Graham Greene delivers here a classic espionage novel, fiction, set in Cuba around the time of the revolution, Greene writes in his knowledgeable subject area of expertise a comedy account of a chance vacuum salesman being recruited by Mi6 as their ‘Man in Havana.’ Struggling lone parent Wormold runs a little enterprising vacuum franchise and looks after his blooming teenage daughter, Milly. It is his spoiling her with a horse that he kind of seizes on the opportunity of becoming a spy, reasoning with himself solely really that he is in it for the extra cash. Hawthorne is the Mi6 officer who recruits Wormold and he is to and for between Cuba, Jamaica and London head office reporting on the growing successful mission of Our Man in Havana. Wormold delivers in what he sees as the safest way possible a series of critical intelligence to the British government. He has photographs of military installations in the Cuban Sierra (not dissimilar to the Russian / Soviet military installations of the later Cuban Missile Crisis), a string of local agents infiltrating and influencing critical areas of Cuban society. He is creating much excitement and hover in London they are well pleased. He collects his enhanced expenses and the bosses decide to expand the operation and send out an assistant and also the lovely young spy/secretary, Beatrice. Wormold’s secret, however, is that he’s actually fabricating all the intelligence with a keen imagination. The military installations are just a state of the art vacuum cleaner that’s been taken apart. The agents are fictitious people or people he has never even met. Yet the reports seduce the bigwigs back in Blighty. The farce grows more and more out of control until it actually becomes a real spy adventure with mishaps including the assassination of his German drinking buddy and best friend, Dr Hasselbacher and he is under a lot of scrutiny by the dirty old corrupt abusive brutal police chief, Captain Segura. Captain Segura wants the freshfaced teen Milly to be his bride and isa a bit lenient on our man, Wormold, as result of seeking the bride’s hand in marriage. Things get totally FUBAR and Wormold ends up shooting a suspected enemy agent and is forced to finally flee the Caribbean Island and head back to the safety of the United Kingdom. His charade is exposed but incredibly despite all the fake evidence, the actual real spy stuff that he accidentally does and to avoid embarrassment leads to him being retained by the intelligence service and ultimately he cops off with secretary Beatrice in a pleasant romantic twist to a wild old tale of Cold War era espionage gambits.
‘War and Peace’ needs no introduction. It holds its place in the minds of contemporary society as a literary classic. One cannot pick up a newspaper article on great books without a passing mention of Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Like other classical works such as the Bible, I think that their obvious fame means and their influence on society and heir survival into modern times means that at the very least if you happen to pick up and read one of these rare works you will rarely face disappointment. Indeed, without further ado, I confess that ‘War and Peace’ is one of the very best books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Critics compare it to Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey. I’d say it outflanks them. Firstly, it is a marathon read. If you’re looking on Amazon for value for money on pence per word you can’t go far wrong with Tolstoy. For about £9 you get 1400 pages. But don’t get fooled into thinking the epic will keep you going for months on end as the pages turn fast. The story is quite entrancing and addictive. I suppose one of the beauties of writing such a huge tome for an author, is that it gives you a big canvas on which to develop your story fully and also to really define your novel’s characters. ‘War and Peace, covers a timespan of about 20 years at the start of the nineteenth century, a time when enlightenment thinking and imperial nationalism had produced great changes across all of European society, including Russia. The French Revolution spread like a virus with its new emancipation ideas and politics was actively changing the shape of entire societies. Of course the guillotines of post 1789 France soon gave way to the ‘little Corsican’ to emerge and of course our hero / antihero ‘old Boney” Napoleon Bonaparte himself does play a leading role in the book. The main war is Napoleon’s initial successful attack on mother Russia followed by his ultimate failure to seize power and the retreat of his army and destruction of the Grande Armée as it backed out of a burning Moscow and headed back down through the harsh winter roads leading back to Europe where virtually his entire corps perished, famously eating their horses to dodge starvation. Of course, closer to our own times a future diminutive European dictator, Adolf Hitler, failed to learn from the mistake of Napoleon and didn’t even make it to Moscow getting his whole World War 2 campaign totally written off by the Red Army following the counterpoint of the battle of Stalingrad which swung Nazi victory away from the latest grandiose empire-builder, daring to challenge the might of the Rus Steppes. Napoleon’s enemy is Tsar Alexander I and it is warming to see the love of the Tsar demonstrated by his people, the army and the characters at peace. These were pre-Leninist times for an aristocratic Russia, still with serfs, a society directed towards the salons of Paris for its artistic and cultural influence, yet close enough to the European mainstream to be sucking in some of the candidness of enlightenment authors such as Voltaire or Rousseau with their revolutionary ideologies that would reshape modern man’s destiny. We are in an age of excitement, an age of hope, a changing world, a globalised society. Tolstoy, a novelist with direct experience of conflict, being a veteran of the Crimean War, was very eccentric in his real life, seeing much of the excesses of society, living both as a hedonist and a monk. He was a gambling philanderer, but also a loyal Russian subject with obvious amazing talent for observation and writing. Undoubtedly ‘War and Peace’ is a masterpiece and is cited as the pinnacle of Russian literary culture. Its beauty, perhaps, is in its uniqueness. The critics had no idea how to categorise it. It is such an original, creative masterpiece. Is it history, is it fiction, is it romance, is it war? Is it philosophy? The answer is that it is all. A variety of all ingredients chucked deep in with the rest of the Borsch in the pot and delivered in a unravelling exciting journey alternating between the peaceful salons of St Petersburg and the battlefields of Austerlitz and Borodino. In researching the novel, Tolstoy actually visited several battle sites just to be fully consistent in his given detail – indeed the accuracy of the book’s battle scenes has been highly lauded by military historians. The characters (and there are over 500 throughout the book) are centred around three main aristocratic families: Thee Bezukhovs, The Bolkonskys and the Rostovs. Count Pierre Bezukhov, a wild young man, accidentally inherits a fortune and his quest for morality and happiness is an inward journey in many ways despite the outward appearance of such material wealth. Prince Andrei Nikolayovich Bolkonsky is the real military hero of the novel and fares the best out of the central characters in the fight against Napoleon. He also manages to land the love of the most delicate and fragrant female character the dainty, youthful Natalya Rostov, although her romantic life is quite meandering throughout her courting adventures. Andrei has a sister Maria and her fraught relationship with her father’s growingly irrational discipline is an interesting familial relationship. Nikolai Rostov is a hussar in the war and although perhaps not reaching the ranking heights of Prince Andrei with his more diplomatic movements in high military circles, he is yet a formidable warrior in touch with the rank and file soldiers of the Tsar.It is Nikolai Rostov’s officer friend and comrade, Denisov who steals the show for me and is my favourite character in the novel. His speech impediment, so faithfully portrayed by the English translators gives his often haphazard movements throughput the novel a genuine comedy value and to me he is the warmest and most interesting of the stars of the show. The journey moves through family life and the early scenes include salons and ballrooms where conversation and polite society in the drawing rooms of Moscow and St Petersburg reflect upon all of society’s concerns. There isa genuine nostalgia for times gone by and to see Russian high society in full flow is a forgotten world now. Oligarchs way have been the bastard children of the collapse of the Soviet Union but they are no replacement for the aristocracy who with all wealth and down to every element of the bourgeoisie, from Count to Kulak, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin et al, destroyed these societal elements completely with the Bolshevik communist revolution. The later years of Soviet Russia I think make Tolstoy even more important as an historical work in that he genuinely, even if working primarily with historical characters, captures the mood and feelings of a society in mutatis. There is genuine love and romance and the female characters hold their own. I’m not so soppy myself and prefer the war stuff like any good redblooded bloke but it’s hard not to notice the sweet feminine grace and womanly charm of some wonderful women who do seduce and distract the gaze of our male protagonists. Tolstoy has it all and ‘War and Peace’ is a wonderful experience from which everyone should benefit at some stage in their life. Dostoyevsky used to be my favourite Russian author but I think Tolstoy now trumps him and I’m in a mad panic to see just how many words per pence Anna Karenina contains so I can drain my piggy bank from some of my shiny rubles.
I’m a big fan of Robert Bauval’s work. I have been an avid reader of his writing since I first encountered the seminal ‘The Orion Mystery’ several decades ago. He is a deep, intelligent author that tests a reader’s intelligence and as an unorthodox, archaeo-astronomer that revisits and questions mainstream archaeology he often gives a fresh outlook on ancient sacred sites, giving modern scientific explanations of complicated alignments of these monuments to the stars. In doing this he justifies the very reason the priests and pharaohs built such temples and his methods, often ridiculed by so-called experts, give a rational and clear scientific explanation of the real advanced knowledge of the ancients which with his clear arguments demonstrates the irrefutable truth of his theories. In this Black Genesis, we head off into the desert, into the Egyptian Sahara or the Western Desert. In ancient times where global climate patterns were much different this wasn’t the barren, arid area that it is today but was a fertile, well-watered productive agricultural region with advanced settlements. Bauval argues that here, in the deeper darker regions of ‘Black Africa’ we discover the true origins of early Egypt. The site in focus in this book is Nabtya Playa, a relatively obscure recent discovery with a crude stone circle jutting out in the middle of the desert. Later we learn of the key astronomic alignments of Nabtya Playa with, as often in the case of ancient temples, the star Sirius or Sothis, the Dog Star, is a key indicator. It is Sirius that the Queen’s Shaft of the Great Pyramid of Giza aligns with and at its heliacal rising, when it initially shines right down the pyramid, the ancient priests could determine the annual flooding of the River Nile, so critical to the farmers who toiled under pharaonic rule. Modern technology is used to determine exact histories of Nabtya Playa and other sites with computer simulation of star movement in the known precession of the equinoxes giving archaeo-astronomers insight into exact times when ancient sacred monuments were most likely erected. We see other sites in the interior such as Jebel Uwainat (inside Libya) which has ancient hieroglyphics.Also, significant prehistoric rock art at Gilf Kebir. IN these remote adventures in an alien landscape, untouched by humans fro so long, we are at the cutting edge of archaeological discovery. One of the saddest parts of this tale is how these remote sites are not protected en0ugh by the Egyptian authorities who are supposed to protect antiquities. Rogue tourists and trophy hunters have disturbed the alignments of stones in the circles etc and also natural climate change and weather conditions mean that these very old ruins are often more susceptible to the extreme erosive conditions of nature in their geographical desert locations. It is interesting to not the significance of bulls as a venerable animal of sacrifice and worship, the practice of which was continued in later Egyptian kingdoms more familiar with us. The book looks deeply at the calculations for Zep Tepi (The First Time) That I have previously visited in another of Bauval’s books – ‘Keeper of Genesis’ which looks at the origins of the Great Sphinx. The Black Genesis idea, of a Black African origin for advanced Egyptian society under the early pharaohs is perhaps a bit more speculative and not concrete but there has been previous work suggesting certain theories akin to Bauval. He traces the son of Noah, Ham to be the founder of Hamites or Black Africans and even looking at analysis of genetic material on preserved early Egyptian Mummies it can be clearly seen as evidence that there is a real validity to the Black origins of the great ancient culture of Egypt. For me, the personal highlight of this book was reading about a really really obscure really remote site known as the Bagnold circle. This took me back to my study of Geography at UCL back in 1996 where remote stone desert circle where i picked up a dusty old book by R A Bagnold, a desert explorer in the early twentieth century. This dusty old university book was probably the best book I ever read during my degree course, a fully scientific academic study of the science of the formation of sand dunes. When the Bagnold Circle crops up in Bauval I was well chuffed to see that one of my favourite random Imperial travellers at least achieved some lasting fame for his devotion to the advancement of global knowledge, even if, unfortunately little remains intact of this Bagnold Circle.
Wez G Books 
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