Steven Buck
@lairddinnaken
Formerly Scottish ex-engineer ex-banker ex-portfolio manager ex-risk dude. Now an African Viking 🤔🤭 UK expat since ‘82 😬, South Africa, Washington DC and now (finally?) Cape Town. MilAv, MotoGP, F1 & Movie (classic horror/gangster) Hist, terrible puns
Just finished this 5-⭐️ read: all the more effective because it resists the temptation to polemicise, just mastery of the narrative, deep research and statement of facts. Also highlights the almost total absence of slaves' recollection (for obvious reasons 😬) Sorry, cocked up orientation 🙈
Absolutely mint Bristol 411 Series 4 or 5 outside the Savoy last week* * We weren't ACTUALLY at the Savoy: slumming it at the Paddington store next to it...😎
USians will remember T1's solemn vow to introduce his Infrastructure Bill 'in two weeks' (also his tax returns and and and...) Well, I suppose better late than never, although I didn't have Negative Infrastructure In A Foreign Country on my ever-present Bingo Card 😑
Unless you Consolidate like this 👇 * Would also make a nice library in the back garden
Impressive even for me: I've had this paperback for almost 30 years, it's been to three continents! Finally got round to reading it 🙈: worth the wait though, insanely clever mystery about art, life and chess. 😑🙈👍🤣
Thank god that horrible yellow thing is partially covered by one of my favourite clouds.. Here's Table Mountain from our walk just now 👇
Given his love of Putin maybe we can hope for a return of the tumblehome battleship? 🙏
#Blastfromthepast Picked up my late father's copy of this (I must have bought it for him c2000). Obviously a bit dated (orig pub 1995) and maybe outdated in parts but still extremely readable, enjoyed it more than I expected I have The Lighthouse Of Stalingrad somewhere, will need to dig it out!
Just posting some recent reads I've particularly enjoyed for #booksky, this one was far more intriguing than I expected. 'Spectacularly revisionist' is right: tried and mostly succeeds at demolishing the established tropes about the Hapsburg Empire 👀
Thought I'd share a few books I recently read and thought worth recommending. This one 👇 covers the four (much mythologised) air-sea battles that made up Leyte Gulf in October 1944. Suffice to say that no myths are left standing, even more so than @alanallport.bsky.social! 4 1/2 ⭐️
Supreme Being™️ got a pic of this little guy yesterday: haven't seen this type before 🤷♂️ Anyone know what it is? Unlike Oz where everything tries to kill you we don't have any poisonous spiders 🕷️ (that I know of 😬)
Very rare to see the majestic Brewster Buffalo get pride of place in a museum 😑
Well, you can come down here next to the penguins (birds not biscuits) and eat a chokky bar EVEN better than a Mars, courtesy of Nestle Seth Effrika…
Amazon Kindle has a Celebrate Black Voices offer on its daily deals today. All very well, except one of the offers is about Black…Holes 😬
Hello! Just finished a splendid book you might like if you haven’t already read it: a lost /cursed silent film , really enjoyed it 👍
During apartheid we had a bunch of fat uber-nazi Afrikaners, in uniforms and riding horses, called the AWB: of course English South Africans called them the Average White Band after the Scottish funk-rock band. Their leader (and I’m not joking) was Eugene Terre Blanch 👀
If you like your crime novels to be backwoods noir, you won’t find much better than this, set in opioid-crippled east Kentucky. Fourth J Todd Scott novel I’ve read: all brilliant.
Hi Benjamin: I just saw your name in the acknowledgments of the splendid Night Film by Marisha Pessl! 👍 Really enjoyed it, superbly written (if overlong at 850 pages IMHO), will be back for more.