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Review: Conflict - The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine by General David Petraeus & Andrew Roberts

General David Petraeus is a renowned military figure in Western circles. He is a retired US general, with 37 years of service behind him and had command in two major wars including in. Iraq and Afghanistan. He was also director of the CIA and has worked very closely with the White House, directly serving various administrations. The co-author of this book, Andrew Roberts, is a biographer and…

Review: Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order - by Bruno Maçães

The Belt and Road Initiative or One Belt, One road, is the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s foreign policy initiative that came into existence in 2013, when first formally announced by Chinese premier Xi Jinping. Since that point in time it has started to become a reality and is a transformational international political project, that offers an alternative to Western US hegemony and that…

Review Tribes by David Lammy

I am an active member if the Labour Party and get out and about here in Monmouthshire, supporting election campaigns and attending the local Severnside branch meetings. I have been trying to get work with the Foreign Office for some time, and had applications ready to join there when I was halfway through a Translation degree at Cardiff University but unfortunately I didn’t complete that degree.…

Review The Oxford History of Modern China by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

China is a massive superpower. To understand China and its role in the modern world, it is imperative to understand its history. This well written modern history details in brief the key points to note in the rise of China from the late Ming dynasty in 1550, through to the present day and the rule of President Xi Jinping. A team of separate specialist authors have penned each chapter. The book is…

Review: An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi

I’ve always been a fan of BBC Presenter Zeinab Badawi and I was encouraged to buy the book by this fact when I saw that she was the author. Zeinab was born in Sudan so hails from the Dark Continent, ie. Africa. She is currently President of SOAS, an excellent education institution, part of the University of London, and, indeed, I used SOAS library books for my own African studies for my UCL…

Review: Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung "Little Red Book"

Chairman Mao is a marmite figure in history. He is one of the core thinkers and philosophers in communism and ranks alongside Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin in being a core thinker. This book is a reproduction of the infamous ‘Little Red Book’ that almost every Chinese person possessed and treasured and indeed the book spread around the world and alongside texts such as the Bible, is one of the…

Review: Empire of AI - by Karen Hao

Karen Hao is a young, dynamic specialist tech journalist and author. She covers the impact of artificial intelligence or #AI on society. This large volume of work is an indepth study into the rise of AI, with a particular focus on its lead company, OpenAI. From its inception as. not-for-profit to the mega business it has become and its global impact, Hao investigates every aspect of this…

#44C Ai #Annie Altman #Artificial Intelligence #Bill Gates #biography #data scraping #Elon Musk #Four Four Cyber #Greg Brockman #ILya Suskever #Karen Hao #Kenya #microchips #Microsoft #OpenAI #pornography #Sam Altman

Review: Moctezuma and The Aztecs - by Elisenda Vila Llonch

Moctezuma II was the last great Aztec king or ruler of the Mexica people in today’s modern day Mexico. His reign saw the arrival of the conquistadors from Spain and it was Hernan Cortés who most famously defeated this strange kingdom in the New World and took hold of ht enew lands in the name of the Spanish King. Quite a few years ago I went and saw the Moctezuma exhibit at the British Museum in…

Review: The Rule of Law - by Tom Bingham

Tom Bingham is a senior and well-respected British judge. He held office as Master of the Rolls, Chief Justice of England and Wales and Senior Law Lord of the United Kingdom. In this concise yet precise book he covers the fundamental priniciples of the Rule of Law and discusses it as it is reflected here in our country and also makes comparisons with the situation in foreign countries where the…

Review: AI, Automation, And War - The Rise Of A Military-Tech Complex - by Anthony King

Artificial Intelligence or AI is a real technology buzz word. It has dominated global news stories and is seen as the great new leap forward in modern technology that will have a transformative effect on all our daily lives. Whereas the advantages to the civilian sector seem positive, good and acceptable. There has been a darker cloud over the military use of AI in terms of its morality. Also,…

Review: Architectures of Violence - The Command Structures of Modern Mass Atrocities - by Kate Ferguson

I discovered this book at Chatham House library. The front cover image of Arkan with his trademark white tiger gave away a lot of the subject detail of the book. It focuses on the war of the former Yugoslavia. Later in the work we touch upon the mass atrocities in other wars such as in Syria and Rwanda and also look at the Rohingya refugee crisis and the actions of Burma. Deep analyses of all…

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#Arkan #bosnia #Brendan Simms #Burma #Croatia #genocide #izetbegovic #Kate Ferguson #Kosovo #milosevic #Rohingya #Rwanda #serbia #Serbophilia #war #Yogoslavia

Review: Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia To Confront The West - by Keir Giles

I am a new member of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, in London. On a recent visit, I made use of the vast resources of a very well-stocked library at Chatham House and this book is the first of the loans that I have finished reading. It is apt as Keir Giles is indeed a senior consulting fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. He is an expert on…

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Review: Before Bletchley Park – The Codebreakers of The First World War – by Paul Gannon

I have previously read a lot of material on World War 2 codebreakers and the likes of Alan Turing and their critical work against Enigma and the invention of modern computing during that period. Of course, codebreaking and cryptography is not a new science and has been a critical part of both war and diplomacy since ancient times and has only increased in significance as time progresses. World…

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Review: Queens of the Crusades – by Alison Weir

I had previously read Alison Weir’s most excellent book specifically on Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine many years ago so the author was familiar to me. I chanced upon this title in my local library (Caldicot) and thought I’d give it a go. It covers the lives of several British Queens, or rather the historical period in England during which they lived. The period is one of the most interesting…

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Review: MI9: A History of the Secret Service for Escape and Evasion in World War Two - by Helen Fry

I randomly found this book on the shelves of Caldicot library. I read a lot of books on U.K. Intelligence services: MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. During the war…. Mt grandfather (GaGa) was in 618 Squadron RAF and 143 Coastal Command. He didn’t really speak to me much about World War 2 itself until quite late on in his life. Typical of an Armed Forces Officer, though, he kept a pristine home and in part of…

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Review: Defending the Realm - MI5 and the Shayler Affair - by Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding

This is just another one of the many books I’ve read on the security services / spies / intelligence agencies in general. I guess I have a morbid fascination. Non-fiction throws up some pretty weird stuff – Life itself is a lot stranger than fiction. This tale from a turncoat ex MI5 employee David Shayler, comes from a time of great change in the world, Security Services in general and it…

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Review: The Assault On Truth - Boris Johnson and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism - by Peter Oborne

I think everyone that has ever heard of Boris Johnson associates him with lies. Oborne, who is an established veteran political journalist, in this relatively brief text, exposes the extent of the former Conservative Prime Minister’s almost total aversion to the truth. He reckons Johnson has told over thousands of lies and although the scope of the book is not to document every single lie and…

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