Richard Hammond covers the daredevil stunts of his childhood with a humour that he obviously took into his adult life. But the book isn't so much about his life as about the aftermath of his horrendous crash in a jet car whilst filming for the Top Gear television programme. The fact that Top Gear pushes the boundaries of acceptable motoring or that at times it can be irresponsible and purely for entertainment is probably not for discussion here. Hammond is part of that set-up and the fact that he drove a jet car could smack of commerciality gone too far.

As we all know he suffered severe brain damage from the crash. This book deals primarily with the build-up to the crash and the aftermath seen both through Hammond's eyes and those of his wife Mindy. Whilst Hammond was trying to pick up the pieces of his life and dealing with the problems of recuperating from brain damage, Mindy was trying to carry the burden of the family whilst giving him a solid base for his recovery. This is an overwhelming story of survival and return to fitness that at one point didn't seem possible. It is about the triumph of the human spirit. It is well written and an enjoyable read although I found the almost pathological need to avoid the Media slightly surprising given that Hammond himself operates within that field.

Bobby Charlton is a survivor and one of the few people who genuinely deserve the accolade of "sporting legend.". At times the first part of his autobiography rather rambles but it is nice to have his own account of his life.

The Charlton story has been chronicled many times. Here Bobby shows just why he is one of this country's greatest footballing ambassadors. The centre point of the book is the Munich air crash disaster that saw the Busby Babes decimated with the loss of many players including the incomparable Duncan Edwards who has been held up by many to be the greatest ever English footballer. Lives were cut short and Charlton was left to wonder just why he had been saved and got out of the crash with just a few cuts and bruises.

We hear that he has been haunted by the crash virtually everyday of his life. But Charlton is a survivor who came to terms with the losses and helped to re-build Manchester United. Here he reminisces on the past, the great players such as Law and Best and today's young Lions. He heralds Paul Scoles as the ultimate and complete professional football (despite leaving him out of his best ever Manchester United team).

Charlton is never going to be confrontational or controversial, but there are some interesting passages here which suggest that a contributory factor to the Munich crash was the need to return to the United Kingdom due to a directive from the Football Association. Charlton also comments on the lack of support from Alan Hardacre of the FA for European Football and the vision from Sir Matt Busby that Europe was the future of football (and how true has this been). He also tackles the family feuds between himself, his brother Jack, his wife and his strong willed mother. There is a great honesty about this book as you would expect from such a gentleman. The book also includes his post Manchester years before returning to the club as a director.

Charlton names his best ever Manchester XI. He is far too modest to include himself in this team. Other people must do this for him. And whilst accepting his laudatory comments regarding Paul Scoles I have to say that the author himself is probably the perfect professional and possibly (just possibly) England's greatest player of all time. It says much for the modesty of the author that the book is almost written as an outsider looking in and marvelling at the skills of others. I had the honour a number of years ago of talking to Bobby Charlton about his soccer school for a newspaper article. I found him quite a difficult man to talk to as he seemed rather shy. Reading this book shows that he has always shunned publicity and obviously takes a little bit of getting to know. I look forward to the second volume of his autobiography that deals with the England years and obviously focuses on the 1966 World Cup triumph.

I found this novel extremely disappointing on a number of levels - and I have spoken to friends who have read it and feel the same.

A Gothic novel set mainly in 1820s London could and should have been dark and sinister. The themes of Bradley's novel are indeed dark and sinister but the whole thing fails to hang together and becomes rather disjointed.

For a start Bradley fails to conjure up the smells and feel of 19th century London in the way that Dickens does. Yes he is historically correct but there's just something missing all the time.

The main character's descent from assistant to an anatomist to body stealer, opium addict and murderer should have been dramatic and tense, but isn't. Characters come and go and the blurb on the back cover is misleading. It talks about the most powerful of the city's resurrectionists Lucan, but this character is never really developed and suddenly bows out of the narrative. Then it says the character must make a journey that will change his life forever. So suddenly he is transported thousands of miles away.

We learn very little of the actual journey and in his new found home things are pretty much as vague as they were in London. In the last section Bradley tries too hard to write in a softer style - more of a Jane Austin than Chjarles Dickens and sadly it doesn't work.

The ideas behind this book are fine, but in trying to produce such a literary offering on such a violent theme, Bradley has fallen somewhere between darkness and light and for me the book achieves so very few of its aims.

I found this novel extremely disappointing on a number of levels - and I have spoken to friends who have read it and feel the same.

A Gothic novel set mainly in 1820s London could and should have been dark and sinister. The themes of Bradley's novel are indeed dark and sinister but the whole thing fails to hang together and becomes rather disjointed.

For a start Bradley fails to conjure up the smells and feel of 19th century London in the way that Dickens does. Yes he is historically correct but there's just something missing all the time.

The main character's descent from assistant to an anatomist to body stealer, opium addict and murderer should have been dramatic and tense, but isn't. Characters come and go and the blurb on the back cover is misleading. It talks about the most powerful of the city's resurrectionists Lucan, but this character is never really developed and suddenly bows out of the narrative. Then it says the character must make a journey that will change his life forever. So suddenly he is transported thousands of miles away.

We learn very little of the actual journey and in his new found home things are pretty much as vague as they were in London. In the last section Bradley tries too hard to write in a softer style - more of a Jane Austin than Chjarles Dickens and sadly it doesn't work.

The ideas behind this book are fine, but in trying to produce such a literary offering on such a violent theme, Bradley has fallen somewhere between darkness and light and for me the book achieves so very few of its aims.

I really don't think this film is meant to be taken too seriously. I found it wonderfully entertaining and deliciously silly.

It mixes in all the usual apocalptic concepts with some black and cutting humour which sets it apart from so many other films.

It would be very difficult to complain about this little gizmo when it is so cheap.

I'm sure it does pretty much the same job as transmitters costing much more. It looks fairly cheap and plastic but it does the job. As has already been said you have to turn the volume of your player and also stereo up high and in the car there is the occasional loss of signal, but ut's still a good buy and very easy to set-up.

Not really Wimbledon qualty, but still very good value for money and I would suggest good enough to last a hardcourt season for most amateur players and youngsters

I thought in recent novels that Ben Elton has gone off the boil somewhat, so I was pleasantly surprised to find another biting satire on life and the universe.

Mind you getting through the jacket blurb as a bit like wading through porridge. "Ben Elton's dark, savagely comic novel imagines a post-apocalyptic society" and that's enough to put you off for starters. My initial thought was "oh no not another 1984 rip off."

Thankfully Elton stretched the bounds of 1984 with some delicious black humour and a wicked ending that brings no real surprises but certainly makes you think about inclusive and exclusive societies. Basically Elton's world occurs after the second great flood when the world (and in this case London) is celebrity and sexually obsessive - so much so that a decree goes out that everyone is famous. It is very much a 21st century view of the future.

The central character doesn't want to conform and sets out to find like minds - people who can think for themselves as opposed to the current Big Brother generation of vacuous me generation self obsessed youngsters.
We meet Cassius who is employed simply to keep up the government's targets for eliminating age discrimination Then Elton has the following to say about the internet "The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance."

In Elton's grave new world virtually everything that happens to a citizen is shared with everyone else through blogs, vids and other electronic means. Nothing is secret. But of course underneath it all lurks squalor and corruption. The thirst for knowledge backfires. And really anybody who uses the internet could be already part of this frightening concept (myself included).

This book is an enjoyable vision of a strange world that hopefully will never exist but at least it's more entertaining than the usual apocalypse fodder from authors that take themselves far too seriously.

I couldn't wait to finish this book, but sadly not because I was enjoying it but because, whilst wanting to know what happened, I really wanted to move onto something more entertaining.

Having found her previous book A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian interesting if slightly unedifying, I had at least some hopes of this follow up.

Lewycka certainly hit upon a good idea - the plight of immigrant workers in the United Kingdom. But she can't quite make up her mind whether she wants to produce biting satire, a serious study or a comedy and it falls horribly somewhere in the vague region of all three and that makes for a very disappointing read.

The book ambles and rambles - suddenly moving off at a tangent where characters are dropped or just seem to go missing. In the end it develops into a kind of Ukrainian love story that becomes more and more implausible as it continues. It could have been a novel about the plight of immigrant workers - it isn't. It could have been a novel about the gang masters - it isn't. It could have been a study about the triumph of good over evil - it isn't.

Lewycka seems to insist on making her characters zany - we even have one of the main characters from her previous novel turn up in a Peterborough nursing home. When at the end some of the central characters come together in Sheffield I was left with the feeling of 1/ just how did they get there and 2/ so what.

Earlier parts of the book are sharp and at times well penned but by the end the whole thing has degenerated into a kind of pastiche. There's even a dog that has thoughts and these appear in the novel in capitals - and that's just plain silly.

Sam Bourne is the pseudonym of journalist Jonathan Freedland and this is a half decent thriller novel that sadly falls down in a number of areas.
It has received mixed reviews and it is easy to see why. You could be forgiven for sighing and saying "Not another thriller novel about the unravelling of codes." This is a genre which in effect began with Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Numerous authors jumped on the bandwagon and the market was flooded with such books.

Here we enter the world of Israeli/Palestinian conflicts. An historic deal is about to be signed but a man rushes towards the Israeli Prime Minister at a rally. He is known to be an opponent of the prime ministers and is shot dead. In his hand is not a gun but a piece of paper.

American/Irish peace negotiator Maggie Costello gives up her quiet life to return to international intrigue in an attempt to keep both sides on track. Unfortunately Maggie spends little time acting as a diplomat, but plenty searching for an elusive tablet that hides a remarkable truth.
Bourne's can't quite make up his mind whether this should be an adventure novel or a more series attempt to shed some light on the Israeli/Palestine conflict.

It therefore drops somewhere between the two. The politics of the area are difficult to comprehend and Bourne seems to get bogged down in this fact with large passages that are difficult to understand within the context of the story as a whole. That said it is a page turner and a reasonable attempt to bring to life the feel of the area, but there is still something missing. It is certainly well researched but towards the end the dialogue and action borders on the silly and the final development is very predictable.