Operation Gold was one of the CIA's great exploits of the Cold War: a tunnel running from West Berlin into the Russian sector to tap into the Soviet com­mu­ni­ca­tion lines. It was believed to be a great success when the Russians broke into the tunnel in 1956. Later it was discovered that George Blake, the MI6 traitor, had betrayed the tunnel from the beginning.

Leonard Marnham is a British Post Office engineer who is sent to Berlin to help the Americans. A naive 25-year-old virgin who lives at …continue.

Macbeth is an honorable Scottish lord who serves an ignoble king. When Malcolm finally goes too far, Macbeth and his wife convince themselves that Malcolm must die. (Encounters with a trio of strange women also swayed their minds.) Macbeth himself becomes king but guilt and paranoia start eating away at him and his wife.

Hartley and Hewson retell Shake­speare's classic play as a novel, providing psy­cho­log­i­cal motivation for Macbeth's usurpation and downfall. Their Lady Macbeth is more sym­pa­thet­ic and less nakedly ambitious than she is usually …continue.

Jake Geismar is an American war cor­re­spon­dent who lived in Berlin before the war. He returns there in July 1945, ostensibly to cover the Potsdam Conference, but actually to find his lover, Lena. Before he finds Lena, he finds the body of a murdered American officer at Potsdam, which—s­trange­ly—no-one is interested in. Then he gets caught up in the race between the Americans and the Russians to take possession of Lena's estranged husband, a rocket scientist.

The war is barely over but already the Russians and Americans …continue.

The Arctic convoys, which took much needed supplies from North America and Britain to their besieged Russian ally in World War II, were brutally dangerous. Between the Arctic weather, the cold seas, and the German U-boats and bombers, many ships were lost. As HMS Ulysses opens, the crew are mutinous, having endured more than a year of such relentless conditions with far too little rest. They have to put to sea again, to escort one more convoy. This will be the worst trip of all, as bad weather, ill …continue.

An Irish newspaper magnate has been found with his head blown off by a shotgun. Quirke, the pathol­o­gist, looks into it and realizes that it's not suicide but murder. As he digs deeper, he finds secrets that the wealthy elite of 1950s Dublin do not want revealed, and he finds himself drawn to the dead man's French widow.

Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) deftly recreates 1950s Ireland through the eyes of Quirke, who, though well placed, is more of an observer than an insider, and of …continue.

It's 1592 and Elizabeth I has ruled England for nearly 35 years. The Virgin Queen has never named her heir, creating both un­cer­tain­ty and op­por­tu­ni­ty. John Shake­speare used to be an "in­tel­li­gencer" for the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Eliz­a­beth's spymaster. With reluctance, Shake­speare is drawn back into that life when the Earl of Essex insists upon com­mi­sion­ing him to find a woman who should be dead—a survivor of the lost Roanoke settlement has been sighted in London. Essex wants her as does his mysterious ally, a …continue.

Three years ago, we visited our friends Louise and Melissa in South Florida, and we drove down Highway 1 through the Florida Keys to Key West—the south­ern­most city in the United States. Recently, they sent me a copy of this book.

Henry Flagler was well-known in his own time as one of the Robber Barons of the Golden Age. He founded Standard Oil with John D. Rock­e­feller and became fabulously …continue.

When the Norse raiders arrive in the English village, Raven, the young outsider who was found two years before with no memory, realizes that he speaks their language. He is drawn to them and he joins them in their quest for glory, plunder, and battle.

After a slow start, the plot moves along with enough fighting to hold one's interest. Aside from Raven, the characters are poorly drawn, with little to dis­tin­guish or motivate them.

Willie Dunne is the innocent 18-year-old son of a senior Dublin policeman, who promptly joins the Royal Dublin Fusiliers when the First World War breaks out, along with thousands of other Irishmen. Their early optimism that the war will be over by Christmas 1914 is soon crushed as both sides get bogged down in the trench warfare of the Western Front. Four long, brutal years of stalemate in the killing fields of Flanders follow, and much of Willie's regiment die during …continue.

I bought a 2TB external hard disk today. It's about the size of a deck of cards, but thinner, and it cost me $95. Disk Utility says it has 2,000,397,884,928 bytes.

In 1998, I got to see more than three terabytes of disks in one system. At the time, a server with a 25GB disk was considered high capacity. The 3TB system occupied con­sid­er­ably more volume than a pack of cards. I don't know what it cost but clearly it was tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At that time, I was a developer on the IIS team at Microsoft. I was the lead per­for­mance engineer for Mi­crosoft­'s …continue.