It is normal when talking about Philip.K.Dick to start by mentioning he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on which the film Bladerunner was based. So lets not do that. Ubik is much less well known and I doubt very much will ever get made into a film. It clearly falls into the science

We are all obsessed by the Second World War. So when I was invited by my daughter to watch an opera by Kurt Weil written in 1946 I was on the lookout for Nazis. Weil was a communist Jew who had fled to America to escape Hitler who would have taken a dim view of

I am a development scientist.  I work in a lab wearing a white coat mixing things up, just like people imagine scientists do.  It is actually a fairly skilled job that I have acquired through long hours and much repetition.  I’d be a little miffed if somebody off the street could walk in and do

While the invasion by Alaric threw Italy into a crisis, Germany was in turmoil.  There was increasing pressure from the Huns in the East – Gibbon traces its origin all the way back to China, which is probably fanciful but I suppose isn’t impossible.  From this emerged a new barbarian leader who rapidly became an

This is a novel that works on several different levels – Dan Brown style pot-boiler, girlie relationship stuff, ghost story, thriller.  But I am going to ignore all that and just talk about the historical bit.

Alaric may well be the best known German barbarian in Roman history.  He was a Goth of high rank and bizarrely for someone who is mainly remembered for wrecking the empire, his role model was probably the man who was for a time to become his great enemy: Stilicho, whose military expertise had given him