Apparently “Milan” is stressed on the first syllable.

And it is on a river which has tides.

How many LibraryThing users have copies of each Shakespeare play:

Hamlet 8675
Macbeth 6080
Romeo and Juliet 5851
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4599
Othello 4060
King Lear 4031
The Tempest 3394
Julius Caesar 2798
The Merchant of Venice 2689
Twelfth Night 2453
Much Ado About Nothing 2412
Sonnets 2238
The Taming of the Shrew 2033
As You Like It 1759
Richard III 1452
Henry V 1415
Antony and Cleopatra 1395
Henry IV, Part I 1308
Measure for Measure 1130
The Winter’s Tale 1001
Richard II 970
The Comedy of Errors 756
Henry IV, Part II 571
Coriolanus 565
Love’s Labour’s Lost 550
Titus Andronicus 541
Troilus and Cressida 533
All’s Well That Ends Well 464
The Merry Wives of Windsor 417
The Two Gentlemen Of Verona 362
Cymbeline 343
Pericles 325
Henry VIII 284
King John 280
Timon of Athens 277
The first part of King Henry the Sixth 205
The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth 182
The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth 153

The jump between the first and second plays on the list (Hamlet to Macbeth) is both absolutely and proportionately the biggest gap. The next biggest proportionate jump is at the bottom of the list, separating the three parts of Henry VI from Timon of Athens. The two other big gaps are i) just below the midpoint, between Richard II on 970 and Henry IV, Part II on 571, with The Comedy of Errors stuck between them on 756; and ii) between the top three (Hamlet/Macbeth/Romeo and Juliet) and the rest (starting with A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

Just thought you would like to know.

…as proposed by SciFi Now and contested by , here. Will go and post my own views later, but don’t let me stop you now.

Brilliant.

22) Expiration Date, by Tim Powers

I think this is one of the few Powers novels I hadn’t yet read. I enjoyed it. Set in California at Halloween 1992, it features the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison being pursued by various unsavoury people and entities. Powers conveys a real sense of the place and time – lots of references to the Clinton / Bush election campaign, and gritty portrayals of the people and localities of the greater LA area. Great fun.

21) In The Land Of Israel, by Amos Oz

I’d been putting off reading this since I work on enough conflicts professionally, and don’t rush to fill my leisure time with more. It is, however, a very interesting account of attitudes in Israel in the winter of 1982, just after the first invasion of Lebanon; the leftish author mainly reports on right-wing voters who disagree with him, though he has a couple of short chapters with Palestinians in Ramallah and Jerusalem.

I must say that my main reaction, having read this en route from Switzerland to Belgium after giving a conference presentation on the Balkans and the Caucasus, is that actually the Israel / Palestine conflict is a lot less special than its protagonists like to think it is. Certainly a lot of the attitudes expressed by Oz’s interlocutors could be found also among Ulster Loyalists, fairly mainstream Serbs, and among various sides in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and perhaps especially Russia.

20) Feast of the Drowned, by Stephen Cole

I’ve enjoyed two other New Series novels by Stephen Cole (here and here), so I’m glad to report now that I like Feast of the Drowned even more, which makes it the best Ninth or Tenth Doctor book I’ve read. It’s not that it has the literary depth that the best of the New / Missing / Past Doctor ranges have, but it’s very faithful to the spirit of Season Two (ie 2006, not 1964-5), and in particular it would fit awfully well into continuity between “New Earth” and “Tooth and Claw”; I found it easy to imagine what a TV version of this would have looked like.

We have here a return to Rose’s London; we have quite a lot of Mickey, and what he went through during the year that Rose had vanished – one of Mickey’s best outings in the canon (if this is canon). We have the Doctor being very David Tennant-ish, confusing friends and confounding foes, especially the military. As with the two other Cole books I’ve read, we also have shape-shifting aliens which share the Zygons’ aquatic habitat (but are otherwise original to him). Rose herself doesn’t come across terribly well, and the science is as bogus as anything else in New Who, but it is a very enjoyable romp.

19) Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470-1603, by Steven G Ellis

Perhaps it is just because I am getting used to the subject, but I found this book much more lucid and informative than either of the other two I have read on the sixteenth century in Ireland. In particular, I feel I have finally sorted out the geography in my own mind: most of the island divided up among Irish-speaking chieftains, and the English-speaking areas concentrated in two large chunks – the Pale and the Kildare / Fitzgerald lands near Dublin, and the Ormond / Butler and Desmond / Fitzgerald regions farther south, the former centred around Waterford, the latter sprawling erratically from Cork to Limerick to Dingle.

Ellis deliberately rejects any inevitability about the forging of Irish nationhood in the heat of English oppression. Instead, he argues that if the Henry VIII / Anthony St Leger policy of “surrender and regrant” had been consistently applied, Ireland could have been integrated into the Tudor realms without much more difficulty than Wales or the far north of England, with the Gaelic chieftains converted to loyal-ish subjects rather than fractious objects of military adventure. (The idea was that they would surrender their ancient claims to their land to the King, and he would then regrant them their territory and give them peerages; there were also usually provisions about adopting English dress and customs.)

This didn’t happen, of course. Partly, Henry VIII had doubts about the policy, and died almost as soon as he had got over them; but mainly, a succession of English governors got sucked into expensive military adventures which then developed their own logic. At times, the accounts of London and Dublin trying to identify which former enemy faction could be this year’s ally are uncomfortably reminiscent of the travails of the US in Iraq. The result of the military approach was that the potential loyalty of the Gaelic chieftains, and indeed the previous loyalty of the “Old English” magnates, was lost; and the island itself politically and economically devastated by the Nine Years War at the end of the Tudor period. (My one complaint about Ellis is that he rather runs out of steam in the 1590s.)

There were two further exacerbating factors. One was that the military policy created a new political dynamic – the “New English”, those who had come to Ireland and made good on grants of confiscated land and offices of state, had a vested interest in conflict rather than conciliation. They weren’t all that numerous, but had a critical mass in the machinery of government and the courts. Their policies were not always adopted; the Old English magnates still retained influence in London, especially when one of their number briefly married Henry VIII and more substantially when her daughter became Elizabeth I. But they were a new element in the Irish political equation which the rest of the island didn’t quite know how to adapt to.

The second exacerbating factor was the Reformation. Ellis confesses himself rather baffled as to why it did not work in Ireland. The dissolution of the monasteries was far from unpopular. Henry’s breach with Rome had little practical effect on the ground. There was no Irish equivalent of the Pilgrimage of Grace. In the end his conclusion seems to be that the Protestant leadership in England simply did not try hard enough to impose religious change on the neighbouring island; confusing instructions, failure to counter the Vatican’s fairly desultory defensive response, and a lack of suitably qualified staff – Trinity College was not founded until 1592, and by then it was too late; language was also an issue here. By the end of the century, the New English were by and large Protestants, and the Old English and their former Gaelic enemies by and large Catholics; but there was no inevitability about this.

Ellis mentions, and I’ll pursue it a bit further here, the other contemporary European country where the Reformation did not have the result desired by its rulers: the northern Netherlands, where Philip II actually lost sovereignty of a large chunk of territory. The Spanish supply lines to Brussels were of course much more difficult to maintain than the British lines to Dublin; also, in all fairness, the Spanish behaviour in the Netherlands was far more extreme than that of the British in Ireland; also it has to be admitted that Hugh O’Neill was not as gifted a statesman as William the Silent.

My reason for interest in this period is my ancestor and namesake, Sir Nicholas White, who I’m glad to say comes out of his three mentions in Ellis’ book rather well, as a consistent opponent of the military line and supporter of conciliation. He complains to the Queen about one of the more aggressive governors and helps get him sacked; he helps institute a revised version of “surrender and regrant” in Connacht in 1585; and he warns London against too much innovation in policy. Unfortunately the point where he fell from grace and died in the Tower of London is precisely the point (1592) where Ellis seems to lose interest in the narrative and there is no reference to this particular crisis. Despite this shocking omission, I very much recommend this book.

In answer to various questions asked on Facebook:

Victoria: yes, it was an easy procedure; once you’ve lived here for seven years (if you have an unlimited residence permit or authorisation to settle in Belgium) you just bring a translation of your birth certificate to the town hall and fill in a form. They charge you a tenner for giving you a new ID card (see illustration below, with my ID number and signature chopped out). There are various other more bureaucratic mechanisms, but it was pretty painless. See here for the full list, and here for the specific mechanism we used.

Svetlana: Obviously I understand why you, as a proud citizen of your own country, would never do such a thing!!!! But I explained it all here. The only practical difference in our lives is that voting in all elections is now compulsory.

Andy: Flemish. It doesn’t say so officially, of course, but you’ll notice that the card is basically in Dutch and English.

Tineke: I believe that it is an electoral district!!!!! (And I’m never home in time to watch that programme, but maybe I’ll start buying the comics.)

Peter/Howard: Ha ha, very funny.

Catie/Eleanor/Amadeo/Mark: Thanks!

The photograph isn’t very flattering, but such things rarely are!

I’m becoming a real cinema addict these days – September isn’t over yet, and I have seen four films this year!

Well, Cruel Intentions is running fourth out of four at present. I saw the Glenn Close / John Malkovich / Michelle Pfeiffer Dangerous Liaisons back in 1989 (with , if memory serves me right) and there is simply no comparison. Apart from anything else, Ryan Philippe, playing the male lead, cannot actually act, which is a fairly serious demerit since the story revolves around him. Meanwhile the female leads, Selma Blair, Reese Witherspoon and especially Sarah Michelle Gellar, do their level best with what they are given, but they are not given much. In particular, SMG is very good in the final scene where her reputation disintegrates, but I am afraid that Glenn Close was better. The incidental music is fun but not quite fun enough. I think even hardened Buffy fans can skip this.

A fascinating exchange about South Africa on BBC radio’s Today programme this morning. The BBC has been running with a particular narrative of what’s been going on with the downfall of President Thabo Mbeki, portraying events essentially as a subversion of the constitutional and democratic process by the populist and possibly corrupt Jacob Zuma. This morning’s piece had a South African businessman (with an obviously Afrikaaner name) and a South African business journalist (with a more English-sounding name) interviewed live to comment on turmoil in the Johannesburg stock markets following the rumoured resignation of the Finance Minister.

The BBC’s narrative collapsed; there is no other way of putting it. Apparently, in late-breaking news, the Finance Minister isn’t resigning after all, and the markets are recovering. What was even more striking was that the two South Africans both said that the removal of Mbeki was a good thing, from their perspective; he was arrogant, out of touch, and incompetent, and they are already getting better communication with the new government.

What was even more striking was a comment made by the finance journalist: “There are an awful lot of poor people in this country, and they ought to be listened to; and the old government wasn’t listening.” Can you imagine the averge Financial Times or Wall Street Journal or NRC Handelsblad correspondent spontaneously making that sort of remark?

The interviewer tried weakly to get them to agree that political instability in South Africa is now a serious problem. But the South Africans indicated that the problem was Mbeki’s behaviour, and the ensuing difficulty of getting rid of a leader who has spent all his political capital in a system that hasn’t done that before; and that has now been resolved, in a completely legal and democratic way. They rejected the BBC interviewer’s description of South Africa as a one-party state, pointing out that while the ANC is indeed strong and will probably win next year’s elections, all bets are off for 2014. And anyway, they saw the ANC as a middle-class, establishment party, leftish but not very, which was unlikely to lurch into new policy paths after the change of leadership.

I found it extraordinary that the BBC’s narrative, which I have been uncritically accepting for months, got blown apart by its own choice of interviewees (also of course the story hook they were using for the piece melted away). Also, it’s sometimes nice to discover that things are not as bad as you thought they were.

18) The Golden Transcendence

Sorry, but I’ve got a hundred pages into it and I’m giving up. The unlikeable protagonist is locked in mental battle with his adversary using various nanotech and other superpowers, and I suddenly realised I didn’t really care which of them won (indeed, as Ian Hislop said about the Mohamed al-Fayed vs Neil Hamilton libel case, I almost wished they would both lose). There are loads of other books on my shelves that I want to read more than this, so I’m putting the trilogy on BookMooch, unfinished.

17) Love and War, by Paul Cornell

This is the debut adventure of Bernice “Benny” Summerfield, one of the more memorable companions of Who spinoff fiction – future archaeologist, hard drinker, unsuccessful lover, heroine of numerous spinoff books and audio plays in her own right. The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive to explore the planet of Heaven; Ace falls in love with a Celtic crusty; the Doctor has difficulty distinguishing her from Susan and, of all past companions to pick, Dodo; and religious cults and various other locals and visitors are dealing, whether they know it or not, with a horrible intelligent fungus which is infecting their bodies.

Quite apart from Benny, whose debut is as memorable as I hoped it would be, this is a good novel for Ace, whose doomed love affair, recollections of her youth in Perivale, and tentative renegotiation of her relationship with the Doctor combine to make her much more interesting and compelling here than she ever was on screen. Some of the familiar Paul Cornell motifs are here – people trapped in a church or local equivalent; owls – but there are some very pleasing nods to the space opera future portrayed in Pertwee-era Who (the Draconians; the IMC) and the planet itself, and the gruesome invasive fungoids, are convincingly attention-grabbing. One of the better New Adventures, I suspect (not that I have read many of them).

The name “Semiramis” crops up as an epithet in both Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew, as a legendary ancient warrior queen.

I first encountered her in slightly different form as Semirama, a character in Roger Zelazny’s The Changing Land (the second of the two books about his character Dilvish the Damned, which is itself a sort of epilogue to William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland). I can’t lay hands on my copy at the moment but she was rather memorably brought to life the illustrator; in the book, she is an ancient queen, resurrected centuries after her death to help contain the mad deity at the centre of the story.

I have no idea how Zelazny intended her name to be pronunced, but I automatically read it as along the same lines as semiCOLon or semiFINal, thus “SemiRAMa” or in the traditional version “SemiRAMis”. (I never really thought about why she would be half of a Rama or Ramis, though.)

However, it’s absolutely clear that Shakespeare has a different pronuniciation in mind:

To wait, said I? To wanton with this queen,
This goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph,
This siren, that will charm Rome’s Saturnine

Ay, come, Semiramis – nay, barbarous Tamora,
For no name fits thy nature but thy own!

Or wilt thou sleep? We’ll have thee to a couch
Softer and sweeter than the lustful bed
On purpose trimm’d up for Semiramis.

I guess it wouldn’t have occurred to me so quickly if I was just reading the plays rather than listening to them as well, but it’s obvious that Shakespeare is stressing the antepenultimate (or, as we say in English, third last) syllable: “SeMIRamis”.

Wikipedia, as so often, has much interesting information about Semiramis, including that her original name may have been the Babylonian “Shammur-amat“. Ancient Babylonian is not one of my languages, so I don’t know where the stress would be in “Shammur”.

Then again, when you consider how different the modern pronunciation of “Julius Cæsar” is from the way he probably said it (“Yoolius Kaiser”), Semiramis would probably be glad to know that she is remembered at all this long after her death, and not too worried about the pronunciation of her name by people in countries she did not know existed.

16) Zlata’s Diary: a child’s life in Sarajevo, by Zlata Filipović

This is the diary of a bright eleven-year-old, Zlata Filipović, whose relatively normal life growing up in Sarajevo was suddenly and abruptly disrupted by the outbreak of war in April 1992; her daily life shifts suddenly from worrying about school and partying with friends and family, to hiding from snipers and artillery fire in her home and waiting to hear which of her friends has been killed. For those of us who deal with international affairs on a daily basis, it’s a pretty good reminder that conflict is not really about the political leaders whose childishness Zlata excoriates; it is about ordinary people whose lives suddenly become hell because of evil decisions made by evil men.

Zlata comes across as a perceptive child, and it is interesting how her interpretation of the conflict shifts from essentially reflecting the Sarajevo consensus to more bitter and wiser invective against everyone responsible for the situation. But this is also a story whose telling in itself changes the teller: by the middle of the book, her diary-keeping has made her a celebrity; by the end (December 1993), she is being evacuated from Sarajevo with her family at the personal instructons of the French Minister of Defence.

But she doesn’t let it go to her head. Comparisons with Anne Frank by external commentators are inevitable; Zlata just remarks that she hopes not to suffer the same fate. Even after the outside world “discovers” her, she still writes about family gossip as unselfconsciously as she did before the war started.

I’ve been a bit disingenuous in writing this so far, because I did not get to know the author through reading this book. I first encountered Zlata Filipović as the bright and efficient intern in ICG’s Paris office in 2002, before the penny dropped for me that I had actually heard of her for other reasons. She lives in Dublin these days, and has followed through on the instincts recorded in her diary to build a career in peace-building and international relations. If you happen to see this via your Facebook feed or by other means, Zlata, well done!

One of my regular google alerts is for news stories and blog entries naming our village. Usually this just throws up stories about the football team and newly posted Wikipedia pictures of the railway station. This weekend, however, it flagged up for me this rather sweet account by a blogger of her aunt’s wedding in our local town hall.

It wasn’t until I clicked on the photo album at the end of the entry that I realised there was something about the happy couple which would have made their marriage impossible in a lot of places.

Sometimes I really like this country.

From and also :

List 10 books you have on your bookshelf that you think nobody else on your friends list has on theirs.

1. Becoming Somaliland, by Mark Bradbury.
   (Just finished this today – study of the emerging state in the Horn of Africa.)


2. ‘with all faults’, by David Low.
   (Rather dull autobiography of a Charing Cross Road bookseller.)


3. Collision Course: NATO, Russia and Kosovo, by John Norris.
   (Insider’s account of the 1999 negotiations.)


4. Roger Zelazny by Jane Lindskold.
   (Literary study of the writer by the woman who became his lover.)


5. Lords of Parliament: Manners, rituals and politics, by Emma Crewe.
   (An anthropological study of the British House of Lords.)


6. A Bachelor’s London: Memories of the Day before Yesterday, 1889-1914, by Frederic Whyte.
   (Literary autobiography of a distant cousin)


7. Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land: The Pensionnat Heger and Other Brontë Places in Brussels, by Eric Ruijssenaars.
   (Looks at the effect of Brussels on the Brontë sisters, and vice versa.)


8. Ten Years to Oblivion, by “Clem Macartney”.
   (Mediocre sf book by veteran Ulster political journalist W.D. Flackes.)


9. The Banovina, by Donka Stančić and Miško Lazović.
   (Architectural history of the government building of the Vojvodina.)


10. Malachy, by Brian Scott.
    (Biography of the Irish saint.)

15) Becoming Somaliland, by Mark Bradbury

Bradbury has done a good job here of untangling the complex set of politics and conflict which have led to the former British colony of Somaliland repudiating its 1960 union with the neighbouring Italian colony, and instead constructing a home-grown democracy, despite its non-recognition by the international community and generally chaotic neighbourhood. Somaliland remains a very poor country, crucially dependent on exporting its cattle across the Gulf of Aden (with mineral resources now coming into the picture as well); yet it has managed to overcome internal conflict and build a robust democratic system with only minimal engagement from the outside world (which has instead wasted its time empowering warlords from the east and south of the disintegrated Somalia).

One of the interesting facets of Somaliland’s development has been the process of introducing democratic structures to a clan-based and partly nomadic society, particularly because one often hears the assertion that some cultures are simply not suited to democracy. The contrast between Somaliland and the other Somalis in the neighbourhood demonstrates that it really isn’t a matter of culture, it is a question of leadership.

That leadership has been provided in large part by the Guurti, the upper house of parliament which consists of nominated clan elders, and still retains immense political credibility in comparison with the elected lower house and perhaps even the president. Yet one must remember that this is a work in progress; the lower house was only elected for the first time in 2005 (and elections due this year were postponed because of the immense technical difficulties of organising them).

I said when I left my previous job two years ago that if you are working in international politics and not doing anything for Africa, you need to ask yourself why. Since the start of last year I have been privileged to work for and with the Somalilanders, trying to get the rest of the world to live up, if not to its principles, at least to their promises to these affable, decent, long-suffering people. It is tremendously rewarding.

Somaliland would certainly satisfy the criteria defining statehood in the 1933 Montevideo Treaty ((a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states). So, of course, would a lot of other secessionist entities.

These days the principle of territorial integrity, generally accepted, provides that international frontiers are recognised as inviolable except by agreement. This is intended to deter wars or territorial aggression; and if you look at the map of how Europe’s borders changed in the fifteen years after the Montevideo Treaty was signed in 1933, you can see why. Preventing such wars in general is clearly a Good Thing; but sometimes the principle of territorial integrity comes into serious conflict with the reality on the ground. The break-ups of the old Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union give us plenty of examples.

Somalia/Somaliland is another one. The current Mogadishu government is much further from satisfying the Montevideo criteria than is the Republic of Somaliland, but it is the former rather than the latter that gets to sit in the UN and other international bodies, despite the fact that it barely controls Mogadishu and a few other towns. But then, who ever said that international poolitics made sense?

Before 1689, only three kings of England had set foot in Ireland during their reign. Can you name then?

Answer: As worked out by and , the answer is Henry II, John and Richard II.

Henry II visited in 1171 and was proclaimed Lord of Ireland, a title that English kings kept until 1534. He passed the title to his youngest son John in 1177.

John visited Ireland, rather disastrously, in 1185 before he inherited the English throne, but came again with a military expedition in 1210.

Richard II came with a very large military expedition in 1394-95, and then again in 1399, but was overthrown by Henry IV while out of England and died in captivity the following year.

13) Walking Dead, by C.E. Murphy

This is the fourth novel in the Walker Papers (see also Urban ShamannovellaThunderbird FallsCoyote Dreams), featuring a Seattle policewoman with mystical powers; it won’t be published until next year, but kindly let me have sight of it. NB that she has been posting short stories on her livejournal this last week, including another Joanne Walker one yesterday.

I’ve described these books before as being slightly in the Buffy mode (and if you like one you’ll probably like the other). One difference, though, is that Joanne is part of the normal system of authority, rather than revolting against it in the way that Buffy does. However, mystical powers and police procedure are not easy bedfellows, and a lot of the tension underlying the narrative comes from her (and to a lesser extent her colleagues) attempting to reconcile her two roles as shaman and detective. I think this book explores this interesting side of things rather more than its predecessors.

In Walking Dead, as apparently it is to be called, Joanne is called on to investigate the disappearance of an ancient cauldron, and soon finds herself dealing with the consequent undead zombies, calling on mystical and human (and half-human) allies to find the person responsible, while also dealing with her mildly messy personal life. As ever, both the mundane streets of Seattle and the supernatural forces spilling into them are vividly imagined, along with Joanne’s more personal dilemmas. Fun.

They are handing out more free yoghurt in the Metro stations!

Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture. Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.) Include these instructions.

I was in a small country’s embassy in Brussels earlier this week, meeting with their Minister for European Affairs (who I knew personally long before he became a minister, but this was a professional meeting). It was a slightly rushed affair because he was being lined up by his ambassador to do the airport run, and also he kept on being interrupted by phone calls. I wondered vaguely why he didn’t just turn his phone off (especially since he answered every call with a terse “I’m in a meeting, call me back later” in either English or his own language), and then it occurred to me that he might be waiting for one particular call.

And then his phone rang again – not with its usual shrill ring tone but with the music of the March of the Imperial Storm Troopers from Star Wars – “POM POM POM pa-pa-POM pa-pa-POM”. The minister looked relieved and took the call. It was the Prime Minister.

I was deeply amused by this. The Prime Minister is a rather short, jolly but sharp guy, who really does not look like a storm trooper of any kind, imperial or otherwise. So perhaps I was getting an insight into the real dynamics of internal government communication. Or perhaps just into the sense of humour of the Minister for European Affairs.

Amused to find that in July a Moroccan front website “revealed” that my employers have a contract with the Polisario Front. This information is not exactly secret; you can see senior Polisario officials pictured with us in an issue of Time from April this year, Al-Jazeera also doing a mini-documentary about it in January, and my boss flagging it up in his book published last year and in a Slate article from March 2006. If that’s the sort of investigative journalism the Moroccans are paying their fake bloggers for, I don’t think they are spending their taxpayers’ money very wisely.

11) Alien Bodies, by Lawrence Miles

I am working through the 8th Doctor books not in order of internal continuity, but in order of popularity on LibraryThing (in the hope that I will thus discover some neglected gems towards the end). I’m afraid I didn’t get a lot out of Alien Bodies. I liked the vignette of the Third Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith burying Laika at the very beginning; and I applaud Miles for bringing back and making effective the Krotons, of all unlikely Old Who baddies, half way through.

But as so often, I stumbled on the means and motivation of the villains – in this case the Celestis, with quasi-magical powers including over the afterlife, squabbling with an unlikely assortment of bidders over the Doctor’s corpse (from way ahead in his own timeline). I understand that this book is the basis for Miles’ own run of spinoff Faction Paradox, so I understand why he was trying to do this, but didn’t quite get what he was trying to do.

Sam Jones is the initial companion in the Eighth Doctor Adventures, and this is the third novel I’ve read featuring her. Miles strives to inject her with some extra background and cosmic significance, rather as the Old Who writers did with Ace in the last season in 1989 (the parallel is made explicit). This looked at one point like it was going somewhere interesting, but wasn’t really resolved; I hope it will be in one of the other novels.

In summary, doesn’t really seem like essential reading to me, but maybe its significance will become more obvious as I work through the series.

For those of you who didn’t know about it, this is a review of the special Torchwood radio play broadcast last Wednesday to link in with the launch of the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. I think it is the first time since Slipback that a radio play has been broadcast which fits directly into the continuity of the Whoniverse (with perhaps a nod also to Whatever Happened to Susan?). It is the first time that a Whoniverse drama has been written to fit into current affairs as far as I know (unless you count Halley’s Comet in Attack of the Cybermen, or the Christmas episodes of 1966 and the years since 2005).

Most Torchwood fans will (and should) love this – written by Joe Lidster, bringing the surviving members of the team together with Martha Jones to face an alien threat. Lots about dealing with the deaths of Owen and Toshiko, and (in a nod to series 1 continuity) Lisa the Cyberwoman. The plot is fairly standard, and certainly I worked out what was going on long before the characters did, but it is nice to hear our old friends again doing what they do best.

I was amused by a couple of environments referenced in the play which would be alien to many listeners but with which I am actually very familiar – the aeroplane flying to Geneva, and the ambassadorial reception. Who has a long history of association with Geneva, going back to The Tenth Planet, and later as the global headquarters of UNIT (oddly not mentioned as such here; one gets the impression that Martha and her boss have come into CERN from elsewhere). But this is the first Whoniverse story to be substantially set in Switzerland.

The ambassadorial reception scene was basically there for a couple of funny lines. I attend them once or twice a month, on average; Brussels is well supplied with such events, since many countries have separate missions to Belgium, NATO and the EU. In Geneva I should think things are more complex, since most countries will have relatively small missions to cover a vast range of activities – ranging from the World Trade and Health Organisation to the UN High Commissioners for Refugees and Human Rights, to the little-known disarmament conferences. I imagine the Geneva diplomatic corps gets to cover CERN too.

SPOILERY SCIENCE BITS

As more than one person has noted, the two key science points of the play are total rubbish. If you remove neutrons from an atom (let alone a person), it will disintegrate catastophically rather than just glow in the dark (Isaac Asimov tries a similar line in The Gods Themselves, but with slightly better handwaving). And ramming a beam of anti-protons into a beam of protons isn’t exactly the opposite of ramming two proton beams into each other. But since the story basically revolves around these two crucial bogus scientific points, I think the sane and sensible thing to do is treat them along the lines of the Rocky Horror Picture Show’s “laser capable of emitting a beam of pure anti-matter”. And anyway this is a tale of evil cross-dimensional beings pretending to be the souls of the recently departed, so insistence on scientific accuracy isn’t a very sensible starting point.

Anyway, it livened up my commute this morning.