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A long, but well-written set-up. Let's get on with it now, eh?

Chapter Four, which covers Cameron's negotiations with the EU, is easily the most interesting section of the book so far. It lays bare the timidity of Cameron's approach and the inner workings of the EU very clearly. It's a great example of political writing.

Wolfe is just a delight to read and these stories are inventive and beautiful.

Too early to tell, but this is readable enough. HRH builds up a sense of mystery pretty well and there are one or two moments of humour, too. I shall persevere.

Despite poor ebook formatting, this continues to be a highly readable and interesting account of the cultural and pseudo-intellectual milieu from which Nazism emerged. Some sobering observations include the fact that people on both sides saw the First World War as an instrument of cultural and spiritual renewal. Human beings are strange creatures.

The end is near.

And, as with most things in this book, it's coming very slowly. The vastness, weirdness and subtle malevolence of the Night Land itself remain the novel's main accomplishment and the hero and his beloved's passing within a mile of the House of Silence is a disturbing reminder of that.

Continues to be interesting, despite the frequent type-setting errors. These early chapters deal with Guido List, an Austrian theosophist who worked painstakingly to produce and promote a theory that Germany had once been a pre-Christian utopia of enlightened priest-Kings who had access to secret knowledge about the way the world was supposed to be. Ludicrous, but also unsettling considering how things turned out.

Isaac's experiments with flying things are wonderfully written.

Mieville's already demonstrated the immense fecundity of his imagination at this point, but the detailed description of the process involved in the making of khepri art is a tour de force. Mr Motley is an intriguing but threateningly remote character; Lin, on the other hand, labours physically (and intimately) to reproduce him. It's extraordinary stuff.

As mentioned by another reviewer, the lack of footnotes is an issue. Not that I don't believe the writer, but the oversight lays the book open to the charge of being less than rigorous academically. Also, Bradford is not in Lancashire, which is an almost calamitous error for an author like Laqueur to make.

A thought-provoking and highly readable examination of the demographic, cultural, political and economic challenges facing Europe in the coming decades.

The section on Russia was very informative and, as most good books do, made me want to read more. The dispassionate examination of multi-culturalism was both sobering and slightly frustrating. An excellent read so far.

The story about the braille books is astonishingly inventive.

Having found Naani, the narrator is making his way with her back to the Great Redoubt. Hodgson's archaic, pedantic narration continues, largely through repetition and a plethora of embedded and subordinate clauses, to weave its bizarre magic. Still impressive stuff.

This continues to be an impressively thorough piece of research, although now somewhat out of date. Nance's determination to paint ISIS as an aberrant rather than extreme version of Islam is, however, undercut both by his comparisons with Saudi Arabia (which don't seem to be as stark as he thinks they are) and a departure from the more dispassionate tone of earlier sections. Nevertheless, a fascinating read.

This has reached the 'unputdownable' stage. Silva's plotting is decent enough but his actual writing is what elevates this above its more run-of-the-mill contemporaries. Thoroughly engaging stuff.