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This promises to be an interesting look behind the scenes of television news, though if we're going to be fair about it, it's really a list of big interviews that Emily Maitlis has done, written out in long-hand, with some thoughts about whether she did a good job or not. She seems remarkably unconfident. The story of how she got Anthony "The Mooch" Scaramucci is very entertaining; and the more interesting (and weird) thing we learn is that she really likes Piers "Moron" Morgan, and thinks he's brilliant; and really doesn't like the Dalai Lama, who she thinks says nothing of any interest. And how much she loves Alan Partridge, with whom she spent an entire afternoon filming one, minute-long, joke. The last chapter of the book is a look into her stalker, a thing I knew nothing about before this book. It's a strange list of people who she's interviewed, and not an awful lot else, and I'm not sure I've learnt much from the book other than TV news seems even more shambolic than I thought it was already.

This is probably a lovely coffee-table book, but it has two super-irritating things.

It talks a lot about all kinds of interesting things, things that you almost have to see in order to understand, and then decided to illustrate them with an annoying undetailed sketch. Flags of cities in the US? You get one badly redrawn thing, which I'm sure is supposed to be clever and consistent, but it's consistently irritating. There are lots of things described here that I'd love to peer at and think about, but instead some annoying illustrator has just dashed off a quick, stylised drawing of it.

The second thing is the length of each segment. If you've ever listened to the podcast, you'll know that it's a long, 30-minute meander through all kinds of detail about one particular element of this book. So, yes, there's a 30-minute exploration of flags of cities in the US, curiously none the worse for not being able to see any of them. We learn all kinds of fascinating details of each subject. But this book appears to skim through a barely-detailed summary of what you need to know; none of that interesting detail, no real data or information about anything in particular, and the chapters are so short, before you are quite expecting it, they end just like this review has

Spotify is quite a secretive company. It's quite hard to know quite what's going on in it - and this book is an interesting view of it from many people who have been involved with it.

The story of how it started is interesting, and in many ways is the typical "naive startup in an apartment" story, except this one starts with quite a bit of money.

It focuses on Daniel Ek, the founder and CEO, and tries to highlight his metamorphosis from unsure, scruffy awkward tech guy to the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world for music. As a story, it kind of succeeds - though Ek's story isn't quite a rags-to-riches story, being more riches-to-riches, if we can be entirely honest.

The book contains many interesting details - Spotify's strange attempted pivot to trying to be a video service, as one thing, which appeared to have consumed a large amount of money and be entirely unsuccessful. You'll hear Spotify talk now about their ambition to be the place people consume audio - and this is mainly driven by a failure to make themselves a media aggregator as they were hoping to be.

It's clear that the main thing holding Spotify back was the record companies, who dragged their feet at every opportunity - a strange thing for them to do, given it revitalised their industry and simultaneously eradicated much of the music piracy problem that they were dealing with. And, as comes as no surprise, Steve Jobs comes across as a Machiavellian schemer, whispering bad things into the record companies' ears. I've loathed every little thing about the Steve Jobs story - and this is yet another book that highlights what an unpleasant shit of a man he was.

Spotify's foray into podcasting started in 2015, so it appears. This is an English version of a Swedish book published in 2019, and though it has since been updated, Spotify's dizzying acquisition trail in podcasting is compressed into a few pages, and you don't get that much of a view into the company's vision there.

You do get a sense of the time that an IPO takes in any company; and the clever way that Spotify achieved their flotation. As Ek is quoted as saying, it was a choice to either float onto the stock market or sell the company to someone like Google or Apple (both apparently sniffed about a bit). It is possibly a little disappointing that this takes up so much of a company's focus, given that this is ultimately nothing that a consumer will ever notice.

You also understand how important Spotify's "influencers" were to its success, given the slew of copycat services in the US.

The method behind 'Discovery Weekly', the clever personalisation method that Spotify uses to keep you listening longer (and act as a product differentiator), is discussed which is fascinating - spoiler, they use user playlists as a way to get similarities of songs. But you don't get much more insight into the black box of how Spotify works.

And perhaps that's the slight disappointment - that Spotify refused to take part in this book. It's a positive, and quite Swedish, history of the company - respectful to everyone, with lots of detail though few real surprises. Spotify missed an opportunity to work more closely on this book - and any criticism I've heard about this book has been from ex-Spotify people, who've pointed out the detachment of the authors from the story; it's especially told from a Swedish, rather than US or UK, viewpoint.

But if you've any interest in how Spotify works as a company, this is a good book to spend time with. You'll end up with a renewed admiration for what the company has achieved, and the way in which it all happened.

(I was sent a preview copy as a watermarked PDF, which I read on my e-reader).

Chesshyre starts this book by gently poking fun at train enthusiasts, and tries to claim he isn't one, but with every train he takes he insists on telling us engine numbers and speed details. It's a laborious joke, I assume, but it's one that wears thin quickly as he hurtles round the world on a bunch of trains, and gently pokes fun at the train enthusiasts he meets while protesting slightly too loudly that he isn't one.

Any "travelling on a train" book that starts with a reference to Paul Theroux is already on a hiding to nothing. This isn't a Theroux-like book; the characters Chesshyre meets on the trains he takes are less interesting and less complex than Theroux's. It's probably partly because Chesshyre travels in first class in as many trains as he possibly can, and seems to only talk to other Brits in much of this book. Theroux took the time to learn to speak in Spanish for his trip down to Patagonia, but Chesshyre appears to be the quintessential Brit abroad - only speaking in English and almost always to the British people he discovers.

He gets his come-uppance in Australia. He manages to rub almost every gold-class passenger up the wrong way, for some reason, and beats a hasty retreat to the cheap seats. Reading this chapter, it seems entirely unlike the Australian culture that I know, but also the Aussies don't like airs and graces, and especially don't like aloofness in any guise. His attempt to be apart from the train enthusiasts, who he derides throughout the book, dismally fails here. He writes the entire chapter as some kind of revenge attack on his fellow passengers, pretending that he's no idea why they were all being so mean to him.

Chessyre's as see-through as rice paper, though. Towards the end of the book, he suddenly - and for no real reason - starts talking about how excellent Christian Wolmar is, a fellow train enthusiast and author. Christian is a god amongst men, you'd think after the flowery paragraph that Chesshyre gives. Lo and behold - the quote on the front cover is from Wolmar. Scratch my back, etc.

As you read it you notice Chesshyre has form with writing books about train trips - he's written quite a few already, making his faux protestations about not being an awful train enthusiast even more irritating.

All this isn't to say that this book is worthless. It isn't - it's a relatively easy jaunt through a number of train trips, and some of it is rather enjoyable. Were it not for the aloofness and disengagement with his journeys, it would be rather better.

You get the feeling, sometimes, that Theroux has to push himself to go on these journeys to write a new book, and that he has little interest in the places he's going to. Certainly, this book starts off that way, with a customary swipe at other travel writers before he makes his way to the Deep South - and clearly enjoys it so much he makes many return visits and appears to make friends.

This isn't Theroux at his finest. He's a known writer now. He can call ahead and get interviews, and does in many cases here. There is less serendipitous meetings in the street, though they do still happen. He's in a car, not in a train, which changes the dynamic of the book since he isn't bossed around by station timetables and over-officious guards. He can, in one slightly embarrassing part of the book, request to go and see some poor people, to which his interviewee agrees and we're taken to a poor family's house in what seems like a zoo visit.

However, it's a good read, with some good characters and an overwhelming message that too many Americans virtue-signal by giving money to Africa when they'd be rather better helping their own country people. Certainly worth spending time with; I regret not reading the print edition, which appears to have some lovely photographs throughout, and instead reading an ebook version that lumps some photographs at the end in poor black and white quality.

As a recent immigrant, I skipped much of the preamble of times I didn't know, and went straight for his time during the Rudd/Gillard years and forward from there.

Turnbull clearly thinks a lot of himself. In many ways, he's a politician from a bygone era: one that appears well-read and clever, and one that appreciates the gravity of the office, rather than one that wears baseball hats and regurgitates meaningless slogans about giving something a go if you want to give it a go.

He's proud of his work for the NBN, and I have to say, after reading this, that he is across the technology in a way that almost every other politician is not. He doesn't describe it as a triumph, he describes it quite strongly as a pragmatic and imperfect choice, and I would tend to agree with him there. It probably shouldn't have been done at all, but it does appear that he made the most from a poor hand.

He paints his party in a poor light, and rightly so in my opinion - Australian politics seems to be a messy, juvenile business with very little to redeem it. Turnbull has a lot of similarities with Tony Blair, in my mind - the same background and the same view of themselves as intellectuals and quiet, careful thinkers. I didn't always agree with Blair's politics, but I think - excepting the war - that he was the best prime minister the UK has had in my lifetime. I'm not sure I can say the same about Turnbull, but given the succession of bloody idiots who have held the Australian PM position over the last fifteen years, I suspect Turnbull's not the worst by any means.

I bailed after getting to about 35%. John Bolton is a fool, Trump is a bigger fool, and I realised this book told me nothing I don’t already know - that Trump is a vain, shallow, stupid man, and that Bolton knew this but got a job with him anyway.

This book is written in a turgid fashion, with Bolton keen to point out how clever he is (quoting in Latin, then explaining to us stupid people what the Latin meant), and how right he was (apparently he made no mistakes at all during his time in this administration). You get the feeling that Bolton would squeeze the excitement out of the moon landings if he could put a bit of Latin into a paragraph. I felt like I was wading through a poor essay from a thick person trying to prove himself clever.

We learn nothing from this book. We’ve read all this stuff before. It’s plain as day to anyone. Yet half of the US still wants to vote for this fool.

Bolton comes out of this worse than Trump, though. He’s helped this man achieve some ridiculous policies, so the left won’t like him. But he’s now published this, so the right won’t like him either now. Not sure who wins, other than a nice retirement check.