Sort of nostalgic reading: "State of Emergency: How We Were - Britain 1970-1974 by Dominic Sandbrook

I have over time read a number of political biographies, memoirs and diaries of the people who helped shape the Britain of the 1970's, but this is the first time I have read a genuine history book about a time I personally lived through. The first thing to say about Sandbrook's book is that this is a genuinely scholarly record of the period. You might guess that from the length - 768 pages to cover four or five years! - and from the endnotes, which account for a 6 or 7 millimeters of the book's thickness. This is the third in a series of histories of recent modern Britain, following "Never Had It So Good" which covers the period from Suez to the Beatles, and "White Heat", an account of Swinging Britain in the late sixties. (I learn this from the cover blurb; I haven't read either of the others.)

Culture and violence: "The Last Mughal" by William Dalrymple

First, disclosure. This book was not read, but listened to in the form of an audio book. The four CD set took four and a half hours and was thus (nearly) perfect for a drive back from Strasbourg this week. Obviously, that means it was abridged, so this can't be a 100% review. (By the way, a good audio book and cruise control on the car help the time of a journey go by extremely well, as well as disinclining you to stressful competitive driving.)

Perhaps surprising reading: "Provided You Don't Kiss Me - 20 Years with Brian Clough" by Duncan Hamilton

Despite the inordinately large place it occupies in my life, I am not a particular football fan. If I am ever really passionate about a football team, it is undoubtedly the red-shirted St-Michel, in its under-15 and under-13 manifestations. Yet, like anyone else, I am not immune to the pull of the big match, or entirely able to ignore the vicissitudes of the top national teams.

All that said, I never thought I'd be reader of football books.

That kind of inspirational reading... "Who Moved My Cheese" by Spencer Johnson M.D.

I've been quoting the title of this book for several years, without ever having read it, so when I saw this (very short) book on offer for almost nothing in a Washington DC bookshop last January, I thought I should buy it. I read it in the span of a crossing in the Channel Tunnel a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it is that short.

If you know anything about what this book says, about its central, genuinely good idea, I suggest you leave it at that - actually reading the thing is enough to put you off for life. 

Enough said.

Short. Should be shorter.

More Berlin reading: "Alone in Berlin" by Hans Fallada

I am aware this might seem dangerously obsessive, but "Alone in Berlin" is just the second in a series of books I have bought recently about Berlin (next is a history of the Berlin Wall). What can I say, the history of this city is just fascinating…

Here we are in the realm of fiction, a recent translation into English of the 1947 work of Hans Fallada (of whom, I confess, I had never previously heard) fictionalising the story of an improbable and slightly oddball resistance couple who wrote anti-regime postcards to leave lying around in stairwells. This decidedly low-key (and in reality only semi-literate) form of dissent, hoped to subtly instil anti-Hitler feelings in the populace, like an early, insidious form of social media. In Fallada's novel, and, one guesses, in reality, the cards achieve nothing, with the enormous majority instantly handed in to the authorities by the terrified "victims" who are unlucky enough to pick them up.