On the positive side this bag has ample space for a DSLR camera body, 50mm lens and long (300mm) lens. There are lots of pockets and spaces for accessories. The body and small lens fit into a padded bag within the main bag which provides good protection - though could be a bit awkward, especially if you wanted to get to the camera in a hurry. The bag is attractive and practical with an easily fitted plastic waterproof protector. On the negative or less positive side - I have doubts about the robustness of the bag, especially the main zip, which does not look well-made and might not last very long. If you need a bag to provide protection in challenging conditions this isn't the one. It did not occur to me when ordering but the lack of a carrying handle in addition to the strap is a nuisance too. Overall probably good value in terms of space and appearance. But some reservations about durability.

It is always a difficult balance to set the lives of key characters against historical events and places and this novel achieves this reasonably well. The story is gripping and you want to know how it ends though by around two-thirds of the way through it's becoming fairly clear. It is fluently written but with heavy doses of sentimentality. While the context is well developed - the history of Thessaloniki from 1917 to the near present in the wider frame of world events and Greek politics - the characters are less so. In a postscript Hislop notes that the city itself is a character and its turbulent tragic narrative of transformation from a well integrated multicultural city to one almost entirely Greek Orthodox is central, while The Thread's narrators, Katerina and Dimitri, remain rooted both in the city and its past, regarding themselves as custodians of a time when it was Jewish and Muslim as well as Christian. But the characters themselves are all drawn in black and white, good/bad, with little exploration of ambiguities or uncertainties and they don't really develop through the novel. Konstantinos Komninos is introduced as cold to those around him and indifferent to humanity and so he stays, without any exporation or inner tension or explanation. Likewise Katerina is long suffering and kind hearted yet a survivor - but again the absence of any interior monologue means that she remains one-dimensional and not in the end very interesting. When despite her strength of character in other respects she marries a monster it is hard to see this as plausible. Her love interest Dimitri, the son of Konstantinos, is similarly undeveloped although his involvement in the resistance and civil war could have been grounds for more nuanced exploration. While we sympathise with Dimitri's rage against his father it isn't really clear why he's developed so differently than his father had hoped. And so on with most of the others. The most potentially interesting character is Konstantinos's brother Leonidas but events mean that he doesn't have a large role in the story despite having been instrumental in creating the crucial thread. There are cleaver plays on weaving, tapestry and design that feature centrally in the lives of the characters and the notion of history and human relationships as interwoven threads. But the plot relies several times on coincidences that are to say the least implausible while courses of action that seem to the reader rather obvious are not followed. Why for example doesn't Katerina's mother having been separated from her daughter on the keyside find out from the seemingly well-organzed Red Cross where the next boat was destined? Well because then the story couldn't have developed as it did. So in all - well written and enjoyable to read but you need to go with the plot and not ask to many questions about it or the characters.

Contains spoilers....This is an appauling book. OK the author has imaginately constructed a child's view of the world and events and through this perspective the reader gradually realises the horror that is unfolding. If this were pure fiction one might say it was well-crafted and persuasive. But it is not pure fiction - it is an attempt to convey to childen an understanding of the Holocaust. It claims to be educational as well as entertaining fiction. In the former it fails. It is apparent from very early on that this is an English language author writing for an English reading audience - since Bruno's mis-hearing of the Führer as "The Fury" and Auschwitz as "Out-With" only works in English. But this is not the main flaw. The narrative is dependent on Bruno being able to wander close enough to the perimiter fence of Auschwitz to develop a friendship with a Jewish child prisoner, Shmuel. Absolutely impossible - there were several lines of eletrified fencing around the camp and no inmate would have had free time unobserved to be chatting to someone on the outside. This conveys a seriously misleading impression of life in the camps. Bruno is also able to enter and leave the camp through a weak spot in the fence and makes a final visit dressed in camp striped uniform when he and Shumel are caught in a round-up of prisoners for extermination and they die together. The idea that it was possible to enter and leave the camp, albeit ilicitly, is again a compelte travesty of the facts. Novelists may bend historical facts for dramatic purposes and in some cases this may not matter, but in relation to the Holocaust accuracy and authenticity are absolutey critical. But moreover, Bruno's innocence stands for the 'innocence' of ordinary Germans about the Holocaust which, under the guise of educating children, takes a deeply problematic stand. See by contrast the historical evidence in Goldhagen's 'Hitler's Willing Executioners'. The least the author could have done was to add a postcript pointing out how facts had been changed for dramatic puropses and directing young readers to reliable historical sources.

This is a box-set of 6 DVDs on the Cold War was originally made for the History Channel. Rather than tell a story in sequence these are discrete programmes with very little analysis. The programme in the threat of nuclear destruction is mostly about an underground shelter for Congress. The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall about the means people used to cross from East to West. The Bay of Pigs has more political analysis than the others but ignores how US isolation of Cuba after the revolution left Castro looking for a new ally in the Soviet Union. Shadow Warriors is about how the CIA aided the anti-Russian Mujahideen in Afghanistan but omits to mention that this set the scene for the Taliban. It also keeps claiming wrongly that the Communist Governments in Afghanistan had no support - they did but mostly in Kabul. Yanks before Stalin is about how some US companies, notably Ford, got involved in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. And Spy Planes is about US spy plane missions over the USSR with more technical details about the planes than most viewers will find interesting. In all there is occasionally interesting material here. But there are two major weaknesses. First, the stories are told entirely from the US point of view and offer no insight at all on the politics of the Soviet Union and therefore no explanation of how and why the Cold War developed (and ended) as it did. Second, there is very little analysis and reflection in these programmes - they assume audiences are mostly interested in technical matters, war footage, tales of heroism and the like. The Soviet leader to receive most attention is Khrushchev, who is presented as a belligerent opponent of the Americans thereby missing the complexity of this leader and the fact that there was a 'thaw' in the Cold War in the later 1950s - early 60s. Having watched these one is little wiser about the international politics of the Cold War.

This book is an important testimony of imprisonment and slave labour in Occupied France. But I have some reservations. It is misleadingly presented by the publisher as a memoir of resistance while this features only in the first few pages. There is though a story here of Humbert's personal resistance and struggle for mental and physical survival. For the most part it is written in rather wooden prose (or this could be a problem of translation). The passages towards the end, after liberation, do liven up and offer insight into the chaotic uncertainty of these few weeks and into the personality of the author who proves herself a competent and energetic organizer despite the extreme debilitation of her years as a slave labourer. However there are passages where she shows little insight or knowledge of what's been happening in France under occupation (bearing in mind this was a memoir written subsequently, after her return to Paris). Her anti-Polish sentiments do Humbert little credit. Following the arrival of US troops and the collapse of Nazi authority in western Germany some Polish former prisoners take revenge on locals by causing damage and killing cattle. One may not condone such actions but to use them as a basis for condemning all Poles, whom she describes as a "primitive people" (and approvingly quotes a colleague "If I don't see another Pole for fifty years that'll be soon enough") is unworthy of the humanity she conveys in other places. Polish units after all (both Jewish and Gentile) were active with the French Resistance throughout the occupation. In all, this is an important testament and will be read I suspect by a wider audience than specialists in WW2 but does not the offer insights into human resistance and character of some other accounts of these times.

In the midst of multiple global crises of food, fuel, finance - the threat of escalating armed conflicts and dismantling of basic social welfare and educational rights established in the mid 20th century - it is timely to ask what Marx, 19th century theorist of crisis and revolution, might have to say about all this. But this is not what Eagleton does in this book. He takes 10 misunderstandings/misplaced criticisms of Marx and attempts to rebuff each in turn - that Marx is not relevant to a postindustrial age (arguably the most significant but shortest chapter); socialism means lack of freedom; Marxism is deterministic; Marxism is utopian; Marxism reduces everything to economics; Marx's materialism impoverished humanity; class is outdated; Marx advocated violence (actually not denied); it believes in an all-powerful state; it ignores other movements, such as feminism, ecology, and anti-colonialism. These are well-worn criticisms of Marx and so are Eagleton's responses. Mostly they read like the kind of thing that passes 'theory' in the journals of the SWP, maybe Eagleton's (new?) political home. It IS possible to defend Marx against many of these criticisms, as Eagleton shows, although sometimes his arguments are weak. In relation to Stalinism for example he repeats the standard line that Russia did not have the material conditions for building socialism but fails to reflect how so many people educated in Marxism could not only have so mistakenly `applied' the theory but created one of the most homicidal and unequal systems in human history. Marx cannot be blamed for what was done in his name after his death but it is at least worth reflecting why his theory offered no obstacle to tyranny. Eagleton's claims are sometimes misleading. For example, he rightly says that Marx noted that domestic servants outnumbered industrial proletarians in the 1860s, but misses Marx's point - that servants are not proletarians because they do not directly produce surplus value, and the increasing productivity of labour actually reduces the proportion of proletarians in the population. This was an important insight but one Marx did not incorporate into his wider theory of capitalism. In the end, even if Marx can be defended against these criticisms, this does not show that he 'was right' or in what way he might have been. Eagleton ignores completely Marx's theory of capitalist crisis and whether this has any explanatory purchase on the present crises. There is a need for a study that examines Marx's contemporary relevance. But this book is not it.

I some ways this watch is disappointing. The dial is easily readable only in bright light and the built-in light (despite warnings that using it drains the battery) is too faint to be of use except in pitch darkness. The settings are complex but can be worked out in half-an-hour or so, though setting the tide graph is a challenge. Not because entering the data itself is difficult but because it's not easy to find the lunitidal interval for a particular coast and in the UK these vary greatly between different stretches of coastline. In the end I used a tide chart and adjusted the lunitidal interval setting until the watch corresponded to the graph. A few weeks later this still seems to be accurate. The dual time is awkward to set (you lose the tidal information) and is really intended to enable switching between standard and daylight saving times - but you're more likely simply to adjust the main time. The 'alarm' is so quiet as to be useless. But the watch is light to wear and, for its price, has a large number of functions. It appearance is OK. So in those senses it's probably good value.

This book is a disappointment. I was looking for a Polish Grammar and it's true there are few on the market. But this is essentially a set of lengthy tables with virtually no textual explanation. It's a usable reference source (sometimes - if one can make sense of the de-contextualized lists) but not means of learning Polish grammar. There absolutely no progression through the book and it is not designed for the learner at all.