I have ordered a few books and DVDs during the New Year holidays and am looking forward to the arrival of three parcels…
One from the Folio Society, containing:
- Holinshed‘s Chronicles
- H. E. Bates, The Darling Buds of May
- G. E. R. Lloyd, Greek Science
- Descartes, Meditations & Other Writings
Meanwhile, from Amazon.com I ordered:
- Aristotle, Rhetoric (translated by W. Rhys Roberts)
- Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong
On the DVD front, I went over to Amazon.co.uk to make sure I got DVDs compatible with Japanese DVD players
and ordered:
- The Borgias (Season 1)
- Downton Abbey (Season 1)

I had intended to check out the early eighties BBC series “The Borgias” but since that series was never able to hold its own against Brideshead Revisited, and since this new version is by the makers of The Tudors and has Jeremy Irons playing Roderigo Borgia, well, it was irresistible at that price when the yen is so high against the pound!
The Amazon.com basket already has some new items in it, reflecting the recent resurgence of an interest in chess:
- The Amateur’s Mind by Jeremy Silman
- Understanding Chess Middlegames, by John Nunn
- My System: A Chess Manual on Totally New Principles, by Aron Nimzowitsch
- The Middlegame (two vols), by Max Euwe.
DH
Ah, Holinshed’s Chronicles, a tome never far from my clammy paws during the heady spring of 1987 when I found myself cobbling together an undergraduate thesis labouring under the clumsy title of ‘Anti-Gentlemen Sentiment in Kett’s Rebellion.’ If I remember correctly, I consulted a sixteenth-century edition in Manchester’s Central Reference Library, and managed to get biro smeared on it.
No Roman stuff? Shame on you for not keeping your Latin end up…
“No Roman stuff” was corrected last night by the supplementary purchase of the Folio edition:
Livy, The War With Hannibal (i.e books XXI-XXX), trans. J. C. Yardley.
Also bought:
Jeremy Black, Great Military Leaders and their Campaigns