But to my mind those are the exceptions, and so when it became clear right from the very beginning of this book that the identity of Jack the Ripper was protected by a consipracy that is so enormous that it would collapse under its own weight I felt a familiar sinking feeling. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think plots and conspiracies can happen they manifestly have, and some of have been very successful. I’ve always been a great believer in the cock-up rather than the conspiracy theory of history. Also it was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction which gave it a certain additional interest. So I was interested to see what this latest one would reveal. I’ve read enough to be clear that a lot of the ‘facts’ out there are just theories, and some of those are fairly crackpot. I will put my hand up and admit that I’ve long been fascinated by Jack the Ripper, though I am well aware that it is all petty lurid stuff. Robinson has a preferred suspect and his book is all about proving he’s right, why the guy did it and how he managed not to get caught. And it really is a huge thing so I’m glad I had the Kindle version (you may have read in one of my Sunday Salon posts that I saw this in a book shop teetering on the edge of a shelf, only just managing not to plummet to the floor due to its sheer size). So Bruce Robinson, former actor and most notably director of Withnail and I, has spent at least fifteen years researching the case of Jack the Ripper and this enormous book is the result of his labours. To help set some context I was going to quote from the blurb on the book’s Amazon page but I got quite cross reading the thing because it makes some claims (especially about the scholarship involved) that I don’t think really hold up. I have taken quite a while to get round to writing about They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper because it’s really hard to know quite where to start. So feeling very pleased with myself as you can imagine and hoping to do quite a lot of reading this week ? Mr Gaunt by John Langan – and other uneasy encounters.The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness – “not everyone has to be the chosen one”.Numero Zero by Umberto Eco – “fuelled by conspiracy theories, Mafiosi, love, corruption, and murder”.In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson – “Berlin 1933, William Dodd is America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany and is about to witness a turning point in history”.God’s Traitors by Jessie Childs – terror and faith in Elizabethan England.The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin – “as inventive as Agatha Christie, as hilarious as PG Wodehouse”.The Man Without a Shadow by Joyce Carol Oates.It was so good that one of the three books I bought myself this week was the sequel: If you like lots of science in your science fiction then this is one for you. Main things to note before we get to the really good stuff is that I finished my second book of the year, The Three-Body Problem, an excellent (and award winning) piece of sci-fi translated from the Chinese. It’s my birthday today, so of course that means presents, and presents mean books!