston Churchill) and his The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy is gruesome but vital and unforgettable. It’s another doorstop (at 900pp) but it is so important. It makes the noxious gases of Holocaust denial as insubstantial as they are grotesque.

• Mark Roseman’s The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: on a completely different scale, thankfully, but still blood-curdling. This investigates what actually happened at Heydrich’s notorious Wannsee Conference at which the Final Solution was articulated and proposed. If you’ve not seen Kenneth Branagh et al’s extraordinary 2001 dramatisation, Conspiracy, you must.

• Julia Boyd’s A Village in the Third Reich: Boyd had already written about foreign travellers in Nazi Germany and followed up with this in 2022. If you’ve ever wondered what it would have been like in your own context, drilling down on just one small community makes for a real eye-opener, and oh, so human. Scary.

• E. H. Robertson’s Christians against Hitler: not particularly well-known book (or story for that matter) but a helpful window on the (minute) Confessing Church of the likes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It’s terrifying how few joined them but what courage.

5 books: Grappling with Nazi Culture

• Laurence Rees’ The Nazi Mind: Rees has worked on this period for years, but his most recent (came out Jan 2025) is urgent and timely. He identifies 12 characteristics of the culture that produced Nazism, and drawing on psychological scholarship and new historical research, writes a truly eye-opening book.

• Sir Ian Kershaw’s The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich: a book I have frequently returned to and which I wrote up here for a very different project. Kershaw is one of the premier UK scholars of German history - and his premise is simple. Of the 7 myths people believed about Hitler, what was in fact true? Answer: not a single one.

• Frederic Spotts’ Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics: this was recommended by a trusted friend but I wasn’t entirely convinced initially. However, it’s ingenious and surprising. He contends that Hitler was driven as much by an aesthetic vision for ‘Germany’ as a hideously racist one - which fits for someone who was a failed artist.

• Rudolph Herzog’s Dead Funny: I’m fascinated by political humour. And this gives a bottom-up account of life in the Reich through the jokes that people told and suffered for it.

• Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams: Another quirky angle here, this time dreams. Of course, dreams reveal much about what people are actually thinking and feeling (sometimes despite themselves), so where people have recorded them, there is a rich vein to be found. Came out last year and is fascinating.

5 books: Personal Experiences of Nazism

• Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State: What did the world know about the Holocaust before the end of the 2WW? Well, Karski was an extraordinary, courageous Polish student who found himself in the Resistance and then researching what was happening to the Jews. He took incredible risks and was even for a time a political prisoner in Auschwitz. And then he told the world. But would they believe him?

• Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider: Just as Nazism is crucial for grasping the GDR, so Weimar is for Nazism. This is a short book but it helps to understanding the cultural climate that somehow made Hitler seem an attractive proposition.

• Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love and Terror in Hitler’s Berlin: Larson has made a name from writing pacey and novelistic accounts of real events, and this is a brilliant example. He tells the story of the new US Ambassador to Berlin who arrives with his family in 1933 only to find that it is a world going insane.

• Jonathan Freedland’s The Traitor’s Circle: Another out last year, the British journalist tells the fascinating story of a few individuals from the heights of German society who bravely tried to do something about Hitler’s mob. There were so few of them, and they could only do so much.

• Anon’s A Woman In Berlin: a devastating book that, strictly speaking, belongs more to the immediately post-war era. But it is important because it shows just both how bleak the world left by Hitler was and how vulnerable it was to Soviet predations in 1945. This book is courageous and resilient, describing horrors you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

5 books: Nazi-era Fiction

• Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin (it’s UK title): unputdownable novel based on the true story of a couple who were devastated by grief for their son killed in France in 1940. So they defiantly deposited postcards at points around Berlin to speak out (quietly) against Hitler. A cat and mouse chase ensues…

• Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s The Passenger: a man relentless tries to flee after Kristalnacht, but finds himself stymied at every turn. Vivid and chilling, Boschwitz’s novel was written in 1938 but was unknown to English readers until it was translated very recently. It perfectly captures the sense of claustrophic desperation of getting trapped in a shrinking world.

• Gunter Grass’ My Century: one of Germany’s greatest writers, reflects on Germany’s 20th Century with 100 short stories and pieces that interlink and capture the splinters and fragments of a devastating time.

• Andrzej Szczypiorski’s The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman: A Polish novel, now. I knew nothing about it but picked it up because of Chimamanda Adichie’s foreword. It narrates 36 hours after the life of a Jewish woman who can pass as Aryan. A surprisingly brilliant book.

• Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director: G.W. Pabst was one of Austria’s greatest film directors who fled to Hollywood when the Nazis came to power. However, things didn’t work out well and so Kehlmann’s brand new novel imagines what it must have been like to return to Europe while Hitler was still in power. Some stunning writing.

5 books: The Nazi Legacy

• Tobias Buck’s Final Verdict: A Holocaust Trial: there are no war criminals left alive now. So Tobias Buck’s interest in the 2019 trial of Bruno Dey (who had been in the SS as a teenager when a terrible atrocity was committed) was motivated by the consciousness that it would be the last of its kind.

• Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad: Finkelstein has been at the heart of Conservative Party politics for years but his family background is anything but establishment. The survival of this family in between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Nazis and Soviets is nothing short of miraculous. An extraordinary story.

• Angela Findlay’s In My Grandfather’s Shadow: Findlay’s father was in the Royal Navy, her maternal grandfather was Wehrmacht General. Her personal story is full of poignancy and heartache as she tries to understand what it means to have inherited very different family legacies. This is a powerful book, not just because (full disclosure) Angela is a distant cousin.

• Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus: I’ve not read many graphic novels but this has never left me. It is a masterpiece, depicting the experiences of Spiegelman’s father under Nazi rule. The genius is to tell the story through animals (mice represent Jews, cats are Nazis) and it is searing.

• Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War: this is very different. Eichler’s brilliant book examines how four composers— Shostakovich, Britten, Schoenberg, and Strauss—attempted to memorialise the war and their different responses reveals a great deal about their respective cultures. Just stunning.

We’re now well into our Second Season, would you believe? Because Triptychpod.com is hosted through my Wordpress blog, and I’ve not yet figured out how to import from there, it’s going to stay there for the time being. But I’m CERTAIN that happy substack people will enjoy it (😊) so I’m going to link here.

The latest one (Episode 2:3) went live yesterday and the show-notes are here. It was one of the funnest we’ve done!

• “Assassins”, episode 1:9 of The Crown (2016): the episode about Winston Churchill’s retirement portrait painted by the great Graham Sutherland. As we all agreed, it was one of the most powerful episodes of television we’d ever seen, with script, acting, production, and drama all at stellar levels. John Lithgow as Churchill is extraordinary.

• Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm (1932): a laugh-out-loud satirical novel from the 1930s, in which her target was the ‘loam and lovechild’ (!) sagas that seemed all the rage at the time. Pricelessly funny.

• The Wallflowers’ “God Says Nothing Back” (2005): a gorgeous and elusive lament-like song from Jake Dylan’s band. The song is hard to pin down but hard to forget.

More details on all the things we discussed are in the show-notes. Hope you have as much of a laugh as we did!!

Get in all your usual podcast places — or watch the video on YouTube (below) — and if you enjoy, spread the word! If you don’t

1. "Assassins", The Crown ep 1:9 (2016)

Peter Morgan has made his name, despite his explicit republicanism, from dramatising the House of Windsor. First on stage, then in cinema, and more recently in Netflix’s blockbuster monolith, The Crown. The latter’s production values are spectacular, and certainly in the first two seasons (I confess I gave up in season 3 as it seemed to become more tabloidy), the synergy between script, actors and direction was impressive.

Season 1’s penultimate episode (Assassins) was written by Peter Morgan, directed by Benjamin Caron, and was first aired on 4th November 2016. The reason for choosing this one was because of its stellar acting and the dramatic poignancy of the storyline: Winston Churchill (a brilliant John Lithgow) is at last stepping down as Prime Minister to hand over to the desperately impatient Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam). A portrait has been commissioned from Graham Sutherland (Stephen Dillane) by Parliament and there is going to be a great unveiling. It is the conversations between artist and subject especially that stand out.

It has to be one of the finest hours of television I’ve ever watched, I think.

2. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

A complete change of tone now. This is a classic satirical novel from the 1930s and on which has brought universal joy and guffaws to all who have spent any time on the farm.

Stella Gibbons (1902-1989) was an English journalist with a remarkable eye for the ridiculous. Cold Comfort Farm was a runaway success that’s never gone out of print; sadly it seems to have been the only one of her many books to have stood the test of time.

Her crosshairs were set on the rural sagas that had apparently been popular in the 1920s, many of which had been inspired by the doom-laden tomes of Thomas Hardy (such as the (IMHO) unbearably bleak Jude the Obscure). By common consensus her targets include the so-called ‘loam and lovechild’ novels (!) like Mary Webb’s Precious Bane (set in Shropshire) and Sheila Kaye-Smith’s Joanna Godden (in Kent).

But you certainly don’t need to have read those books to love this one (none of us had, in fact). Her turn of phrase is sparklingly witty and the pen-portraits of the various characters laugh-out-loud funny. And the greatest joy of all is that we never do discover the precise nature of the “something nasty in the woodshed” that so perplexed the matriarch and protagonist Flora Poste’s Aunt Ada Doom.

It sets imaginations running wild and so that’s perhaps why the phrase has become enshrined in the English language. It even appears in a song by Neil Hannon’s wonderfully arch and rakish band, The Divine Comedy

3. God Says Nothing Back by the Wallflowers (2005)

Rebel, Sweetheart was The Wallflowers fifth studio album. Lead singer, and songwriter of all the tracks, is Jakob Dylan (who is, as you might expect, son of Bob) and while it didn’t make huge chart waves, it’s a gorgeous and provocative album.

The sixth track is our focus: God Says Nothing Back. It’s a haunting song, full of questions and doubts, and fittingly, is hard to pin down.

Other Mentions

Opening question: what album saved your life?

• Joel: Rich Mullins’ Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth

• Sophie: Mahler’s 5th Symphony

• Mark: Peter Gabriel’s So

But then there is the accumulative cultural toll, on the landscape, the urban environment, the historical inheritance. Iconic places and viewpoints, beloved and relished, are damaged, ruined or utterly destroyed.

So yesterday’s news about the bombing of Kyiv’s Uspenski Cathedral, which lies at the heart of Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery complex is devastating. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and so its targeting itself constitutes a war crime. Its ancient roots go back to the very arrival of Christianity into the region, over a 1000 years ago. In 2023, UNESCO actually added it to the World Heritage in Danger list “due to the threat of destruction the Russian offensive poses.”

I’ve no doubt that, like Notre Dame in Paris, there will be restoration and repair. But how absurd to imagine that targeting a place like this might undermine Ukrainian morale. It will surely achieve the precise opposite. But how pointless and unwarranted! All in the name of Putin’s holy war (yes, he has couched it in precisely those terms) against European Nazism, Secularism and Anti-Christianity.

I’ve been looking through photos from when I visited it a decade ago with my good friends Sergiy & Irina.

I’ve never forgotten one aspect of that visit. We were in one of the complex’s grandest halls (see below). And Sergiy remembers coming on a school trip during Soviet times. But this hall had been converted into a Museum of Atheism. Well, of course. What else would you do in this kaleidoscope of ancient faith? How the propaganda posters of Gagarin declaring the absence of God when he reached space and the venality of the priests must have clashed with the glories of these ancient frescoes.

Here are a few classics to give an idea.

And so yet again, a place that’s so precious to a Ukrainian identity that’s battling to survive under the jackboot of Muscovite hegemony.

Just a few more pics, this time of the amazing passageways and tunnels to the underground cells from which some mediaeval monastics would be confined for life.

This has been a hobby horse for years; primarily, I guess, because I never feel I’ve plumbed my concerns with it.

It just works, ok!

And that’s the point. Pragmatism works. There was a certain Christian publisher several decades ago that had this fairly notorious strapline:

Tools to get the job done!

I shall preserve its anonymity to protect its blushes. But it rather beautifully distils both the concept … and the flaws. Because pragmatism is so closely related to post-enlightenment, modernist thinking, let me evaluate it in classic modernist terms: the cost/benefit analysis.

Pragmatism has its benefits…

Who doesn’t want a task to be undertaken in the most efficient, cost-effective, well-planned way? You’d need to be a mug not to. These are the bare bones of business and organisational activity. And it’s true that churches have much to learn from them.

Before you can do that, however, you need a clear idea of the task itself. What will completion look like? What are the criteria for success? After all, no journey, however well-equipped, can be planned without establishing the destination. Only then can you use maps and other tools for identifying the best route. So this is why VISION STATEMENTS are crucial in the corporate world; and are now all the rage in churches. How else will you be clear on the WHERE you are heading?

Once you’ve got your VISION clear, then you need to get everybody onboard. Cast the vision and show how you’ll get there. Hence, your MISSION STATEMENT. This is what you’re going to commit to doing now. I suppose few in the secular world give much thought to the concept’s Christian origins, but it is a little ironic that churches are adopting it in its corporate frame. This is where the 1-year and 5-year plans come in. This outlines WHAT you’re going to do to get you to your desired end.

Finally, you might adopt a VALUES STATEMENT, because this will ideally shape the experience of serving this mission. An organisation aspires to be marked by certain characteristics, the HOW.

So far so good.

You then recruit leaders who will be ideal for having (or setting) such a firm grasp of the organisation’s VISION, that they can apply their creativity, charisma and dynamism to the MISSION. They need to inspire and encourage members to participate. This means it’s crucial to recruit:

• someone who’s ambitious for the organisation.

• someone who’s great up front, a gifted communicator (or even performer)

• someone who’s organised, gets the big picture and can manage (& delegate to?) a team

You get the drift. It is all tried and tested. And it works. That is how corporations and NGOs operate the world over. But the church…?

… but aren’t they outweighed by its costs?

I wonder how the apostle Paul would have fared in this recruitment process. I think it’s clear he had kingdom ambitions and was driven in his determination to meet them. He wanted to reach Spain… and after that, the relatively recently subdued province of Britannia? Who knows? But by his own admission, he wasn’t great up front (or is that a bit of a bluff to provoke the Corinthians?!). And while he was someone who sacrificially invested in individuals who joined him on his mission trips, not everyone could handle it. Was he too demanding and tough? Is that why John Mark dropped out and Barnabas picked up the pieces? We’ll never know. But Paul was by no means a perfect leader (surprise, surprise!). And to top it all, he had the rather disconcerting habit of finding himself imprisoned, jeered at and even on occasion getting stoned (literally).

That’s all idle speculation. But what clearly isn’t is the trail on both sides of the Atlantic of carnage left by abusive leaders. They’re recruited because they can lead the charge into the fray; because they come over brilliantly on a stage or screen or both; they have learned how to manage organisations from the best of the gurus out there. And the grim reality is that a thoroughly theological Vision masks a shadow vision:

• for seeking kingdom growth read vast numbers

• for sharing kingdom resources read mega-sales, hits, and newly resourced territories

• for training kingdom workers read clones who toe lines, maintain acquiescence, and serve the brand.

How has this happened? In short, we are too modernist. We’ve turned the church into a corporation. The vision—set by people—trumps every inconvenience and impediment. And the pragmatist will justify anything by it, including almost any means. To do this, the hallmarks that ought to identify a group or person as explicitly Christian are sidelined, if not ignored. Gifting is everything, and character irrelevant.

But in the NT, this is alien. Because the values of Christ come first and last. Become more like HIM, and you’ll find the vision and mission can more or less look after themselves. I’m exaggerating of course. But only just.

Unless we get this right, the costs are horrendous… and profoundly undermine our witness.

• we will rank gifting over character in leaders every single time

• we will be seduced by external success indicators over signs of genuine kingdom maturity every single time

• we will presume to have the right to decide who gets to be ‘in’ and will feel entirely justified in pushing out those who don’t agree or obey or stay quiet.

• we will have no room for the broken or weak or failing because they will be a distraction or impediment to fulfilling the vision.

• we will presume to set the priorities as indicated by the vision (which we have forged), which will then enable us to ignore the needs or challenges right in front of our noses.

So for my next 25, and because I’m hubristically attempting to write my own, I thought I’d gather my favourite historical novels, in rough chronological order (in terms of setting rather than writing); although to be fair, this rather breaks down by the end!

One rule I’ve set myself is that no author can appear more than once (even though one or two on this list warrant several entries).

** = my top 3!!

5 books: Out of the dim and distant mists…

• Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth (Beyond Hadrian’s Wall): I suppose this is a book for young adults, but so what? It’s a brilliant and pacey evocation of Roman Britain, imagining how the 9th Legion’s standard might be recovered from the barbaric Pictish tribes north of the wall as a way of salvaging some Roman honour. Just love it. Ignore the movie.

• Frederick Buechner’s Godric (County Durham): A masterpiece about Godric, a real mediaeval hermit and ex-Crusader, who harbours deep secrets and guilt and who tries to fob off the innocent monk Gerald sent to write his hagiography. Stunning writing and some real shocks, it is a powerful meditation on guilt, regret and facades.

• Anya Seton’s Katherine (London and Spain): another story based on reality, this is the shocking story of the Dutch Katherine Swynford (Geoffrey Chaucer’s sister-in-law as it happens). She was the beloved lady-in-waiting to the wife of prince John of Gaunt (Duke of Lancaster). To cut a long story short, Katherine will become his 3rd wife. And all subsequent English monarchs are descended from them through their oldest surviving son, Henry IV. This is a beautifully researched but never heavy novel that is a full mediaeval immersion experience. (Oh, and for what it’s worth (not v much), our family can trace back to John and Kate too!)

• Benjamin Myers’ Cuddy (Durham over the centuries): Cuddy was the nickname of St Cuthbert who ended up being buried in Durham Cathedral. But this ingenious novel traces different story lines in four different eras: Viking attacks on Lindisfarne, mediaeval cathedral builders, Regency-era academic scepticism, contemporary period of austerity. Such a clever conceit, but it is always affecting, with real stop-you-in-your tracks emotional punch.

• **Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (Italy): Eco was the polymath’s polymath with a personal library to die for. But this page-turner of mediaeval whodunnit made him a household name (especially once Sean Connery inhabited the protagonist, William of Baskerville). But Eco effortlessly incorporates a fascinating philosophical puzzle, intricate knowledge of the ecclesiastical turmoil during the Avignon papacy (it even ended up on Oxford friends’ Mediaeval History reading lists), all while paying homage to Sherlock Holmes (Baskerville anyone?). If I wasn’t restricted to one per author, I’d also have included Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum here!

5 books: Into the Renaissance…

• Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Henry VIII’s England): I read one or two others by Mantel which didn’t grab me, despite being super writing. But this, the first of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy was astonishing. She takes a notorious and (by common consensus) villainous actor in English Tudor history and conjures him into a deeply sympathetic and compelling character.

• C. J. Sansom’s Heartstone (Henry VIII in Portsmouth): Can’t remember who introduced me to Shardlake, the hunchback lawyer-cum-sleuth, but I have hungrily anticipated each book in the series that began with Dissolution (exploring at some of the havoc wreaked by Cromwell at the king’s behest from below). This is the fifth, and much that I loved all of them (though the final Tombland could certainly have done with a little more editorial rigour!), this is a great romp because it features the sinking of Henry’s great flagship the Mary Rose in Portsmouth harbour. Brilliant.

• **Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost (Restoration Oxford): Now here is the true MASTERPIECE. This is my favourite historical novel of all time, hands down. Set in the royalist city of Oxford soon after the restoration of the Monarchy, Pears constructs four different narratives of the same events, each one adding a completely new but compatible spin. Breathtaking in its invention, its atmosphere and detail, its characters and historical context. Just WOW!

• Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence (Denmark): We’re in the royal Danish court, but not Hamlet’s. This is the story of the relationship between the court lutenist Peter Claire and Emilia, a servant of Christian IV’s second queen just as the king is divorcing her. We’re in the 1630s, a period about which I knew not a thing. As one might expect, court politics was fraught the reader is propelled into its absurdities and jeopardy. As the title suggests, this is a book of counterpoints and opposites.

• Michael Frayn’s Headlong (Netherlands): If you’ve not discovered Frayn, you must. One of the funniest men alive (at time of writing he is 92). You might know him from his weepingly funny play and film Noises Off. This straddles the present and the time of the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c1525-1559) who lived under Spanish rule. But in true farce style, the main character thinks he’s discovered a missing Bruegel but his plans come to naught as everything that could go wrong, implausibly and hilariously, does.

5 books: Heading further afield…

• Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red (Ottoman Empire): This is strange but utterly compelling: 21 narrators tell the story of a murdered artist from the Sultan’s workshop of miniaturists (including the victim at one point, and at another the colour red!). An undergirding theme behind the crime is the fraught relationship the Ottoman world (not to mention modern Türkiye) has with the West, using aesthetic style and philosophy as a lens. Not so much a whodunnit (the murderer is another narrator) as a whydunnit. A superb immersion into an alien world.

• **Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill (British New York): oft repeated, the greatest eighteenth century novel written since the eighteenth century (ie in 2016). The intonation and language of colonial America is nailed as the stranger Mr Smith appears in New York with a demand note for a vast amount (£1000). It takes several weeks to get messages across the Atlantic so should it be honoured before verification arrives or not; and what does Mr Smith want this sum for? Read it to discover! It’s gripping, hilarious, moving and evocative with an utterly brilliant denouement.

• Rana Dasgupta’s Solo (Sofia, Bulgaria): Can’t for the life of me remember why I picked this up but it’s stuck with me. A blind Bulgarian chemist turns 100 and reflects on his fairly unremarkable twentieth century life while dreaming of what the 21st century will hold. He has daddy issues that still affect him and he is haunted by the question of how to measure and weigh a life. For more, see the review I wrote 15 years ago.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (Nigeria during a coup): I read this because our daughter raved about it and I quickly realised why. Adichie’s a wonderful writer who perfectly captures times and places. A family’s dynamics evoke many of Africa’s own, in particular the constant need to grapple with colonialism and outside influences as well as the religious and cultural tension between tradition and modernity. It is emotionally fraught with the horrors and legacy of a husband’s abuses exposed with empathy rather than prurience.

• Moses Isegawa’s The Abyssinian Chronicles (Uganda): I read this soon after we arrived to live in Uganda in 2001 (it came out in 1998). There are parallels with Salmon Rushdie’s and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing on India and Colombia respectively since this book begins the night that Uganda gained independence from Britain. It is not (as one might expect) about Ethiopia but the title has significance that only appears deep into the narrative. There is darkness and joy, horror and wonder. But then any who know and love Uganda will know true each is for the place.

5 books: With Tsars and Commissars…

• Malcolm Bradbury’s To The Hermitage (18thC and 1990s St Petersburg): Not to confused with his American namesake Ray, Bradbury is perhaps best known for inaugurating the UEA Creative Writing course in Norwich (from which the likes of Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Rose Tremain graduated). He was a fascinating and witty writer and this is no exception. Like the Frayn above, this straddles the 1990s and the eighteenth century, this time with a modern academic travelling to Stockholm and St Petersburg to trace the steps and impact of the French philosopher Denis Diderot in Catherine the Great’s court. Like some of the best books it’s impossible to describe since every attempt usually sounds dull. But it really isn’t!

• Charlotte Hobson’s The Vanishing Futurist (Revolutionary Moscow): This perfectly captures the excitement and infectious optimism in those early months of the Russian Revolution. Everything was possible before the iron grip of commissars and Chekists spread throughout society. Gerty, a British governess who arrived in 1914, gets caught up in it all, and joins a thrilling commune of pioneering social experimenters. One is a bit of a mad inventor… but he soon disappears. Has he actually managed to invent a Time Machine?!

• Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow (er… Moscow): People love this book and it’s not hard to see why, especially because it resonated coincidentally with Covid. An aristocratic White Russian is mistaken for a revolutionary poet and weirdly gets confined to a posh hotel in Moscow. He ends up staying for years, tracking with the first decades of Soviet Russia. He’s one of the most likeable characters in fiction, for all the implausibilities of the scenario and you end up simply wanting to hang out. This is a real delight.

• Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time (1930s Leningrad): Barnes is a favourite writer and Shostakovich is one of my all time artistic heroes. I was overjoyed they converged in this book, as Barnes fictionalises the composer’s private agonies under Stalin (he came of age just as Uncle Joe came to power). Famously, he would dress for the cold with an overnight case and wait outside his apartment for the KGB so that this family wouldn’t be disturbed by his arrest. Such a poignant book.

• Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin (1990s Kyiv): Unexpectedly hilarious, this takes us to the other end of the Soviet experiment and its collapse in the early 90s. We’re in Ukraine (included in a previous 25) at a time when nobody could tell exactly how it would all pan out. The protagonist (a newspaper obituary writer) has to look after a penguin from Kyiv zoo because in the anarchy, there are no funds to keep it going. He gets into all kinds of scrapes with the mafia and the various competing forces and thus gives us a scary but funny window into chaos.

5 books: Out of the fog of war…

• Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (Mythical Greece & Troy): It’s become quite the vogue to revise ancient classical myths from more contemporary perspectives, but Pat Barker was one of the first and easily the best. This is the first of her trilogy inspired by Homer’s Iliad, but gives voices to the countless women who were mere possessions and barter in the ancient world (not to mention more recently). Briseis was Trojan royalty but is now Achilles’ concubine and slave. What makes it all the more galling is that Achilles had killed her husband and brothers. How will she cope? What can she do? Women’s suffering in wartime is vivid here. And Barker is a brilliant writer of wartime (I could easily have included her Regeneration trilogy here about the 1WW).

• Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong (France in 1WW): This was a gut punch of a book, with Faulks crafting a deeply affecting love story spanning three generations. We’re transported from the intensity of the relationship between an Englishman and French woman before the war to the grotesque horrors of the trenches on the Western Front.

• Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without Wings (Türkiye in 1WW): The convulsions as the Ottoman Empire collapsed have been largely forgotten. But for millions they were as seismic as the partition of India after 2WW, with Greek-speaking Turks were forced to migrate east and Turkish-speaking Greeks west. The effects are still felt in the eastern Mediterranean over 100 years later. Perhaps it takes Brit of Huguenot extraction to write an historical novel admired both Greek and Turkish friends of mine. This will put the Gallipoli tragedies in context too. It is also the prequel to the better known Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, but I think this is the better book.

• Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin (Germany in 2WW): After the Nazis come to power and Hitler has launched his wars of aggression, what on earth do you do to resist or protest? This was first written in 1947 but not translated into English until 2009 (in USA its title was a direct translation of the original, Every Man Dies Alone). Remarkably, it’s based on the true story of a couple, the Hempels, who simply distribute leaflets and postcards around the city urging resistance (spurred by the wife’s brother being killed in action).

• Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot Sea (France in 2WW): Another fan favourite, this tells the story in occupied St Malo (on the Brittany coast) of Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, her museum curator father and a young German radio operator. It’s a surprisingly hopeful story beautifully told and like many on this list, it really sticks with you. It came out in 2014 and it became even more vivid in my mind after walking St Malo’s old city walls with a friend and colleague, Michael in 2017. Even better, Michael’s wife is called Marie-Laure.

Having done one for Ukraine, I’m perhaps getting onto a bit of a roll. Friends know I’ve been working on a novel for the best part of 10 years now. It’s set in 1968 East Berlin, so whenever I spot books about the GDR (East Germany), I make a beeline. Here are some of my favourites (not exhaustive, scholarly, or authoritative!).

5 books: GDR Background History

• Neil MacGregor’s Germany: Memories of a Nation: A British art historian and former British Museum boss, MacGregor worked in Berlin for a number of years and wrote this survey focused on key objects from the country’s history to coincide with a major exhibition.

• Antony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall 1945: Beevor is a renowned military historian, known especially for his history of the Battle of Stalingrad. This is a devastating account of how the European war ended with total German destruction. It’s impossible to understand subsequent events without this seismic event.

• Konrad H. Jarausch’s Broken Lives: To be an ordinary citizen of Germany in the 20th Century was to experience extraordinary extremes, and this book reminds us that geopolitical machinations always have individual consequences.

• Frederick Taylor’s The Berlin Wall 1961-1989: The construction of the wall was representative of both a society under totalitarian control and the utter failure of its ideology. If it was creating such a paradisiacal world, why was everyone so desperate to leave? Taylor’s history is a brilliant overview of how the wall came to be and what it meant, and ultimately, why it could never last.

• Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans 1942-2022: A very recent addition, I’ve not read it all yet. But Trentmann considers how a country that went from total defeat to modern economic powerhouse, with all the rescue plans, compromises and dodgy deals that characterise modern politics.

5 books: History of the GDR

• Frederick Kempe’s Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the most dangerous place on earth: It is long forgotten, but before 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the world’s gaze was locked on Berlin where Soviet and US tanks faced each other off at Checkpoint Charlie. A brilliant account to trace the real jeopardy we all faced.

• Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990: Hoyer grew up in East Germany and does an excellent job dispelling many myths and prejudices about life there; but for all its benefits, one can’t help feeling that many would have preferred they had come without the political realities of this insecure, little communist state.

• Gary Bruce’s The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi: And the reason for that was the Communist Party’s (SED) sword and shield: the Stasi (secret police). It was a vast organisation with tentacles everywhere. They did know about pretty much everything; and what they didn’t know, they guessed (with varying degrees of success, mind). A relentless book.

• Kerry Kathleen Riley’s Everyday Subversion: From Joking to Revolting in the GDR: an academic book with fascinating insights about what might be said, what went unsaid and what eventually was said. People have ingenious ways of navigating seemingly insurmountable odds.

• Craig R Whitney’s Spy Trader: Germany’s Devil’s Advocate: this is one of the weirdest stories from the GDR, about one of East Germany’s most complicated and compromised characters, Wolfgang Vogel. A lawyer who worked with ease on both sides of the wall, he spent years as a go-between negotiator for prisoner releases and even ‘sales’…

5 books: Life in the GDR

• Anna Funder’s Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall: this is a classic and the perfect starting point if you need one. A decade after the country was reunified, Funder (an Australian journalist living in Germany) puts out ads to get volunteers to share their stories. Astonishing and very poignant.

• Timothy Garton Ash’s The File: A Personal History: An Englishman’s account of returning to read his Stasi file a decade after spending 6 months doing PhD research in the East. He sets out to meet everyone mentioned in his file (including friends, informers and Stasi officers surveilling him). A superb meditation on memory and motivations, not least because he can triangulate what he remembers, what he wrote in his diary at the time and what he finds in the files.

• Thomas Harding’s The House on the Lake: Harding delves into the history of his grandmother’s former house in Berlin (from which she fled when the Nazis came to power) after finding it derelict. He discovers that the 5 families have lived in it, mirroring the tumult of the German century.

• Joel Agee’s Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany: this is a weird one. Joel Agee’s mother had been married to the writer James Agee, but after divorcing she married a German communist in Mexico. They moved to the Soviet sector after the war, and lived in what became the GDR for the next decade. When that marriage also failed they moved back to the USA. A unique outsider’s inside view.

• Maxim Leo’s Red Love: The Story of An East German Family: a dumb title but an interesting story of different generations’ means of navigating incredibly difficult circumstances.

5 books: Fiction in the GDR

• Christa Wolf’s They Divided The Sky: the Wall didn’t just split a country, it split people. Wolf was one of the most important writers in the GDR, and this compelling and moving novel was her breakthrough. She describes the splintering effects from the society’s tensions and surveillance with powerful insight.

• Christoph Hein’s The Tango Player: set in Leipzig and strongly recommended to me by a friend who grew up in GDR Leipzig. A pianist tries to rebuild his life after nearly 3 years in prison (his only crime had been playing in a cabaret in which some subversive lyrics had been sung). For those in the State’s crosshairs, life could be brutal, absurd and maddening.

• Eugen Ruge’s In Times of Fading Light: This time several generations are in view, and it’s not all grim and dark. There are moments of humour and levity as the protagonists find ways to survive and even build their resilience.

• Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper: the two worlds in Berlin were never as hermetically sealed from one another as one might think and this novel tells of the various people who refused to be bound by either bricks and mortar or ideological constraints.

• Aroa Moreno Durán’s The Communist’s Daughter: a Spanish language novel this time (in translation of course), and imagines the eponymous Katia discovering there is a whole world outside the one her ideologically driven father insists is sufficient. But her venturing out will have consequences inevitably.

5 books: The Church in the GDR

• Arthur C. Cochrane’s The Church’s Confession under Hitler: Much is made of the effect of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church (far more complex and inspiring in fact than Eric Metaxas would have us believe) and this is right. But they were so small. This book assesses what happened in many Nazi-era churches, and the legacy they left after the war.

• James R. Edwards’ Between the Swastika and the Sickle: Those who had endured under Nazis in the Confessing Church were then well-tempered for the trials to come in the East. The GDR was the only predominantly Protestant country in the Communist East (a fact I find absolutely fascinating) and Ernst Lohmeyer was a truly remarkable man who went from the Nazi frying pan into the Red Fire and was killed. A truly remarkable man.

• Johannes Hamel’s A Christian in East Germany: Hamel went about ministry in a lowkey way in the GDR and wrote some papers that were smuggled out and translated in 1961. I asked friends who grew up in the GDR and they’d never heard of him — but then how would they. There were no platforms for big Christian ‘names’ to gain a hearing. Hamel had a particular heart for university students. Amazing.

• James S. Currie’s The Church Beyond The Wall: Currie puts Hamel into wider context and compares/contrasts his life and system navigation with that of Prof Hanfried Müller, a theologian who successfully played the system. The choice between suffering and success was stark and tested the mettle of everybody. This is a powerful account.

• Elisabeth Braw’s God’s Spies: The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage Campaign Inside the Church: I mentioned that the Stasi knew everything. Well they had whole departments for different parts of society; that meant an entire Stasi department dedicated to infiltrating and eavesdropping on the Church. The impact was devastating, and far exceeds what people ever realised at the time.