I had been meaning to pick up Silver’s paean to the virtues of Bayesian statistics for some time and found it on discount at WHSmiths. It is thoroughly entertaining and manages to hop from baseball stats to climate change, poker and global terrorism with aplomb.

This short novel is broken into 3 parts each with 3 subparts each of them having 3 chapters. Which appealed to me in a geeky way. Hanging from this structure is a novel about a character and his relationship with the world: visual, cutural and, for want of a better term, cosmological. The prose is dense and poetic and quite beautiful. And occasionally amusing. It is the sort of experiment that is enthralling even if somewhat selfconsciously experimental.

This is more an insider’s acccount of how the world of intelligence, particularly US intelligence, operates. I found it rather too much focussed on the niceties of how the bureaucracy functioned and how it may be improved than on the broader philosophical questions of under what circumstances it might be ethical to spy, steal or murder as the intelligence agencies do.