Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery and WG Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape

Umberto Eco is awfully clever, I think I missed most of the allusions and the significance in the book, about how the conspiracy theories that abounded in the 19th Century about Jews and Freemasons and the like were all the work of one man, a master forger, sewing confusion and acting as a double agent. Reminiscent of the dodgy WMD Dossier, and a worrying reminder of how easy it is to fool people into believing some horrific things. Read Hoskins again, but it really needs to be read with an OS map in hand. It would have been fantastic to sit with him and have him point out the many features that are obvious to him, but that the rest of us miss about bends in roads and field shapes. We did take F&L along to watch the cycling, it was an epic trek across Hoebridge Golf Course and the ridge above the water-meadows between Pyrford and Send Marsh, but we made it, and watched the peloton whizz past. The bunting is up, the only house on respectable York Road to bother; unlike the jubilee when all the posh houses had their flags out.