Filling in the gaps reading: "Six Months in 1945" by Michael Dobbs

There are two Michael Dobbs(es). One wrote the original UK version of House of Cards (and is credited as "executive producer" of the recent US version). He is not the author of this book. The other Michael Dobbs (how much he must hate that) is a renowned US Cold War historian and Washington Post journalist. He did write this book, which (I now discover) is the last of a series of three books on the Cold War. 

I say that just to get it clear, because I wasn't so clear when I impulsively picked up this book in Brussels' Waterstones. 

Why did I pick it up? Because I did have a kind of gap, exactly the gap that this book is designed to fill. I have read plenty about the end of World War II, plenty about the Cold War and the early years of the Soviet satellite states, but that bit in the middle, the manoeuvrings between the Allies at Yalta and Potsdam, the geopolitical background to Hiroshima, the transitions from Roosevelt to Truman and from Churchill to Atlee (in this context), had slightly passed me by. Well, this remarkable book did the job.

In a book full of telling anecdote and detail, Dobbs sets out a tightly focused story of how the "Big Three" thrashed out, in many respects unsuccessfully, the deals which determined the shape of the postwar world, one which we still in many respects inhabit today. I have heard quite a lot lately (something to do with my job) about Polish resentment about how they were "sold out", perhaps even "betrayed" by the Western Allies at Yalta. Well, yes, this book makes it all too clear how ambivalent and, yes, guilty, Churchill in particular and Roosevelt felt about the deal they felt able to secure at Yalta and subsequently concerning Poland, but also how, as they say, possession was nine parts of the law when it came to Stalin's intransigence over the new power structures in Poland (in particular) post 1945. 

Relaxation reading: "Whispers Under Ground" by Ben Aaronovitch

Where once there was the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency to provide that slightly guilty low-brow relief from "worthwhile" books, now there is the Peter Grant series of sweetwise-magical-London-copper tales from the Metropolis. This is third in the series, and the third I have read, and while it is true that it will be hard to recapture the delight of discovery in the first book in the series, The Rivers of London, I did not feel the disappointment which came with the second, Moon Over Soho. 

Perhaps it's just that Aaronovitch has relaxed a bit. He seems more comfortable with his characters, less stressed about having them perform for us, so more able to get on and tell his fantastical tale. Once again, it is impossible not to take to hero-narrator Peter Grant, he of formidable Sierra Leonian mum (and the family that goes with her) and just agreeably dissolute jazz-playing London dad, who relates his story in witty, self-deprecating style. The cast of characters is gradually consolidating around him: mainstream senior officers Seawoll and Stephanopoulos who resent, but ultimately accept, PC Grant's specialisation in "weird stuff", formerly high-flying but now fellow magical apprentice PC Lesley May, who is made to be Grant's love interest, but who has to wear a mask to conceal the hideous destruction of her face which occurred in the Rivers of London, DCI Nightingale, Grant's other-wordly Guvnor and only-surviving postwar wizard in the land working for the forces of law and order, the weird and taciturn Molly, housekeeper at magical HQ, the Folly, who definitely has something of the night about her, as well as many delightful minor characters, such as the tribe of smart-talking, bling-toting London-Nigerian water divinities, who pop up not infrequently, ostensibly to give Grant a hard time, while in fact charmed into helping him out of this or that magical scrape.

Modishly Tudor reading: "The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England" by Ian Mortimer

I have committed that most heinous of book blog crimes: to get two books behind, a.k.a not writing the review of one book before finishing the next. So expect cheapskate, two-for-the-price-of-one, abbreviated posts for this book and the next. 

Actually, it won't be that complicated, because both books are sequels, even remakes, of books that came before, and have featured in these pages. The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England is, unsurprisingly, Ian Mortimer's follow-up to the Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England and works on the same concept, namely telling you what you would need to know if you were taking a trip in time to visit a country you think you know but from which you are separated by getting on for five centuries. I liked the earlier book, and, minus only the discovery-of-a-neat-new-idea factor, also very much liked this.

I'll say what I said in 2010, that though Mortimer's concept is not fantastically innovative as the publisher's blurb might have you believe, he does it really well and delivers a satisfying and original book as a result. The main impression you come away with, in the words of the cliché, is that the past really is another country. A visit to Elizabethan England would be more alienating, dangerous and exotic that visiting almost anywhere in the modern world. 

The routine nature of excruciating cruelty, the utter pervasiveness of religious belief in every aspect of daily life, the mind-bogglingly obtuse and ignorant exercise of medicine (a case in point), the unhygienic conditions of daily life and the rigidity of the social class system are all things that would disconcert the time traveller considerably. Similarly, for all Mortimer's helpful provision of a mini Elizabethan phrase book, including a guise to swearing and cursing, the language would probably flummox the modern Brit rather more than he or she would expect.

Enthused reading: "One Summer - America 1927" by Bill Bryson

In the people-I-might-actually-like-to-be stakes, I have already identified Bill Bryson as a front runner. This book has done nothing to modify that opinion. Again, I am struck by the guy's sheer curiosity and the delight he takes in serving up stories of both the ordinary and the extraordinary, both of which he finds in the midst of its apparent opposite. It is typically Bryson to alight on one particular year - indeed the summer of one particular year - and lay it out for us in a breeze of fascinated enthusiasm and anecdote. As ever the research is formidable but lightly-worn, the details arresting and illuminating, the regard inquiring and amusing.

Yeah, so I liked it...

But why 1927, I hear you ask, it is not one of those usual suspects, 1914, 1929, 1933, 1968, 1945, 1989 for example, usually included in the pantheon of twentieth century landmark years. There is a rationalisation for the choice, to which I will come back, but my own suspicion is that Bryson's interest in the year started rather with a typically rather boyish attraction to the two centrepiece occurrences of the book. The first is the famous Lindbergh transatlantic flight and its extraordinary aftermath, the second the remarkable season enjoyed by that supposedly over-the-hill baseball star, Babe Ruth. Hmm, thin pickings, one might think, on which to construct a 550 page popular history, especially for a European audience, which may have heard of Babe Ruth, but does not know the difference between a batting average of 0.295 and one of 0.375, and may be more familiar with Charles Lindbergh as a noted Nazi sympathiser than as aviation hero.

Ambiguously nostalgic reading: "A Delicate Truth” by John le Carré

My heart wasn’t really in this post. A Delicate Truth was the tail end of my holiday reading in Australia, not however completed until well after being thrown back into the frenzy of the rentrée. It duly got finished bittily, rather than in the quick but substantial bursts appropriate to a book like this. Moreover, all this was a while ago, meaning the novel has faded rather from my memory.

Was it a bad book? Actually not at all, with some critics describing it as something of a return to form for Le Carré. I was unaware that he was particularly out of form, except inasmuch as his Cold War glory days (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) are growing ever more distant, though the Constant Gardener was of course a bit of a hit more recently. Over time, I have dipped into Le Carré’s recent novels mainly for lightish relief, often in the form of audio books on long journeys (always read by the author himself, a job he does very well, by the way).

Such was the spirit in which I undertook this book, boosted by a couple of positive reviews in Sunday newspapers.