Tom Holland’s Rubicon, a romping story of the Roman Republic’s endgame, was one of my top reads last year so I was relishing getting stuck into Persian Fire, which gives the treatment to the Persian Wars. Holland’s strengths as a hi[…]

Open2 sheds some light: in response to Pete’s musings, I immediately thought that the beans/UK craze might be a first world war thing – tinned rations at the front, shared experience of hardship, a generation shaped ect ect.
But no &#8211[…]

Football Manager 2006 comes equipped with a very large and memory-consuming data editor. Ostensibly this is so you can tweak stats and update your teams with new transfers, managerial changes etc. in advance of the next upgrade. You can also add enti[…]

I just got a belated birthday present from my kindly colleagues – a copy of Trivial Pursuit: THE 90s, in lurid shiny green box. “The decade of your life…” it says – a truly depressing thought, as a lot of the 90s were pe[…]

The grand tradition of cashing in musically on the World Cup is thriving in England but traditionally fails to capture the imagination of Mr J Foreigner. This year though the hosts have made a little more of an effort with the release of THIS purport[…]

Publicity gets moving for Who Season Two. The BBC reports everything quite staidly but guess what story the radio is running with? (And, one imagines, the angle the tabs will take on it?) Yes, the Doctor could be a woman! OMG A RADICAL BREAK WITH TRA[…]

Not some mad fantasy born out of Dave Boyle’s World Cup Spreadsheet (TM), but REAL RESULTS from the Pop World Cup, which has been running in the parallel universe of the Poptimists LJ Community for eight weeks now and has just reached the end o[…]

Finally finished Dominic Sandbrook’s history of the late 50s and early 60s, Never Had It So Good. For a massive book – 700 pages covering only 7 years – it still feels a bit insubstantial in places, but it was an entertaining read. […]

Thanks to the miracle of Interweb stealery I was able to watch The Changes last week, the ten-part kids’ TV adaptation of Peter Dickinson’s novels from the 1970s. This was always a touchstone of Mr R Carmody’s thinking, so I was eag[…]

Dungeons and Dragons is the game most identified with roleplaying, but it certainly wasn’t the only option. In fact, once you’d got into the hobby you quickly realised that most vocal gamers had a certain disdain for D&D, seeing it i[…]