Recommendations you can check.
by Mervyn King
Who uses, recommends or left The End of Alchemy, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.
1 person
Mervyn King, The End of Alchemy. Not recommended.
His running "Reading Archive" page, where he logs each book, lecture series and podcast he finishes with a short verdict. The page carries no date; the newest entry on it is Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny (published February 2017), so it was last extended around then.
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.