Apr 30 2026

Book review: King of kings by Scott Anderson

Another result of browsing in a bookshop, this review is of King of kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran by Scott Anderson. For readers of the future – this review was written in April 2026, two months into the what is currently called the “2026 Iran War“.

King of Kings covers the run up to the Iranian revolution in 1979 mainly focussing on the 1970s and ends with the release of the American Embassy hostages in January 1981. The acknowledgements talk about the aim of the book being to capture the Revolution from the point of view of those involved through interviews with them. The book was published in 2025 and those interviewed are in their late seventies and older now.

I think it is inevitable that the focus is on American participants – Anderson specifically calls out Michael Metrinko and Gary Sick as key contributors. Sick was a member of the National Security Council under President Carter, and was the principal White House aide focused on the Persian Gulf. Metrinko was the US consul in the Iranian city of Tabriz in the run up to the Revolution and was one of the US Embassy hostages. However, Anderson also spoke with the Shah’s Queen, Farah Pahlavi who is still alive.

From the revolutionary side, those surrounding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the spiritual leader of the revolution – there is relatively little. Ebrahim Yazdi, one of his closest advisors, gets a chapter and is referenced throughout the book.

King of kings is divided into three parts: the first titled “Towards a great civilisation” provides some background on Iran and the Shah – leader of Iran from 1953 until the 1979 Revolution; the second “The Unravelling” covers the build up to the revolution, mainly in 1978 and “Downfall” covers the revolution itself from the end of 1978 through to the return of the US embassy hostages in January 1981.

The Shah claimed a dynasty for Iran going back 2500 years, in fact one of the key events in the early part of this book was an extravagant celebration of this anniversary at Persepolis. Iran lay at the collision point between the the expanding British and Russian Empires in the 19th century, oil was discovered in 1908 and largely signed away to the British by the ruling Qajar dynasty. During the First World War Iran was a battleground for Russian and German forces, in the process 2 million Iranians died. In the Second World War Iran sought an accommodation with Germany which worked fine until Russia and Britain joined forces to invade Iran; they deposed Reza Khan, the Shah’s father in 1941 and installed him (Mohammad Reza) as monarch.

In the post-war period the country was governed by the Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh who introduced a range of social reforms, and nationalised the oil industry much to the chagrin of the British and Americans who deposed him in a CIA backed coup in 1953 re-instating Mohammad Reza as an absolute monarch.

The Shah ran the country as a dictatorship although he introduced a large set of social reforms in his 1963 White Revolution which upset more conservative Muslims such as Khomeini.

Iran as a country became very wealthy very rapidly in the seventies as a result of the Shah nationalising the oil industry, and OPEC starting to exert itself (1973 is a key year here). At the same time the US essentially entirely opened up arms sales to Iran and the Shah was a very willing customer. But the wealth was very unevenly distributed, Iran urbanised rapidly bringing many young men into cities not prepared for them. These young men were often conservative from a religious point of view.

There had long been opposition groups in Iran but they were subject to arrest, violence from the secret police (SAVAK) or, like Khomeini, exile. Khomeini had been living in Iraq but Saddam Hussein was becoming increasingly unhappy with his presence and he fled to France in October 1978. This turned out to be a fortuitous move because he was much more able to hold court with Western journalists there with his lieutenants he was able to present a (completely fake) moderate face.

It’s difficult to pinpoint a point at which the revolution started, Iran is a Shia majority country and offers a wide range of dates for public displays of mourning which could be readily repurposed to rioting. This started happening with increasing frequency and surprising precision from the start of 1978 following a government sanctioned news paper editorial attacking Khomeini. Precision because very particular businesses and institutions were targeted by well-disciplined rioters. I think this is part of the story is missing something, it seems clear there was significant organisation on the ground of the revolutionary forces and there is no real indication of Khomeini being very actively involved in this.

The Revolution, when it came, followed the departure of the Shah from Iran on 16th January 1979 – having installed Shapour Bakhtiari as Prime Minister – an opposition leader of long standing – with a view to arranging a moderate post-revolutionary government. Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran on 1st February 1979. Outside of Iran he had been making moderate noises but on his return to Iran he resumed his theocratic radicalism, sacking the recently installed Prime Minister and adding his own. The army mutinied in favour of Khomeini’s forces. A number of senior figures from the previous regime were summarily executed within a month of Khomeini’s return. He then set about making a constitution that handed power entirely to clerics (and ultimately himself).

There was possibly a space for a more moderate government but that ended with the US embassy hostage crisis and the US’s botched rescue attempt. The Embassy had been invaded by radical university students and it is not clear whether Khomeini had sanctioned the attack but in any case he supported it once done. Also unclear is whether Ronald Reagan’s campaign team had influenced the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages – it seems very plausible – they were released on the eve of Reagan’s inauguration. Interestingly the Revolutionary Iranians were keen to do arms deals with the Americans since they had a large quantity of US military hardware and needed consumables resupply.

Anderson’s conclusion regarding the Revolution was that the Shah seemed strangely inert as the revolution approached, attributing this to him being a dictator but not of the sufficiently brutal, bloodthirsty type to put a stop to opposition. In common with all dictators he ended up surrounding himself with people that only agreed with him. I can’t help thinking his deteriorating health played a role – he died at the age of 60 in 1980 having fled Iran in January 1979, he had been fairly seriously ill for several years but kept it secret even from his wife.

The US was almost completely oblivious to the tide rising against the Shah, very few of their embassy staff spoke the local language (Farsi) and they were discouraged from speaking to any sort of opposition to the Shah. They were also doing good business with Shah for military hardware, and saw him as a moderate bastion and ally in the area. As the revolution unfolded the institutions of the US government were fairly actively fighting each other.

I found this gripping reading, partly because of its current relevance but also because it is well written. It is clear that the American focus does not capture the internal workings of the revolutionary forces very well but I suspect that is still a hard problem even now, for Middle Eastern writers.

Apr 21 2026

Book review: Ancient Rome Infographics by Nicolas Guillerat, John Scheid and Milan Melocco

There’s no real alternative to a good browse around a bookshop, this book Ancient Rome Infographics by Nicolas Guillerat, John Scheid and Milan Melocco is the result of just such browsing. I’ve been interested in the history of Britain, and the important part the Romans played in it for a while so this was a welcome find. I’m interested in data visualisation, so it’s fair to say this is the sort of exercise I would undertake given data on the Roman Empire!

The authors emphasise several times that the underlying data for these infographics is sometimes uncertain and that there is pretty much no data prior to the fourth century BCE so this period is ignored. They provide an extensive bibliography although it is not referenced at an individual infographic level.

The book is divided into three parts:

  1. The Lands and People of the Empire
  2. Government, worship and social needs
  3. Rome’s military might

The infographics generally span a double page spread, and usually include explanatory text. I’m finding writing a review a bit challenging without reproducing the infographics, the publisher Thames & Hudson have some examples on their product page.

From the first section I liked the visualisation showing the physical extent of the Roman Empire and its growth in both population and area over time. I was surprised to learn that the Iberian peninsula contained a large chunk of the Roman population (5,000,000) compared to 7,000,000 in Italy. The population of Egypt was also significant (4,500,000) although it was absorbed rather later, in 27 BCE. The Roman Empire continued to expand until 150CE.

This section includes quite a lot of detailed information on Rome particularly in terms of the types of buildings in the city, and how the footprint of the city evolved over time. I assume that the Roman remains in Rome have been subject to a huge amount of study hence the large quantity of data. Rome grew to a population of 1.75 million in the 3rd century CE declining to 500,000 in the mid 5th century CE.

Also included are rather complex diagrams of the social and legal classes in Roman society. I must admit I found this less interesting. The authors mention several times that one of the strengths of the Roman Empire was that citizens from all the states across the Empire became fully fledged Roman citizens, as well as citizens of their local state. The social structure was very oriented around voting men, with the paterfamilias – the senior man in a household – essentially holding all of the rights the state bestowed which they distributed as they saw fit to their household. The paterfamilias might also have a patron-client relationship with others outside the household, I suspect this is one of many topics which warrants a whole book to elucidate.

The second section continues with the delineation of roles in society with the focus on the political and government. My favourite part here was the chronology of emperors which also introduced the term damnatio memoriae which is an attempt to expunge an emperor from the historical record. The term, although Latin, was coined in the 17th century. Some emperors had quite long reigns but at other times there were flurries of emperors, or at least those that proclaimed themselves so. This is where the infographic presentation falls down a bit – subtleties are lost because they cannot be presented cleanly. From towards the end of the third century CE there are Eastern and Western empires each with their own emperor and for a brief period there was the “Tetrarchy” – a system of two senior and two junior emperors.

Religion gets a few pages, Romans had a system of public and private “cults” – a city would follow a public cult with its ceremonies and rituals but individuals could also follow their own cult with a shrine and ritual in their home. Later the Christian faith was to spread through the Empire encompassing over half of the population by 350CE.

Also in this chapter is data on the production of grain, and the cost of living. For quite some period the residents of Rome had a “grain dole”, or annona which gave an allocation of grain to selected citizens of Rome (adult male citizens). The cost of living data is so interesting I’m tempted to do my own visualisations! For example 1 rabbit cost 32 as (a small Roman coin) but a pound of wild boar meet was only 8 as. 8 as would also buy you a prostitute but a bath was only 0.25 as. Slaves started at 800 as but went up to nearly 100,000 as for “1 very attractive slave”. A skilled worker could earn 12 as per day, a legionary (a junior rank) 10 as / day, a centurion 165 as / day and a senator 5480 as / day.

The final chapter covers war, I was a bit surprised to learn that the Roman army and navy were not that great but they made good use of local fighters and were good at simply being present. There are descriptions, and infographics of Roman marching orders, camp construction processes and the the evolving equipment of a Roman soldier. I sometimes wonder how accurately such prescriptions were followed, I assume there is at least one documentary source for these processes but how closely were they followed in the field?

I liked the visualisation showing movements of one Roman legionary through his career around Armenia and Eastern Europe. The Social Wars, Punic Wars, conquering Gaul and Spartacus have their own sections in this chapter. I’m assuming these are the most important of the Roman wars.

Overall I enjoyed this book, although I was sometimes frustrated by the complexity of the infographics. It works well as a taster for further investigation.

Apr 07 2026

Book review: Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin

My next review is of Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin. For me it follows on from Pete Wharmby’s autobiographical book on autism, Untypical, and Steve Silberman’s history of autism, Neurotribes.

Thinking in Pictures is comprised of 11 thematic chapters which typically contain a mixture of reflections on the author’s personal experiences with autism, animal handling technology and research into autism and how it is treated. Grandin is very well known in the field of animal handling, one third of the animals slaughtered in the US are processed using machinery she has designed.

The core of Grandin’s experience of autism is visual thinking. She describes having a library of video clips in her mind which she combines in order to think new thoughts – verbal thinking is a second language to her. This makes some tasks easy, like designing animal processing equipment, and other tasks difficult – verbal tasks require her to find the right piece of video to capture the words, and abstract ideas are a real challenge. Similarly arithmetic is challenging for her.

Grandin was diagnosed as autistic relatively young, she learnt to speak quite late, was prone to tantrums and did not like being touched. She was born in 1947, 4 years after Leo Kanner’s landmark paper defining autism. This was at a time when autism was not widely known, and the diagnostic criteria were very strict. Her diagnosis was triggered by her mother who was very committed to getting the best for her daughter – she has written her own autobiography (A Thorn In My Pocket: Temple Grandin’s Mother Tells the Family Story by Eustacia Cutler).

In common with Wharmby, Grandin sees autism as very much a sensory issue. Sights, sounds and touch are often not processed in the same way by autistic people and it is from this their symptoms arise – sensory over-sensitivity overwhelms their brain’s ability to carry other tasks. Sounds may be garbled: their ability to hear frequencies is unimpaired but distinguishing words or separating different voices is challenging. Similar issues can apply with vision.

Grandin talks here about her “Squeeze Machine” a device she invented based on a cattle crush which allowed her to apply soothing pressure to herself – a device later marketed more widely – and to which she attributes the ability for her to empathise with others. She found touch from people stressful, and the feel of clothes very difficult to cope with.

In her early years Grandin was given very intensive teaching based on the Lovaas method which involves a lot of repetition and positive reinforcement. It was sufficient to get her into mainstream school but she was thrown out for misbehaviour and went to a small boarding school specialising in bright children with emotional problems. Here she seems to have clicked with one science teacher in particular who supported her in her interests and odd ways. Interestingly she later ponders the value of online school for some “high functioning” autistic people – as she points out learning to build social relationships with teenagers is not an important life skill outside of school!

Grandin entered the world of work in a crabwise fashion, writing to an agricultural journal to publish an article she had written on animal handling which led on to a regular column in the journal. This was to become a full-time job in designing animal handling equipment. She preferred to work as a consultant since this allowed her to get work without interviews and removed a lot of the social difficulties of a fixed workplace. Grandin felt she needed to learn social niceties explicitly rather than dropping into them naturally. She used her visual thinking both in terms of understanding machinery but also the behaviour/thoughts of cattle moving through machinery. She believes that animals must think visually, as she does. Her record is a testament to how good she is at her job.

Grandin talks in some detail about her use of antidepressants to address her autism related anxiety, this is part of quite a lengthy chapter discussing a wide range of drugs and how they have worked for different individuals.

Grandin says she would not want to give up her autism and lose the skills she has, this leads into a wider discussion of other potentially autistic people (Einstein, Wittgenstein, Van Gogh) and how their genius lay in part in their autism. I think it is common to see these retrospective diagnoses as problematic these days, it is something that Silberman touches on in his book. She also talks a bit about the parents of autistic children and their higher prevalence of autism, anxiety, depression or panic attacks. It seems that autism is very substantially genetic. There is also a chapter on “savant” skills, and how in some senses these might be considered “unthinking”.

The books finishes with a chapter on religion, Grandin believes in a personal God for logical reasons but points out that other autistic people have no personal God or are entirely fanatical about religion. Interestingly she sees the books she writes as her version of an afterlife and finds the destruction of culture very upsetting because it is taking away an afterlife. Thinking in Pictures ends rather abruptly on this point – there is no “conclusions” chapter.

I found Grandin’s descriptions of how she thought and animal handling technology the most interesting, the autism research feels a little dated to me (this revised edition of the book was published over 20 years ago) and have the air of notes transcribed with little synthesis.

Mar 11 2026

Book review: Four Points of the Compass by Jerry Brotton

My next review is of Four points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction by Jerry Brotton. I read his book A History of the World in 12 Maps in 2013,

One might imagine that the history of the four points of the compass was a rather brief affair, and Four points is a relatively short book. However, it packs a lot in because the compass points are more than just geography – they encompass religion, culture and politics.

The book starts with an “orientation” chapter followed by chapters on east, south, north and west and finishes with one entitled “The blue dot”. In this case the blue dot is us; our marker on the map we now find on our phone. A fitting end since Brotton starts by talking about the Apollo 17 “Blue Marble” photograph – not to be mistaken for Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” taken by Voyager 1 as it passed beyond Saturn in 1980. Brotton sees the rise of our blue dot on a phone as an end of the compass directions.

It is easy, particularly for the map obsessed, to think of the cardinal directions of the compass as being almost timeless, and it takes some prompting to recall that the words North, South, East and West have meanings beyond those physical directions. This is highlighted in the “Orientation” chapter.

The other source of direction in the human world is based on our own body: left, right, front, back, up and down. This creeps into the compass direction with the etymology of some languages linked to them, i.e. north is the left of east. The Guugu Yimithirr people of Queensland Australia don’t bother with these egocentric directions, referencing everything to the compass (“please, pass the salt to your west”). The up and down directions rarely feature alongside the compass directions, with the exception of Mesoamericans who for a considerable period added up as a fifth cardinal direction.

The first written references to compass-like directions are from the Akkadian culture from around 2000 BCE. They are compass-like since they relate to prevailing winds and weather rather than magnetic or astronomical dirctions. The second phenomena prompting direction, and probably the primary one is the sun which rises in the east and sets in the west. The invention of compass north and south comes rather later with the Chinese discovering what they called “south pointing stones” around 200 BCE. Magnetic compasses only became common as directional aids in 12th century in Europe. It wasn’t until William Gilbert’s work De Magnete published in 1600 that the earth’s magnetic field was understood in broad terms, and recognised as not aligning with astronomical definitions of direction – the magnetic North Pole is hundreds of miles from the point where the earth’s rotational axis surfaces in the Arctic. The difference becomes important for longer voyages.

From a religious point of view the east was initially important as the location of the rising sun, and represented birth with the opposite direction, west, representing death and sometimes rebirth. The Jewish faith, Christianity and Islam tried at the beginning to break this link to distinguish themselves from earlier sun worship but in the end succumbed to the east being a special direction. Christian churches have long been oriented with the altar at the east, and burials with the head to the west. In Islam the great expansion of the Islamic Empire was along the North African coast which meant praying in the direction of Mecca meant facing east. Geographically medieval maps of the world placed the east at the top. Mercator placed the north at the top of his 1569 map of the world but this seems to have been more a convenience than a matter of principle for him. He was mapping primarily for east-west journeys which fit better with north at the top.

North and south do not appear to have had strong religious connotations, culturally their meaning varied over time. The south represented unbearable heat from the point of view of ancient Mediterranean civilisations and the north every increasingly harsh conditions with fanciful notions as to what happened at the North Pole (which continued through to Mercator’s time at least). Later Thomas More and Francis Bacon would locate their Utopias in the far south.

These days North, South, East and West all have strong political meanings although these vary with context, in the UK the North has been associated with poverty, depravation and decline whilst in the US and Italy the opposite is true. On a global scale we talk about the wealthy Global North and the developing Global South. The West has long been a place of political aspiration, the East represented the old Soviet Union and Japan.

For me the biggest idea in this book was think of the compass beyond physical direction, it also provided a handy supply of pub quiz facts all in all a short yet thought provoking read.

Feb 16 2026

Book review: The Flawed Genius of William Playfair by David R. Bellhouse

My next review is of The Flawed Genius of William Playfair by David R. Bellhouse. I’ve long had a professional interest in data visualisation, William Playfair is a name frequently mentioned in terms of the invention of several types of chart (line, area, bar and pie charts).

Playfair led an interesting life, fleeing from the French Revolution at one point, and spending several spells in debtors prison.

He was born in Scotland in 1759 and died in 1823. His brothers James and John are notable in the own right as an architect and mathematician respectively.

He apprenticed as an engineer in Scotland and went on to work as a draughtsman for James Watt in Birmingham at the Boulton and Watt works between 1777 and 1780.

It is not discussed in this book but Watt and Boulton were probably close to the origin of engineering drawings as we know them now. They needed them to ensure the parts of the engines they sold, made by multiple manufacturers, would fit together. They also had a business model which saw them paid on the basis of how much money they saved their customers. So Playfair would have a combination of the technical skills required to produce data visualisations, and work for a business that had some call for them. It is interesting to note that another person noted for his innovative visualisations was Charles Joseph Minard, a civil engineer.

Playfair would also likely have had knowledge of Priestley’s Chart of Biography (1765) – a sort of timeline diagram, which plotted the lives and deaths of famous people in history, and the New Chart of History (1769) which showed world history in a similar manner. Priestley was a member of the Lunar Society, as was Matthew Boulton.

At the end of his contract with Watt and Boulton Playfair took on their document copier business, arising from an idea by Erasmus Darwin, patented by James Watt. Playfair seems to have set up the manufacturing process for the machines to a high standard but then left to set up his own business.

This business followed on from the type of manufacturing work that Boulton did, making small metal items with machines. It did not go particularly well, he resumed attempts to set up a manufacturing business on moving to Paris in 1787. His view was that the French were trailing the British in their Industrial Revolution so represented a better opportunity than England, where he would always be competing with Boulton. When in France he also made a proposal to replace the “Machine de Marley” which supplied water to Versailles from the Seine – in this he was unsuccessful. He also set up a bank, as well as being involved in the Scioto Company, which looked to sell land in America to French refugees – an issue here was that the company didn’t actually own any land in America!

Playfair left Paris in 1792, as the Reign of Terror started – he had been peripherally involved in the French Revolution at the beginning but later he became strongly opposed. Supporting the British government in their war with Napoleon – he worked as a journalist, proposed a semaphore telegraph scheme and played some part in a scheme to damage the French economically with a scheme for forging French “assignats” – a form of paper currency used in revolutionary France.

It was just prior to moving to Paris that his writing career started, and his first published works in data visualisation: The Commercial and Political Atlas. The data visualisations were the key novelty here, Atlas uses charts to illustrate economic data. Playfair was showing an increasing interest in economics, meeting Adam Smith in 1787, and also writing a pamphlet on interest rates The regulation of the interest of money. He also edited a version of Smith’s Wealth of Nations after his death.

He also wrote extensively on politics, propounding his views on Jacobins, Catholics, the Irish, and the economy. I was a bit lost here since Bellhouse never tells us what a Jacobin is or the broader historical and economic background. Playfair was in favour of a landed gentry continuing to run the country, and against reform of the parliamentary system. Reviews at the time seem to indicate he was a poor writer with not particularly profound opinions. His British Family Antiquity had the side-effect of bankrupting his publisher, although not Playfair himself (this time).

In his desperation for cash he engaged in low level extortion, effectively writing to people he felt might have money and describing how someone was about to write terrible things about them and he was the man to stop them, for small renumeration. One gets the impression from Bellhouse that this was not uncommon at the time.

Ultimately his attempt to set up a bank in England led to his being imprisoned in debtors prison. His Original Security Bank was established in 1797. It provided notes of convenient denomination in exchange for Bank of England notes. It was clearly designed to take advantage of an evolving situation in banking – the Bank of England had recently stopped exchanging paper money for gold as a result of the war with the French. It presented high “regulatory risk”, in fact the founders, Playfair included were briefly imprisoned for forgery.

As it was the Original Security Bank was quickly wound up, as a result of competition and mismanagement and it is from this bankruptcy that Playfair’s multiple trips to debtors prison arose – the first in 1809. He seems to have come off badly relative to his partners in the bank. Being imprisoned for debt meant that his ability to go into business in future was very limited, hence he leant heavily on his writing. The early 19th century was a different time in terms of how bankruptcy was handled – imprisonment in special debtors prison was routine – a practice that ended in 1869 Debtor’s Act. Playfair formed friendships with other debtors whilst in prison, and these were pretty much the only people he could go into business with – several were outright fraudsters and so this did not go well for him.

In the background to all this he was married to Mary Morris possibly in 1780 when their first child, John, was born although wedding banns were read for them in 1795. They had four children, one of whom was blind and thus needed support throughout her life. One wonders how much Playfair was responsible for the financial support of his family.

I have mixed feelings about this book, it is pretty readable but although the author mentions and illustrates Playfair’s work on data visualisation one gets the impression his interest is more in economics, politics and debt. This may simply be an accurate reflection of Playfair’s life but I was more interested in the data visualisation side of his career.