Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith: The Dictator's Handbook Much liked this book, which is a sort-of modern version of Machiavelli's The Prince. Don't get fooled by its silly title, this book is the general-audience version of Bueno De Mesquita et al's selectorate theory, which describes any kind of power structure in terms of which groups leaders need to please (or can ignore!) in order to stay in power. It's a rather cynical theory, with leaders having staying-in-power as more or less their only goal, and they give a great many example; leaders in democracies and authocracies are more-or-less equivalent, it's only that the former needed to please many more people and thus are induced to play a bit nicer. Of course, political science is a bit shaky, but the writers do have statistics and analysis (but one needs the more scholarly version of the theory for that) to back it up. Also, esp. Bueno De Mesquita is known for making quite accurate predictions of future events, more so than others. This gives some confidence, esp. against the common theme of theories that can predict anything. With selectorate theory in hand, the book explains how we could look at e.g. foreign aid, international politics, to make it beneficial to leaders (democratic or not) to be better to their subjects, improve governance, freedoms etc. So, in the end, the cold, hard-nosed cynicism does point to some ways to make the world a better place... Recommended. I'll be going to watch world events through these lenses, and see how wel it works.

Shadowplayers: The Rise And Fall of Factory Records by James Nice (who is also military history writer James Hayward). A history of the Factory Records label, by the man who's reissued large chunks of its catalogue over the past twenty years. A marvellous story if Manchester post-punk sounds like the sort of thing you'd be interested in. I have to go through it and redigest large chunks of it into Wikipedia. This is unduly difficult as for once in my life I've bought the physical paper item and it's a five hundred page brick, but at least I can use page numbers in the references.