What book are you currently reading?

[Hydromet]

Just finished this morning, "Goodwood", a first novel by Holly Throsby, who is better known as a singer-songwriter and daughter of radio presenter Margaret Throsby.
It's a good read, set in a small country town, where two people go missing a couple of weeks apart. The things that happen and the way the disappearances effect the town's residents are the meat of the novel, and the denouement is quite unexpected.

[Magnus]

Currently re-reading "Consider Phlebas" by Iain M Banks as well as reading some military history stuff I found. Must go and dig out Brick's book about the Wild Weasels; haven't looked at that for a while.

[Sisemen]

None. I'm playing on the internet with OpsNormal currently.

[Fliegenmong]

Yeah .... Ha! ...me too!

[om15]

" A Trenchard Brat at War" by Thomas Lancashire.

A 33rd Entry Apprentice joining in 1936, passing out as an engine/airframe fitter on the eve of war, then carrying out 34 Ops on Stirlings as a Flight Engineer, followed by a further 9 trips on Lancasters with the Pathfinders, before being shot down and spending 2 years as a POW.
Riveting account of the horrors and adventures of RAF life up to the last operation, followed by descriptions of the hardships and dangers of POW life, particularly at the end with the advance of Russian troops.

This is an interesting book, clouded slightly by one a sided versions of events that others are not around to challenge.

[Mrs Ex-Ascot]

This looks like a good book to get hold of, an interesting article from the DM about the Cockleshell Heroes http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... rsary.html

A book for those interested in WWII amazing and dangerous operations. Only two survived.

[OFSO]

Idle thoughts of an Idle Fellow by Jerome K. Jerome (yes of "Three Men in a Boat fame"). Brilliantly witty.

[om15]

"So long, see you tomorrow" by William Maxwell. Life in Illinois pre WWI, dated and interesting because of that.

[Magnus]

"The Leaky Establishment" by David Langford. Farce about bureaucratic nonsense in a nuclear weapons establishment.

[FD2]

'His Bloody Project' by Graeme Macrae Burnet. Three murders in Applecross, north west Scotland, in 1869. Great read.

[om15]

'His Bloody Project' by Graeme Macrae Burnet, read that a couple of months ago, agreed, recommended.

[fin]

Use of Force by Brad Thor. Did not know It was a best seller when I borrowed it.

Prior was Midnight Line by Lee Child and Cuban Affair by Nelson DeMille. Both also best sellers and both also a coincidence.

[Hydromet]

The Great Pink Hunter, by Graham Bond, creator of Auntie Jack. Not far into it, but seems pretty good and is a nice light read.

[om15]

Last year I read "Rogue Male", this was required reading as a boy, set at the outbreak of WWII it is the story of a fearless hero who set out to assassinate Hitler, failed but led to exciting adventures. Publishing was given a boost as the War Department ordered thousands of copies for enlisting soldiers to inspire them. A film starring Peter o Toole was made in the 1960s.
The author, Geoffrey Houshold penned a sequel in the early 1980s, "Rogue Justice", our hero in now back in occupied Europe, intent on waging a one man war against the Nazis, using a snipers rifle he gets stuck in, reverting to close up bayonet work for particularly unpleasant members of the SS.
If you can suspend belief, have a yearning for life in Britain before socialism ruined it, this is the book for you, it makes Richard Hannay look like a softie.

[Tall Bird]

This looks like a jolly book. The Times Review 18/11/17:

For many years I lived in the Herefordshire Balkans, and this high-spirited book by Quentin Letts, who describes himself as “a Marches blunderbuss”, reminded me of the many conversational rants I enjoyed at the Rose & Lion, Bromyard, over a pint of whisky with retired red-faced Royal Marines officers and Leominster carpet salespeople.

How we would have cheered at Letts’s pillorying of “windy head-wobbler Simon Schama”; “runty little property developer” Lord Sugar; “Peckham’s Eva Peron”, Harriet Harman; or the “glottal-stoppy mateyness” of Tony Blair.

Letts’s put-downs, indeed, are hysterical and take the libel laws to the brink. Theresa May is “so boring they should use her to dig for shale gas”. Alan Bennett made a fortune out of that “ooh-Betty Leeds accent”. He suspects that Alan Milburn “might wear designer underpants”. Jeffrey Archer, prisoner number FF8282, is “an adornment to any black comedy”. The novelist Ian McEwan is “a mumbler who rocks on his feet and plays pocket billiards”. Richard Branson is a “public school O-level thicko”. Emma Thompson “camouflages her blazing intolerance with English irony” — “Those Footlights people perfect the art of being patrician without ever quite seeming it.” Charles Saatchi “lost four stone by eating nine eggs a day”, and his gastric blasts may well prove fatal to any passer-by.

Theresa May is ‘so boring they should use her to dig for shale gas’
This is exactly the kind of abusive jollity that reliably raises hearty chuckles among the middle-aged in the saloon bar. But Patronising Bastards wishes to look deeper, if more paranoically, at the “opaque snootocracy” who run everything — the “prancing snoots”, quangocrats, “left-wing clap-trappers”, “preposterous fixers” “patronising plutocrats”, finger-waggers, “egomaniacal freaks” and “proselytising know-alls” who have flattened the British spirit; the vegetarian teetotal dieters and the “clean-living brigade” who are “unutterably joyless”; and the “elite’s media munchkins” who sniff out offence where none is intended.

Letts, the parliamentary sketch writer and theatre critic for the Daily Mail, alleges that such sorts — from the designers of the 2012 Olympic logo to Steve Coogan to the government’s chief scientific adviser — badger and belittle ordinary people with their celebrity tweets, “mission statements” and “forums” in Davos, which they fly to by private jet to talk about global warming.

Letts is suspicious of these “foundations” where philanthropy is an excuse for billionaire get-togethers and moneymaking. He wishes that businesses would stop coming out with corporate gobbledegook (empowering, pioneering, focused on impact — Letts finds many similar horrible examples) since everyone knows greed and profit are what count, so it is silly and condescending to pretend otherwise.

He is correct to point out that what is particularly pernicious is “the sheer deadness of the jargon”, which is everywhere prevalent: universities with their Research Excellence Framework; the rubbishy sounding Fair Access to Professional Careers and the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission; the plethora of data reports, impact assessments and indoctrination procedures. He takes aim at the compliance officers, communications enablers, gender neutrality awareness seminar coordinators and diversity and inclusion outreach officers — the phoney new “professions” where juicy sinecures are to be had and the number one qualification is to possess no sense of humour.

Education has been wrecked by the prevailing belief that “no oddball must be judged and every viewpoint is valid”, the upshot of which is intellectual paralysis because “discrimination”, the ability to tell one thing from another, is a dirty word. The Church of England vandalised its traditional liturgy to be more accessible, and with everyone having to be the same no one can be exceptional. You can’t even have ladies’ and gents’ loos; the Barbican introduced “gender-neutral toilet: with cubicles” and “gender-neutral toilet: with urinals”. By the time I had processed that, I was in danger of going all over the floor.

Emma Thompson ‘camouflages her blazing intolerance with English irony’
At the BBC cultural coverage is determined by elite grandees with shaved heads and earrings who “think the little people are too thick to understand art without having it dumbed down”. Kenneth Clark of Civilisation has been replaced by Sandi Toksvig, whom Letts bewilderingly dubs a “porcelain-petite heart-breaker”. At the other extreme Nicholas Serota, “a sterile figure” whose art galleries “scorn common taste”, has filled the Tate with conceptual junk “that people don’t understand”.

Much the same kind of sod-the-public pretentiousness goes for fashion — as led by Vivienne Westwood (he suggests she wear a T-shirt saying, “I AM A CAPITALIST, TAX-AVOIDING STINKING HYPOCRITE”) , who had the gall to tell us to vote Green at a time (2015) when she was accused of tax avoidance — and the food industry, with chefs on television “swanking and making us feel small”. Parenthetically, “did anyone have wheat allergies in the 1960s?” asks Letts. Letts at least approves of “heavy-drinking, fag-puffing” Keith Floyd, whose convivial habits led to bankruptcy and an early demise.

Earnest without being preachy, Patronising Bastards is a tonic for those who look about them and feel an insuperable sense of defeat, who scream with impotent rage at arbitration services, health-and-safety fascism, the “see it, say it, sort it” slogan on the railways, ambulance men and women calling themselves “paramedics”, Camila Batmanghelidjh in her “cod-tribal costume” giving public money to kids who spent it on drugs, and the sleazeballs and mediocrities in the House of Lords (“a recycling bin for failed and former MPs”).

Where I disagree with him, however, is that it was the chap in the street’s fury and fear over all of this that made 17,410,742 of them vote for Brexit, which Letts calls “an act of thrilling dissent”. I honestly can’t see how dumping the European Union will ensure better pictures at the Tate, the closure of “boutique” hotels (a Letts bugbear) or the reintroduction of Hymns Ancient & Modern and ladies wearing hats to Evensong. University vice-chancellors are not going to stop paying themselves fortunes. Charity bosses won’t turn down six-figure emoluments. The Kinnocks won’t regret their huge pensions. Despite Letts’s splendid tirade, wealthy faux liberals will, I fear, carry on speaking and dressing “like mechanicals — tattoos, mockney accents, crumpled clothes”.

This book put me in mind of Churchill, rallying the troops in 1940, girding them for “the battle for our island — for all that Britain is, and Britain means”. Leaving the EU is not going to put a stop to ignorance, stupidity and corruptibility, and nor did our being part of Europe create vice in the first place. Faced with the evidence Letts presents here, my conclusion is that the enemy was already within.
Patronising Bastards: How The Elites Betrayed Britain by Quentin Letts, Constable, 305pp, £16.99

[Cacophonix]

'The Quick and the Dead' by Bill Waterton and Empire Of The Clouds: When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled The World by James Hamilton-Paterson...

waterton.JPG (233.98 KiB) Viewed 265 times

His efforts were not endorsed by the ostrich orientated blimpish hubrists in the British aviation industry (see above) at the time but his views were prescient and the book is a gem that has stood the test of time and Waterton clearly told the story honestly, bravely and as he saw it. He suffered for his views being fired by The Daily Express for his pains. His criticism of the early versions of the Javelin, that had so nearly killed him, had also previously got him fired by Gloster....

billwaterton.jpg (24.39 KiB) Viewed 265 times

...he tested the Javelin, a big brute of a plane with a radical delta-shaped wing and designed to intercept high-flying Soviet intruders.

After his first flights in it, Waterton was a fan of the plane, declaring it easy to fly and highly promising. But, he insisted, it had some dangerous tendencies that needed correcting. His suggestions were not ­welcomed by businessmen and accountants intent only on the ­bottom line. They ignored him.

On its 85th test flight, because he was under pressure to demonstrate the Javelin’s superior manoeuvrability to RAF top brass, Waterton came close to extinction.

As he sped over the Oxfordshire countryside at 3,000ft, without warning, he recalled, the plane went into an uncontrollable judder, ‘turning into a sort of crazy pneumatic drill. Landscape, instruments, everything, fuzzed into a blur. There were two explosive cracks and the nose pointed itself towards the ground, which was only seconds away.’

The control stick flopped in his hand, offering no resistance to ­forward or backward movement. Something vital had sheered and dropped off — the elevators that make the aircraft go up or down, as it turned out, though at the time he thought it might be the entire tail.

Thinking hard and using all his skill and experience, Waterton miraculously managed to get the Javelin under control. Its nose began to rise and he could climb to safety of a sort.

But the plane was fatally damaged and there seemed little chance of getting it — or him — home in one piece. He considered baling out ‘but no one with a conscience could abandon several tons of explosive fuel and metal where it might fall on a town’.

Staying cool and toying with what few controls he had left, his brain working flat out to find a solution, he decided to try to land the plane, if for no other reason than the need to return with the evidence of what had gone wrong.

My primitive instinct of self­ preservation was urging me “Get out, you fool”, while my reason was saying: “You must try to save the aircraft.”’

With the stick wedged between his knees, one hand keeping the plane steady and the other stretching to reach the throttle, Waterton came in to land faster than he should have done, but touched down with just a slight bump.

His relief was short-lived. ‘A split-second later all was lost. The speeding Javelin bounded into the air again, then fell back on to the runway — to be flung aloft again by her tough, springy undercarriage, aided by her great buoyant wings. In a succession of ever-increasing bunny-hops and bangs we bounced along the runway.

‘Then we dropped with an almighty crash. The smell of paraffin, and a sheet of flame and black smoke slashed over the cockpit. Fuel tanks were exploding. The port wing-tip dragged along the ­concrete, swinging the Javelin off the runway and then down on her nose and into a dust-spewing heap.’

As Flames licked around him, he tried to pull back the canopy, but it would not budge.

Through his mind flashed the image of a colleague whose charred remains he had once seen in a burned-out ­cockpit amid an unforgettable smell of flesh and oil, human fat and melted metal.

Like that man, Waterton was trapped inside his own burning plane. The heat was suffocating and the cockpit filling with acrid smoke. The metal sides were so hot that they burned his hand when he touched them.

Hoping to smash his way out, he reached for the crowbar normally clipped to the fuselage.

‘But it had gone. I banged around the cockpit like a man gone mad. I cursed, pressed buttons, pulled, tugged and heaved — but nothing would yield.’

Just in time, he managed to make a gap big enough to squeeze his fingers in ‘and the sheer brute strength of desperation helped force the canopy open. I was out in a flash and put 50 yards between myself and the blazing wreck’.

What had happened was conclusive proof that the Javelin had serious defects and was not ready to go into service. Bringing back life-saving information like this was what, in theory, test pilots were there to do.

But rather than being relieved, his company chiefs, desperate for a firm order from the RAF, were unhappy with him for the long list of design improvements that would now be necessary. What he called their ‘selective deafness’ to the truth went on to cost the life of a friend and fellow test pilot before essential modifications were made.

Not long after, Gloster sacked Waterton for being a troublemaker, a classic case of shooting the ­messenger — and an extraor­dinarily short-sighted one.

He continued to make trouble, however, taking a job as the air correspondent of a national newspaper. In supremely well-informed reports he voiced his increasing alarm abut the deficiencies of Britain’s aviation industry, now being rapidly overhauled in initiative, inventiveness and innovation by the Americans, Russians and French.

All the opportunities of that brief golden age had been wasted, he concluded, with the sadness of a patriot seeing a country he loved going down the drain.

In 1956, Waterton published his autobiography, taking a long, hard swipe at the industry’s lazy bosses, incompetent workers and slow, antiquated factories that he likened to ‘back-alley garages’ compared with modern aircraft plants like ­Boeing and Lockheed in the U.S., or the go-ahead Dassault’s in France.

Empire Of The Clouds: When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled The World by James Hamilton-Paterson

The Javelin History

Goucester Javelin.JPG (13 KiB) Viewed 265 times

I wonder what those who might have flown the Javelin, who post here, thought of it?

Caco

[Cacophonix]

This looks like a jolly book. The Times Review 18/11/17:

Patronising Bastards: How The Elites Betrayed Britain by Quentin Letts, Constable, 305pp, £16.99

Purchased on the basis of TB's post.

I am not always a fan of Letts's sometimes small minded rants and simplistic outlook but,when he is in his stride, he can be very amusing!

I honestly can’t see how dumping the European Union will ensure better pictures at the Tate, the closure of “boutique” hotels (a Letts bugbear) or the reintroduction of Hymns Ancient & Modern and ladies wearing hats to Evensong. University vice-chancellors are not going to stop paying themselves fortunes. Charity bosses won’t turn down six-figure emoluments. The Kinnocks won’t regret their huge pensions. Despite Letts’s splendid tirade, wealthy faux liberals will, I fear, carry on speaking and dressing “like mechanicals — tattoos, mockney accents, crumpled clothes”.

This book put me in mind of Churchill, rallying the troops in 1940, girding them for “the battle for our island — for all that Britain is, and Britain means”. Leaving the EU is not going to put a stop to ignorance, stupidity and corruptibility, and nor did our being part of Europe create vice in the first place. Faced with the evidence Letts presents here, my conclusion is that the enemy was already within.

How true...

Caco

[Capetonian]

Worth Dying For
The Power and Politics of Flags
Tim Marshall

Not only enlightening, but wittily and creatively written. Well worthwhile.

[Mrs Ex-Ascot]

This looks like a book worth reading;a biography of Duncan Menzies.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... oneer.html

[603DX]

A welcome Christmas present from my son, filling in much of the desperate activity of Churchill and Chamberlain, during that crucial period when I was but a toddler. Of Chamberlain I have no personal memories to tap into, but I was one of about a million respectful and freezing-cold mourners on the bitter January 1965 streets of London, to witness the old warrior's spectacular funeral cortege, as the nation said farewell.

Six Minutes in May - How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister: Nicholas Shakespeare - ISBN9781846559723 Harvill Secker