Factual Books

There are tens of thousands of books about the second world war and perhaps there is not much new to say. All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945 does not set out to be provide any new analysis, instead it is about the experience of individuals caught up in the war.

The scale of horror incurred in Poland, Russia and Germany is horrific, with large portions of their populations dying. Many of the rest faced rape, violence and constant fear. It is pessimistic in that heroism and nationalism are not heavily featured. Even those that fight are seen as doing so because to not do so is to risk being shot by their own commanding officers. Perhaps some of those fighting it did enjoy the experience, but this book portrays it as overwhelmingly a wretched experience.

The overarching theme is that the Germans fought far better than everyone else on a man for man basis, but strategically they made terrible errors. They found themselves outmatched by the huge combined military power of Russia, the USA and the UK. Biting off more than they could chew they were always going to choke to death. But they put up a hell of a fight.

Most of the fighting was done in the East and this does nothing to hide the fact that Russia paid a heavy blood price for victory. Probably the USA and the UK could have done more, but overall they were happy to let Russians do the dying. They most preferred smaller actions for public relations purposes in relatively unimportant theaters of Africa, Greece and latter Italy. Even the bombing of German cities did little to win the war, but made good PR. The boots on the German ground were Russia ones and they were drenched in blood.

I must confess I was unaware of the famine in West Bengal in which between 1-3 million Indians died, whilst ships were transporting food to the UK. The famine had complex causes, but we could and perhaps ought to have done more.

The war is now fading into the past as few people are still alive who can remember it. Like many people I never really asked much about it and regret that. This book does not do a bad job of giving voice to the dead victims of that war.

I enjoyed this book, although apart form the famine in West Bengal I am not sure I learnt much. 

Soccernomics aims to provide a degree of numerical analysis to soccer. I have heard is stated that each equation added to a book reduces the readership by a half. This book avoids that issue by being quite anecdotal and not digging into or explaining the statistics too deeply.

There are some interesting take-aways:
1. Fans are a more fluid group than people believe. There is a high degree of churn as people move, or get bored with the game or have families.
2. The market for players is effient and paying more for players will generally lead to better results. They do not use transfer fees as they are often non-disclosed.
3. Managers have a small impact on the overall performance of a team. They are little more than figure heads and spokespeople. The authors to have a lot of good to say about Wegner and Clough though.
4. The impact of 2 and 3 means clubs cannot select players on the basis of race without incurring a penalty. With regard to managers they can.
5. Football is not really big business. Even the largest Manchester Unite/Chelsea teams are barely, if at all profitable and their turnover is tiny compared to the largest firms on the stock exchange. The teams at the bottom of the Premier League are closer to a single Supermarket store in terms of turnover.

The book then drifts into some analysis of why England perform poorly on the world stage. They develop a model using income per head, population and football experience. This seems to indicate that England have slightly overperformed(they don't prove this factors are causal or identify exactly how good at predicting these variables are). They then speculate that the future belongs to large country that are open to new footballing ideas.

This book is rather like Moneyball which looks at baseball. But baseball is probably an easier game to analyse as there are fewer situations. And football is already heavily analysed via Opta, this book fails to really deep dive into the data and feels quite superficial. It is quite easy to read. I enjoyed it, but felt the best chapter were around the business of football and fandom rather than football itself.

This book gives biographical account of the lives of five defectors from North Korea. It is ethnographical and does not contain much in the way of facts and figures regarding the regime. It is necessarily a biased viewpoint as there have only been a very small number of defectors and so it is hard to be sure that those profiled are necessarily representative of the people who have remained.

The book does show how the regime began to collapse after the end of communism in Eastern Europe and it is from this point that the standard of living in North Korea began to plummet. By the mid 1990s the economic system almost completely collapsed and the country began to endure widespread famine. The individuals in the book find themselves foraging for weeds to cook or engaging in petty theft to survive. The collapse of the economic system sees their skills (doctors and teachers) being no longer used as schools close and medicines run out. That seems to be a common theme as people’s skill remain unused, factors are scrapped, cinemas and hospital close. All that seems to work are the military and secret police. And the result is a huge loss of life (perhaps 10% of the population) and waste of potential.

The system manages to keep going as the people are starved of information about the outside world, and many seem to believe it is a paradise. Moreover Korea’s pre-communist culture is heavily tied in with families and those who betray the regime stain the family name, ensuring their children and grandchildren are punished. This means that defections are rare, and the huge informal spying network acts to ensure no-one criticise the leadership. It feels very much like George Orwell’s 1984.

The sheer level of terror means that the book is unable to speculate on whether everyone really believes in the regime or if they are just pretending. It seems even those who do defect, at the risk of imprisonment to death, still have some hope that North Korea really is a lie and the outside world is much worse.

It seems to be written from a female point of view. Males are assigned workgroups and jobs, these are often no longer paying and so are relatively worthless unless they are used to accept bribes. However women are allowed to engage in small scale enterprises - cooking, selling or prostitution, forging activities and as wives to those across the border in China. This means women have more opportunities for very limited self advancement and are better able to escape.

The book seems to have few positive notes to it, although it does seem that mobile phones are starting to penetrate into North Korea and radio and television can also project into the country. However it does not make any projects when and if the regime will collapse. It seems the famines of the 1990s are gone as food aid has poured into the country.

This book is Alistair Darling's tales of his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer. I have read quite a few books on the characters in New Labour.


Darling had a reputation as a safe pair of hands, and I suspect that relatively few people would have remember the roles he had prior to becoming Chancellor, and the book does not really cover this period. It starts when he was appointed after Gordon Brown became Prime Minister. He seems himself as being a mere stop-gap whilst Gordon Brown manoeuvred Ed Balls into the post. Darling face quite a lot of challenges to stay in the post.


Darling is critical several key characters:-


Governor of the Bank of England who he regarded as out of touch and behind the curve. He was more concerned about fighting inflation and was wary about bailing out banks as they would be encourage to continue their risky lending

Bankers - their excessive risk taking caused the banking collapse. He seems to regard the banks as blind to the risk that they were taking, and the fact that the whole banking system was interlinked so they would all sink or swim together. He is also morally against the high levels of pay they received.

Gordon Brown - a man who he believed underestimated the size of the crisis until rather too late, although he ultimately gives him credit for creating the international consensus to recapitalise banks.


Darling starts the book at the beginning of the collapse and so can take little responsibility for a recession that had already started. But it seems that there are few places in the book whilst he admits that he made mistakes. The timescale of the book means New Labour's Iraq war is not discussed.


The book is quite critical of Gordon Brown's leadership, but Darling did little about it at the time. He did not take part in any of the plots to remove Gordon Brown, but equally did not quite give him 100% support. Like many in the cabinet they rather seemed to hope someone else would weld the dagger, but it never happened. The result of many of these plots was it allowed Darling to remain as Chancellor while Ed Balls had to wait on the sidelines, unable to step in as Darling could not be pushed aside.


I guess the one thing that is interesting is that beyond an interest in "fairness" and the idea that governments can help people in their lives he does not seem especially ideological. Darling is perhaps a Blairite in the Brown/Blair divide. Yet he rarely seemed to disagree on policy and it was often more around presentation of the facts. The overall impression is that the debates within New Labour were largely all around personality rather than politics.

1. Fees – individual investors have to pay an array of fees. These include bid/offer spreads, stamp duty, professional fees for brokers and advisors, dealing costs, etc. It is not easy to assertain these costs as they are not really clearly disclosed.
2. Psychological Costs – individuals make mistakes on when they trade often being sucked into rising markets and selling when the pain of falling markets is too low.
3. Surviorship Bias- this is a direct cost, but more the reported returns of stock exchanges to include only the winners. Because the losers dissappear they are not included in the average returns(as the data can only include shares that exist at the beginning and end of a period being considered). A similar argument applies to funds as poorly performing funds are closed.