This sobering and sometimes shocking survey of the new world disorder takes as its starting point the fall of the USSR and the subsequent orgiastic looting of Russia's money and resources, the rise of the mind-bogglingly wealthy oligarchs and the Russian mafia. Guns, drugs cars and human beings are all grist to the mill of these hyper-capitalists who cross international borders, subvent laws, rule by violence and yet, oddly enough, provide a modicum of order and stability in destabilised regions even as they spread misery and make billions. And that's just the starting point. South Africa, Brazil, Canada, Japan and China are all linked in an ever-expanding shadow economy that mirrors and outpaces the legitimate trade network. Crime has gone global. Crime prevention has not.
There are many horrible things between the covers of this book, but it's the sad and terrible plight of the victims of sex-trafficking that make you want to weep. Deceived, used, abused, every night a long string of rapes under threat of violence, escape usually means deportation and the risk of recapture. It makes you want to hit something, but, of course, hitting things is their game.
The globalisation of crime is a huge theme. Each area examined in this books deserves a book of its own. Nevertheless, Glenny's concise, impassioned account of the web of illegality wrapped around our world gives a proper sense of what's going on and where it might be going.

Though a long and at times wearying slog, this book is not an unpleasant one. Sumption's writing style is crisp and clear highly readable. The details it contains of the early years of the Hundred years War are, well, not. It's no fault of the author that the convolutions of the historical and economic and social conditions of the soon-to-be warring nations are so intricate and dull, but they are vital to understanding the reasons why the war goes the way it does, particularly the economic details, which mostly have to do with sheep.
My own understanding of the War was incredibly limited, saving a single Bernard Cornwall novel and Branagh's Henry V, to the extent that I'd mix it up with the Thirty Year's War. Whether it was a good idea to jump feet first into this vast, exhaustive, epic historical narrative without a better understanding of the broad sweep of events and more of the principal characters involved is a moot point at this stage, but it's a bit disheartening to actually feel yourself forgetting stuff almost as soon as you've read it. Anyway, let's see what I CAN remember.
There's a ton of dynastic kingly squabbling in the background here, slivers of France in the possession of the English king, but as a duchy, rendering him a vassal of the French king. The English king should pay homage to the French king, doesn't want to, avoids it like the plague, eventually sends his son, Edward III to do the homage. Edward II is deposed, Edward III ascends, gets to fighting with Scotland, who are allied to France, gets a taste for war, as do his nobles, and decides he wants to reclaim his birthright in France. There follow tortuous rounds of fundraising via taxes and loans and dodgy, not to mention stupid, wool-trading, all in the name of getting an army together to invade France. Dodgy fundraising becomes a repeated and familiar feature of both sides, often with a strategic bearing as on more than one occasion an army is left unopposed as the other side simply can't afford to pay its soldiers. Then again there's all sorts of military incompetence, mismanagement, timidity and downright idiocy which seem to prolong the conflict by failing to bring it to a definitive conclusion. Edward III comes across as a right sod, burning and pillaging all around, while poor old Philip VI is just hapless in the defence of his realm. and his son even worse. Will they ever learn to cope with the withering fire of the English archers?
In the midst of all the campaigning there's the odd startling turn, such as the daring actions of Edward III's French mother ('evil,' Sumption calls her, reserving such emotive adjectives only for her and one other woman in the book,) or the ten French men-at-arms who hold an army at bay at a ford or the six burghers of Calais who appear before Edward III with nooses around their necks. I could have done with more of this sort of thing, but Sumption seems keen to avoid the more sensationalistic stuff on the grounds that they're more exhaustively covered elsewhere, and the battles as recounted are plenty sensational enough.
Volume 1 leaves us at the fall of Calais the English ascendant and the French humiliated, a state of affairs not likely to change any time soon. I may leave the next two volumes for when I have a slightly better grasp of events and players. It's interesting to think that these events must have formed a sizable chunk of the history lessons of French and English schoolchildren, but only got a passing mention in Irish history books. Or maybe I wasn't paying attention.

What an unexpected little treat this was. An account of the building of the dome of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. Begun in 1296 and completed in 1436, the dome itself took nearly a quarter of a century to construct, and even when it was initially designed regarded as potentially impossible to construct, the original designers essentially shrugging their shoulders and hoping God would provide. Provision came in the form of bad-tempered genius Filippo Brunelleschi, master goldsmith, whose years spent treasure-hunting the ruins of Ancient Rome equipped him with the ideas and inspiration which would ultimately not only pull of an amazing feat of engineering, but also do it without the wooden structure that normally provided 'centring' while domes were being erected. Along the way, he came up with a few minor inventions that would turn out to be decades ahead of their time, and nobody's quite sure how he did it. This is to say nothing of the ravages of the plague, warfare, professional and political rivalry (with dueling sonnets) the odd disaster and even a spell in prison. It's an epic of human ingenuity. You'd almost say folly, but the end result has endured in its beauty and splendour and made important contributions to the world of art and science, and stands testimony to what humanity can achieve with time, genius, money and an army of workers. The dome endures, but alas, the sonnets are lost.

One thing is for sure: war is about money. Always has been and always will be. John Hawkwood was merely an excellent and unashamed practitioner of war as a revenue-generating activity. 1360, a treaty is signed and the Hundred Years War pauses, but people keep fighting, mostly English soldiers who stay in France to kill and burn and pillage because it beats going home and doing an honest day's work or dying of the plague. The soldiers coalesce into large companies who style themselves mercenaries, though instead of being paid to fight, they mostly just fight until they're paid to go away. Amongst the hordes laying waste to much of France is unassuming Essex man, John Hawkwood. They range far and wide until they finally threaten the pope, living in luxurious exile in Avignon. In sheer self-defence, the pope hires Hawkwood and tells him to go to Italy, and that's where Hawkwood goes, bringing an exciting new era of death and destruction with him.
Northern Italy is full of strong, prosperous city states like Milan, Florence and Siena, all of whom hate each other, a situation which Hawkwood coolly and calmly and ruthlessly exploits. Soon he and his men are killing peasants, raping women, burning crops, ransoming nobles and even defeating the odd army here and there, collecting vast sums from various signoria to go away and bother the other guy. Then the pope returns to Rome and tries to take charge and more people die and Hawkwood keeps raking it in.
Hawkwood, oddly enough, remains a cipher. We only know him through his actions, his clever maneuverings, his carefully controlled slaughtering and kidnapping and, oh yeah, that one really big massacre at Cesena. He left no writings behind to provide any sort of insight into his character or personality, and mostly he just kept soldiering and ransoming and robbing and threatening and killing because that's what he was good at. Instead we have walk-on parts by the likes of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Petrarch and Catherine of Siena to bring the age to life and illuminate the minds and souls of the players and the landscape they moved through: wealth, poverty, famine, plague, war, not to mention the obscene iniquity of holy mother church, outdoing all others in the atrocity stakes as it gropes for secular power, while its cardinals and prelates are ardent practitioners of the seven deadly sins.
This is a deeply interesting book, written with a cool, clear detachment that occasionally turns acerbic. It is an edifying and sobering piece of history, and if Hawkwood remains an enigma, it may be because we don't yet understand how much of history is carved out by cool, ruthless bastards doing whatever the hell they wanted.