The Room: The Definitive Guide
Book
The Room: The Definitive Guide is the ultimate key to the biggest pop culture phenomenon of the 21st...
Fear and Loathing in La Liga: Barcelona vs Real Madrid
Book
It's Messi vs Ronaldo, it's Catalonia vs Castilla. It's the nation against the state, freedom...
David McK (3372 KP) rated Angels and Demons in Books
Jul 4, 2021
And, like, I'm sure, many others, I actually read that sequel first, only later discovering it was such (although, admittedly, not a direct sequel) and going back to read the first on the series.
This is the one largely set in and around Rome, with a high-tech ticking time-bomb counting down in Vatican City as the Cardinals all meet to elect a new Pope following the death of the previous incumbent of that role. It also makes lots of the (supposed?) divide between religion and science, drawing on lots of conspiracy theories and bringing back into the realms of popular culture that old secret society, the illuminati.
I have no problem with any of that, and I do like a bit of derring-do, mystery and romance, but even I found it hard at times to swallow some of the outlandish scenarios and set pieces of this novel - I think, for me, the icing on the cake was the surviving-a-jump-out-of-a-helicopter-without-a-parachute bit towards the end!
Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power
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A contemporary of Shakespeare and Monteverdi, and a colleague of Galileo and Artemisia Gentileschi...
Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth Century America
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The 19th century witnessed an explosion of writing about unproductivity, with the exploits of...
The History Makers: How Team GB Stormed to a First Ever Gold in Women's Hockey
Sarah Juggins and Richard Stainthorpe
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When Great Britain failed to qualify for the women's hockey competition at the 2004 Athens Olympics,...
The Team That Changed Rugby Forever
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It is 50 years since the great 1967 All Blacks World Tour. Drawing on interviews with the surviving...
Stars and Cars
Book
Steve McQueen. A Ford Mustang. And San Francisco. The ten-minute pursuit in Bullitt has remained the...
Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People's Republic of China, 1949-1964
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Finding Women in the State is a provocative hidden history of socialist state feminists maneuvering...
Straight Acting: Popular Gay Drama from Wilde to Rattigan
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Between the trials of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s and the beginnings of legal reforms in the 1960s, the...