Itinerant reading: "A Short Ride in the Jungle" by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

Three, perhaps two and a half, degrees of separation lie between Antonia ("Ants") Bolingbroke-Kent and me.  Her book, which was lent to me by a friend, contained a dedication addressed to him by the author. "Do you know her?" I asked later, after I had read the book. "Not really", he replied, "I've never met her; she's sort of a friend of a friend, but I was in touch with her during her trip on Facebook, exchanging a few thoughts about Vietnam and so on." 

So two and a half degrees is about right.

Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent is, in her own words, a "writer, TV producer, traveller and lover of the curious and quirky". As a TV producer, we discover, she has worked on many BBC travel documentaries which have taken her professionally to - or at least in the direction of - places in which she has subsequently undertaken personal journeys. Such is the case of the subject of this book, a solo exploration of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, previously visited while working on a Top Gear special featuring the nation's favourite three uber-blokes larking around on scooters in Vietnam. You don't have to read too closely between the lines to discern that such programmes are very far from what they seem, with our laddish heroes accompanied by hordes of mechanics to fix the machines they bust and insisting on five-star hotel accommodation to help them recover from their exertions of an evening. No such cosseting for Ants (I shall call her "Ants"; everyone does, it seems, and besides getting us past the aristocratic resonances of the name, Ants is also considerably shorter to type than Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent), for whom the journey was explicitly an exploration of place, history and self. 

The idea was indeed, also self confessedly, rather mad. I had been under the impression, admittedly without having really considered the matter, that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was, well, a trail, i.e. a single route linking two places. But no, the Trail is a vast network of often near-impassable trails, threading through the mountains and jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. With two seconds thought, this is rather obvious. To commit the entire military supply line to North Vietnamese forces to a single route would have been suicidal. Even the network of small hidden trails running through three countries was intensively, mind-bogglingly so, bombed by the USAF. 

Last of the holiday reading: "The Tudors" by Peter Ackroyd

Lots of people have remarked that I seem to have read quite a few books over the summer. Well, folks, that's over.

This is the last of the books started in balmy Pescara, but the first to be completed on a small aeroplane bumping down through the cloud into a ridiculously cold and bleak late August day in Birmingham (whence Nottingham), a trip marking the end of summer as we know it. Expect a reading slowdown, as the grim world of work resumes.

Elizabeth: badass compromiser

Meanwhile, how not to be a fan of Peter Ackroyd? This is a history book bought unashamedly on the strength of the reputation of the author as a writer, rather than as a historian. I imagine it must be frustrating for real historians (perhaps one of whom will let me know if Ackroyd can or cannot be considered a historian), but there's no arguing with this man's ability to tell a story, be it as a novel (Hawksmoor (astounding, by the way - had me prowling the East End of London in my precious lunch hours in distant 1988 just spotting Hawksmoor churches); The House of Doctor Dee), or as non-fiction (London: The Biography; London Under). Moreover, my appetite for the Tudors had been whetted (of course) by two marvellous Hilary Mantel novels (this and this), as well as Ian Mortimer's Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.

All of which to say, like most of the middle-class anglosphere, it seems, I'm currently in a fascinated-by-the-Tudors period and in any case stand a fair chance of buying any book which has "Peter Ackroyd" on the cover.

Cutting edge history, however, I suspect this is not. I recall a reviewer's comment from somewhere saying that this book tells "familiar stories", and that is indeed the case. However, Ackroyd tells these stories exceptionally well, and has the gift of bringing the protagonists to life. That is a key strength of this book, the personalisation of this period of history, in which many great public events seem indeed to have been driven by personal characters and impulses (Marxist historians beware!). This is hugely valuable in itself.

Yesterday's dystopian reading: "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell

At least as an adult, I have never been a re-reader of books. There just seems to be so much new stuff out there... However, this is an exception. 

It all comes down to a remark made by a old friend, by the name of Sam Moreland (for the record), whom I saw again a month or so ago, who had himself just re-read 1984. "I wondered what it would be like to reread a book I first read as a teenager," he said, "Would it be the same?" His conclusion was that it was a really interesting thing to do. He recommended reading the appendix on Newspeak ("which nobody reads") and, on the book in general, concluded: "Actually, it's all about sex." 

Anyway, all of that, together with a reissue of the book by Penguin with a clever new cover (the title blacked out but legible in relief) induced me to undertake the novelty of a reread. I shared Sam's curiosity about how such a seminal work, which we have all read as teenagers, would seem to the adult me. I am very glad I did so. 

The first thing I have to do however is to dissent from Sam on a couple of points. First, I did read the appendix first time round. Maybe it was my linguistic tendencies showing through, maybe it was because, just as I was brought up to finish all the food on my plate, for me it was a kind of a moral obligation to read everything between the covers of a book. (Notes aside, I still do this, as well as finishing my food, even - bad idea - when in America.) Second, 1984 is not all about sex. There is a lot more sex in it than I recall, and it is a more important factor in Winston's rebellion than I remember, but, sorry Sam, the book is still what I thought it was about: a nightmare of totalitarianism. That said, I am sure that like most teachers at the time I first read the book in the late seventies, mine rather skated over the sex stuff.

Rather frivolous reading" "Broken Homes" by Ben Aaronovitch

No one will blame me, methinks, for something a little lighter after the last one, and indeed I have gone to the other end of the spectrum. 

Broken Homes is the fourth in Ben Aaronovitch's series about streetwise, magically gifted copper Peter Grant, fighting "weird stuff" on the streets of London. On this occasion, the skulduggery leads our hero, together with partner Lesley and boss Nightingale, to an only-slightly-fictitious brutalist housing estate at the Elephant and Castle, but one which turns out to be imbued with special properties unsuspected by its residents. 

As ever, the plot rattles along, in the always agreeable company of PC Grant, whose knowing take on police procedure and contemporary London street life are a genuine delight. The usual cast of improbable multicultural river deities, faeries, water sprites and wood nymphs is also out in force, and by now we are expected to know who they are and where they all come from. 

Utterly chastening reading: "Savage Continent" by Keith Lowe.

If there were ever a risk that I would become too frivolous in my holiday reading habits, this book most decidedly redressed the balance. A gruelling read, not because it was badly or turgidly written, but because of the stories it tells. Lowe's intention with this work is to fill a gap, especially for the general reader, in the usual accounts of European history which take us from the end of the Second World War into the postwar era.

As aficionados of this blog will be aware, there have been quite a few history books covering the final stages of the War, the great power politics of the immediate aftermath and the early stages of the Cold War. But for me at least there was indeed a gap, about which I had often wondered: what was happening "on the ground" in the year or two after the formal end of hostilities? As Lowe points out, the Brits and Americans in particular are prone to place a full stop at VE Day (one definitely relativises the term "victory" after reading this book), after which Europe gets into the business of rebuilding and recovering. Well, as Lowe demonstrates, it ain't quite that simple.

We knew that, of course, but I guess many people, like me, had no concept of the sheer scale of the horrors which filled the years between 1945 and 1949 (for many well beyond that). At the outset, Lowe sets the scene by giving some indication of the sheer scale of death and destruction unleashed by the War itself and the utter devastation visited on vast tracts of the continent, which, particularly in the East, we're beyond the imaginings of British and American observers. The physical infrastructure was in ruins, vital supplies were lacking (hundreds of thousands starved to death across Europe in 1944-5) and millions of people were homeless and displaced. In this situation, civilisation breaks down. As Lowe puts it in his introduction:

Imagine a world without institutions. It is a world where borders between countries seem to have dissolved, leaving a single, endless landscape over which people travel in search of communities that no longer exist. There are no governments any more, on either a national scale or even a local one. There are no schools or universities, no libraries or archives, no access to any information whatsoever. (...) There are no banks, but that is no great hardship because money no longer has any worth. There are no shops, because no one has anything to sell. Nothing is made here: the great factories and businesses that used to exist have all been destroyed or dismantled, as have most of the other buildings. There are no tools, save what can be dug out of the rubble. There is no food. Law and order are virtually non-existent because there is no police force and no judiciary. In some areas there no longer seems to be any sense of what is right and wrong. (...) Goods belong only to those who are strong enough to hold on to them, and those willing to guard them with their lives. Men with weapons roam the streets taking what they want and threatening anyone who gets in their way. Women of all classes and ages prostitute themselves for food and protection. There is no shame. There is no morality. There is only survival.

It sounds like a Hollywood script for some post-apocalyptic movie, but this was reality for millions of people across swathes of Europe.