BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Emanuel Swedenborg [Graphic Novel] (1982) Christopher Hasler/John Kaczmarczyk The Hell-Fire Friars:Sex Politics and Religion (2002) Gerald Suster   The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (2003) Ian McCalman  The Hellfire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies (2008) Evelyn Lord   A vailable at a ridiculously low price from the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, a graphic novelisation of the life of Emanuel Swedenborg by Hasler and Kaczmarczyk provides a simple and accessible introduction to one of the geniuses of early Modern Europe. He is as important in his way as Da Vinci or Paracelsus, someone struggling to make sense of the world he had been born into and coming up with radical new ways of perceiving it within the frameworks of belief that everyone else around him would have taken for granted. Such people do not shift paradigms but they make a stab at making existing paradigms work and, in doing so, they open the door to new and creative ways of seeing the ...

King Kong Theory (2006)  Virginie Despentes   This is a review of the English Edition, published by Serpent's Tail, rather than the French Edition. Let's get the negatives out of the way quickly because this is an important little book that might have got more praise if its faults had been more sincerely addressed by its Editors. It has three spectacularly interesting chapters on rape, prostitution and pornography that would have made excellent articles in some intelligent monthly. These sit oddly between an equally interesting introduction, in which Virginie Despentes places her book in some context, and an utterly daft rant at the end in which she lets vent to her furies. There are plenty of blank pages between chapters and the print is large so that this reads like a collection of articles or a pamphlet, scarcely a book at all. It is also so 'French' as to make it dangerously close to being dismissed in Anglo-Saxon circles. There are cultural differences ...

The Great Crash of 1929 (1954) John Kenneth Galbraith   Who Runs Britain: And Who's to Blame for the Economic Mess We are In (2008) Robert Peston   J. K. Galbraith produced his short book on the Great Crash of 1929 in late 1954 in an atmosphere that still recalled recent witch hunts over communism (a fact that will help an early twenty-first century reader with some of his more obscure political references). The Penguin edition adds the short Foreword to the 1975 edition that urged 'memory' as a necessary corrective to over-enthusiasm within the financial system. One can only guess what this grand old man of liberal economics would have written in 2008 or, indeed, about the self-inflicted economic mess today (2023). Galbraith's book is not the last word on the subject of the causes and consequences of 1929 - how could it be: it was written over 50 years ago within only 25 years of the events in question and largely from contemporary newspaper reports and ava...

Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult (2008)   Richard B. Spence   Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (2014) Marco Pasi I n Lobster , the premier journal of para-politics in the UK, I argued that more latitude should be given to historians when dealing with the shadowy world of espionage. I had an interest as someone initially trained as a historian, who had participated in a range of political projects and who often had had to deal with cases of political manipulation damaging the reputation of persons who were clients or friends of mine. The 'truth' about the grey world between official record and unrecorded action is generally handled in one of two ways. Professional historians will rely solely on the records available and refuse to speculate on what might be missing. This might mean that no lies are told but it might also mean that interpretations of events are incomplete or that we see historians unwittingly writ...

Rubbish! (2005)  Richard Girling Rubbish! is a tirade against the Blair Government but also by extension any British Government since all governments are essentially the same crew whatever the party. Environment policy is seen here through the eyes of a senior specialist journalist whose text ostensibly majors on 'rubbish' but who also covers the degradation of land and water resources, the collusion between government and business at the expense of everything from food security to clean air, and waste itself (especially hazardous waste). There is anger at the incompetence of policy-makers at every level - but largely at those at the top. One chapter is a genuine eye-opener, about the scale of the traffic of Western waste into the developed world. A picture emerges of a pre-credit crunch global economy that trafficked sex slaves and skivvies in one direction and the detritus of growth in the other. It is a shame that the baby of a theory of imperialist exploitation h...