• Brussels Comment: A Private EU Battle
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• Johann Hari: Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason – Johann Hari, Commentators – The Independent
  The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can’t afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can’t access the care they require. That’s equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year.
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Soon after I moved to Brussels in 1999, I was having lunch with John Cushnahan (then a Fine Gael MEP, and a former leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland) in the European Parliament, when he briefly broke off our conversation to greet Robert Ramsay as he passed by. Cushnahan, not a political lightweight in any sense of the word, is a somewhat acerbic personality, so I was struck by the respect he clearly had for our fellow-countryman, a senior European Parliament official, who I frankly had never heard of before.

Well, I know about him now. The core market for this book – people who have escaped Northern Irish politics for a career in Brussels – is admittedly rather small, but I certainly qualify. Ramsay was a high-flyer in the Northern Ireland Civil Service, where he worked from 1964 to 1983, and then came to Brussels until his retirement in 1999 (though he remains engaged). Most remarkably, he served as PPS to Brian Faulkner, when the latter was Minister for Commerce in the late 1960s and again when he was the last Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. After a gap of a few years, he then found himself doing the same job for Roy Mason who was the Labour Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the late 1970s. He had always been a firm European, and welcomed the growth of the European project at the same time as the Northern Ireland situation deteriorated. He moved to Brussels to become the secretary-general of the European Democrats group of MEPs, and then masterminded the election of his boss as President of the European Parliament in 1987 for an intense term which ended in 1989. Apart from that he did various other public service jobs and took time out to write a book about Corsica.

The book comes across as a clear and honest account of the view he had of events. He is not awfully sensitive to the grievances of Catholics under Stormont rule; while he is at pains to rule out institutionalised discrimination over, say, the siting of the new university at Coleraine, he expresses utter bafflement as to why these decisions were made. There is a repeated theme of the bad stuff not really having happened on his watch, and therefore uncertainty as to whether it happened at all. (Though he also has a blind spot about the Orange Order, for which he has no understanding or sympathy.)

His account of working with Faulkner is probably the most interesting part of the book, in particular the dynamics around the suspension of Stormont and introduction of Direct Rule in 1972, which probably includes the most intimate portrayal of what it was like to work with Faulkner that we will ever get. Ramsay is clearly still conflicted about these events, and his account is contradictory with itself in places, as well as introducing elements that were new to me. First off, he admits up front that once the British Army had been deployed in August 1969, Stormont’s pretensions to autonomy were gone. But he then blames Edward Heath for “betraying” Faulkner, by abolishing Stormont in March 1972, motivated (in an original and intriguing analysis) by fear of possible French objections to British and Irish membership of the EEC (as it then was), rather than by any real security concerns (which were almost entirely Heath’s responsibility by then anyway). By his own account, the die had been cast almost three years earlier, and in any case from Ramsay’s perspective (as from Heath’s) the price was surely one worth paying. But that is perhaps to look at it too intellectually. It is clear that the introduction of direct rule killed Ramsay’s sense of loyalty to the concept of Britishness, and shaped the rest of his career.

One other passage from the 1971 period caught my eye. The Faulkner of Ramsay’s account is a moderniser and thus a reformer, rather than a sensitive or strategic thinker, motivated to reform local government and housing by the obvious requirements of the day. But his arrival as Prime Minister is presented as a genuine new beginning for organic evolution of the Stormont apparatus into something resembling what we have today, cynically disrupted by the SDLP at the behest of the Irish government. Ramsay mourns the casual discarding of the olive branch offered by Faulkner in March 1971. But I have to say that he is the only writer of the period who I have read who identifies this as a particular missed opportunity; his account may well reflect the wishful thinking inside Faulkner’s office, but it doesn’t appear to have been communicated well to the rest of the world if so. A bit further on, his defence of internment, a decision made by Faulkner in August 1971 with Ramsay present at many of the crucial discussions, is deeply unconvincing even on its own terms.

Ramsay’s subsequent career is not as fascinating (he was out of the country in the crucial 1973-74 period), but he has a great supply of anecdotes and personal glimpses – arguing taxation policy with Prince Philip, trying to chase lost government papers which a junior minister thinks may have been fed to the pigs, Margaret Thatcher squeezing his knee. His move to Brussels came at a time when the Tories had just set up their own little group of MEPs, but at a time when they were the more pro-European of the two main British parties, and Ramsay was able to jockey the relatively small group into a position of greater importance without too much difficulty, to the point that he was able to win the tightest election ever for the presidency of the Parliament starting from a very low base (he recounts with justifiable glee how he managed to swing the crucial votes of Fianna Fáil and Jean-Marie Le Pen). In the mid-1990s, he was involved with the setting up of the EU’s special funding programme for community projects in the name of the peace process (of which in general he takes a rather jaded view).

He finishes with some reflections on the future of Ulster in a Europe which he expects to split into fast-track and associated states (the latter, he believes, to be a potential parking spot for Turkey, whose membership he opposes for somewhat peculiar reasons). He sees the Union with Britain as a busted flush, and urges a more secure bedding of Ulster Scots as a European cultural identity; and he also sees this as possible in a post-Paisley environment (Paisley being one of several individuals of whom he has nothing good to say). Interesting thoughts, though I don’t see the DUP approaching this question with much imagination. He has received the unlikely support of veteran leftie Eamonn McCann.

There are some irritating errors with foreign names, including one appalling footnote about NATO which is probably libellous, but in general it is a much more interesting book than the title and rather drab cover would suggest.

I read Bates’ earlier book, The Genius of Shakespeare, at the end of last year, and very much enjoyed it; this didn’t grab me quite as much, but is still very good, concentrating on what Shakespeare’s works tell us about his environment – cultural, political and intellectual – rather than on the man and his legacy as in the earlier book. It is organised around the Seven Ages of Man speech, which gives a nice thematic progression. The chapters on the Essex rebellion of 1601, and on Shakespeare’s education and philosophy, are particularly worth reading. (It is certainly a book where you can dip in and out for particular chapters.)

I was puzzled therefore by a couple of gaps in the story. There is a good discussion of astrology and astronomy (Shakespeare was clearly a sceptic of horoscopes), but no mention of witchcraft or other aspects of the supernatural, which is a pretty huge lacuna – from Joan La Pucelle and the sorcerous Duchess in Henry VI 1 and 2, to the deities performing in The Tempest, unearthly powers are never far away. The other area which struck me listening especially to the later plays (though perhaps it doesn’t fit Bate’s intellectual scheme) is Shakespeare’s use of music, song and dance as an integral part of the play.

Still, a useful addition to the Shakespeare section of the bookshelf.

• Op-Ed Columnist – The Swiss Menace – NYTimes.com
  Nobel Prize winner on US health
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All three of these are rather good, and all seemed to me to succeed by not trying too hard. The Eyeless has the Doctor on his own, the other two feature Donna. In all three cases I listened to an abridged audio version, but I imagine that the full dead tree original is also worth picking up.

August Books 32) The Eyeless, by Lance Parkin

A rather effective story of the Doctor landing on a devastated planet, with confused and conspiring human factions, deadly robots and a young girl who is a lot more sinister than she first appears to be. Read by Russell Tovey who is very good at characterising the different speakers.

August Books 33) Beautiful Chaos, by Gary Russell

This I think is the best New Series Adventure I have yet come across. The audiobook is narrated by Bernard Cribbins, and Wilf Mott is a central character in the story which takes the Doctor and Donna back to contemporary London, dealing with the Noble family’s complex dynamics, and also with an old enemy (who also featured in the excellent second series of Sarah Jane audios, and whose presence is signalled by the introduction of a character called Dara Morgan). The astronomy is a bit off, but this is not a textbook. Strongly recommended.

August Books 34) Ghosts of India, by Mark Morris

Another pretty decent story featuring Ten and Donna, this time in India on the eve of independence, encountering Gandhi and competing aliens trying to take over and use the locals for their own purposes. I’m not totally familiar with Indian history of the period but this didn’t seem to me to have any obvious howlers. Two minor irritations: Morris continually refers to the sonic screwdriver as the “sonic”, and David Troughton reading it is not totally sure of Ten’s accent. But it’s generally good.

A slightly grim tale of 12-year-old Virginia, known as Rusty, who returns to her family in England in 1945 after five years in America, and finds huge difficulty in settling in (to her mother’s distress, she refers to America as “back home”n hence the title) and then faces further trauma of a repressive boarding school and her parents’ disintegrating marriage. Oddly paced in places, but has the courage of its convictions.

It is not so long since I first read this, but in the meantime I have read three other Austen novels so now have a basis of comparison.

Pride and Prejudice is much the best for my money. This is largely because of the strength of Elizabeth Bennet as a protagonist, and the portrayal of the other characters, especially the somewhat endearing hopelessness of most of the Bennet family. Also, Austen gets the mix between mocking the conventions of the day and actual plot pretty much right. Elizabeth is surprisingly self-confident for her age and given her family dynamics, but of course great stories are often written about unusual people. Darcy is also rather a paragon of enlightened beneficence, despite his occasional good-faith mistakes, but again he is a romantic male lead. The plot is tight and simple. All good stuff.

Galileo was born in 1564, two months before Shakespeare, but he outlived the English playwright by 26 years. Indeed, if Galileo too had died in 1616, he would be remembered as a promising observer and mathematician, killed off shortly after a theological rebuke came his way from Cardinal Bellarmine – his only major work then published was The Starry Messenger, with the Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems, which caused his biggest difficulties with the Church, not completed until 1632.

I have never been completely convinced by the revisionist story that one often gets (including from such unlikely quarters as Thomas Henry Huxley) that Galileo basically brought his condemnation by the Inquisition on himself. The story is a complex one and tends to get told as one of patronage politics gone wrong. Sobel, rightly in my view, brings us back to the scientific truth of Galileo’s observations; and whatever the reasoning and motives for Pope Urban VIII’s pursuit of him, the fact remains that the ecclesiastical authorities were given all the right information and came up with the wrong answer, and while Sobel doesn’t rub it in, she doesn’t veer from the central point either.

The central point is not, in fact, Galileo’s daughter; the title of the book is misleading. Galileo’s life is very charmingly illustrated by the letters he received from his daughter Sister Maria Celeste, born in 1600, over the period from 1623 to her early death in 1634, which of course cover the key moments of his own career. I shall always now think of him gardening in his leather jacket. But I think Sobel misses an opportunity to reflect on the life prospects of women like Galileo’s daughters, immured in the Poor Clares convent in their early teens – and their mother, who bore the scientist three children before marrying someone else. It is a necessary but absent piece of context.

Still, the book is a very good example of how to take a particular motherlode of primary source material and weave a good story around it.

…actually this is old news, but the forger of the Kenyan birth certificate for President Obama has actually posted pictures of the production of the fake for our delectation and delight. (And the post is dated 5th August, so I can’t claim it was in response to my appeal of the following day.)

The rubric to this one goes, "The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Instructions: Copy and bold those you have read." I’m not sure where the BBC made this statement, and the list bears a close resemblance to the BBC Big Read of a few years back. But anyway, here goes, with the additional strikingthrough of books I didn’t like:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (have read all the plays, but not all the poetry)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (odd to have it listed separately from Narnia…)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

83 read, three partially, 14 not yet.

The subtitle of this anthology is “Award-winning SF with Catholic Themes”, and it’s almost accurate – a couple of the stories did win awards, and most of them are at least loosely related to Catholicism. But I think that description rather undersells the collection, which is in general very good, and which really addresses the intersection between religion and science fiction from a number of different directions, not all of them obviously Catholic in sensibility; Robert Silverberg’s “The Pope of the Chimps”, for instance, looks at non-human religion. (I believe that all the other authors here are in fact Catholics, with the possible exception of Nancy Kress.)

Several other classics are included: “The Quest for Saint Aquin”, by Anthony Boucher; “A Case of Conscience” (the original short story, which is the first and best section of the novel) by James Blish; “A Canticle for Leibowitz” (the original version, much improved by the author for the novel) by Walter M. Miller. There are also a couple of good original stories by Gene Wolfe and Jack McDevitt.

I got a lot more out of this collection than I did from the collection of Jewish sf which I read last year, and I don’t think it is just because I am Catholic rather than Jewish. The editors here have consciously sought stories that engage intellectually with religion, rather than being based on cultural stereotypes (though admittedly the latter are not completely absent). I think this anthology would be much appreciated by any sf reader with an interest in religion and a basic knowledge of Christianity, and it’s a bit unfortunate that it was marketed solely to Catholics.

• Notes From The Geek Show: An Open Letter to John C. Wright
  Not sure if I can qualify as an Elder of Sodom but I agree entirely with the argument!
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• Making Light: True Tales of Health Insurance
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I was really disappointed by this book. Pinker starts out by claiming that he will explain the origins of human emotions, aesthetics, and belief in the context of the latest findings of evolutionary and psychological research. He does not really succeed in doing so. It is a succession of moderately interesting research reports, linked together with a glue of neat one-liners (mostly other people’s), but without really coming to a killer conclusion and indeed occasionally resorting to sheer polemic (eg on gender). The section on neural networks is particularly dull, especially as Pinker admits that living brains don’t actually function that way.

I found precisely two points of interest in the book, both pretty tangential to the main thrust of the argument. First, of interest only to those who also know her, is that an old family friend is mentioned in passing on the development of children’s minds. Second, of more general interest, is the observation that all cultures tend to design ornamental gardens with unconscious reference to the primeval African savannah – lawns and flowerbeds interrupted by carefully placed features. Rather a pleasing thought! This observation is not Pinker’s own, but he does give pretty full citations for it which the interested reader can follow up.

I hear that Pinker’s other books are better, so shall continue to look out for them though without particular enthusiasm.

August Books 25) Fables vol 9: Sons of Empire, by Bill Willingham

This volume really illustrates the problems of passing meaningful judgement on subsets of an ongoing series. It is very bitty; the bits make sense as contributions to the entirety of the narrative, but don’t hang together especially well combined rather arbitrarily here. It doesn’t help that of the numerous artists involved, one or two are distiinctly sub-standard.

August Books 26) Fables vol 10: The Good Prince, by Bill Willingham

Having grumbled about the last few volumes in the series (including vol. 11 which I read a couple of months back) I am relieved to say that I really liked The Good Prince, in which Ambrose, the former Frog Prince, attempts to lead an army of the resurrected to establish his own haven of peace and tranquility on the territory of the Adversary. It’s a good story; I felt it was not totally consistent with the way we’ve been given to understand the magic of the Fables works, but basically I suppose it can be handwaved into compatibility. It is a good, chunky volume of ten issues of the comic, all very nicely done (with the awful exception of one interlude which is separate from the main narrative).

The government of the Turks and Caicos Islands has been suspended and direct rule from London imposed.

I shall keep an eye on this.

After my note on Cullybackey I started to wonder if the Arthur family had left any legacy in Northern Ireland, and indeed a couple of days ago I found myself in Belfast walking from Arthur Square along Arthur Street past Arthur Place to Upper Arthur Street. Could it be, I wondered, that the future President’s family at one point found favour with Belfast’s city fathers and got commemorated?

Checking the records, it seems that Arthur Street doesn’t appear on the 1685 map or the 1737 one, but is there in 1833. (On the map it runs roughly north-south, Upper Arthur Street being the southern end which runs off the bottom edge of the map, just east of the church marked A67 [the Donegall Square East Methodist Church].) The river running through the area in the 1685 map is the Blackstaff, before it was diverted to enter the Lagan a bit further upstream, allowing houses to be built in Arthur Street / Victoria Square.

Well, Google Books gives me partial access to Marcus Patton’s 1993 booklet, Central Belfast: An Historical Gazetteer, enabling me to piece together the following sentence:

Eliza Street was probably named after Lady Elizabeth, daughter of the First Marquis [sic] of Donegall, with Charlotte Street, Amelia Street and Arthur Street being named after her siblings.

Debrett’s, available in full from Google Books, tells me that the first Marquess of Donegall (whose own dates were 1739-1799) had seven children by his first wife (and none by his second or third), listed as George Augustus (1769-1844), Arthur (1771-1788), Spencer Stanley (1775-1819), and the girls whose birthdates are discreetly omitted, Charlotte, Anne Henrietta, Elizabeth Amelia, and Emilia, all of whom apparently died young.

I’m not sure that I buy this story. Eliza Street, Charlotte Street, Amelia Street, and Henrietta Street which would also go with this pattern, are all to the south – in the case of Charlotte Street, some way to the south – of the Howard Street – Donegall Square – May Street axis where Upper Arthur Street ends. It does make sense that the marquess, who basically owned Belfast, would commemorate his dead daughters in the streets built in the later eighteenth century; but looking at the geography, Arthur Street should have been constructed a few decades earlier. I think it’s more likely that it commemorates the first marquess himself, rather than his son, as his name was also Arthur (as were all four of his predecessors as Earl of Donegall).

In any case, it’s pretty clear that there is no connection, or only a distant one, with the Presidential family of the Ballymena area. I remain on the lookout for local connections to the 21st President; next time I’m up in Derry, I shall ask my old friend Paul if he has any ideas.

• FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: Occam’s Razor and Health Care
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• Avuncular American: Earth To America: Chill On Health Care
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• Ignoring polling, Wash. Post redefines "center" as excluding public plan | Media Matters for America
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• trendpreneur – Resetting the clock: successful bodyhacking
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• PaulCornell.com: The Captain Britain Hugo Awards Thing
  (tags: sf)
• liz_marcs: Countries with Government Health Schemes: Talk About Your Health Insurance/Health Care Here
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• liz_marcs: Americans Only: Uninsured and Underinsured
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• And now the NHS not giving out drugs for free is apparently a bad thing – What You Can Get Away With
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• An Open Letter To My American Friends About The NHS – Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
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I have a notion of making my next big reading project to get through the whole of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a chapter at a time. The whole text is on-line here and elsewhere. I think I would like to pace it at about two chapters a week. I did start making notes on the earlier chapters at the beginning of this year, but paced it wrong and ran into the sand.

My question is, would anyone be interested in making this some kind of group activity? Perhaps set up a separate LJ account or community to cover it. I would commit to posting my own thoughts regularly, or indeed preferably spread that burden around other interested parties, starting in the first week of September.

On the other hand, perhaps it’s entirely adequate to just post here, tagging appropriately, along with a master index of the kind I pasted into my Shakespeare reviews after I had finished them. That is certainly the default option.

Views welcome.

These were three stories originally commissioned for the 23rd season of Doctor Who, which was then cancelled and reconceived as the Trial of a Time Lord season. Target, at the point that they were running out of stories to publish, latched onto them in 1989-90 and got the writers of the unbroadcast scripts to write them up in novel form. Two of them are apparently to be released as audios by Big Finish later this year, kicking off a new sequence of Six/Peri “Lost Stories”.

August Books 22) Doctor Who – The Nightmare Fair, by Graham Williams

This is a comeback story in a couple of ways: Williams had been the producer of Doctor Who in the later Tom Baker era, now returning to try his hand at writing a script for the show; and the villain is the Celestial Toymaker, who had featured in a 1966 story turning William Hartnell’s Doctor invisible and subjecting companions Dodo and Steven to playing a series of deadly games. This time round the Toymaker has set up shop in Blackpool, and the Sixth Doctor and Peri have to pursue him through a deadly amusement arcade to prevent him from Taking Ovar The Wurld, helped by a young man named Kevin Stoney (who must have been named for the actor who had portrayed the two great early Who supervillains, Mavic Chen and Tobias Vaughn).

It’s not hugely inspiring stuff, but no doubt would have been rescuable with decent performances and effects (and coming at the start of the season it would probably have got them). I have heard a fan-produced audio version which is utterly deflated by the poor performance of the person playing Peri, and of course didn’t have the resources that Big Finish will bring to it. Fans of the Toymaker, if there are any, will probably find The Magic Mousetrap, the recent Big Finish play with the Seventh Doctor, more satisfying.

August Books 23) Doctor Who – The Ultimate Evil, by Wally K. Daly

This is an odd case – probably the best of the three Missing Episodes books considered as a story (so it’s unfortunate that Big Finish won’t be doing it), but the worst written by some way; Daly, who is basically a TV and radio scriptwriter, has followed the by-the-numbers novelisation method of the Target books at their least compelling.

The story, as I said, is decent stuff: there is a planet whose two halves are at an uneasy peace with one another; there is a bad guy who is using Evil Tech to make them go to war and has subverted an ambitious aristocrat in one of the planet’s hemispheres; the Doctor is also subjected to mind control, and Peri almost gets some romance from a guy whose girlfriend, presumed dead in the first chapter, she resembles. I thought the Doctor let the bad guy off a bit lightly in the end, but basically enjoyed it apart from the clunky style.

August Books 24) Doctor Who – Mission to Magnus, by Philip Martin

It will be interesting to see what Big Finish manages to make of this story, because on the page it is a confused and confusing mess. We start with the Doctor being uncharacteristically terrified by a fellow Time Lord, who we are told was the class bully in Gallifrey, and who is in any case dispatched before we are a third of the way through. We have a planet populated by women and boys, all the men having died off, but not much is done with this interesting setup. It’s a Philip Martin script, so we also have Sil just being generally villainous. For some reason we also have the Ice Warriors, who appear at the half-way point, keep changing their minds about shooting people, and try and blow the planet into a new orbit for their own inexplicable motivations. The Doctor and Peri get to run around between all these elements. Despite this rather rich menu of happenings, the 120-page novel still feels padded in places. For completists only.

So, in summary, none of these will make my Top Five Doctor Who books list: or even, I am sorry to say, my Top Hundred.

I was surprised that so few of my top five suggestions related to Doctor Who. I admit that I got the meme from Who fandom, and you can see some of the excellent recent Who top fives listed on . Anyway, here are my four.

asks for my top five actors who have never played the Doctor who I would like to see in the role. I’m really bad at that kind of question, I’m afraid; I’m just not sufficiently engaged in stage and screen to have a meaningful opinion. So I shall pass on this one (though I also agree with Alex Wilcock that any of Peter Davison’s AVPP co-stars – Graham Crowden, David Troughton and Barbara Flynn – would have been fantastic).

asks for my top five Doctor Who adventures. I’m taking this to mean televised Who, both Old and New, since I listed my favourite Big Finish audios quite recently and will do novels below.

I tried doing this by taking the whole list and trimming it down, but that was insane. Instead I went through each of the Doctors and chose my favourite, plus one extra for Ten.

5) The War Games

Neil Gaiman has raved about his original memories of this series, shown forty years ago this spring. I can see why it had such an impact on him. There are of course two totally unforgettable moments in the story (two more than in most stories, let’s be honest) – the moment of recognition between the Doctor and the War Chief (played by Edward Brayshaw, later Mr Meeker in Rentaghost) at the end of episode 4, and the Time Lords’ destruction of the Doctor’s body at the end of the story. In between, despite the length, it keeps up a cracking good pace. The DVD released last month is already essential for any Who collection.

4) School Reunion

This story and Dalek both have New Who meeting with Old Who, but this is much the more enjoyable story – Sarah Jane speaks in a way for any of us who feel we have lost touch with our younger selves and with the people of our personal past. K9 will make you cry, a prediction that would have been impossible in the 1970s. It’s also one of the better moments of the Rose/Mickey/Ten dynamic. And, let’s not forget, it has Anthony Stewart Head as the chief baddie.

3) The Daleks’ Master Plan

I have an unfashionable love for the original third season, and especially this massive monster of a story, which seems to me to epitomise the science fantasy elements that Old Who was originally meant to be about. We lose not one but two companions to violent death; we have Nicholas Courtney making his first of many Who appearances; we have Kevin Stoney as the villainous Mavic Chen, not to mention Peter Butterworth as the Monk; and we have the Daleks at their most determined and villainous, and much less pantomimey than they subsequently became. Shame that only three of the twelve episodes survive, but the audio with Peter Purves narrating is great.

2) The Deadly Assassin

Tom Baker was and remains my favourite Doctor, but it’s difficult to pick out an individual story rather than simply rave about the entire era. However, if I must choose, it is probably this superb marriage of the talents of David Maloney as director and Robert Holmes as writer (the same team having done The Krotons rather less successfully), bringing (as with The War Games) new insights into the Doctor’s background and (as with Maloney’s earlier The Mind Robber) wacky psychedelic visions of artificial reality. Supported well by George Pravda and Bernard Horsfall in particular. Unfortunately it scores badly on the gender front (the only credited female actress plays the Voice of the Matrix). This is the beginning of a superb run of stories, Leela having had a particularly good start as a companion.

1) Blink

I felt a little guilty about including two Ten stories, since I actually rate Tennant below Hartnell and Ecclestone as well as T Baker, but really this is 45 minutes of concentrated terror and wonder, which barely qualifies as Doctor Who (having less Doctor in it than any other story bar Turn Left and Mission to the Unknown) except that it has the correct opening and closing titles. This is the episode I would show someone who knew nothing about the show to see if they could be convinced to try more. Though I would have to apologetically admit that it doesn’t get any better.

If I were doing top five Old Who, I would add The Talons of Weng-Chiang and The Caves of Androzani to my list; my top five New Who would also include The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, Dalek and Midnight.

asks for my top five Doctor Who novels. I take this to include all varieties of printed Who, which means that the novelisations, especially of the First Doctor, come out well.

5) Beautiful Chaos, by Gary Russell

This is cheating a bit as I haven’t finished it yet (and I’m not even reading it, I’m listening to Bernard Cribbins doing an abridged version), but it’s a brilliant exploration of Donna’s back-story, with plenty of household tension between her, Wilf and Sylvia, and the Doctor rather out of his depth. There isn’t another New Series Adventure as good as this so far; I hope I am not disappointed with the ending!

4) Doctor Who – The Romans, by Donald Cotton

This is a novelisation that completely re-imagines the story and turns it into a set of letters and diary entries following the protagonists around their Italian adventures, beautifully done by Cotton taking some liberties with Spooner’s original script.

3) Doctor Who and the Dæmons, by Barry Letts

An excellent account of what the producer/writer of this story would have preferred to appear on the screen – reasonably faithful to what actually did appear on the screen but without dodgy special effects and with somehow much more tension and excitement.

2) All-Consuming Fire, by Andy Lane

This is a superb pastiche of Doctor Who (Seven, Ace and Benny in this case) with the Cthulhu Mythos and Sherlock Holmes, from Virgin’s New Adventure range. Along these lines are also two other favourites Evolution by John Peel, which brings together Four, Sarah, Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling in person, and also Eye of Heaven, by Jim Mortimore, which takes Four and Leela on a Victorian sailing expedition to the Pacific.

1) Doctor Who and the Daleks, by David Whitaker

Doctor Who novels have been on a continuous if occasionally interrupted decline since 1964. Actually that’s not true at all, but the very first of them is still the best – a total rewrite of the beginning of the story, much more explicit if understated romance between Ian and Barbara, glorious description of the Daleks themselves as unfamiliar entities, credible tight first-person narration by Ian; this is still the mark which all other Who books should aim at, and not many come close to.

If I were doing top five novelisations only, Ian Marter’s Doctor Who – The Rescue and Ian Briggs’ Doctor Who – The Curse of Fenric would have made the list. For my top five pre-Nine spinoff novels, I’ve mentioned three above; my other favourites are Kim Newman’s novella Time and Relative and Steve Lyons’ Salvation, both featuring the First Doctor with resectively Susan and Dodo/Steven. Of the Ninth and Tenth Doctor novels, my top five would also include Sting of the Zygons by Stephen Cole, The Feast of the Drowned also by Cole, Only Human by Gareth Roberts, and Winner Takes All by Jacqueline Rayner.

asks for my top five Doctor Who villains.

5) The Master

It’s impossible to do a top five Who villains list which doesn’t include the Master. (It’s difficult to do one that doesn’t include Davros or the Black Guardian, but I think I have succeeded.) What’s odd is that the Master’s stories, on the whole, are not actually the best ones. (Probably the best Master story apart from The Deadly Assassin is Utopia, which hardly has him in it.) But he is such a fundamental part of Who that he can’t be ignored. (And I have to admit he pwns the other renegade Time Lords – the Monk, the Rani, the dismal Drax and Azrael.)

4) Sharaz Jek

Let’s hear it for the disfigured sinister guy! (Scaroth, Last of the Jagaroth, and Magnus Greel came close to taking this spot.) Sharaz Jek is not totally villainous, which is what makes him so memorable – one of many good things about The Caves of Androzani.

3) Tobias Vaughn

Vaughn is the best of a super array of villains who confronted the Second Doctor. I love them all – Salamander, the War Chief, the Great Intelligence, the Ice Warrior leaders, Maxtible, the Master of the Land of Fiction, even mad professor Zaroff; the Troughton era is brilliant in its variety of nasties. But Vaughn is way the most interesting, doing deals with the Cybermen to try and Take Over The World in The Invasion.

2) Mr Finch / Brother Lassar

New Who by contrast has been rather weak on villains, tending toward the pantomimey (including, I’m sorry to say, Simm!Master). Outstandingly the best (if we count the Weeping Angels as monsters rather than villains) must be Giles from Buffy playing a giant bat-creature in School Reunion. That scene by the swimming pool still sends shivers down my spine.

1) Mavic Chen

Sorry to go on about it, but Mavic Chen totally pwns Davros in every respect. He has gained elected office by his own skills, and is the first of many Who villains to think he can gain power by doing a deal with the monsters (as his successor and twin Vaughn does with the Cybermen). His story is a fascinating one of a fall from grace. Again, it’s a real shame that only three of his episodes survive.