I've been following Harry Pearson ever since his first book, The Far Corner, which was all about non-League football (a subject I have no interest in) in North-East England. For my money, he is consistently one of the funniest writers in the English language. This book just strengthens that reputation.

It is an account of his arm's length love affair with the Second World War and military matters in general. That love affair is expressed through the medium of a) British war comics, b) plastic model kits (mainly Airfix) and c) table-top wargaming. In amongst the anecdotes from his two childhoods - the one he had as a boy and the one he is now living through as an adult (allegedly) - he inserts a lot of social history of 1950s and 1960s Britain, plus a lot of history of the model soldier business.

World War 2 was the defining event for my father and others of his generation. It was reflected in the popular culture of comics, books, tv shows and films for possibly the following twenty years or more. Pearson maps this out and shows how it turned his generation, the "baby boomers" of the 1950s and 60s, into a generation obsessed with military modelling of some sort or another, I am of that generation; and I remember my junior school friends all being equally obsessed with modelling aircraft, tanks and ships. Pearson has written an account of all our childhoods that is both funny and true.

The same goes for his portrait of the wargaming community. The characters he illustrates are typical to most specialist interests and many readers will be able to identify the personalities and fill in their own selection of names known to them. I particularly identified with the final line of his acknowledgements, where he names all the people he's traded miniature figures with or faced across a wargames table, ending with "...several dozen blokes named Dave." ( )

Reading Pearson's previous tomes (about Belgium, soccer, English country fairs and the like) did not ready me for the discovery that he was a miniature figure war gamer. I never ventured into miniature war gaming as a youngster, probably for the best as I was already geeky enough without this added burden.

Pearson does an admirable job making miniature wargaming, surely one of the least interesting pastimes for spectators, at least somewhat interesting. He discusses the history of miniature wargaming from the 1602 introduction of leaden soldiers into England, Napoleon's wargaming, HG Wells writing on the subject through to his disdain for games like "Dungeons and Dragons", plus his own history in wargaming, as well as the history of the dozens of Daves that appear to populate the wargaming fraternity.

There will be people bored titless by this but not me. ( )