There's this really good book..

I picked up in Border's yesterday, called 'The secrets and lies: exposing the world of cover-ups and deception' by David Southwell. I cannot emphasise enough how interesting this book is! I actually couldn't put it down until I'd finished reading it at 1 in the morning. It comprises of 200 articles, organised into the following sections: science, war, big business, politics, media, crime, missing evidence, suppressed data, celebrities -beyond the gossip, drugs and medicine, technology, cults and secret societies, public faces secret lives, white washes, and institutions. It contains the details of secret govt complexes, and underground masonic temples in London, how Britain almost became the 51st state of America in the 1960s, the rituals undertaken by the skull and bones society members (including George W Bush) when joining, and how faulty computers almost started WWIII. Interesting! Really, I mean that isn't the half of it. The Brontosaurus never even existed?! This guy in Wyoming, 1874, found this amazing dinosaur skeleton, complete in every respect apart from a missing head, so he took the head off another dinosaur (a Camarasaurus) he'd found 4 miles away, and attached it, claiming in academic papers to have found an entirely new type of dinosaur, a Brontosaurus, when in fact it was an Apatosaurus all along! The Brontosaurus was only removed from palaentology books in 1974 when the fraud was acknowledged. Other headlines: Sony ran a psychic research division and announced that ESP does exist; cigarette companies have tried to make their products more addictive; missing cosmonauts of the Soviet space programme; the Vatican helped Nazi war criminals escape to new lives; the CIA was involved in sinking a ship on the Thames in 1964; the mysterious 'Black Knight' satellite of 1960 found orbiting the Earth even through no one then had rockets large enough to launch something of that size; the gun that fires a million bullets a minute; China's cyberwarface attack on US telecommunications; Winston Churchill was a druid; ticking time bomb at the bottom of the Thames... I would go on, but really I think you should just read the book!

I also picked up 'The Hotel on the Roof of the World: five years in Tibet' by Alec le Sueur, which looks like it could be quite funny. It's a travel book, I cannot get enough of them. It's been described as 'Fawlty Towers goes to Tibet', so I'm quite looking forward to reading that!