Neil Hopcroft

This is a collection of stories about business failures, they vary in length from a couple of paragraphs to about 20 pages, so there is quite a lot of easy to dip into reading. I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t much in the way of analysis of *why* they were failures, rather just […]

I first picked up this book because of its title. But reading the back of it, it became clear it was a book about Britains relationship with the European Union rather than one examining liberty in Britain. Still a subject about which I am under-informed, so worth a read I thought. It was soon evident […]

With thanks to Grandi for this book. This is an utterly fantastic book, it is written as a series of emails and text messages mostly from Martin, the marketing director of a global conglomerate, to his colleagues and family, but, where pertinant, mails he receives too. It follows his life for a year, during what […]

I like Gibsons writing. This book took me a little while to get into, but by the time I did I found it an absorbing read. It is quite a departure from what I consider his normal work, being set more or less in current time. It follows the life of Cayce Pollard and her […]

“Creating word-of-mouth marketing” This is an interesting book, written (or at least published) at the height of the dot.com fiasco it takes a look at the way some of the ‘new economy’ was marketing itself. There is an element of hubris to it, that this new way has eclipsed the old way of doing things. […]

“Conquer your enemies, promote your friends and wage the real art of war” This is a little book which is an incredibly easy read, its a comic management book which starts with the assumption that all management have read, and are implementing the ideas from, The Art of War. It describes how truly ruthless people […]

This book follows the story of the life of the famous equation, describing a little about its ancestors (each of e, =, m, c and squared), how Einstein put them all together, and the life the result took on after he had. It describes a lot about the research done during wartime, explaining how the […]

I chose this book after someones response to my gentle mocking of someone reading ‘NLP for dummies’ on the train – its not a subject I knew much about. Well, I thought I didn’t know much about it. Reading this book though is like reading a collection of many other management and personal development books, […]

“He figured the odds. And they still beat him” This book follows the authors self destructive love affair with WorldCom shares as they fell from grace. And describes some of the lessons he learned along the way. I spent about half the book being annoyed by his incorrect grasp of some of the statistics he […]

The heroine of this book, Rosie, had managed to annoy me by the end of page two by sleeping with someone obviously deeply inappropriate. She started the book as such a vacuous waste of skin and air that I considered giving up on her but although she was irritating I felt I had to find […]