Phil Carradice

I'm afraid I can't give a positive review for this one. It's a good thing I read Ronald Hutton and Radcliffe Edmonds III's books in 2023 as I fact-checked each chapter. The narrative is disjointed and general statements aren't expanded upon with little transition. In one page it jumps from Anne Boleyn to Mickey Mouse to Rome. There are just too many detours. Carradice also frequently uses the words "most" "many" or "some" in their descriptions, avoiding any specifics and more than a few statistics need citation. For example, they describe the witch's familiar as "becoming an accepted fact" in the Early Medieval Period. By whom? And how? Familiars do not exist in French, German or Slavic witch lore, only in Britain. Writing in "the Devil's book" is also a strictly British phenomenon. Those are the kind of rudimentary facts that proper research provides. Otherwise it's just misinformation. The witch hunts themselves aren't mentioned until you're about halfway through, but Carradice diverges to royal witches instead. It's ok to mention nobility, but dedicating several pages to bios doesn't exactly represent the full impact of European witch crazes on the general public. Here they recite heavily from Tracy Borman's and Gemma Holman's books.

Carradice also has a fundamental misunderstanding of what magic and witchcraft are. From an anthropological and historical perspective, not all magic / ritualistic practice is witchcraft, and not all who practice magic are witches. Shamans, Healers, Sorcerers, Alchemists and Temple Priest/Priestesses are separate titles and do not function in the same way. Any pagan religion can be called witchcraft if one removes it from its proper context. To broadly simplify Chinese ancestral worship, Japanese Shintoism, Greek oracles and Egyptian calendar rituals in a book on "witchcraft" is a terrible disservice. I can't recommend this one when I know there are better sources out there.… (más)

Almost comic. The 1797, Directory government of Revolutionary France came up with a plan to invade England. The French navy would land 12000 men in Galway, Ireland, and doubtless the disaffected Irish would flock to the Tricolor and achieve Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Simultaneous other fleets would land a few thousand each on the East Coast of England and in Wales, as diversions. There being a shortage of regulars, most of the invaders were convicts who were promised freedom and glory in exchange.

This actually got started; the fleet showed up in Galway Bay. But the commanding officer, General Hoche, had been blown well out into the Atlantic, and his second in command was unwilling to take over; thus disgruntled French troops sat it in their ships waiting for Hoche to show up, and eventually sailed back to France. The eastern diversion never got out of port. But the western one did, and landed at Fishguard in Wales. What they were supposed to do was march to Bristol, burn it, and then go north to Liverpool and burn that too; what they actually did is loot farmhouses, get drunk, and wander around Wales robbing, pillaging, and raping. Eventually enough militia showed up to overawe the French and they surrendered. Thus ended the Battle of Fishguard, the last invasion of the British Isles.

Phil Carradice’s book on the subject is entertaining and an easy read. The situation was pretty confusing, with neither the French nor English nor Welsh really understanding what was going on, but Carradice does manage to make sense of it. Unfortunately, book does suffer from a lack of maps; the only one that shows the battle area doesn’t have a scale, a North arrow, or any relation to the larger area. Carradice does apologize for his illustrations, noting that there are no known pictures of most of the participants and has to be content with what he can scrape up (David’s Death of Marat, for example). End notes and a good bibliography.… (más)

In A Hundred Years of Spying Phil Carradice gives a nice overview of intelligence work during, primarily, the 20th century. This is a good introduction and suggests many opportunities for a reader to explore certain people or aspects more fully.

As he makes clear, the act of spying did not originate in the early 20th century, but that is when it became a standard arm of a nation's defense. Prior to that spies were usually employed for specific purposes rather than an organization of spies maintaining a flow of information as a matter of course.

Carridice manages to tell the story as a coherent narrative while also highlighting certain spies and incidents. In this way the reader sees both the bigger picture of how the intelligence community developed over the years as well as the personal aspects of some of the people who played key roles.

I would recommend this for anyone wanting a good introduction and overview of modern intelligence gathering. While some with more background may not learn a lot new I think even they will appreciate the way in which this book brings the separate strands together.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (más)