The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars is a big fat history book published in 2016 by Allen Lane, a Penguin imprint and the guys who also last year brought out Norman Ohler’s Blitzed. That book is hipster military history/history verging on alternative history. That book is funny, entertaining, possibly incorrect and full of presumption on the back of – to be fair – heavy research. The House of the Dead isn’t written by a trendy Berliner novelist, though, it is instead the work of Daniel Beer, a British academic who is the Senior History Lecturer at a London university. And there isn’t much – no matter what the coked-up Hackneyites tell you – cool about London any more, and there’s never been much cool about academics. This is not a cool book, even though it’s about a COLD place (boom boom), and I like cool books, yeah… This is the end of my non-fiction marathon.