Congrats to Ros Scott.

9) More Real Than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts, edited by Donald E. Morse and Csilla Bertha

A collection of scholarly essays on the subject of the title. I admit I skimmed most of them, as they are more about writers not usually considered part of the genre, though there is an interesting essay on why Lord Dunsany is not as good as either Tolkien or Lovecraft, and another on mermaids. The ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses, and a play by Yeats called The Only Jealousy of Emer, get a lot of attention.

One of the relatively few boons of long-haul flying is that I have had time in the airport to watch a few more Blake’s 7 episodes, after a hiatus of over a year.

Seek-Locate-Destroy is the one which introduces Blake’s foes Travis and Servalan, in a scene of crackling testosterone. We also get the unexpected bonus of Peter Miles (Nyder in Genesis of the Daleks) as Secretary Rontane, demanding Blake’s head, and some lovely lines from Vila: “Tell him I’ve just worked out a completely new strategy. It’s called running away.” “There isn’t a lock I can’t open – if I’m scared enough.” Nice character bits as they attack the complex in the first half of the episode.

Unfortunately after that first scene with Servalan, Stephen Greif seems to rather lose interest in playing Travis and Terry Nation rather loses interest in giving him anything interesting to do. The core of the plot is promising – Blake risking all to rescue captured Cally – but in the end it is rather disappointing that he simply teleports through the defences that Travis has laboriously set up precisely to prevent him from doing so, and the dramatic punch evaporates.

Mission to Destiny is an interesting example of B7 veering into a completely different genre, as essentially a locked-room murder mystery on board a spaceship, with a subplot of Perilous Journey for Blake and the others. Avon solves the mystery and gets one of the best quotes ever. (Cally: “My people have a saying, ‘A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.'” Avon: “Life expectancy must be fairly short among your people.”) John Leeson, the Voice of K9, plays one of the spaceship crew whose mutual antagonisms support the plot. We also get a glimpse of life on human planets outside the Federation.

It all works except for the Liberator sub-plot, where the timings (desperate run to the planet Destiny, through the meteor storm, yet somehow back again in time to catch the Destiny crew before the bad guys arrive) just don’t work out. Also it might not have been a bad idea to check that there was something in the box before risking life and limb for it.

As for Duel, it is essentially an interesting variation on the equivalent Star Trek, Frederic Brown and Longyear – most notably, that Blake and Travis get their companions as well to help them. Again, Avon gets the best line (“Blake is sitting up in a tree; Travis is sitting up in another tree. Unless they’re planning to throw nuts at one another, I don’t see much of a fight developing before it gets light.”) Some good special effects especially as Liberator rams Travis’s ship.

As always with this type of story, I am bothered by the fact that we don’t get a good handle on the means and motivation of the god-like aliens. Poor Isla Blair, playing Sinofar, was obviously rather cold. The concept of the Mutoids is good and well explored though.

Project Avalon works perhaps the best of these four episodes. It is strangely reminiscent of a couple of Terry Nation’s Doctor Who stories – the whole underground lab reached through a cave complex thing from Genesis of the Daleks (and indeed The Daleks), the androad doubles from The Android Invasion (and less seriously The Chase) and the super-vicious virus from Death to the Daleks! (and references also in Genesis). Here he has boiled some of his own favourite themes together to make a decent drama.

I still don’t like Stephen Greif as Travis, but I did like the changed relationship with Servalan, she now is putting him under pressure to deliver (and I’m not really sure that his assertion that he could have eliminated Blake but for the Federation’s insistence on capturing the Liberator is supported by that we have seen on screen). A lot of fans don’t like Julia Vidler as Avalon but I think she’s OK, both as Avalon herself and the android double. Some decent special effects as well. Vila and his heat suit is hilarious. Even Blake gets a good line (“They probably tried to surrender…). The best of these four. Apart from the stupid robot.

8) Doctor Who Annual [1966], [rumoured to be mainly written by David Whitaker]

I must say it was interesting to read this at the same time as Jim Mortimore’s Campaign. This was the first of many Doctor Who annuals, containing half a dozen short stories about the Doctor – two of which feature the Zarbi and Menoptera from The Web Planet, with one each for the Voords from The Keys of Marinus and the Sensorites. One story has two children and their dog sneaking onto the Tardis, but otherwise the Doctor is travelling alone. The illustrations are beautiful; the stories fairly standard, with huge lapses of continuity (Is the Doctor from Earth or not? What is the timeline of the stories set on Vortis?) and the occasional scientific howler (the Crab Nebula is not a galaxy; it is part of the Milky Way). It’s included as an extra on the Dalek Invasion of Earth DVD, but I imagine that few will have taken the trouble to actually read it!

7) Campaign, by Jim Mortimore

This was the Doctor Who novel which was turned down by the BBC and which Mortimore subsequently managed to get published privately, now downloadable for free thanks to those awfully nice New Zealand chaps. There is no way the BBC could have published it – by Mortimore’s own (rather too extensively documented) account, it is about a million light years away from the novel he actually agreed to write. But it is a brilliant read all the same, though I think you would need to know who Lola McGovern and Cliff were to really appreciate it. It is the story of the First Doctor, his grand-daughter and the two people from 1960s England who travel together, in the Tardis after an adventure with Alexander the Great and several ambiguous outcomes, trying to cope with the disappearance of the entire universe outside the Ship. Mortimore takes the narrative to very peculiar structures and places, but it kept me reading.

The New Zealand edition includes both Mortimore’s authorial notes, describing his bitter struggles with his muse (incarnate as a monkey), and an account of his dispute with the BBC publishers which I think could usefully have been summarised into rather fewer pages.

6) Brussels versus the Beltway: Advocacy in the United States and the European Union, by Christine Mahoney

A somewhat technical but none the less interesting analysis of my world of work. Mahoney has conducted 147 interviews with lobbyists of different backgrounds covery 49 different issues in Washington and Brussels, and presents the results. She starts off by making the interesting point that in the US system, most legislative proposals fail to even reach a decisive vote in one House of Congress, let alone become law, whereas in the EU, once the Commission has started work on a new legislative proposal, it is very rare for it not to emerge from the complex system in some form as a new law.

Every chapter has an interesting and sometimes provocative insight from her data. One that jumped out at me was that while American lobbyists don’t very often (but do sometimes) argue to lawmakers that their constituents will care about a particular issue, this argument is literally never used by EU lobbyists, at least the ones Mahoney talked to. The fact is that even MEPs are not really accountable to voters, but rather to their political party selectorates, which are only weakly responsive to MEPs’ actual legislative activities; and other EU officials have no direct accountability to the electorate at all. So it is not surprising but it’s interesting to see it brought out so strongly.

Another point is that insider networking tactics – lobbying visits, seminars, cocktail parties – are used much more frequently by Brussels lobbyists (as I can see daily in the cafes around my office) than by their DC counterparts. Mahoney speculates that this is because of the tighter regulation of US lobbyists’ activities; I’m more inclined to feel that the more weirdly participative nature of the EU policy process, and the superior quality of catering in Brussels restaurants, are germane factors here.

Another fascinating point was that there is a strong correlation between the propensity of lobbyists to mobilise mass public support on a particular issue, and their ultimate failure to achieve their goals, on both sides of the Atlantic. I suspect this is because once you have taken your issue outside the closed circles of the epistemic community, you have almost admitted in advance that you have lost.

This is of course a world that I work in myself, though I inhabit its wilder fringes – only a very few of Mahoney’s 49 policy issues have to do with external relations, and none of those is as specific as the stuff I work and have worked on. Still, it’s interesting to see it subjected to someone else’s searching analysis. My one complaint about the book is that it gives only the barest description of the actual policy-making process; if you don’t already have a degree of familiarity with both the EU and US structures, you won’t get much out of this.

5) Burma Chronicles, by Guy Delisle

A recently published graphic chronicle of cartoonist Guy Delisle’s year in Burma with his wife (who works for Médécins Sans Frontières) and their baby son. It’s a country I know much less about than I would like. Without being patronising, Delisle captures a lot of fascinating moments – the absurdity of censorship and surveillance, the Christian heroin-addicted Kachins of the north, a stay in a monastery. He also captures a lot of the experiences of just being an expatriate with a small child which I’m much more familiar with – the admiration of locals for your foreign baby, the desperate shopping trips across the border to the neighbouring more developed capital city. A very good book; I believe Delisle has done a couple more about China and North Korea, and will look out for them.

Apparently it was all a vicious rumour. So his mother says.

4) The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett

I have bought a few books in New York, mostly for me, a few for young F; and picked this up on impulse for as she is a bit of a Bennett fan. Then this evening, with an hour and a half to spare between work and dinner, I found it slipping into my hands, and read the 120 large print pages pretty rapidly.

It is a lovely little novella about Queen Elizabeth II suddenly deciding to start reading, and the viciously negative reactions of her advisers to her new habit. There is a nice twist in the tail. I won’t say more so as not to spoil it for , but I recommend it.

By glorious chance I happen to be in New York at the moment, and watched the results coming in with friends who live uptown. I got a cab back but ran into celebrating crowds when we reached 47th St, so paid it off and walked the rest of the way to the hotel (on 29th). An amazing atmosphere, and I’m so glad I was here (and bought the T-shirt).

And I realised I’d been concentrating more on the party politics of it, but for the black people of America this is a moment of triumph. By the time the final result was called, everyone else had left the party except me and a black friend of my friends; and she was in floods of joyful tears. People who in living memory had difficulty even in voting have now elected one of their own. My son will grow up thinking it is not remarkable that America could have a black president; my friends’ baby boy, due in January, will not remember a time when there wasn’t one until he turns eight (God and the voters willing). That is what makes it such a special moment.

(And the Obama daughters will get a puppy.)

Apparently V died yesterday. I don’t make a habit of studying the lives of dictators of countries I otherwise know little about, but V shared my precise date of birth: like me, he was born on 26 April 1967. Unlike me, he was born to a young single mother in the capital of a developing country; like me he went to the local grammar school; unlike me, he joined his country’s army as soon as he had finished school, aged 18 in 1985, and rose rapidly through the ranks, to the point where he had a commanding role in the government campaign against the rebels in the east of the country.

V’s country was a corrupt single party state, and the army was exceptionally poorly supplied. Three days after his/my/our twenty-fifth birthday, on 29 April 1992, (when I was in Belfast, researching what became my PhD) he led his fellow soldiers on a protest march from the east to the capital. The government fled, and V found himself the youngest head of state in the world, in charge of a disintegrating country faced with an unwinnable civil war.

V was not a good president. He killed his political opponents in mass executions; he conscripted children as young as twelve into the army; he kept power by paying off white mercenaries with his country’s looted diamond wealth; and the rebel insurgency gained in strength, to the point where on 13 January 1996, when I was busy with the Northern Ireland peace process, debating the possibility of elections and George Mitchell’s report on decommissioning of terrorist weapons, V’s colleagues removed him from office, and themselves handed over power to a democratically elected government two months later. V fled to Britain for asylum, eventually starting (but not finishing) a law degree in Warwick University and working as a nightclub bouncer.

In 2000, the year after I had moved to Belgium, V left the UK and went back home again, living unemployed with his mother in the dismal suburb where he was born, reportedly drinking heavily and rumoured to be using narcotics. Yesterday’s news is therefore not surprising. Of the various mildly famous people who share my birthdate, two others have died, one murdered in South Africa, the other in a car accident. V’s death appears to have been from more or less natural causes, exacerbated by lifestyle choices.

I deliberately haven’t named his country up to now, because I wanted to tell the human story of someone with whom I have only the obscurest of links. But if you are interested, it was Sierra Leone, and V’s full name was Valentine Esegragbo Melvin Strasser. Not many people will miss him, but presumably his mother loved him.

Edited to add: According to his mother, this is all untrue and he is not dead after all.

2) Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, by Tony Judt

This huge (800+) page history of Europe’s last six decades has been looking at me from the bookshelf for some time, and I finally managed to get through most of it on a transatlantic flight on Saturday (I am in New York for work until Wednesday).

It is pretty impressive: a detailed account of both Western and Eastern Europe, covering in particular detail the immediate aftermath of the second world war, and then going on to survey the Cold War and post-1989 eras. In particular, I learnd a lot about the German Question – having grown up with the realities of a Federal Republic embedded in NATO and the DDR likewise in the Warsaw Pact, I had never quite appreciated the twists and turns of international policy that got to that point from the defeated and occupied Third Reich. Judt is also particularly good on the individual histories of the Soviet bloc states, especially Poland.

I was disappointed by his much more cursory treatment of some Western European countries. Belgium has the same population as Hungary, Portugal or Greece but gets much less coverage here – granted, it did not have the political transition that the other three enjoyed, but I found Judt’s treatment of the linguistic issue a bit journalistic. The same goes for Ireland (with a similar concern about his coverage of the Troubles). Judt devotes a lot of space to analysis of the personalities of Mitterand, Adenauer and Thatcher, but I don’t believe that a single Irish politician apart from Gerry Adams is even name-checked. OK, Haughey was not an international figure in the same way, but I think his story is also of some importance for Europe as well as Ireland.

In the earlier sections (less so in the closing chapters) Judt brings in interesting evidence of Europe’s state of mind by looking at the literature, music and especially cinema of the decades in question. This feeds into his recurrent theme of Europe’s difficulties with acknowledging the past in order to move on from it; he has a thought-provoking epilogue about attitudes to the Holocaust, which in almost every country (except Germany, for obvious reasons, and also Denmark, for better reasons) tends to underplay the extent of local collusion and enthusiasm for the project – almost (though he doesn’t use the word) a kind of soft denial.

In the end though I wasn’t completely satisfied with his conclusion. He doesn’t quite seem to believe in the European Union, by which I mean not only that he doesn’t seem to accept the validity of the political project (which is fair enough, if in my opinion wrong-headed) but also that he doesn’t quite seem to accept what is already there. While he is quite good on the effects of the concept of “Europe” on the transitioning states of the East, he is much vaguer on the reverse effect – what the new states bring to the EU – seeming almost uninterested, which is odd.

Even so, there is a lot of very good stuff here, and it is well worth reading.

October Books 25) Interference Book One: Shock Tactic, by Lawrence Miles
November Books 1) Interference Book Two: The Hour of the Geek, by Lawrence Miles

Hmmm. A typically rambling Lawrence Miles story, rambling in this case over two volumes, linking together his Faction Paradox concept with the truth about I.M. Foreman, and bringing in also Sarah Jane Smith as an investigative journalist to supplement EDA regulars Sam and Fitz. There are some passages of vivid writing (the Saudi prison cell, Sam’s experiments with LSD) and a fairly spectacular plot resolution, with an intricate narrative structure which I suspect actually does make sense (though I remained a little confused about the various versions of Fitz’ story). I think really one for completists only (as with almost the whole Eighth Doctor range), but engaging enough to keep my interest over both volumes.

24) Waterloo, by Andrew Roberts

I got this after reading Vanity Fair, and reflecting that it’s a while since I last went down to the battle site, which is only half an hour’s drive from us. It is a very short but very detailed account of the June 1815 campaign which sealed Napoleon’s fate. The carnage was brutal and vicious; the battle of Waterloo took place over a very small area, four kilometres by two, with the focus of the fighting being two building complexes which Wellington needed to hold long enough for the Prussians under Blücher to arrive from the east; he held one and had to abandon the other when the garrison ran out of ammunition, but it had held for long enough for the Prussians to arrive.

Roberts is excellent on the details (and there are two very good maps) but very annoying in his description of the context. The British element of the allied forces get noticeably more praise for gallantry, bravery and intelligence (when basically the crucial move in the battle had happened a couple of days earlier, when Blücher’s deputy decided to retreat north rather than east from their defeat at Ligny, and so were available to save Wellington at Waterloo). One senses that Roberts is trying to be neutral and objective, but that his heart is not in it. I did, however, appreciate his debunking of Victor Hugo’s description of the battle in Les Miserables.

The other problem with the book is that it isn’t made terribly clear why all this slaughter mattered. What if Wellington and Blücher had lost? Napoleon would eventually have been defeated by the Austrians and Russians, no doubt with the help of a revived British army of veterans from the war with America; or else (perhaps less likely) he might have settled for a restored Empire including Belgium but otherwise at peace with his neighbours. Europe in 1840 would surely not have looked very different if Waterloo had gone the other way (except, as noted, for Belgium). Waterloo put an end to Napoleon’s career, but he had peaked in 1812 and it was always going to be downhill from there. In the end, I was actually left wondering if it was all necessary.