No. 141 The Trusty Servant
OW Publications
Peter Barker( G, 75-77) has recently written a book titled Product Design for Students. Based on 40 years of professional activity in industrial product design( sparked in part by metalwork lessons supervised by Mr( Brian) Biddulph( CoRo, 67-80) in Mill during his time at Win Coll, Peter lays out in simple terms the basic ideas of physical product design in practice. The book is intended for anyone interested in the profession of product design.
202 pages; Routledge; ISBN 978-1032631189
In his latest book Rasputin: And the Downfall of the Romanovs Antony Beevor( K, 60-64)‘ not only captures the mysterious Siberian holy man in all his bizarre complexity but also paints a vivid portrait of tsarist Russia hurtling toward the abyss.’ Rasputin was a devoted monarchist, not a revolutionary. He had no official position, no forces at his command. Nevertheless, he contributed more to the fall of the Romanov dynasty than any other individual. In this new work, Antony Beevor, master of narrative history on the grandest scale, sharpens his focus to pierce the fog of fantasy around Rasputin that has only grown denser over time.
384 pages; Weidenfeld & Nicholson; ISBN 978-1399617628
Rants Reviews etc was privately published in 2025 by Geordie Burnett Stuart of Crichie( JG Slessor( K, 61-65)). It is mainly an anthology of articles published between 2015 & 2025 in two specialist Scottish farming papers, plus one each for The Far East Review and Historic Scotland. They expose the rush to Net Zero and the Climate Crisis and examine the science, the political agenda and the complacency apparent among the establishment elite who espoused these fashionable nostrums. This book shines a light on the failures of society to take farming and food security seriously.
£ 12.50( p + p included) Available from Geordie Burnett Stuart: Crichie, Stuartfield, Peterhead Aberdeenshire. AB42 5DY. gbstuart489 @ gmail. com
David J Critchley( B, 68-73) has translated Abbé Claude Barthe’ s Trouvera-t-Il encore la Foi sur la terre? Crise de l’ Église, histoire et questions into Shall He Find Faith on the Earth?: A Critical Account of the Crisis in the Church. The book dissects the crisis arising from the Catholic response to modernism, which has moved from the opposition of Pope Pius IX and the Syllabus of Errors to a virtual embrace at the Second Vatican Council.
190 pages; Angelico Press; ISBN 979-8892801782
Among the many patients that trauma surgeon Shehan Hettiaratchy( Coll, 83-87) has seen on his operating table are: a teenage victim of a knife attack; a young girl who has nearly lost her leg in a boating accident; a survivor of a major terrorist attack at Westminster Bridge. In The Careful Surgeon he explains how it feels to take the lives of these people into his hands. In this insight into the life of a trauma surgeon, the reader is taken into the heart of what it takes to train, practice, perform and perfect surgical skills. Through real-life case studies of patients,
Shehan explains how the emotional connection he makes with them must be set aside the moment he takes a knife to cut them open. Radiant with light and darkness, this is a book full of scenes of life and death that the rest of us rarely even glimmer.
272 pages; Yellow Kite; ISBN 978-1529350654
In Impact Banker Alexander Hoare( B, 75-80) answers the question: how does a family bank prepare for the 21st century? Uniquely positioned as an 11 th-generation partner in the family bank and having spent 38 years at C Hoare & Co, Alexander answers the question by explaining that it doubles down on the power of relationships and instead of pursuing scale it seeks simplicity and quality.
224 pages; PublishU; ISBN 978-1917829427
Oliver Osborne( F, 99-04) lives and works in Berlin. As an artist, his subjects range from recognizablyappropriated figures of portraiture to his own family. The richly illustrated monograph Recent Painting provides the most comprehensive overview of Osborne’ s practice to date, delving deep into the nuanced layers of his work and showcasing his ability to oscillate between subjects and techniques with remarkable fluidity and purpose. It includes an essay by Michelle Cotton, director of Kunsthalle Wien, and a conversation between the artist and Alberto Salvadori, director of ICA Milano.
204 pages; DISTANZ Verlag; ISBN 978-3954767939
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