It was a little disappointing to discover, when this arrived this morning, only 36 hours after ordering it, that most of my shirts had already been ironed! Nonetheless, the clean laundry basket did have enough items to carry out an initial test.

The machine is easy enough to set up, and does warm up pretty quickly, although I think it may have been a little more than 2 minutes before the steam pump switched itself on and the iron was ready to go.

The advantages of this device soon became clear:

Fewer stops to refill the iron with water, and even if you do have to refill you can do so without the problem of refilling a not steam iron. (Not that that has ever worried me - I tended to do it anyway despite the usual instruction not too, but perhaps that's part of why ordinary steam irons don't seem to last very long.

The iron itself is lighter than a normal one, and the brand new ceramic plate on the bottom of this one glides over clothes very smoothly.

When you press the button, steam does squirt out at a much higher rate than it does from any ordinary steam iron that I have used.

I found, also, that unlike with an ordinary iron, you can turn the heat setting of the iron right down to the "nylon/silk" setting, but you still get a pulse of steam when you want one. To be used with care, of course, as I expect that steam will damage delicate fabrics even if the iron plate is only warm.

Disadvantages:

It does take up a lot more space;

And, of course, it is rather more expensive.

There was a certain novelty value in using this machine, but I do think that with big batches of ironing it will speed up the process considerably and make it easier to iron to a higher standard. I'll post an update later when my wife - who did adopt a somewhat cynical attitude to the arrival of this new toy - has had a chance to use it too.

Apart from its size and the storage space needed for it, my only quibbles would really be with the instruction manual. It says that it can be filled with ordinary tap water or tap water mixed with demineralised water. I used the softened water from our water softener, as normal tap water, here in the south of England, is fairly hard and "furring up" with calcium is an ongoing problem with everything. While I assume that this is good, it would have been reassuring to have confirmation of that in the instruction manual. The manual was adequate but not brilliant: with only the briefest of notes in ten languages, pictures were the main communication method, and I would have preferred a few more words. I was a little confused initially as I thought that I had the wrong manual, as it referred to buttons and dials that I did not have. The manual covers a wide range of different devices in this series, ranging from the simplest one (which is the one that I had to one that had steam, dry and "eco" settings. Would it be so much more expensive to have a different book for each range?

This is the first time I've bought grass seed after so much research, the first time that I've known exactly what proportion of what seeds I've had to sow. I have to admit that they haven't grown yet, but the 5kg bag arrived (and I didn't really appreciate just how much volume 5kg of grass seed takes up) and it's now sown. The bag came wioth a little leaflet on sowing new lawns, and a number of other pages of advice about meadow flowers which the company also provides. The one thing that woud have made this package better would have been some specific information about overseeding existing lawns, although I did find what I was looking for on their website.

After a long literary journey through Ayn Rand's novels and Edward Younkins's very much pro-Randian readerAyn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion, I wanted to finish off with a brief look at some of Ms Rand's many detractors. Levi AsherWhy Ayn Rand Is Wrong (and Why It Matters) aimed at a balanced critique, but I'm glad that I found Charles Hayes' work as well.

This is an excoriating attack not so much on Atlas Shrugged as on Ayn Rand personally and even more so on her supporters, or, as he dubs them, "John Galt pretenders". Mr Hayes doesn't hold back with his criticism; of Rand's younger adherents he says: "When a rush of adolescent hormones encounters an ideology that makes biologically self-centred and narcissistic inclinations seem glorious, critical thinking stops and notions of superiority blossom." A year or so ago, watching the news footage of the Tea Party movement, I was intrigued by the many banners by its supporters that read "I am John Galt". Knowing now what an arrogant if not hubristic claim that is, I have sympathy with Mr Hayes point. Hayes is swingeingly critical of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and American right wing "shock jocks" in general, health insurance companies, Sarah Palin (fair enough, perhaps) and Paul Ryan, amongst others. Former US Marine, policeman, oil worker and self-proclaimed auto-didact, Mr Hayes has a sharp pen!

Many of his attacks on Rand are personal and quite vitriolic. I particularly liked "Rand's insidious ideas are unaffected by the antibiotics of reason". I haven't read much about Rand's personal life, although it wouldn't surprise me of much of what Hayes says has some basis in fact. Her portrayal of sex and the sadomasochistic overtones of some of those passages suggest a woman of unusual proclivities, to say the least. Mr Hayes is absolutely right in identifying that there is something entirely flawed in Rand's belief that the perfect man would be purely rational. Great leaders have to have a strong emotional grounding too, an ability to empathise, and to be likeable. A Mark Anthony is far more likely to be a Randian "driver" than a Brutus. The extensive research on "emotional intelligence" post-dates Atlas Shrugged, of course, but I suspect that there have been few great leaders who did not understand that instinctively, and that Rand did not does suggest a personal weakness in that area.

I'm not sure that I agree with all of his points: to blame India's appalling poverty on it being a free market seems a little unfair, as it has, until recently, been a highly regulated country, and its economic growth may be down, in part, to the liberalisation of some of its self-imposed rules. Hayes is one of many writers to make references to 2008 financial debacle as being proof of the error of Randian economics. This can be argued whichever way round you wish - personally I think that a little regulation may be more dangerous than no regulation at all. A couple of minor criticisms: Hayes does like to name drop; at one point it seemed that every paragraph started with a one line reference to an individual, including Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nassim Taleb and many others whom I'd never heard of previously were roped in, somewhat superficially, to support his case. Secondly, I do wish that Mr Hayes had found some other way of saying that Rand, and Randians, were or are "narcissistic" - I think that I read that one word more often in this pamphlet than I had done in my whole life.

In any event the fact that many of the people who claim to support Rand's thinking haven't really understood it is not a criticism of that philosophy itself, other than perhaps that it is complex and difficult to follow. (It wouldn't be the only philosophy of which that criticism can be made!) Nor, in my view, should it be a criticism of Atlas Shrugged that some people - some of the leaders of corporate America, dare I suggest - who claim that this book is their guide to life just use it as a front for arguing against government interference in their exploitative practices, and for their pursuit of their own objectives to the disadvantage of others. Doubtless many of the financiers and executives that Hayes criticises are inclined to exploit their power through connections with government and otherwise, in contradiction of Rand's dictum, via John Galt, that: "I swear by my life and for my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." Would that they were held to account to Rand's ideals and that the many hypocrites were exposed.

Perhaps the most valuable learning that I took out of reading this pamphlet, however, was to question what, exactly, Rand meant by selfishness. Mr Hayes clearly interprets the word in its normal, day to day usage. While I had been inclined to look for more complex meaning, perhaps I was trying to read more into the word that Rand intended. Enlightened self-interest I support, selfishness, in the common usage of the English word, I can not.

This is a useful little book to add to the discussion about Rand's work. Like all polemics, it is amusing, and while it may overstate its case from time to time it is all the more entertaining for it. If you are a dyed in the wool Randian, or a seeker after the truth, I commend it to you.

The Napoleonic period, and the Peninsula War in particular (1808-1814) is I suppose a "favourite" period of military history for me, and not just because I have read the Sharpe novels. No, I've visited the battlefields, read the biographies, studied the strategy and tactics. I've even - this was more than 30 years ago, I hasten to add - painted the lead figurines and wargamed it. Quite the geek, in fact! So I couldn't resist this novel when I saw it. What was it to be? Bernard Cornwell meets "chick lit" or even Mills & Boon?

Well, shortly after the start I thought that this was indeed what it was to be, as James, husband of heroine Harriet, assists his young wife out of her dress and shift - at her bidding, I hasten to add. Before that point, however, I had been reminded more of Patrick O'Brien, as Harriet had revealed herself to be the daughter of a Chemist, and I wondered if she was to be a female Dr Maturin.

In fact, this novel does neither of those things. Having introduced couples at the beginning of the story, it separates them and they either never meet again or seem to wish that they hadn't. One of the themes seems to be how women may prosper in the absence of their menfolk; another is that war, and growing old, and trauma, change people. Kitty, wife of Lord Wellington, is portrayed as a strong character, becoming in his absence a daring investor in the financial opportunities of the day. The Duke, on the other hand (and he is raised to his dukedom by the end of the book) is portrayed in a rather more critical fashion. Apparently he had his portraits painted with rather more hair on his head than he actually had, one of several pointers to his vanity. Sent me searching for my Lady Longford biographyWellington: The Years Of The Sword to corroborate that - unsuccessfully, unfortunately, hope it's in the attic somewhere!

On the home front the female characters are involved with a number of historical characters, and I'd like to think that the author, an established biographer - this is her first novel - has portrayed them with the intention of historical accuracy. This being fiction, however, you just don't know. In fact, this novel seemed somewhat overpopulated with principal characters based directly on actual people, which makes it particularly vulnerable to accusations of inaccuracy. Nathan Rothschild seemed accurate enough from what little I know of him (and from what I Googled, of course!). On the other hand, one of the men who brought gas lighting to London at this time, and who becomes a short term love-interest for our young wife, is described by her as being twenty-five, thirty, "even forty", while in fact he was forty nine at the time.

Of the entirely fictional characters, the storyline pushes to boundaries of in a number of ways. We have an Army doctor experimenting with blood transfusion, sensing that the answer lay in something particular to each individual...almost a century before the discovery of blood types. A captain in the 95th Rifles is portrayed as holding down a woman during the sack of Badajoz while she is raped by all comers - a counter to the legend of Captain Harry Smith of that regiment saving Juana Maria de los Dolores de León in the same battle. Disappointingly, Harriet is never given the opportunity to develop her interests in chemical experimentation after the first scene.

There is much to commend this novel, and I shall certainly consider reading another by Ms Tillyard, should she write on - and may also try one of her biographies. On the other hand, I was a little disappointed by the lack of a clear denouement, and the feeling that storylines were developed never really to be solved or explain. Our heroine spends a great deal of time mulling over the disappearance of her mother during her childhood, and her father's role in hiding the truth, but the answer, when we finally get it, is mundane, incomplete, and - to my great disappointment - unconnected to any of the other subplots that were developed. Perhaps I have become used to reading unsubtle fiction, but my dissatisfaction with Tides of War is that I spent 368 pages waiting for a climactic event, and never got one.

Mark Schaefer explains how he, too, had a false start or two before he really found out how to make Twitter work as a business marketing tool. Schaefer is a marketing consultant and business academic - and now a marketing consultant specialising in social media - a proverbial one man band, and his advice, distilled down to the essence, is to communicate on Twitter in the same way as you would at a face to face networking meeting, like BNI or a Chamber of Commerce. You wouldn't read out press releases, make defamatory statements, make relentless sales pitches nor be gratuitously rude at that sort of a meeting. (Well, actually, I know some people who have come rather close to doing that, but they didn't get anywhere, so we get the message.) So, as you might at a face to face or "IRL" meeting (In Real Life - an interesting Twitterism, considering the implication that Twitter isn't real, but there we are!) you spend some time chatting about other subjects, finding out what's going on in someone's business and finding out how you might help, all short of a pushy sales pitch, you are much more likely to prosper. Provide meaningful content and be genuinely helpful.

Schaefer spends a little time discussing how bigger corporates and even medium sized companies can remain personal while complying with company policies and public relations strategies. McDonald's, for example, has its extensive Twitter team tweet on the same account, but the "sign off" their tweets with their initials, and people can follow links from the Twitter profile page back to the website and see the people behind the letters. US telecoms giant ATT has individual accounts in the style of @ATTSusan, another useful option. This knowledge alone made reading the book worth it for me. The author's preference, however, is to allow people to tweet in their own names, and with a single account that they are using for purely personal conversations as well, but I know how difficult that idea is even for quite small professional firms, for example, terrified as ever of some legal or professional breach.

The book will be most relevant, however, to small and medium sized businesses. It describes business development strategies that are directly at individuals in a personal way, not to market segments or the world in general. Schaefer recommends putting a post-it on your computer: Social Media is P2P (person to person) as a reminder that you're aiming to interact with real people. Schaefer doesn't explain the very basic mechanics of setting up a Twitter account - i any event that's fairly obvious - but he does explain most of the next steps that you have to take to get it to work effectively for you, and then goes on to explain some more advanced techniques, some of which I haven't tried but must check out, like Chats, Brand Pages and advertising.

I find myself, rather like Schaefer not so long ago, someone who has tried twitter but, not having found it to have brought quick commercial successes, has given up again. If you're in the same position - or if you are getting some returns but it's just absorbing too much time - then I think that this book may both inspire and give you some useful new techniques. Twitter is not for everyone, Schaefer admits, but that may be rather more to do with them personally than it has to do with their commercial or professional sector. If you're prepared to give it a go, The Tao of Twitter, short and accessibly written, is well worth a read.

I've been following a 5:2 dietary regime for about 6 months, ever since watching a Horizon programme by a Dr Michael Moseley, see also The Fast Diet: The Secret of Intermittent Fasting - Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer, who, after looking at a number of intermittent fasting diets, some of them pretty extreme, advocated a very simply approach based on restricting your diet to just 600 kilocalories (500 for women) for two days per week. It was only recently, however, that I came across Dr Michelle Harvie and Prof Tony Howell's variation on that theme, and - since my weight loss had rather stagnated - decided to adopt their approach.

The "2 Day Diet" approach is very much more technical - restricting calories is less important than avoiding carbohydrates and favouring proteins on the two dieting - or in their parlance, "restricted" - days. Moreover, while Mosely's approach was literally "eat what you like" on the other 5 days, Harvie and Howell do impose a regime of following a "Mediterranean" diet. It's fair to say that this approach makes old fashioned calorie counting look simple in comparison - their system involves a requirement to have a certain number of portions of carbs, protein, fat, dairy, vegetables and fruit each day. The bonus is that the calorie count is much less restrictive, and they say that there's no need to miss a meal. As I've been skipping dinner on my two fasting days, that sounds an attractive option. The complexity of the approach is not such a problem if you can simply choose the appropriate recipes, but having bought their original book The 2-Day Diet: Diet Two Days a Week. Eat Normally for Five.for my Kindle, I realised very quickly that an ebook is not a good way to have a recipe book - tables are hard to read, and nothing beats a bookmark or post-it note to identify the page you're working to. Accordingly, I ordered this cookbook in advance, and today it was waiting for me when I got home.

Just six pages are spent summarising the principles of the 2 Day Diet, which is fine by me - the original book had to establish the research credentials of the method, and a great deal of space was devoted to "FAQs", some of which seemed a bit repetitive. Harvie and Howell both became involved in this work researching ways to prevent cancers - primarily breast cancer - and the proceeds of this book, like the last, go to Genesis Breast Cancer Prevention. There are then 76 pages devoted to restricted day diets, just under 50 to unrestricted days - 43 and 22 recipes respectively - and then a dozen pages are devoted to a summary of nutritional information, information on serving sizes, ready-reckoners and meal planners.

Most recipes are designed to serve four, but there are some single person ones too.

The book is a good size - 9.5 inches high by 7.5 inches wide - printed on full colour semi-gloss paper with excellent photographs of almost all of the recipes. The semi-gloss is fine by me - it allows notes to be made on the paper, even in ink, although pencil is probably better as ink will take a minute to dry, and I find that essential in recipe books. (My mother doesn't approve, I should point out!) The text is well spaced out so it's easy to read. All in all it's a beautifully produced book as well as having great content, and I'm looking forward to getting it splattered with ingredients as of tomorrow evening!

I've been following this dietary regime for about 6 months, ever since watching a Horizon programme by a Dr Michael Moseley, who looked at a number of fasting based diets, some of them pretty extreme, before recommending a diet based on restricting your diet to 600 calories (500 for women) for two days per week, while eating "normally" for the other five. This dietary regime was not primarily about weight loss, although that seemed to be a useful side effect for most people. The primary benefit was to reset various body clocks in various ways, reducing cholesterol, proneness to diabetes and improving cell replacement.

It has worked for me - an excellent cholesterol count, and I lost about half a stone before my weight stabilised again.

Angela Dowden's recipe book doesn't specifically credit Dr Mosley's approach, which is also known as the Fast Diet (and he and another dietician/recipe writer have published their own books) but seems to be based pretty closely on it. She also references work by Dr Michelle Harvie, one of the medical researcher authors of "The Two Day" diet, a somewhat more proscriptive approach to two day dieting where portion counting, and avoiding carbohydrates and focussing on proteins, are the hallmarks of the fasting days. The recipes in this book, however, and the meal planners, are very much oriented to the calorie limit with no reference to the protein/carbohydrate split.

The meal plans are also designed to allow for three, admittedly rather small, meals per day, rather than the single meal recommended by Dr Moseley in his Horizon programme. The plans are all set at 500 kilocalories, the recommended level for women, with suggestions as to how men might eat a little more. I rather liked that approach - but I may be biased.

The recipes are calorie counter to the last digit - e.g. the first, Tahini Hummus, is 88 kcals precisely. They are all easy enough to make, with preparation and cooking times stated at the top. I was a little surprised that most were designed around 4 or 6 servings, as if a whole family might be following the diet, but then of course you might freeze portions, and even if it's not recommended that children or teenagers follow these fasting diets, I dare say there's no problem with them having some of the meals topped up with other foods off limits to the strict dieters.

All in all, a useful resource.

This is the third in Dr Weiss's series of three CDs on the subject of negotiation. As previously reported, the three introductory tracks - 10 minutes long in total - are exactly the same as in the first CD, The Negotiator in You: At Work (BBC Audio)and the second, The Negotiator in You: At Home: Tips to Help You Get the Most of Every Interaction.

This CD then has six sections relevant to negotiating "in life": cooperative versus competitive negotiating styles, assertiveness, making the first offer, valuation, high value purchases and negotiating with companies as the "weak consumer".

This CD has rather confirmed the view I had by the end of the second CD - that these Cds are bext seen as a set, and complement each other. The sliughtly arbitrary subdivision suggested by the titles don't really allow those CDs to stand alone. This CD, for example, used many examples that were "at work" examples.

Overall, this is a gentle introduction to the art of negotiation. It can only scratch the surface of Dr Weiss's knowledge of the subject. As is says in the downloadable workbook to accompany the CD, "There are many other challenges when negotiating at life, but not all can be addressed in this worksheet." Quite so! Moreover, many may say that what he says is, in the British English vernacular, "the bleeding obvious". None the less, it's worth and hour and a half of listening, and there are probably few of us who apply these rules consistently.

It's been 16 month since I received, and started to read, this book, so I do feel a little embarrassed that it's only now that I'm getting around to reviewing it.

This book is itself a marketing tool, for the authors' consultancy, Brand Learning, and a series of proprietary tools and models, such as "The Growth Propeller", "The Brand Learning Wheel" and the "Fit for Growth" tool. I have nothing in principle against books like that, as some of my earlier reviews reveal. Indeed, "Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs (New Rules Social Media Series)", which was in the main a marketing tool for HubSpot's SEO services, was my favourite book of 2011. Andy Bird and Mhairi McEwan, both alumni of Unilever's management/marketing training programme appear - based on the reviewers listed on the dust cover and in the foreword - to have a client list to die for. It's beautifully produced - good quality matt paper printed in blue and black and with good quality diagrams and illustrations.

However...while I don't doubt that Bird and McEwan are excellent marketing practitioners, I just found this a difficult book to engage with. My problem, in the main, was its attempt to claim as novel and innovative ideas on marketing which have been around for quite a while now, and generally go under the heading of marketing orientation. Yes, everyone in an organisation can and should have a role in marketing!

In part, the (almost) exclusively multi-national level of the case studies also put me off. Unilever (obviously!), Pepsi, McDonald's, Shell, Pfizer etc, there was not even a large SME in the mix. While I would not for one second say that the cases are not applicable to smaller organisations, I am afraid that this also made the book less engaging for me.

I don't like giving poor reviews, so I think that I'll finish by saying that this is probably a better book that I found it, and that if you haven't read a recent book on current marketing concepts you could do a lot worse than starting here. I'm also pretty sure that of you've retained Brand Learning then this is pretty much required reading!

I have to admit that I'm a little disdainful of books that claim to offer "MBAs" in one form or another; it's rather like a short history of Britain claiming to offer you a BA, or a popular science book offering a BSc. The most detailed and densely packed business books on my bookshelves are texts for just single modules within an MBA or professional qualification, and I seem to recollect having bought two or three such texts for each module. The claim that any book is "an MBA" is, therefore, at best pretentious and at worst ridiculous. Nor was I reassured by the first sentence in the book: "This book is the first of its kind in the third and final wave of social media literature." The final wave? Really? With social media advancing so rapidly, with new platforms appearing regularly, it seems odd to be talking about "final waves" of literature.

Having got that off my chest, I did like the Social Media MBA. Its claim to MBA status is that it is presented as a series of case studies by Mr Holloman's 15 co-authors, and the chapters are easy to read and easily digestible. The language is pleasingly non-academic! I most enjoyed the case studies, or which there are eight, each written by a senior social media practitioner in a separate companies: ARM, Aviva, Dell, Evans Cycles, GSK, Kodak, Philips and Sage. Interesting, and an indication of the sort of level at which this book is considering social media strategy - that of the FTSE 100 or multi-national corporation. All very "MBA", you might say... With my own focus being on SMEs, this did all seem very high level, but sensible enough.

This book would have been more useful to me if it had included some medium sized company examples (and a medium sized company is one with up to 250 employees and something like £26 million turnover); only Evans Cycles came anywhere near that. I would have found some professional service firm examples useful - but perhaps there are still insufficient examples of psfs, especially the bigger ones, using social media properly.

If there are any Social Media modules in MBA courses - and I suspect that there must be, even though many will take the view that social media is just another tactic within the long established fields of marketing and communications - this book, or an updated version thereof, does deserve to be on the reading list. If you're trying to work out how to use social media in a large organisation environment, it's certainly worth reading too.