John Calverley's new book When Bubbles Burst is highly recommended by Geoff Riley – it's in my pile for allocating to a reviewer for the next edition of The Business Economist, if anyone wants to volunteer.

It's Our Turn To Eat by Michaela Wrong, about the Kenyan whistleblower John Githingo has been getting consistently good reviews, including a long one (not available online) by Bernard Porter in the current London Review of Books. The underlying theme, I gather from these reviews, is that politics in the country are still distorted by the dreadful legacy of colonial rule. This topic has been on my mind for two other reasons. One is that Edward Miguel raised the question of signs of a trend to authoritarianism over on his Africa's Turn blog, in a post on recent events in Madagascar.

The second is that I've nearly finished the gripping memoir by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Settler's Cookbook, about her childhood and youth in pre-independence and then Obote's Uganda, which she fled early in the Idi Amin era like so many others of South Asian origin. Not only is a terrific eye-witness account of those years, and the politics of decolonisation, but it has a lot of great recipes too. As someone who grew up in northern England in the 1960s and 70s, I shall always be grateful for the impact of immigrants to these islands on our typical cuisine, so I particularly like Yasmin's recipes which spice up (literally) English classics like Shepherd's Pie and Beef Wellington, but they all look mouth watering.