3) Daughters of Britannia: the Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives, by Katie Hickman

I’m probably being rather unfair to this book, but I’m giving up on it not quite half-way through. Hickman, herself a diplomat’s daughter, has pulled together an engaging collection of correspondence from the wives (and occasionally other female relatives) of British diplomats posted abroad throughout the last four centuries. The material is amusing and sometimes moving. But I felt that the book lacked a substantial intellectual framework, such as any serious interrogation of the concepts of Britishness, diplomacy, or wives. And I think Hickman did intend it to be that kind of book, but it isn’t.

I must say also that having lived abroad in three countries in the last twelve years, and having myself set up from scratch two local offices (and overseen the setting up of a third) for my various employers, I did find myself rather unsympathetic to some of the accounts of hardship reported by people whose government-funded bureaucracies weren’t always able to guarantee them a perfect quality of life. In the non-profit sector things are a bit different.

In fairness, some of the hardships are very real. Hickman’s father was deputy head of the British embassy in Dublin in 1976 when the ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, was killed by the IRA: perhaps the most moving section in the book (and one of the longest single extracts) is her mother’s description of the aftermath for the Ewart-Biggs family. It is the more vivid for me because I worked with Jane Ewart-Biggs many years later, administering the book prize established in her husband’s memory.

I’m inclined to put this up on Bookmooch, but I know that some on my friends list have a personal interest in this topic, so you folks get first shout.

The first sentence of the first lj entry for each month:

January: A lot of people on are doing this: basically, mark any of these books which you have ever read (not just in 2007). My increasingly traditional book poll. (This year’s one will be a bit trickier to lay out.)

February: …which Torchwood character are you?, from The Guardian. I will not say who I turned out to be. (I have forgotten by now.)

March: I read with great interest this review of Kate Fisher’s Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain 1918-1960 – so much so that I didn’t even spot the name of the reviewer. The reviewer was one Harry Cocks.

April: Just received an exciting message from WAYN.com (“the worlds’ largest travel and lifestyle community”, WAYN standing for “Where Are You Now”). Yet another crap social network.

May: I must admit I wouldn’t normally read a book like this; it came free with the Palm T|X back in November 2005, and I had pretty much laid that gadget aside since I got a Blackberry with my new job last year. Review of Pat Conroy’s novel, The Prince of Tides.

June: I know this is a heretical view, given that this is such a popular and well-loved book, but I found it terrifically tough going. Review of Little, Big, by John Crowley.

July: I have never been all that convinced by Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which “proves” that there is no perfect voting system and made its author the youngest ever winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics. My views on why Arrow got it wrong.

August: So, did anyone else see it? The partial solar eclipse on 1 August.

September: Picked this up on a friend’s recommendation of the author last month, and I must say I was really impressed. Review of Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane. (Can’t remember who recommended him to me now.)

October: What name is missing? First names of US Presidents. (Second post of the month, as first was locked.)

November: 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. Review of Andrew Roberts’ book on the Battle of Waterloo.

December: I picked this up in Paris a few weeks back, and was inspired to re-read it – of course, I had first read it as a teenager – by young F picking up Zlata’s Diary to read at the weekend. Review of the Diary of Anne Frank.

Picking, say, 2 September 1972, and browsing through Wikipedia:

Nicolette “Coco” Krebitz, German actress and director (shown to the right on the cover of the New Order album Get Ready)
Bakhtawar Murad, better known as Sonam, Bollywood actress (this was her big hit).
Vincent De Paul, American actor
Marcus Nigsch, better known as Marque, Austrian musician
Sergej Trifunović, Bosnian Serb actor
Yoshiaki Takahashi, Japanese actor (killed in a road accident in 1989)
Erika Narumi, Japanese voice-over actor
Kobun Shizuno, Japanese anime director

Syleena Johnson, American musician. (Though some sources give her birthdate as 1976.)
Alberto Rionda, Spanish musician.

Maurto Denigris, Italian journalist.
Atsushi Kawashima, Japanese TV announcer

Pat Watkins, baseball player
Søren Colding, Danish footballer
Maksim Nizovtsev, Kazakh footballer
James Willis, American football player
Silvia Gemignani, Italian athlete
Katarína Studeníková, Slovakian tennis player
Leon Cameron, Australian rules footballer
Garfield Gonsalves, Antiguan footballer
Mefin Davies, Welsh rugby player
Betty Lise, French athlete
Thomas Schertwitis, Kazakh/German water polo player
Jermaine Guice, American basketball player
Elżbieta Trześniewska, Polish basketball player
Takaharu Murahama, Japanese mixed martial art fighter

Which all goes to show that the birthdates of people in showbiz and sports tend to be fairly well known.

I had originally planned to take last Thursday and Friday and Friday off work, so as to do research on the Nicholas White/William Cecil correspondence in the National Archives and British Library, and also take in the Tun on Thursday night. But alas, events gradually conspired against me; an important meeting in Brussels was scheduled for Thursday morning, the National Archives are closed, and I have two VIP visitors coming next week whose agendas need preparation, so in the end I settled for buying two books about William Cecil second-hand off the internets. I will probably try this trip early next year though, so possibly see some of you in the Melton Mowbray on 5 February.

Meantime, have a couple of links:

ponders the similarities between physical and psychological stress.

is working on some more lj network mapping – not quite perfected yet, but worth watching.

Monitoring your MEP – Real Soon Now.

Anagrams: Howl hesitancy. Welsh China toy. I watch shy Noel.

2) Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture, by Patrick E. McGowan

An impulse purchase while in the Fitzwilliam Museum the other week, this is a survey of recent findings in archaeology about early wine-making. McGowan concludes that grapes were first domesticated for wine-making in eastern Turkey or the south Caucasus (certainly my Georgian friends would agree, and would be a bit more specific). We wander around Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean, using the latest analytical techniques to try and pin down places of production and trade routes. The extent of the wine trade into ancient Egypt in particular was pretty remarkable, and the Mesopotamian sacred barmaids rather intriguing.

I wasn’t completely satisfied by the book, however. It seemed a bit of an artificial distinction to relegate beer and mead to mere details, when it would seem that beer was at least as widespread. And while the argument about the extent of ancient international trade in wine was well developed, I would have liked more comparison with trade in other luxury goods, or indeed other goods at all. I have to say also that the style is at times an uncomfortable mix of the anecdotal and the jargon-ridden. I couldn’t really recommend this book to people who are not already somewhat interested in the archaeology and culture of the period.

I have been working Very Hard today, so haven’t fully kept up with Livejournal. I will say this: at one point in the evening twilight I saw a glowing neon sign on a Brussels building which appeared to say PIJE, which means "drinks" in Albanian and also Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. When I looked a bit closer I realised it was a sign saying PUB with a shadow over the middle of the U and another over the right-hand side of the B. But the basic concept is similar. I suppose.

Anyway.

Terry Pratchett on his illness.
 makes blue string pudding.
Harry Brighouse on Kenneth Morgan on Michael Foot.
Various Canadians are traumatised at the thought of a coalition government, for the first time since 1917. Oh dear, poor diddums.

1) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank

I picked this up in Paris a few weeks back, and was inspired to re-read it – of course, I had first read it as a teenager – by young F picking up Zlata’s Diary to read at the weekend.

Gosh.

I had forgotten just how gripping the story actually is – eight people stuck in hiding, with the inevitable personality clashes between two married couples with three children and an older, not-quite-confirmed bachelor; the story told by the youngest (but, by her own account, smartest) of the crew; the desperate grasping for hope as the news of the war starts gradually to turn to the possibility of a German defeat; Anne’s fifteen-year-old love for the seventeen-year-old Peter; and the final, crushing, end of the narrative in mid-stream as the Franks and their fellow fugitives are taken from the back-streets of Amsterdam, never (with one exception) to return. I cried on the train tonight reading the final pages of the book, and I challenge anyone to read it and remain unmoved.

A number of points seemed very fresh to me (perhaps also they were not so visible in the edition I would have read 25 years ago). The Franks and their fellow fugitives were from Germany; Anne and her sister actually teach the others Dutch at various points, and she expresses her desire to become a full Dutch citizen after the war. I don’t remember previously reading of, for instance, the extent of Anne’s problems relating to her mother, or of the difficulties of the lavatory arrangements; I think the new version of the account is stronger for including them.

I have a minor concern about the translation. In the very first entry – the only one in this edition given in the original Dutch – Anne, addressing “Kitty”, her new diary, says ik hoop dat je een grote steun aan me zult zijn. The English translation is “I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support”. Well, frankly, it’s a bit of a stretch from the single noun steun to “source of comfort and support” – normally it would just mean “support”, and having spotted the translator over-egging the meaning here, I wonder where else it may have happened. This may be a minor quibble (I’ll get a Dutch edition for young F, and decide for myself). The major point is that Anne Frank beats out the most impressive teenage livejournaller by a factor of ten or a hundred.

And she died. She ded horribly and painfully and unnecessarily, along with millions of other people, as a result of evil decisions made by evil men. And her story is the more vivid because she wrote about it; but there were six million other Jews killed because they were Jewish, and millions of others killed for similar reasons of state policy. Those incredible figures become more real to us from reading her account; but she was only one among millions.