I don't usually write review of books that have already received 91 reviews for fear my review will never be read, or if it is, all its sentiments will be old news. But this book is special.

First this book is very entertaining, it is droll, and whilst taking itself very seriously, never takes itself seriously.

Secondly, the Irishman who wrote it, like many perhaps most Irish men and women, knows his history. He knows what happened in 1847 and in the many years before and since, knows the sins of the English, and the Irish landlords, and of all men and women, at least in some measure.

To be more prosaic this book tells you plenty about what life was like in the potato famine, and around that time, in Ireland and also about Early Victorian London.

It is a wonderful novel.

This book is marvellous because it creates an enormously vivid picture of what life in East Germany must have been like. In my mind it sits alongside 'Hope Against Hope', the memoirs of Nadezda Mandelstam, wife of the Russian poet, as the two most powerful descriptions of life under communism in the Eastern bloc that I have read.

The particular E German flavour seems to have been incredible attention to detail, a suffocating level of intrusion.

Funder's writing is distinguished by sensitivity, intelligence and a remarkable compassion for everyone she speaks to, both victims and perpetrators.

To explain, the book is a record of two trips to East Germany in the years after the fall of the wall, and has a lot to say about the past and the then present, in the phase of adjustment.

A very powerful piece of writing.

This book may be much better than four stars but to be honest I stopped reading after about half way. This was not because of any fault of the book, simply because my interest was not sustained. There are some things about Yeats I understand and some things I do not. I understand his love of the land and of tradition, I understand his interest in the past and Irish mythology, and I understand his promotion of Irish cultural life, the energy he put into the Abbey Theatre, and his carefully measured but at times passionate support for the independence movement. I also have an interest in how the occult becomes a constant theme in Yeats' poetry and his interest in the relationship between image and truth, 'How can you know the dancer from the dance?'

But for me the real interest in Yeats is his struggle to arrive at the kind of plateau he seems to have arrived at by the mid 1920s, from which point he seems to repeat old themes, and whatever there is that is new and further refined somehow ceases to engage me.

For me the vital chapters of this book are those that deal with the sudden re-arousal of Yeats' ferocious political instincts which occurs at the time of the Black and Tans, (as evidenced by his poem 'Reprisals', a fine poem never before printed but here included), and then Foster's careful discussion of 'A Vision', which I have never read but intend to, and which is no doubt a summary of many of his beliefs.

As in the first volume Foster's approach is exhaustive and meticulous without being dry or disinterested. All his relationships are hung up to dry, but for me are perhaps less fascinating than in the earlier volume. The relationships which most interest me are those with Gonne, Synge and Gregory, and to some extent his wife; those that came later don't grab me and unless I'm missing something it is Synge and Gonne more than anyone who turn up again and again in his poetry throughout his life.

This review is of a six volume Everyman's edition, which says on its flyleaf first published in 1910 and reprinted in 1960. It has Dawson's introduction and notes along with Gibbon's.

I should say that I read the first three volumes fairly carefully and about half of the fourth, being interested in Justinian and Belisarius but losing interest in the latest adventures of the Goths and Persians. After that I stopped.

It took me several months to read even as much as I did, and I think there were several reasons for this.

1) Gibbon wrote more than two hundred years ago, from a vantage point before the industrial revolution, before modern democracy. Culturally speaking he was far closer to the Roman Empire than we are, and also far less entrenched in the arid rule-of-science mindset than we are today. Nevertheless, living as he did towards the end of the `Age of Reason', his elegant scepticism (not without some devotional aspects) benefited from the earlier influences of the scientific revolution, which allowed him to revere the logic of the classical era and adopt a mixture of piety and scepticism in regard to Christianity.

This viewpoint allows a much fresher take and a much less dry one on Roman history than any modern historian I have read, you can hear him licking his lips as another Emperor rolls into view to be dissected and pinned to his pages.

However this approach takes some getting used to, and to some extent so does the eighteenth century idiom, although that aside Gibbon is highly readable.

2) The other reason Gibbon was slow going for me was that his ideas require a lot of thought and time to absorb. In particular I found what he had to say about the early years of Christianity fascinating. Up until AD300 when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, what impressed me, despite Gibbon's earnest efforts to downplay unverified stories of martyrdom, was how much the Christians suffered persecution. Not all the time, and not by every Emperor, but for nearly three hundred years they were driven from pillar to post, and if there was a favourable emperor, he was probably only favourable to one sect of the religion. Countless thousands lost their lives, or their livelihoods, or their place of habitation when all they had to do was to deny their faith at a time when they had nothing but their own peers to support them.

Gibbon doesn't really discuss how it was they managed to achieve this however.

What then happened of course, was that after Christianity became accepted, all the energy the Christians had put into survival got turned into fighting each other with incredible ferocity as they argued out the exact status of the holy trinity. Massacres, torture and persecution just as they had suffered from the Romans were now applied to each other, along with endless high level conferences.

Gibbon regards himself as a participant rather than just an observer in this debate, a position quite different I feel to that of any modern historian, but speaking as he does with a constant flow of elegant and not infrequently wicked irony, we are left to infer his views.

I also enjoyed his portrayal of Justinian, Theodora and Belisarius, three amazing characters.

One day I may go back and read the rest, but I think I have enough to think about for a few years!

This is a remarkable book. I think I heard Brown's name in an interview with Daniel Woodrell, another American writer whose books are set in what used to be called the lumpen proletariat but is now termed the underclass. In this case people who don't have social security or any other kind of numbers.

His writing style however is less mannered than Woodrell's, and I kept thinking of Kerouac, the tone, the sort of outlook is similar, although Brown does in the end structure his narrative more than Kerouac.

The book is a series of set pieces, which layer on layer build up the characters. You might say the characters are just a tad stereotypical but nevertheless there is something very refreshing about this book.

Like many American writers who don't write about cities - Woodrell, Proulx and James Lee Burke who does (partly), descriptions of the landscape provide the texture, the backdrop for the story.

Excellent read

To be clear, this book is essential to any serious student of Yeats. Foster gives the impression of having researched every available fact about Yeats from every available source, and seems to have included every single particle in this book. Much of the time, speaking strictly for myself, this makes the book impossible to read in the normal way. This may say more about me than the author, but each paragraph mentions four or five notable figures and several notable events, mentioned in passing in a ceaseless narrative.

Where Foster comes into his own however is when an episode or situation is arrived at which holds particular interest for the reader. In my case these were his relationship with Maud Gonne, the staging of 'Playboy of the Western World', and the Lane gallery controversy. I knew of these from reading other books on Yeats, and Foster gives far more detail than other sources, and thereby makes it possible to develop understandings of Yeats' behaviour that I did not have previously. In particular the nature of his differences from Gonne, his differences from Gregory, how his dedication to the cause of Irish culture consisted, like Milton's in seventeenth century England, in asserting tolerance. Yeats strode above the conflict between the truth expressed in Synge and the morality of the Catholic church, and brought down universal criticism on his back for doing so.

Much easier to read are Ellman, and I also recommend Judith Hill's biography of Lady Gregory. Also you won't find any systematic approach to Yeats' poetry here, for reasons Foster explains in his introduction. What you do find however is exhaustively compiled information on Yeats's social, cultural and to some extent political life to a greater degree than you can find anywhere else.

I like Don Winslow. I like his quirky, literary mind, his enthusiasm for Peregrine Pickle, Cuchulain, and his understanding of the influence these fabled characters have on his allegedly untogether but self-effacing heroes like the redoubtable Neal Carey, and in this novel, Callan.

Aside from "The Power of the Dog", my favourite is his first, "A Cool Breeze on the Underground", in which Carey messes with London punks and holes up in the Lake District. Winslow is a Yank, but seems to know Britain quite well. His second book evidences a decent knowledge of China, and his third and fourth seem at home in the mid-west.

I understand "The Power of the Dog" took him six years to research. Some say it is not really fiction, and at many points it reveals a comprehensive understanding of the history of the whole of Central America over a thirty year span. In particular showing how your nice cuddly Ronald Reagan, among others, terrorised a whole region of the world in the interests of protecting the USA from Communism, as he thought. Personally I've never read anything that has made me think Communism as such was ever going to take a hold in that region, just farmers trying to make a living.

I have read several nonfictional accounts of recent history in Central America and at no point does "The Power of the Dog" make me think, `Oh, he's gone way off here.'

Perhaps it is easier to construct a dynamite plot which doesn't creak at the hinges when it is all based on reality.

Either way it is up there with Stone's film "Salvador" as a brilliant fictional treatment of the dark underbelly of US Imperialism.

Having been attached to Yeats' poetry for nearly fifty years, I knew Lady Gregory and her house at Coole Park was very important to him. But until I read this beautifully written book I did not know how much.

This book was first shown me by my landlady at a bed and breakfast in Galway, herself a frequent visitor to Coole Park, where it is possible to walk around the woods, although the house no longer exists. My landlady was convinced that Augusta Gregory and Yeats had an affair, although this is not the view of Judith Hill. However, by Hill's account the devotion shown over several decades to Yeats by Gregory was such that I can think of no parallel in any relationship between a man and woman I've ever heard of where there was no romantic involvement.

Yeats' importance for Gregory was not only as a man, but as a poet, playwright, comrade, and partner over many years in running the Abbey theatre, so both had an enormous amount invested in the partnership.

At times they disagreed and even fought, but mostly they valued and relied on each other implicitly. Especially in the early years, it was Yeats relying on Gregory, who understood his talent overshadowed the others in their circle.

Gregory as time went on, fought Yeats' corner tooth and nail, prepared to risk all other friendships. But I got the impression this was not because she wanted to protect their relationship for its own sake, but because she believed that the value of his work was greater than any other factor.

Nevertheless her sensibility was slightly different to his. To me she comes over as Irish aristo, where as his sensibility was slightly more pan-European. Their first tiff was when he wanted to bring an English manager to the Abbey theatre.

For a while they formed a triumvirate with Synge. I felt that Gregory found him hard to take at times, and I felt Judith Hill was slightly unappreciative of Synge herself, unlike Yeats, who clearly felt he was a major talent of the first order.

Another slight point of difference I had with the author was over Yeats' poem `In Memory of Major Robert Gregory', which is one of my favourite of his poems. Hill explains that this was in some measure a collaboration between Yeats and Gregory as she kept badgering him to big up her son who had just died in the war, and Yeats apparently expressed his frustration about this.

But in reading the poem, had you not known this, you would never have guessed, and in fact the praise of Robert Gregory, which is mostly for his prowess as a hunter, is completely at one with Yeats' values, so that frustration or not, as with a number of endeavours, the poems is effectively a successful collaboration between Yeats and his sponsor.

The great thing about this book is that the relationships between Yeats, Gregory, Synge, George Moore, Russell, Martyn, Hyde and many others are delineated deftly and confidently, and situated in the multiple contexts of art, politics, and the successful struggle to establish an independent Irish theatre.

Of course this is a biography of Gregory, not Yeats, and perhaps when I have read more of her own work, I will reread the sections which are about that more carefully, for my reading on this occasion was primarily to know more about Yeats and Synge. But these were close relationships, and this is a very valuable record.

As an Englishman what intrigues me most about this is what it reveals about the way Obama works. Having read Suskind's "Confidence Men" last year about Obama's attempts to handle the banking crisis, he seemed to be a man with no opinions who let himself be pushed around by his advisors. And yet Suskind's analysis didn't really hang together, and Suskind himself didn't comment on what he described. I felt something was missing in the picture.

Many of the reviews on Amazon.com make similar criticism of Obama, as do many of the players in Woodward's book: Obama doesn't know how to negotiate, they say.

I disagree. It seems to me Obama was forced to negotiate with a bunch of Republicans holding by any standards prior to 2000 an extreme right wing position, who themselves felt hostage to the Tea party, a bunch of people who they said didn't care whether America defaulted all its debts, it didn't matter anyway. Presumably they felt the market was the only thing that mattered.

To me Obama did extraordinarily well in his refusal to compromise. He was after all dealing with the Republicans who to a man (not many women in this book) were not prepared to countenance the idea that the megarich should have to pay more than 28% tax to help the country nay world out of a jam. Even Obama's own people, some of them, like Reid and Pelosi seemed prepared to undercut him at times.

Woodward himself is quite critical of Obama in his brief judgment at the end, suggesting that if he had handled the Republicans more skilfully he might have got more out of them. To me that seems very unlikely. Someone towards the end of the book said the Republicans felt they needed to come out of the negotiations looking as if they had humiliated the president because that was the only outcome that would satisfy the Tea Party.

I don't agree with Woodward's opinions, but as always he does a great job of stating the play. The negotiations were incredibly protracted and tedious and you have to admire the stamina and resilience of all the players if not necessarily their motivation. However the things they were arguing about on day 25 were the same as day one, and as is often stated in this book it was all really just a game of chicken. At one point one of the politicos rings up the guys on Wall St., who were all having kittens, to say, "Chill, we're all just playing a game here."

I should explain that I only read the second half of this book, from about 1600 when the British became involved. I bought it because I wanted to know more about the British East India Company, and also wanted an overview of the history since partition.

For these purposes the book was great.

On Amazon.co.uk many reviews refer to the book being hard work to read, and many American reviews describe it as dry.

I found it neither, although it did take me thirty or forty pages to tune into the author's style, which is really high-grade journalism, not to question his scholarship. It reads like an articulate lecture by someone who thoroughly understands his subject.

One reviewer said you need some prior knowledge. Perhaps you do. I came to the book with knowledge of post-independence India being only what I had gleaned from newspapers over the years, but that was enough. I had also many years ago read Gandhi's autobiography, which is a book that sticks in the mind.

Regarding the East India Company and the development of British rule, Keay dispels any notion of the British as avuncular colonists. When push came to shove they were decisive and at times brutal. We Brits like to appear as nice imperialists. Effective yes; nice, not unless it was convenient.

Having said that the Brits and Indians appear to have had a certain mutual regard.

The story since independence is complex and fast-moving and I felt Keay told the story with conviction. He doesn't burden his text with footnotes, jargon or prevarication and plonks his opinion down on the page, which is just as well given how much he has to tell.

He has a tendency to try and see the positive in authoritarian actions by different rulers, for example Indira Gandhi and Bhutto. Gandhi instituted a rule of emergency but according to Keay she did it temporarily in order to sort out a raft of administrative disasters, which she did before returning the country to democracy.

I enjoyed what I read of this book very much and would recommend it.