This was a very good run of plays. Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Othello and most of all Hamlet are all brilliant plays. There is a certain cruelty to the comedy in both The Merry Wives of Windsor and Twelfth Night, but both are still very enjoyable. I was a bit less sure about Troilus and Cressida (because of Cressida’s abrupt switch of loyalties), and by the odd sexual politics of All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, though both could be very impressive in the right hands.

I veered a bit from my loyalty to the Arkangel series here – watching the Branagh version of Much Ado About Nothing and the BBC version of Troilus and Cressida. Good to have a bit of variety.

An interesting question raised in my mind by Morgan Llewellyn’s Red Branch: what is the origin of the name Ulster?

She has a throwaway reference to the Ulaid being named for the wool they produced – this would link the word to modern Irish olann, which is a cousin of Welsh gwlan and goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European *wlna and thus English woollen, and (dropping the initial w) Latin lana and French laine.

But not everyone believes this; the shift from the initial o of olann to u of Ulaid seems unpopular among linguists. Instead the received wisdom, including that of the great Pokorny, is that the ul of Ulaid is from Irish ulcha meaning “beard”. This root supposedly comes from Proto-Indo-European *pul- which otherwise has only an obscure Greek cognate transcribed as pylinx and meaning hair on the posterior, and an Old Indian root pula meaning when your hairs standing on end.

Ptolemy calls the people of the northern part of Ireland the “Uoluntii”, which doesn’t help as it is evidence in both directions.

I was a bit dubious about the idea that Celtic words drop an original Indo-European “p”, but this turns out to be reasonably well attested – the root *palam turns into Latin palma and thus English “palm”, but Irish lamhpater/athair and first/primus/roimh. So I am convinced by that bit.

But for some reason I prefer the idea that the Ulaid were so-called because they were wool producers rather than because they had beards (which would I suppose make them equivalent to the Lombards). It seems more convincing to derive the toponym from economic activity than shaving fashions. (However, if there is no other case of an initial o shifting to u in Irish names, I shall have to concede to the beard theory.)

A fairly hefty (550 pages) reworking of the Cuchulain legends I think I still like ‘s The Prize in the Game more, but this is a decently told tale, with due respect given to the facts of geography and the findings of archæology.

Stephen King may not be the best remedy for insomnia… I think the only one of his novels I had previously read was Hearts in Atlantis, which I very much enjoyed. The Stand drew me in but I am not sure if I really enjoyed it. The story starts off as a gripping disaster narrative, as most of humanity gets wiped out by a flu virus (developed, of course, by the US military) and the few survivors begin to cluster together. Then we take a turn to the fantastic, as everyone begins to dream about an old black woman in Nebraska and a sinister white man in Las Vegas, who represent the forces of good and evil. I must say I found this set-up rather unsatisfactory in terms of world-building; the means and motivation of both sides remained rather unclear, with both the evil white dude and the nice black lady (who is incidentally almost the only person of colour in a very large cast of characters, apart from some stereotyped tribesmen at the very end) able to call on supernatural powers, which in turn fail them inexplicably at moments convenient to the forward movement of the plot. The struggle of the good guys against the bad guys made for thrilling reading, but the payoff is that the bad guys lose due to their own internal division, and the efforts of the good guys actually had nothing to do with the outcome, so all that struggle as pretty pointless in anything other than character-building terms. The version I got is the expanded 1100-page edition, but I suspect I would have been just as happy with the 900-page original. Good for long plane flights and the subsequent jetlag.

George R.R. Martin, with support from John Scalzi and Charles Stross, on the reasons why the next Song of Ice and Fire volume is late and how the fans are Not Being Helpful. I’ve been rather appalled by some of the arrogant and rude comments Martin has been getting from drive-by visitors to his livejournal, and am if anything impressed that his response is relatively civil. I’m sure that behaviour like that makes it more difficult for Martin to get motivated.

Having said which, I too can’t wait for the appearance of A Dance With Dragons…

The Haunting of Thomas Brewster introduces the eponymous Brewster, played by John Pickard who I understand is a soap star, as a new companion to the Fifth Doctor. The story ambitiously portrays a mid-Victorian milieu, and the script conveys the setting very well. Unfortunately there are several killer flaws in the play. The first is the incidental music, which starts out really good but becomes tired through over-use. The second is guest star Pickard as Brewster, who seems unable to tell the difference between commas and full stops in his lines. The third is the rather gratuitous way the Doctor allows other characters to be killed off. So plenty of marks for trying, but it didn’t work for me.

The Death Collectors failed totally to engage my interest, yet more monsters with silly voices and Sylvester McCoy shouting a lot.

By contrast the one-ep story Spider’s Shadow, on the same BF release, seemed to me a really neat time/space paradox with Seven trying desperately to avoid being caught by the bubble as it collapses.

Peter Davison is cruel in the extra tracks of The Boy That Time Forgot: “So imagine my surprise when I saw that they had brought Adric back, only this time he is being played by … an actor!!!” Indeed, Adric survived the crash of Earthshock, and is now in charge of a prehistoric kingdom of intelligent scorpions. But don’t worry, Nyssa, he has decided that you shall be his queen. The Doctor, however, is to be eaten. The story treads on uncertain ground but does it pretty confidently, helped immensely by Andrew “Manuel/prank phone calls” Sachs as the aged and crazed Adric. Unfortunately John Pickard returns as Brewster at the end, but you can’t have everything.

The Doomwood Curse was my favourite of this run. Charley and Six, having visited a far-future library, find themselves caught in the fictional world of Dick Turpin. This is territory Who has occasionally dipped into, most memorably in The Mind Robber, but done with great conviction here, especially by India Fisher who plays Charley Pollard as a gangster’s moll. Excellent fun.

Both Kingdom of Silver and Keepsake seemed to me unusually dull even for Seven/Cyberman stories. Apparently they fit into the continuity of BF’s sequence of Cyberman plays; I might give them another try in that context.

In summary: The Doomwood Curse and The Boy That Time Forgot are good, the others not so much.

Review in NYT.

Good heavens, that was exciting!

In this short book, Economist correspondent Tim Judah has simply put down on paper the basics about Kosovo, up to the declaration of independence about a year ago. I know the author well and I know the subject well, so I may be biased, but it seemed to me a good and pretty neutral guide to the facts about Kosovo’s history, and the problematic future of its relations with the EU and its neighbourhood. (Though I still don’t believe Carla del Ponte’s organ-legging story deserves any airtime – Doug Muir fisked it ages ago.) Recommended for anyone wanting a quick decent guide: I wish there were similar books for Bosnia and Macedonia.

In Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Gould makes a strong and eloquent case that science and religion can and do normally get on just fine; that despite the extremes of creationists on the one side and (though Gould does not name him) Richard Dawkins on the other, in fact most practitioners of both science and religion recognise that they are answering different questions, and are sensible enough to stay out of areas in which they are not experts. I agreed with almost everything in it, and recommend the book to anyone interested in a saner take on the issue than we sometimes get.

This is the translation of The Odyssey by T.E. Lawrence. The narrative is, of course, very dense, as you would expect from transposing epic poetry into prose, and I rather felt that I should read it again some time over a period of weeks, taking one of the 24 chapters each day in several translations. The central narrative has more of Odysseus’ son Telemachus than I had realised – he goes off on an initial quest for his father and then is instrumental in engineering his return to Ithaca. I was also startled by the brutal violence with which Odysseus and Telemachus dispose of Penelope’s suitors and the maidservants. Most of the stories I already knew from other reading, but it was interesting to get a sense of the original.

I got this collection mainly because it had the only Erimem story I had not otherwise read or listened to – “The Gangster’s Story”, by Jon de Burgh Miller. I was not bowled over by it, or indeed by many of the other stories in the collection, which is built around a theme of people whose survival affects the Web of Time and who are therefore removed from history by the Doctor – completely un-Doctorish behaviour, it seemed to me. I did rather like Kathryn Sullivan’s “The Diplomat’s Story”, but otherwise you can give this one a miss.

here.

Does anyone have a suggestion for decent webwriting software? I used to use NVU and then Kompozer but am getting annoyed with them both.

Ramush Haradinaj to mediate in Ugandan conflict?

In Write It When I’m Gone, DeFrank chronicles three decades of interviews with Gerald Ford, from his appointment as Vice-President in late 1973 to a final conversation in late 2006. For most of that time, Ford was old news; he ruled himself (with some bitterness) out of the presidential running fairly early in 1980 and settled down to being an elder statesman. There’s nothing terribly startling in any of DeFrank’s revelations: Ford didn’t like Reagan, but liked Carter even less until they unexpectedly bonded on the way back from Sadat’s funeral; Ford was never really on speaking terms with his predecessor as Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, although they lived very close to each other in retirement; Ford generally backed Cheney and Rumsfeld, his own chiefs of staff, but thought Cheney should have been dropped from the Bush 2004 ticket; Ford and Clinton negotiated about his possibly having a role in the Lewinsky impeachment crisis, but it came to nothing. But in general it’s the account of a journalist’s admiration for a decent chap who didn’t want to be President but accepted the office when it was thrust upon him, and who had few bad words for anyone (except Carter and Reagan, and even then he ultimately relented on them both).

I am on the road this week, and have been listening inter alia to Big Finish’s recent production of three Doctor Who plays originally written for the stage.

Seven Keys to Doomsday, by Terrance Dicks, has the Doctor acquiring two new companions, regenerating into Trevor Martin, and then going on a rather pointless quest to find seven bits of crystal which fit together to form a mystical key. It obviously inspired the Key to Time season a few years later, but I think it looked better than it sounds.

The Ultimate Adventure, also by Terrance Dicks, has Colin Baker, a French companion, and several songs, as at the request of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher they try and rescue the American delegate to the world peace conference who has been captured by Daleks and Cybermen. Unlike Seven Keys to Doomsday, it is not actually bad, but it is on the whimsical side.

The best of the three plays is the earliest, Curse of the Daleks, written in 1965 by Terry Nation. I was amused to note that we begin with convicts on a spaceship which they manage to take control of and bring to another planet where they have to do a deal with the local baddies – the second episode of Blake’s Seven reworks this with surprisingly few changes. Later parts of the plot, with the Daleks’ human stooge reviving them, were recycled by David Whitaker in the first Troughton story, Power of the Daleks. On top of providing the source material for those two excellent later pieces, Curse of the Daleks has a rather good “who’s the traitor” plot, and Nick Briggs does the best linking narration for any of the three plays. Recommended.

I was moderately impressed by the audio original version of this story, but I really liked the book. It is a real shame that Barry Letts has written so few Who novels; his Doctor Who and the Dæmons is one of the best Third Doctor novelisations. It’s an enjoyable romp round the Brigadier’s elderly relative’s Italian castle, largely but not entirely told from Sarah Jane Smith’s pov, with a little bit of coloration from Letts’ own theological speculations. Definitely one of the Missing Adventures to look out for (and thanks, , for sending it to me).

It’s rather weird to hear from one of my former interns that her husband has just been made Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Defense at the Pentagon.