A detailed yet slightly austere/opaque history of the whisky industry in Campbeltown from around 1769 through to the early 2000s, covering the burgeoning scene to its production peak with the 29 active distilleries in 1835 and the subsequent decline following
Pundamentalist
I love seeing Gary Delaney at work – a slightly battered comedy ‘everyman’ with a hint of wrong’un, he fires out puns and stupid one-liners like a sort of giggling bullshit howitzer, and I can’t help but get caught up
Boris Johnson: The Beast of Brexit
More a pamphlet than a book – I was intrigued into this by seeing it on a friend’s “recently read” feed. It’s a 60-ish page essay on the character of Alexander Boris DePfeffel Johnson, and given his temperament and past
Rum: The Manual
A companion to his excellent Whisky manual, but geared at The Sugar Spirit – Broom-san deploys his mixer-led grading system to inform notes on a load of different styles of rums, and paves the way to educate on different styles
eyE Marty
An autobiography posthumously discovered in an attic, of one of the British comedy scene’s most distinctive enigmas. Though he died incredibly early at 48 his life was packed with more living than most people – my head was spinning at
52 Times Britain Was A Bellend
One could be forgiven for feeling a little bleak about one’s adopted country on the face of reading this – if it weren’t abundantly clear that the author had started with THOUSANDS of similar incidents and narrowed it down to
Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating
Began as a fascinating exploration of the pulling of various strings to manipulate senses into contrarian experiences for people trying things, and somehow partway through turned into a love letter from the author to the Italian Futurists. Not helped by
Tales from the Colony Room
The history of Soho’s Colony Room Club – a gathering place of Bohemians, artists, and free thinkers – established in 1948 by the redoubtable Muriel Belcher and closed in 2008. In that time it was home to a rollcall of
How To
Randall from XKCD has collected a bunch of thought-scoping exercises here about how to solve fairly basic problems (such as how to dig a hole) and then extrapolated to some less-basic ones (such as building a lava moat around your
Tall Tales and Wee Stories
For the first time, comedy LEGEND Billy Connolly has put “pen to paper” to record some of his dizzying array of stories collected over the years and meted out to audiences in packed houses across the globe. You can’t begrudge