If you thought long ticket-office queues, Byzantine pricing structures, indecipherable announcements, and chronic under-investment were just a British railway phenomenon, Tim Parks's compelling new book would have you think again. Swaying on an intermediately priced, intermediately slow train between one Italian city and another, Parks (normally a novelist, and a long-time Italian resident) conveys a detailed, dense, oppressive sense of the inadequacies and idiosyncrasies of the national rail system. So detailed and oppressive in fact, that you begin to long to open the window and gaze at some passing campagna or other. But you can't – it's locked, by order of the railway authorities, to ensure the proper functioning of the air conditioning.