Lyrics by John Finnemore, music written and played by Susannah Pearse, performed by Simon Kane, with Carrie Quinlan and Margaret Cabourn-Smith.

Here’s what 2025 brought:

The slowest read was certainly that Gallup volume of poll data, full of extra bits and piece of information to help fill out my Pollbase records. I also finally got into reading books about road race cycling, which one day I will become a proper fan of as a refuge from politics. Although given the politics of the UCI, drug testing, relegation rules…

Phil Cowley kindly let me run one of the chapters from his book in Lib Dem Newswire and a few comments on each book were posted through the year on this thread.

Hope you’ve had as much fun with your books of the year as I’ve had with mine. If you’re getting any books for yourself, if you used these Amazon, Waterstones or Bookshop.org (supports independent bookshops), it helps cover the costs of this site without costing you anything extra.

Now to get a head start on 2025’s reading.

For old time’s sake, here’s what I read previously…

Books of 2024

As I had hoped they would (see 2023 below), espionage novels did indeed feature more heavily this years, prompted by the great Spybrary community.

Books of 2023

Espionage novels crept up in their share of my reading, something I hope to repeat in 2024, spurred on by the fun of talking spy novels for a podcast.

Books of 2022

A lighter reading year this time around including a book which I’ve got no idea why I put onto my reading list. The Talbott Agreement has not aged well since it first came out, and, even after reading it, I can’t figure out what it was about the name, authors or plot that somehow got my attention and got me to get a second-hand copy.

A book that has aged much better, however, is Robert Littell’s famous fictionalised history of the CIA, The Company. To avoid giving away the final stretch of the book, let’s just say that it is even more bitter-sweet about the value, or not, of secret services given what one of the real life characters mentioned has gone on to do since the book was published. I think it’s the book that has aged best of any I’ve ever read thanks to subsequent events.

Another book that has aged well is Michael Frayn’s The Tin Men. A satire of the 1960s fad for automation, it now reads just as funnily in the age of artificial intelligence. But if you get a copy, don’t get the old version with a yellow cover from Faber and Faber as it’s missing a few sentences in a couple of place.

Books of 2021

Up in the top left is Brexitland, a book I liked so much I did not just one but two episodes of Never Mind The Bar Chart with its authors.

Books of 2020

No prizes for guessing what topic I’ve been researching this year for a future book…

In the pile on the left is the fascinating Confessions of a candidate, which I wrote about on this site.

It happened to me again, just before Christmas.

Out walking in the gloom, I saw a streetlight that wasn’t on.

I ran through my usual checklist.

‘Are the other lights nearby on, showing it is dark enough that this one should also be on?’

‘Have I reported this one before?’

‘Who does this fault need to be reported to?’

‘Which app or email is the best for them?’

‘Which pocket is my phone in?’

And then, just as I point my phone at the dark light, ping! On it comes as if it has been shamed into working by the imminence of my fault report.

Once is a coincidence, easily dimissed.

Twice is a curio.

But a regular pattern, once or twice a year?

Sure, I know that’s still coincidence.

And yet…

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Welcome to 175 Stroud Green Road, near where I live, often surrounded by potholes, and a house with an important little role in the history of chocolate and Doctor Who. The middle of a run of three houses that currently has a Sainsbury’s in their ground floor, it was back in the 1880s home to George Osborne Barratt and his family.

The confectionery firm he founded made, amongst other products, Liquorice Allsorts and, Doctor Who’s favourite, Jelly Babies:

Barratt’s eponymous firm became part of Cadbury in later years. Its manufacturing started in Islington and then moved for many years to Wood Green, on the site still known as The Chocolate Factory, though these days alas no chocolate is made there any more.

Barratt was known as a good employer, providing the sort of conditions for staff that were all too rare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Number 175 itself was purchased by David Hall in 1899, along with the houses on each side, and so started the sequence of shops which spanned all three of them at ground level.

One of the other shops to have occupied the site was Woody’s, which initially was kitted out with an apostrophe-induced grammatical horror on its shop front but thankfully its owners soon rectified that. The shop itself, alas, declined from its promising quirky independent supermarket start. Its later replacement with a more mainstream supermarket therefore only produce a pang of nostalgia-induced unhappiness locally.

Anthony Price features, of course. As does (ssssh! former spy) Paddy Ashdown and US President Lyndon B Johnson, subject of perhaps the best non-fiction book and one with a brilliant narrator too.

In coincidental related news, I discovered recently that the author of the standard book on the history of the early years of campaigning for proportional representation was a Communist, and possibly a Russian spy. The author is Jennifer Hart and the book is Proportional Representation: Critics of the British Electoral System 1820-1945.

Show notes

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The drummer ain’t bad though.

South of the river again, this time to the recently reopened Level 10 Cafe at the Tate Modern.

Due to the proximity of residential flats, photography is not allowed from the external viewing gallery. But the views through the window from the cafe itself are still pretty good.

The cafe itself is fairly standard as museum or gallery cafes go, though it has the advantage of being neither the big ground floor cafe, nor the one in the other block on Level 6, and so is much quieter. Plus it has great views.

You can see all my cafés with view in London here.

It’s been a while so it’s time for another London café with a view.

This time it’s the Riverside Café on Lambeth Pier, next to the Thames. It’s pretty small, with very little seating space inside and limited seating outside. It also gets quite hot inside on a warm day. But the views, oh the views…

You can see all my cafés with view in London here.

* But I can’t vouch for Ed Maxfield.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Tower Bridge look quite so small.

It’s yet another benefit of the planning rules in London which frequently require tall buildings to give public access to views from the top, rather than those views being reserved for the richest to enjoy.

As the building’s name implies, it used to be part of the underground postal railway which has its own great museum.

No café at the top of The Post Building, alas.

This one was the site of a large pile of abandoned road works barriers and signs, left unused for several months. On the boundary between two local councils, and with the name of a firm on them that has since sold its roadworks business to another firm, it took a fair bit of chasing since before Christmas. But now… all gone, all tidy.

(And another reminder of how one of the main causes of dumped items on our streets are contractors working on behalf of the government in one form or another. It’s pretty common for utilities work, road repairs and the like all to leave behind barriers, signs and other material which, if dropped by a teenager, would have excitable MPs demanding a crack down on yobbish behaviour.)

This empty pavement is next to the site of the left-over recycling sign that remained in place long after the recycling bins were removed. I got that sign removed nearly a decade ago now, but looking again I see that the pole from the sign is still there. Back to work…

The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill is a locked room murder mystery that is usually taken to be the first full length novel of that type. (Edgar Allan Poe got to the concept earlier in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. But that was a short story rather than a full novel.)

The book has plenty of black humour – an unusual choice for murder stories of the time – and features a nicely caricatured appearance by William Gladstone. There is a strong backdrop of satire of Victorian society to go with the main business of the murder plot.

The revelation of how the locked room crime occurred is clever, even if you have come across derivatives of it in subsequent locked room plots. There are a couple of Jonathan Creek plots which use very similar explanations to the one found in this book, for example.

The motivation of the murderer didn’t really work for me, though as the puzzle is much more about the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’ that only takes a little away from the enjoyment.

My version was a print on demand book. It has the poor typography and design that is common with such books, alas, and also a cover that warps very easily. The main text is all there and, some horrible layout aside, all readable. But if part of the pleasure you get from reading is the physical experience of handling a book, this one will disappoint, so look out for a normal edition instead.

You can buy The Big Bow Mystery from Amazon or Bookshop.org (which supports independent bookshops).*

If you like this, you might also be interested in The Hollow Man, with its wonderfully superfluous spilling of numerous different locked room plot devices.

* These links includes affiliate links which generate a commission for each sale made.

The best part, which definitely justifies a visit (and would even if the tickets were not free once more), is the art display inside, with some very ingenious uses of lights and mirrors.

From a few angles, it’s possible to get an impression of what was originally in the mind of the designers of the mound.

From many angles, however, it looks like something even now only half done and without the loving attention to stylish detail that great urban art manages. It’s like a Microsoft Zune rather than an Apple iPod.

But my main impression from the visit is that the mound suffers from not being nearly tall enough, lower even than some of the surrounding buildings. A lot can be forgiven if you get a great view, but without a great view, a viewing platform has a flaw that not even free access can compensate for.

It also suffers from (attempting to) be a mound of grass and trees in a location where… it is already surrounded by grass and trees. Far from being an alien intrusion of nature into an urban landscape (see, I could have written the mound’s press release), it is too similar to what is near it.

In that respect, it’s a failed version of Christo’s oil drums on Hyde Park’s Serpentine Lake from a few years ago. They were huge, bizarre and incongruous – and a hit for being so. Plus Christo is notorious for self-funding his work, so not only were they brilliant, they were taxpayer free.

Even without a Christo to pay for it, urban art done well is well worth paying for given the boost it can give to neighbourhoods and communities. But the Marble Arch Mound isn’t done well.

If you’ve been called by 020 3966 0062 with an automated voice claiming that you are about to be taken to court over taxes, you can breathe easy.

These are dodgy calls, being made blind to large numbers of people. The people running these calls don’t really know something about you and your taxes.

If you receive such as message, it’s always a good move to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner here. The regulator can move a little slowly, but movement happens when there are lots of complaints.

More information on these sorts of dodgy calls is also available direct from HMRC itself:

The section on the HMRC website is good and clear, including advice on what to do if you have been taken in by one of these scams.

I’m also quite partial to this 2015 finalist:

The 2020 winner was a variant on the popular staircase illusion:

More on the competition’s website.

The best optical illusion in London, however, is by the British Library toilets.

The admiring quotes at the front of the book tell us that its author is, at least according to The Poultry World, “the most arresting and provocative writer on poultry”. It went into at least a second edition.

George Scott also wrote a preface to The Ceylon Poultry Club Year Book, 1934. Quite the expert it would seem.

He was also a man who was not modest about the role of poultry detection in the happiness of mankind. Hence he selected this Huxley quote to appear at the start of the book: “There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off”.

The various chapters are titled:

• What faking is
• The psychology of faking
• Modern tendencies in faking
• The detection of faking
• Darkening the plumage of buff and red varieties
• Dyeing the plumage
• Bleaching the plumage of white varieties
• Faking leg colour
• Other forms of faking
• Notes on the chemicals used in faking/li>

But best of all is Scott’s foreword. Socrates, Galileo, Voltaire, Neitzsche and DH Lawrence (who was, Scott says, “harassed and persecuted by a flock of moronic smuthounds”) are all cited in it. Impressive. Though not quite as impressive as Scott’s line in insults such as when he complains of “the pseudo-scientific Hogan cult, with all its blowsy jargon; its crapulous fundament of snide anatomy; its noisy and prolific drool of whim-wham”.

A good read.

Now if only he ever did the legendarily wooden Pet Shop Boys…

Hat-tip: Tom Scott.

Here is that John Finnemore version (starting at 39:02):

And here is a more traditional version:

Everything is wrong about it.

Yet I still look at it every day.

It shows how many words I’ve written for my book each day, along with a straight line projection of when the total will hit 60,000.

The data is debatable. (Should the word count include footnotes or not?)

The project is absurdly crude. (Not even adjusting for weekends.)

The target is meaningless. 60,000 is the minimum mentioned in a contract, true. But it’s only a minimum, and quality matters as much, if not more. A brilliant 55,000 or an awful 60,000? Not much of a guess as to which even the publisher’s contract lawyer would prefer.

So this is all another distraction from getting on and writing the damn thing?

Not at all. Because although everything about the graph is wrong, it is serving one purpose spot on. I am writing more words, more regularly.

What the graph measures is deeply flawed. But the behaviour it is changing is just what is needed.

It’s a point often overlooked when talking about KPIs, targets, data series and the like. If their purpose is to help change what happens, then the real test is not the purity of the data. It’s the behaviour change it drives.

A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carré reminds me of the work of three other authors. First, Terry Pratchett’s final Discworld novel, Raising Steam. The similarity here is a brilliant novelist, whose reputation was made with earlier novels, returning to familiar characters late in their career.

As with Pratchett, Le Carré does not hit his previous heights but for long term fans he does provide a satisfyingly low-key return to old favourites. In A Legacy of Spies, George Smiley does return, but only tangentially to the plot. His presence is to be welcomed by the reader rather than his actions generate tension for the reader. Indeed, it is one of the weaker parts of the novel that it has little in the way of dramatic tension driving the plot. The plot is rather an incidental device to justify the retelling of events and its resolution is both simple, brief and only little related to those retellings.

Second, A Legacy of Spies reminds me of Len Deighton’s trilogy of trilogies featuring Bernard Samson. It too saw past events repeatedly returned too and comes with a morally ambiguous ending. The espionage part of Deighton’s plot wrapped up easily but the lives of the characters left in a more complex state. As with Deighton, too, there is a handful of plot inconsistencies – in his case across a nine volume (later ten volume with a prequel) series, in Le Carré’s case with his previous stand out hit, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Which brings me to the third author this novel reminds me of, Anthony Price. Although successful in his time, Anthony Price never had the same fame as John Le Carré, perhaps because the complex and ambiguous dialogue of his books lent themselves poorly to successful TV or film adaptation.

But for my money, his version of the plot device powering A Legacy of Spies was rather better. In A Prospect of Vengeance Price took the same approach as seen in A Legacy of Spies: writing a novel in which the events of an earlier novel are returned to years later thanks to the investigative digging of outsiders into the past. However Price uses this device to present the reader with radically different potential interpretations of the past events. The plots of the two novels fit together as pleasingly as an insanely complicated wooden puzzle.

For John Le Carré, however, the reworking of past events through new eyes does not bring as much ingenious pleasure because there is little reorientation done for the reader. What’s more, the one moment where a major such twist seems to be on offer with characters believing something at odds with what we were told in the previous novel (see spoiler footnote below if you wish) seems, I think, to be just a plotting inconsistency as nothing is made of it in the end.

This all makes A Legacy of Spies an enjoyable, even a must, read for long term fans of Smiley and co but not a good starting place for those new to their world.

Spoiler footnote:
The plot inconsistency mentioned above is about Hans-Dieter Mundt’s switch to being a British double agent. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold this comes during the visit to Britain in which he tried to kill George Smiley and hence the suspicions over how easily he escaped Britain when supposedly the British state was in full pursuit of him.

But in A Legacy of Spies his switch comes on a subsequent visit to Britain, with his previous successful escape therefore left unexplained.

If you treat the earlier novel as correct, then for a moment in the newer novel a very dark turn of events flits into possible view – if Mundt had switched already on his earlier visit, is he able to carry out a murder on his second visit because Smiley has decided the murder is necessary? But this bleakness slips away and instead the switch in the Mundt story looks to be just a plotting inconsistency.

If you like this, you might also be interested in A Prospect of Vengeance.

Buy A Legacy of Spies by John Le Carré here. 

The Hollow Man, published in the US as The Three Coffins, is a classic, if not the classic, locked room murder mystery from the Golden Age of detective fiction. It secured this accolade not only for its own apparently impossible pair of murders but also because of the bravura lecture given by crime-buster Dr Gideon Fell in which he outlines multiple different ways in which apparently impossible locked room murder mysteries can be done (and gives spoilers for several other pieces of detective fiction to boot along the way).

Of course, the book suffers the usual frailties of Golden Age detective fiction too: implausibly complicated plots and a profusion of characters of variable credibility, carrying out carefully choreographed activities to set up the plot and its camouflaging misdirections.

But that’s a bit like pointing out a stage magician isn’t looking and sounding like a normal human being. The point is to enjoy the trick – the misdirection and cleverness which makes the apparently impossible happen in front of your eyes, whether on stage with a rabbit and a hat or in a book with a collection of dead bodies.

In the Hollow Man, alongside a somewhat confusingly large cast of characters, rather thin dialogue and all the usual illogical insistences from a detective who won’t tell anyone else what he’s just worked out, you get two such glorious tricks. There is the man murdered in a locked room from which the murderer appears to have vanished into thin air. Then there is the man murdered up close out in the open, despite witnesses seeing no-one close by and the surrounding snow lacking footprints for anyone else.

Read for the enjoyment of the trick and not for the characters or quality of the dialogue.

Buy The Hollow Man (also called The Three Coffins) by John Dickson Carr from Waterstones or Amazon.

If you like this, you might also be interested in the Bryant & May series by Christopher Fowler, which often pays homage to the Golden Age of detective fiction.

As a result, there is little of the plot that a reviewer who respects yet-to-be readers of the book can say of the plot other than, “Trust me, it’s worth the read” or a brief account that makes the book sound much like dozens of other novels.

That would be to miss its charm. What can be said is that the different quality of this espionage thriller is reflected in there being but one death in this thriller – a death that is all the more shocking for the book’s understated tone. It is also a book in which the characters talk and talk and talk, reminiscent of Anthony Price at his very best. There is a plot and there is action, but this is a thriller that would never make it as a Hollywood action epic.

There are traces too of black humour too as a Cold War defection leaves both sides unsure as to whether they are the real loser from the switch and where the truth lies. AJ Lewinter is a physicist who has done military research and then, on a trip to Tokyo, defects to the Soviet Union. Not only the Americans but also the Soviets want to know why. For the Americans, why has he gone, what did he know and when did his loyalties end, and for the Russians, why has he come, what does he know, why did he switch – and is he a plant?

As characters mull over what may be true and what may be misdirection from the other side, thoughts of bluff, double-bluff and treble-bluff are discussed, but without the plot every spiralling into implausible complexity. Littell’s prose is often sparse, using precision to paint swift pictures of characters before getting into the main business of the conversations. His description of KGB man Pogodin is particularly fine: “one-quarter Marxist, one-quarter humanist, and one-half bureaucrat”.

That is the beauty of Littell’s writing – a simple set-up with a simple dilemma, yet complexity and ambiguity spirals away as people’s thoughts, rather than implausible plot twists, add to the uncertainty and make the situation twist and turn. It is a book that pleases with its swish cleverness, not with pulse-quickening moments of action.

It is an unconventional masterpiece.

Buy Robert Littell’s The Defection of AJ Lewinter from Amazon or a second-hand bookshop.

Think again and watch something that’s only a notch short of magic – and perhaps also gives you a sense of why mathematicians so often talk about the beauty of numbers.

As Ben Orlin tweeted:

You’re about to spend the next 25 minutes watching a guy solve a Sudoku.

Not only that, but it’s going to be the highlight of your day.