Ian Pindar (2008)

£5 well spent in a charity shop. This is a collection of essays on different historical mysteries. There’s something for everyone: the building of Stonehenge, the abandonment of the Mary Celeste, and (my personal favourite) the fate of the Princes in the Tower. Perhaps a book best dipped into.

Some of the essays haven’t aged well against subsequent scholarship. That’s inevitable and doesn’t detract from them as decent introductions to a wide range of happenings.

3/5. Finished Friday 1 August, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Garry Kasparov

Possibly one of the most insightful books on AI that I’ve read – all the more remarkable because it was written in 2017, shortly before the 2020s emergence of large language models and the mass-market appreciation of AI as a force.

It’s built around chess – of course – and around Kasparov’s own journeys through both chess and computers. He was an early adopter: I played against one of “his” chess computers many times during the 1980s. He has a keen technical eye, arguing that more data and more processing will defeat more algorithmic cleverness. That’s not a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with, because new approaches can overturn the previously accepted wisdom in ways we never get to simply by throwing more computer power at the problem in the same way. (Modern deep learning itself did this, overtaking the more “classical” structured approaches.) But chess computers do provide a good example of how depth of searching beats better positional evaluation.

But it’s also built around Kasparov’s second act as a business strategy consultant. He worries about the effects that automation and AI will have on business, on employment, on human motivation and pursuit of expertise. This part is also immensely relevant as AI is assimilated, at least somewhat, into wider society.

3/5. Finished Monday 7 July, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Keith Houston

I was expecting a book that was more calculator focussed, perhaps misled by the sub-title. This is a book about pocket (and other) calculators, but it’s more a book about calculation and its mechanical assistants, from the abacus and Napier’s Bones through to computers.

And that having been said, it’s a great history. It addresses the needs that have driven mechanical computation over the centuries, as the applications have changed alongside the technology (and in many ways have driven its development). You can see this in the way that the scale of the machines changes, becoming alternately smaller and more pocket-sized and then larger as the increasing demands require steam or electrical power. (The latter can be miniaturised while the former clearly can’t.)

What we would actually regard as pocket calculators occupy only a tiny part of the story. I think there’s a more detailed history that could still be written about the different processors used, methods of entry used (for example HP’s determined and continued use of reverse-Polish notation), and how these were taken up by sub-groups within science, engineering, and finance and used almost as tribal signifiers (“real engineers use HP”). But that would miss the wider story that this book tells well.

4/5. Finished Monday 9 June, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Italo Calvino (1997)

Surrealist science fiction at its best. A selection of short stories told from the perspective of a being simultaneously almost god-like and hopelessly confused as the universe evolves around him (it?).

It’s a hard work to classify. My closest analogy would be with The Cyberiad, but with less narrative consistency and a far broader scope. Still, it’s extremely enjoyable, in a mind-bending way.

4/5. Finished Sunday 8 June, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Guy Hands (2012)

Are there lessons here? I’m not entirely sure. It’s certainly a rags-to-riches story of a self-made man, and a very entertaining and honest one. Whether it provides any insights into the world of private equity is less clear to me.

Hands made his money from corporate takeovers followed by ruthless cost-cutting and asset-stripping. This is good for him, possibly good for the next buyer – and utterly tragic for everyone else concerned, whose jobs are eliminated or consolidated with scarcely a backward glance, and the excuse that the companies would have failed anyway. That might be true, but it’s not a certainty, and it can only happen in a culture where everything has been financialised without any broader responsibilities being taken (or even admitted to exist). Hands’ later philanthrophy has to be set against this.

It all rather crashes down when Hands buys a record company, perhaps the epitome of a company whose value comes predominantly from the people it employs and not (as had been the rationale for the deal) from the back catalogue of hits. It shows how different companies and industries can be, flying in the face of the simplifications of finance that they can all be treated the same. Maybe that’s the lesson, albeit possibly an unintended one.

3/5. Finished Monday 2 June, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)