• The Art of Penguin Science Fiction
  (tags: sf)
• America’s Groucho Marxists
  Chris Patten: We know that despite its great wealth – and its groundbreaking medical research – America’s health-care system is awful. It is hugely expensive. Its costs overwhelm workplace health-insurance schemes. The poor go unprotected. Too many of the sick are untreated. Overall health statistics are worse than those in comparable countries.
  (tags: ushealth)

• BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Five consumer laws you really ought to know
  (tags: law)

I resolved to buy and read this several years ago after my argument with Ken MacLeod about the so-called Glorious Revolution; it appeared to be the most recent heavyweight academic analysis of the period.

Scott’s subtitle is “Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context”, but actually that’s not really what the book is about. His argument is that all four Stuart kings (James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II) were faced with similar problems of statecraft and in fact made very similar mistakes, with the result that two were deposed (and one of those was executed). He is most interested in the intellectual reasons given by the protagonists in the struggle between the kings and their opponents (who usually controlled the House of Commons and London). In particular, he boils down the cause of the “troubles” to a) the fear of the Stuarts that their opponents were motivated by the intention of reducing the monarchy to the status of the Doge of Venice, or to abolish it altogether; and b) the fears of their opponents that the successive kings intended to introduce “Popery and arbitrary government”.

The kings were certainly correct in their suspicions, as is demonstrated by the historical facts that the monarchy was in fact abolished for a decade, and restored in 1660 only by promising to restrict its freedom of action with respect to parliament (a promise broken by both Charles II and James II, which was therefore tightened up still further for William III). Scott goes into considerable detail on the political theorising of the radical republicans throughout the mid-century, both before their victory in 1648 and the reversal of that victory in 1660. I am sceptical about the usefulness of political theory in current international relations, but it seems OK to look at it as a cultural phenomenon to explain behaviour as here.

He has to plead a lot harder, and in my mind unsuccessfully, for comprehension of the radicals’ fears of popery and arbitrary government, though he certainly makes it very clear that “fundamental conservatism, intolerance and anti-catholicism [were] the bases of English parliamentary policy”. I’m not equipped to deal with this very neutrally, as I grew up with people marching past our house asserting that the Glorious Revolution was good for them and not for me. It has always seemed significant to me that the final straw for James II’s rule came when he attempted his Declaration of Indulgence as a liberalising gesture not just for Catholics but also for Dissenters (something his brother had attempted as early as 1662). I don’t claim him as a great liberal hero, but it seems ludicrous to claim his opponents as such (though some of my lefty friends do).

Scott’s basic message seemed to me that these two conflicting ideas, combined with the financial and military weakness of England after Elizabeth I bankrupted the kingdom, made conflict inevitable; the Stuarts were driven to making stupid policy decisions by their own preconceptions and by the intransigence of their domestic opposition. I instinctively and deeply disagree. I suspect that the Stuarts made stupid policy decisions because they were stupid, and that better men (or women) would have made better decisions – in particular that they could have found a way of coming to terms with the domestic situation without having to depend on the good will of the King of France. William III, after all, was able to do so (and one of the best chapters shows just how contingent the 1688 invasion was on domestic Dutch politics).

So, an interesting book, but I disagreed with the main conclusion, there is very little on Ireland (where the backwash of the English troubles was particularly calamitous and horrible), and I could have survived with less on the radical political thinkers.

I admit that I only bought this because the author has the same name as a friend of mine who has a key back-room role in British politics; next time I see him I will give him this book as I don’t especially feel the need to treasure it in my collection.

It’s a somewhat confused tale of two wrongly accused prisoners breaking out and discovering that the USA (indeed, the world) of 2030 is on the brink of biological catastrophe. The point of the book seems mainly to be the escape sequences of the first half, followed by the resistance against the bad guys of the second half, which are decently enough written. The elements of a good book are all there but somehow don’t quite gel.

• reading_gibbon: Chapter II: Of the Union and Internal Prosperity of the Roman Empire in the Age of the Antonines
  (tags: gibbon)

I was trying to read this book while feeling ill, and we did not really get on. I wish in retrospect that I had followed the author’s advice to read just the first four chapters (when authors tell you not to bother reading what they have written, it is often advice worth taking) and that I had waited until I was feeling better, because reading about the horrible digestive problems of Eggers’ dying mother was not really what I needed at the time. (I am feeling much improved today, thank you.)

It is not a bad book. Dave, as twenty-something narrator, finds himself looking after his much younger brother after their parents die, so he combines the lifestyle of a young Californian magazine editor with his paternal responsibilities. We are meant to take it as a non-fiction memoir with fictionalised elements, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a novel which leans more heavily than usual on personal experience. As noted above, it goes on rather too long, and my edition came with a rambling foreword which I found self-indulgent (by which I mean boring).

• Thatcher told Gorbachev Britain did not want German reunification – Times Online
  No big surprise.
  (tags: history)
• Treatment of Alan Turing was "appalling" – PM | Number10.gov.uk
  (tags: ukpolitics sexandsexualityandgender)

Stuck with two heavy serious books on my uncomfortable travels on Wednesday, I realised to my relief that I had downloaded this ebook from Project Gutenberg some time ago (onto my Blackberry, using Mobipocket – none of that silly DRM’ed stuff, thank you) and it kept me going.

I had gone off the Barchester Chronicles a bit after not really enjoying the second’s retreading of the first’s territory, so it was good to find new ground being broken here. In fact it reminded me a lot of both Middlemarch and P.G. Wodehouse, though less serious than the former, less funny than the latter and frankly not quite as good as either.

It is pretty obvious from the word go that Frank and Mary are destined for each other, not least because Trollope interrupts and delays the narrative to tell us so (which I find a bit precious). It also becomes obvious at a very early stage how Frank’s mother’s snobbish objections to Mary’s (relative) poverty will be overcome, to the point that I found myself wondering how on earth Trollope was going to keep to book going for another x hundred pages (answer: by introducing more characters, or by blatant digression).

Although the characters are not especially three-dimensional, they kept my attention (more than Dave Eggers or seventeenth-century England). The happy ending is a bit of a cop-out, in that the social pretensions of Frank’s mother triumph rather than being seriously challenged (Mary is still illegitimate at the end of the book, but now she is rich so everything is all right). It’s a pleasant little tale as it is; I would have cheered a little harder if Frank and Mary had got on with their marriage on a modest income and without Lady Arabella’s blessing.

(In real life, when I have encountered people behaving badly about their children’s prospective weddings, they are usually repeating patterns of bad behaviour learnt from their own parents, often indeed about their own weddings; Trollope doesn’t really indicate that as being a factor here.)

Anyway, I enjoyed it, especially the election chapters (always a winner for me).

• Ireland’s Eurocrats sound the Lisbon alarm | Charlemagne’s notebook | Economist.com
  (tags: eu ireland)

I am not convinced that the British House of Lords should be replaced by an elected upper chamber.

First off, I am not wildly convinced about upper chambers in general. It seems to me that a lot of countries with unicameral systems – the Scandinavians, most of the Balkans, the longer-lasting democracies of Africa and Central America – do perfectly well without. Croatia abolished its upper house a few years back, as part of a general liberalisation of its political system. The Senate Chamber of the Hungarian parliament is beautiful but empty, and there is no cry to fill it up again.

Conversely I am not persuaded that any of the countries with two fully elected chambers really benefits much from the experience. Certainly there is no good argument to be had about democratic legitimacy; if you have one house whose members are entirely elected on a fair voting system, why do you need two? Both Romania and Italy have experienced constitutional crises in the last couple of years precisely because the will of the voters was reflected slightly differently in the two houses. It seems to me an avoidable error.

If you have a fully federal system, as in Germany or Switzerland, it is of course a different matter; when your country is at least in theory composed of different units, they deserve formal representation of some kind in the legislature. I have to say that the German solution, of each of the Länder governments appointing its own Bundesrat delegates, strikes me as preferable, but there are many other ways of doing it. And there are also unicameral countries of considerable internal diversity.

The arguments in favour of having an upper house all revolve around checking on the executive rushing through bad legislation. But I think this needs some unpacking. The issue of “rushing” can be dealt with by having a properly elected legislative chamber which actually scrutinises the executive. (I have written before of the foolishness of restricting the membership of the executive to parliamentarians.) The issue of quality control is trickier. Testing for legality and constitutionality is essential but also fairly straightforward, and should be done by a properly constituted and empowered supreme court (and the UK has just taken a step in that direction). But I am uncomfortable with the idea that an upper chamber should be able to vote down a government proposal which has been passed in a democratically elected lower house because they disagree with it politically.

It does seem to me reasonable that there could be a revising process where the proposals of the lower house go before a panel of experts, preferably selected by an independent panel for a reasonably long term of office and barred from running for election to the lower house themselves while so serving. You could build regional (and gender and ethnic) representation into such a system rather easily. In fact that is not far off what the House of Lords is at the moment, once you get rid of felons, the remaining hereditaries, the bishops, the completely senile and those who are just there because they are rich.

But an elected upper chamber will simply have exactly the same kinds of people in it as the elected lower chamber, with the important difference (on current British propsals) that it will at least in part be elected fairly. It would be better to get rid of it entirely. I don’t see what value that adds to the legislative process, and I do see it as a distraction from the key issue of a democratically elected House of Commons.

I had a long uncomfortable journey yesterday feeling ill and trying to get through two rather heavy books which did little to cheer me up. As soon as I got home I went to bed, picking this off the shelf, and very much enjoyed it. Charles Pooter is a grotesquely comic creation, sometimes engaging our sympathy, sometimes the horror of recognition. He is a snob, a beast to his maid, certainly less clever than his wife or friends; he is boring and self-centred. But he is fascinating, and a brilliant window into the life of late Victorian London.

Incidentallly, George Grossmith was knocking this out for Punch while starring as the tragic jester Jack Point in the opening season of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Yeomen of the Guard”, having just finished a very successful run as the original Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner in “The Mikado”.

• dorianegray: Hmph. Today I read a book from Del Rey
  Author sets book in Dublin; fails
  (tags: ireland)
• The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions | Information Is Beautiful
  Glorious!
  (tags: internet)
• jemck: Something more for the ebook debate.
  What if your Kindle is lost or stolen?
  (tags: copyright)

I first read this a couple of years ago and was unimpressed. But I must have been out of sorts generally because I enjoyed it much more this time. It is set in what is now the very near future – May and the summer of 2010 – and concerns two different projects to change the future of the human race, a massive investment in the African country of Beninia and the genetic experiments of the Asian archipelago of Yatakang. The narrative is broken up with vignettes of daily life in Brunner’s future dystopia, where human reproduction is increasingly harshly limited by law, and nobody’s motives are above suspicion (and there is an almost sentient computer). It is rather long but surprisingly tightly written given the diversity of material and perspective; rather a dazzling example of the New Wave.

Stand on Zanzibar won the 1968 Hugo for Best Novel, beating Alexei Panshin’s Nebula-winning Rite of Passage (a decent book with a stupid ending), and also three books I haven’t read, Nova by Samuel R. Delany, Past Master by R.A. Lafferty, and The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak. One of those years when the Nebula shortlist was better; it also included Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ.

I had a good evening yesterday: met up with an old friend who has just moved to this city and was able to show her some of the sights before going to my favourite restaurant.

But at 3 am, it was a different matter, and I found myself, as they say, talking to God on the great white telephone. ‘Orrible stomach cramps rather impeded my attempts to get back to sleep.

On top of all that, I had a very important meeting at 0930 (with Alexander Downer, who will be known to Australian readers if not to many others). My desperate emails asking if the meeting could be postponed received no reply, so I struggled to the vertical position and arrived at the UN compound half an hour late. Downer took it in his stride, but I was rather mortified.

I came back to the hotel and have been in bed ever since. My dinner companion of last night – who like me had the excellent swordfish at El Sabor Latino – is in perfect health, so I must simply have been unlucky with the water or something.

I called this evening’s dinner companion to cancel our arrangement, and asked whether he thought I should try sweating it out at a hamam (Turkish bath). He said it certainly wouldn’t do any harm! But I then found I didn’t really have the energy to even walk round the corner to the nearest one.

Well, rest and cups of sweet black and/or herbal tea are probably all that I need. Home tomorrow, all being well.

So, I’m in an eastern Mediterranean city, my first meeting isn’t until 1100, I’ve had my breakfast by 0900 and I need a haircut. And I haven’t shaved since Friday. The concierge directs me to the nearest barber, and where my hair is duly shortened. I seem to be the first customer of this week; a small boy stares at the pasty-faced foreigner who doesn’t speak their language.

And then the barber offers to shave me as well, and I accept. I am 42 years old, and have never been shaved by any hand other than my own. The small boy lathers up a huge shaving brush – foam all over it; he rinses off the handle and sets it down for the barber (who is also young, but they don’t look related – brother-in-law? step brother?). Many layers of towels are laid over me, and then the foam; and then the barber comes at me with a sharp sharp cut-throat razor. My throat feels very exposed; but then, like a junior wolf, I submit.

Like most teenage boys, I simply adopted my father’s shaving habits – shaving brush and ordinary soap, Wilkinson safety razor, do it twice over – and have gradually moved to my own variation – shaving gel, Gillette Mach 3, a single run over the relevant area is enough. Occasionally hairdressers have nibbled around the edges of my scalp with a straight razor, but now it’s a comfortable stroking of the blade against my skin, separating off the bristles from the follicles, looking clean, feeling smooth. He pulls at my lips to get at the tricky bits in the corners of my mouth and under my nose.

And then he does it again, to catch anywhere he missed first time. And all the other trimmings as well, including patting my ears with flaming alcohol to get the hairs there; a bit alarming, but effective. The little boy pinches and pulls at my arm muscles, presumably his idea of a massage, for that extra bit of service. And the whole lot, including haircut, costs me €20. Money well spent.

It’s 1045. time to go.

I have been working my way through various US bestsellers of recent years, due to various manipulations of the top unread books lists in various places. This one is about a teenage white girl in about 1964, who flees her abusive father to the far side of South Carolina, where she ends up living with the same black family of bee-keepers who had sheltered her mother many years before. There’s lots of lovely symbolism in the processes of apiculture and (more unexpectedly) the Blessed Virgin Mary. I couldn’t help but notice, though, that the laudatory blurbs all seemed to be by white critics; I wonder how this has been received in the black community?

Back in 1981 it seemed like centuries since the last Doctor Who reference book had come out (it was three years since the second edition of The Making of Doctor Who). We fans grasped eagerly at the two rather slim volumes produced in the break between the Fourth and Fifth Doctors. The first volume is a recapitulation of cast, crew and plot from the first eighteen seasons of Who; the second an A-Z of characters, creatures and concepts in the Whoniverse up to that point in time.

They are pretty thin by even the standards of the day. Characters and events from the less fashionable end of the Hartnell and Troughton eras get pretty short shrift (eg the entry in volume 2 for Ping-Cho, whch reads, in its entirety, “Chinese girl”).

The two volumes are a good model for how to do a comprehensive guide for Who, but not a brilliant example of the execution. (Numerous misprintls – poor John Abineri!)

Somehow this didn’t get posted on Sunday when I actually finished the book. It is rather a good romp with scary children and scary monsters, Ten and Rose and a creepy Welsh island. Very well read by Anthony Stewart Head.

The fourth series of Companion Chronicles from Big Finish is off to an excellent start.

After the rather unexpected posthumous return of Sara Kingdom in Home Truths, Simon Guerrier has a tricky problem for the sequel: how to combine Sara’s unusual position of partial resurrection in the far future with the format-dictated reminiscence of an adventure with One and Steven. He does it very well, with future-Sara essentially on trial for her continued existence, recounting a rather eerie claustrophobic tale of a waterlogged asteroid, which ties in rather well psychologically to her existential dilemma. Very well done by Jean Marsh and Niall McGregor.

The events of 1688-90 period in England, Scotland and Ireland are ever so slightly controversial, among the decreasing minority who care, so I was interested to see how Jamie, Zoe and Two would fit into it – Big Finish has tackled similar bits of history very badly (The Marian Conspiracy) and very well (The Settling). Jonathan Morris is definitely towards the upper end of the scale with The Glorious Revolution, which takes Jamie back to the precise origin of his own personal history, with the crew landing in London in 1688 as James II’s rule is tottering; on the one hand, we get a fair perspective that the Glorious Revolution was not especially glorious if you were not an English Protestant; on the other, James II was a pretty bad king, even though he had been an excellent military strategist in his brother’s reign. Fraser Hines is excellent as a Jacobite who discovers that his hero has feet of clay; likewise Andrew Fettes as both James II and a Time Lord sent to investigate a potential time anomaly. I felt the plot itself didn’t quite cohere in terms of the time-paradox sub-genre, but Morris’s mostly excellent writing distracted me for most of the time. (The arbitrary executions of Judge Jeffreys, as depicted, are however out of place for 1688 in London; even the notorious Hanging Assizes actually had assizes.)

It’s striking that both of these plays are flashbacks from the point of view of Sara and Jamie, respectively, and that the framing narrative is given a decent prominence.

Meanwhile the main narrative of Big Finish plays is staggering along:

The Company of Friends is actually four separate Eighth Doctor plays, each with a different companion: Benny Summerfield (who is mainly a Seventh Doctor companion but did appear in the first Eight Doctor spinoff novel), Fitz Kreiner (who is apparently in more Doctor Who books than any other companion), Izzy (from the DWM comics) and Mary Shelley (from out of nowhere). I must say I felt that a lot of this was not my personal canon, as Andrew Hickey would put it. The one I enjoyed most was with the companion I knew least, Izzy’s story, with its very witty portrayal of late 70s comics fandom; the Fitz and Benny stories were OK, the Mary Shelley one didn’t quite hang together for me.

I keep on enjoying the Six/Charley plays despite my inclination, and Patient Zero was no exception. The Doctor is absolutely aware that Charley Pollard is much more than she has admitted; but Charley now finds herself substituted by a mysterious invisible alien which takes over her very being; meanwhile the Doctor is defending himself from the Viyrans (boo!) and Daleks (yay!). A great set-up for the next two stories.

Big Finish has been moving towards story arcs – the Fifth Doctor / Guardians one earlier this year, for instance – and it is a welcome change of gear: The Company of Friends suffers a bit because it goes the other way (four stories, rather than a third of a story, in the one release). The Companion Chronicles, which ought by rights to be rather more format-bound, feel a bit more vibrant right now.

Read all about it! Here.

Having enjoyed A House for Mr Biswas, I tried this as a follow-up, but did not enjoy it as much. Naipaul’s protagonist is Indian, and gets a scholarship to study in London, where he starts to make a career as a journalist and writer; and then he abruptly goes to Africa with his current lover. The best thing about the book is the vivid sense of place of the three settings – the immediate post-independence period in India, the London literary sub-culture, and the African colony lurching towards independence: I really felt immersed in the settings, both the physical and human aspects of the geography.

That said, the book is rather frustratingly incomplete. There is occasional name-dropping of real people – Krishna Menon, Arthur Christiansen, Che Guevara; but I couldn’t really understand the contrast between on the one hand this specificity about real people, and the very well conveyed sense of place, and on the other a geographical coyness. Why not name the Portuguese colony on the east coast of Africa? (There is only one, after all.) Why not be more specific about Willie’s home town in India? Perhaps the point is to make it a more universal critique of colonialism, but I think it would have been more effective without the vagueness.

It’s not a very cheerful book. Willie makes love to many women, but doesn’t really appear to enjoy it, or to like them very much. I don’t think it is misogynistic – Willie’s sister, and his Portuguese African girlfriend, are both memorable characters with their own motivations – but it’s not especially upllifting. It is, however, mercifully short.

The reading list system I set up four months ago has been pretty satisfactory. I’m changing it just a bit and also adding a couple more for the rest of this year.

1. unread sf (excluding Who), in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue:
   1. Appleseed by John Clute
   2. White Crow by Mary Gentle
   3. The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois
   4. Irish tales of terror, edited by Jim McGarry
   5. Forbidden Acts, edited by Nancy A. Collins
2. unread sf (excluding Who), in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole:
   1. Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett
   2. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
   3. The Wandering Fire by Guy Gavriel Kay
   4. The Darkest Road by Guy Gavriel Kay
   5. Kushiel’s Scion by Jacqueline Carey
3. unread sf (excluding Who), as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by you here:
   1. Fairyland by Paul McAuley
   2. Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan
   3. Appleseed by John Clute
   4. The Best Science Fiction of the Year #4, edited by Terry Carr
   5. Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
4. unread fiction other than sf or Ian Rankin, in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue:
   1. Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
   2. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
   3. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
   4. Thirteen Steps Down: A Novel by Ruth Rendell
   5. Notre-Dame of Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) by Victor Hugo
5. unread fiction other than sf or Ian Rankin, in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole:
   0. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
   1. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
   2. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
   3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
   4. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
   5. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
6. unread fiction other than sf or Ian Rankin, as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by you here:
   1. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
   2. Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
   3. Notre-Dame of Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) by Victor Hugo
   4. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
   5. Njal’s Saga by Leifur Eiricksson
7. non-fiction, in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue:
   1. England’s Troubles : Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context by Jonathan Scott
   2. The Meaning of Tingo by Adam Jacot de Boinod
   3. The Jesuits by Jonathan Wright
   4. The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism by Stephen Schwartz
   5. Radical Islams Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law by Paul Marshall
8. non-fiction, in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole:
   1. The Stuff of Thought:: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
   2. Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger
   3. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould
   4. Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
   5. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
9. non-fiction, as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by you here:
   1. The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by Richard Dawkins
   2. A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield
   3. The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis
   4. Constantinople by Philip Mansel
10. books I have already read but haven’t reviewed on-line, ranked by LT popularity:
    1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
    2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
    3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    4. Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
    5. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
11. Hugo-award winning novels which I haven’t previously reviewed on-line, in order of winning the award:
    0. Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner
    1. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer
    2. Where late the sweet birds sang by Kate Wilhelm
    3. The uplift war by David Brin
    4. Hyperion by Dan Simmons
    5. The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold
12. unread Doctor Who books, in order of internal continuity:
    1. Zeta Major by Simon Messingham
    2. Imperial Moon by Christopher Bulis
    3. Doctor Who – Slipback by Eric Saward
    4. Time of Your Life by Steve Lyons
    5. The Algebra of Ice by Lloyd Rose
13. unread Doctor Who books, in order of LT popularity (changed from previous restriction to just New Series Adventures):
    0. Doctor Who Programme Guide: v. 1 by Jean-Marc Lofficier
       The Nightmare of Black Island by Mike Tucker
    1. Doctor Who: A Celebration : Two Decades Through Time and Space by Peter Haining
    2. Wooden Heart by Martin Day
    3. The Pirate Loop by Simon Guerrier
    4. Nightshade by Mark Gatiss
    5. Cat’s Cradle: Times Crucible by Marc Platt
14. Ian Rankin novels, in order (NB am expecting Strip Jack to arrive shortly in which case it goes at the head of the list):
    1. The Black Book
    2. Mortal Causes
    3. Let It Bleed
    4. Black and Blue
    5. The Hanging Garden
15. books owned only by me on LT, in order of entry into my catalogue (NB the first of these has since picked up other owners):
    1. Power & Light (The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Two) by Roger Zelazny
    2. Doctor Who Quiz Book #3
    3. "Doctor Who" Void Vision Activity Book
    4. Liberal Language: Speeches and Essays 1998-2003 by Graham Watson
    5. A People’s Peace for Cyprus: Testing public opinion on the options for a comprehensive settlement by Alexandros Lordos
16. books by PoC, in order of entry into my catalogue:
    0. Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul
    1. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
    2. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
    3. Wild Sweet Love by Beverly Jenkins
    4. Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman
    5. Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran
17. New list: books acquired before 2006, not otherwise listed or reviewed:
    1. An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that Changed the World by Toby Musgrave
    2. Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong
    3. Wheel Of Engaged Buddhism : New Map Of The Path by Kenneth Kraft
    4. Ta Hsueh and Chung Yung
    5. Mr. Bloomfield’s Orchard : The Mysterious World of Mushrooms, Molds, and Mycologists by Nicholas P. Money
18. Another new list: books acquired by me since 2005, not otherwise listed or reviewed:
    1. Paris Gold Guide (Bonechi Gold Guides) by Giovanna Magi
    2. Year’s Best SF 6, edited by David G. Hartwell
    3. Year’s Best SF 7, edited by David G. Hartwell
    4. Year’s Best SF 8, edited by David G. Hartwell
    5. Who Saved Bosnia by Vitomir Miles Raguz

Progress, as ever, to be reported here.

It’s time for an earwormy post.

Since childhood I have loved the traditional Irish song, “The Star of the County Down” – not so much because of the words, which are a decent enough encapsulation of male fantasy for the attractive babe who has just walked past, but more for the associations with my ancestral stmping grounds which are indeed near to Banbridge, and also for the tune which is very catchy and memorable. Tying in with certain of my other interests, one of my favourite renditions is by The Orthodox Celts, a band from Belgrade who have moved to adopt someone else’s culture (note the landscape shots, partly against a photo backdrop of authentic County Down drumlins and partly against very Serbian looking wheatfields):

(lyrics here.)

I listened to Classic FM a lot in the summer and to my surprise at one point heard this rather wonderful piece by Ralph Vaughan-Williams:

I recognised the tune at once, of course, but had never heard of “Dives and Lazarus”, upon which which this was supposedly a set of five variations, But it is a well enough known folk song, apparently, performed below by Vilma Pääkkö at a festival in Pori. (lyrics here.)

Anglicans being as they are, the tune has been adopted and adapted into the canon of hymn tunes as “Kingsfold”, and thus as the tune of “O Sing a Song of Bethlehem” and “I Heard the Voice of Jesus”. Version of the folk tune, according to Wikipedia, are also to be found as “Gilderoy” (in Scotland), “The Thresher” and “Cold blows the wind” (in unspecified localities) and “The Murder of Maria Martin” (in Norfolk). Classic FM seemed to know of several versions of it arranged by Holst as well. I didn’t find any terribly compelling performances of these on-line, but feel free to share if you know of any.

A couple of years back I started, but didn’t finish, rewatching Blake’s 7. I’m giving it another try for , and so started inevitably by returning to “The Way Back”. On top of my comments from last time, I will add the following two points once the discussion starts:

First, the look of it is even better than I remembered. The camera shots through bars, or stairs angled to look like bars, reinforce the claustrophobia. The close-ups on Blake’s eye bring home to us that his perception (and thus ours) has been altered and may not be completely reliable. The silent guards in their masks and black uniforms are very sinister indeed. The shots of Blake’s memory being wiped are effective so it’s not surprising that they get used twice.

Second, the show does a good job of subverting our expectations for what kind of series this is going to be. The very first word from an on-screen character is spoken by former child star Gillian Bailey, who was one of the Double Deckers (if you don’t know, don’t ask). Then we go to the rebel meeting chaired by Robert Beatty, veteran of various screen performances (Who fans will know him as the General in The Tenth Planet). It looks rather as if Bailey and Beatty are going to play central characters in this new series; but they are mercilessly mown down. (A bit like Temmosus of the Thals, with some important differences.)

Then it loolks like Blake may be sprung by his lawyer, even though the lawyer and his wife are played by less luminous actors, and we may be moving towards a series with Blake’s new friends Jenna and Vila in space, and Tel and Maja Varon as his agents on earth, Blake somehow operating in between. But the Varons too are killed, off-screen, though we glimpse their twisted corpses.

The Way Back gives us no idea of what sort of show this is going to turn into. The first episode ends with Blake’s permanent deportation from Earth, for crimes he didn’t commit, his only allies killed by the government. It is not a happy ending, but it certainly left my ten-year-old self wanting to watch more back in 1978.

If you haven’t been following , this is a good day to dip in:

Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City…

So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one of the high places, Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge; which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the bridge….

Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another….

…to White Hall, and there up to the Kings closett in the Chappell, where people come about me, and did give them an account dismayed them all, and word was carried in to the King. So I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of Yorke what I saw, and that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire. They seemed much troubled, and the King commanded me to go to my Lord Mayor from him, and command him to spare no houses, but to pull down before the fire every way.

…At last met my Lord Mayor in Canningstreet, like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck. To the King’s message he cried, like a fainting woman, “Lord! what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me. I have been pulling down houses; but the fire overtakes us faster than we can do it.”

…However, we had an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry, as at this time we could be….

So near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops….

We staid till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it. The churches, houses, and all on fire and flaming at once; and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruins….

…And got my bags of gold into my office, ready to carry away…

And I think there will be more tomorrow.

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This is a fairly slim volume detailing archæological and historical records of the Anglo-Norman Earldom of Ulster, which was set up by a lightning conquest of Downpatrick by the Norman adventurer John De Courcy in 1177, and then gradually subsided out of history in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. I have a personal genealogical interest in the subject, which I will save for another post; but most people who have lived in Northern Ireland will be familiar with the monuments of the Norman period – most notably Carrickfergus Castle, possibly also Inch Abbey and Greyabbey, with their ruined Gothic arches still visible, and Dundrum Castle farther south.

But the Normans did not penetrate very far inland, as this map from the book demonstrates:

Essentially, there is an arc of settlement from Dundrum Bay through Downpatrick and Lecale up around the Ards Peninsula through Bangor, petering out around Belfast (but not up the western shore of Strangford Lough); another arc from Antrim Town through Newtownabbey and Carrickfergus up to Larne; and a more diffuse concentration in the northwest Antrim/Coleraine area. And that’s it, bar a few outposts elsewhere (Greencastle Co Down, Greencastle Co Donegal, Dromore, dubious religious endowments further in). De Courcy’s wife was a Viking princess, and it’s impossible not to look at that map and see that the sea connections matter much more than the land links. From the mid-fourteenth century, the only part of Ulster that remained securely under Dublin/English control was Carrickfergus Castle, which is much more easily supplied by sea (much later on, that was where William III landed in 1690).

The story of the Earldom is not just a landgrab by adventurers (of the kind the Normans and their kin were engaged in from Newfoundland to Palestine) then eroded by the natives coming back. For a start, De Courcy was able to exploit a power vacuum when he arrived in 1177, after the local chieftains in Downpatrick had killed each other off. It’s an episode which looks rather odd viewed in the context of the rest of Henry II’s Irish policy, in that normally the practice was to marry into the ruling clans and demand submission fromt he rulers rather than simply kill them off. I wish McNeill had looked at it in the context of the career of De Courcy’s father-in-law, which I think helps make more sense of it. In any case, it’s clear that local actors were vigorous behind the scenes in ensuring that De Courcy, a rather young but obviously charismatic man, took and held power along the eastern Ulster littoral until King John got tired of him in 1204.

The Earldom might well have prospered in the long term – it seems to have been economically self-sustaining, and a committed Earl could usually ensured that the neighbouring Irish chieftains would occupy themselves fighting each other – had it not been for catastrophic dynastic failure in the mid-fourteenth century. McNeill discounts previous historians’ suggestions that the Earldom was killed off by the devastating invasion of the Bruce brothers in 1315, as documentary records show it was still a going concern for several years after (and also, I would add, that the Scots were no worse at devastating than the various Irish and Norman devastators of the previous 120 years).

Instead he points to the deaths in quick succession of the heir to the earldom, John de Burgh, in 1312; the Red Earl himself, Richard de Burgh, in 1326, and then his grandson via John, the Brown Earl, William de Burgh, murdered in a family feud in Belfast (almost the first thing that is ever recorded to have happened in Belfast) in 1333, leaving the earldom to an infant daughter in the care of his mother, John de Burgh’s widow. She was a redoubtable woman who was widowed three times and founded Clare College, Cambridge, but maintaining her granddaughter’s inherited property from her own first marriage was not among her priorities, and while the title of Earl of Ulster eventually merged into the royal family (and is now held by the 20th in line to the throne), the lands, apart from Carrickfergus Castle as mentioned above, were left to fend for themselves and mostly ended up back in Irish rather than Norman hands.

Lots more here about architecture and economics (and far more about pottery than one would have thought possible, given that a) there is very little of it and b) it is very boring), but it is inevitably the politics that grabbed my attention.

WHITE, SIR NICHOLAS (d. 1593), master of the rolls in Ireland, described as of Whites Hall, near Knocktopher, co. Kilkenny, a descendant of one of the early Pale settlers, was a relative apparently, perhaps the son, of James White of Waterford, gentleman, to whom Henry VIII in 1540 granted a lease of the rectory of Dunkitt in co. Kilkenny (Cal. Plants, Hen. VIII, p. 154). He is surmised to be identical with the ‘Nicholas Whyt’ mentioned in the codicil to the will of James Butler, ninth earl of Ormonde and Ossory (MoRRiN, Cal. Patent Rolls, i. 133). He is mentioned in April 1563 as a justice of the peace for the counties of Kilkenny and Tipperary, and the following year as recorder of the city of Waterford (Cal. Plants, Eliz. Nos. 542, 666). Visiting England subsequently, he made a favourable impression on Elizabeth and Cecil. On 4 Nov. 1568 the queen directed him to be appointed to the seneschalship of Wexford and the constableship and rule of Leighlin and Ferns, in the room of Thomas Stucley [q. v.] On 18 Jan. following he obtained a grant of the reversion of the lands of Dunbrody in co. Wexford, and of sundry other leases (cf. Cal. Plants, Nos. 1527, 1537, 1543, 1558, 1562, 1572, 1638), with instructions at the same time to be admitted a privy councillor (Cal. State Papers, Irel. Eliz. i. 392, 400). It is noteworthy that his advancement was attributed to the influence of the Earl of Ormonde (ib. i. 404).

On his way back to Ireland he had a curious interview with Mary Queen of Scots at Tutbury in February 1569, of which he sent a detailed account to Cecil (HAYNES, Burghley Papers, pp. 509-12). During the Butlers’ war his property was plundered, and he himself obliged for a time to take refuge in Waterford (Cal. State Papers, Irel. Eliz. i. 406, 412). On 28 May, in consideration of his losses, he obtained a grant of the lands of St. Katherine’s, Leixlip (Cal. Plants, Eliz. No. 1369 ; cf. Cal. Hatfield MSS. i. 413), where he afterwards established his residence. As seneschal of Wexford he kept a firm hand over the Kavanaghs (Cal. State Papers, Irel. Eliz. i. 426), and by his conduct at the siege of Castle Mocollop in May 1571 won the approbation of the lord justice, Sir William Fitzwilliam (ib. i. 457). In September he repaired, with permission from the state to be absent six months, to England. On 14 July 1572 he was appointed master of the rolls in Ireland (patent, 18 July) in succession to Henry Draycott, with concession to retain the office of seneschal of Wexford for the further space of eight months, ‘ in the hope that he may more effectually prosecute those that murdered his son-in-law, Robert Browne ‘ (Cal. Patent Rolls, i. 548 ; SMYTH, Law Officers, p. 60 ; see also under O’BYRXE, FIAGH MACHUGH). At the same time the lord chancellor was directed to accept a surrender from him of his lands in counties Tipperary, Waterford, and Kilkenny for a regrant of them to him in fee-simple.

After his return to Ireland in the autumn of 1572 a dispute arose between him and Archbishop Adam Loftus [q. v.], on the death of the lord chancellor, Robert Weston [q. v.], as to the custody of the great seal, which Loftus claimed ex officio (Cal. State Papers, Irel. Eliz. i. 506, 509). The incident caused bad blood between him and the offifials of English birth, and was followed by disastrous consequences for him. A year or two later he supported the agitation of the gentry of the Pale against cess by refusing to sign the order for their committal [see under NUGENT, SIR CHRISTOPHER, 1544-1602], and drew down upon him the wrath of Sir Henry Sidney, who described him to Walsingham as ‘ the worst of Irishmen ‘ (ib. ii. 117). He offered an explanation of his conduct to Burghley on 13 June 1577, alleging that he had no intention to impugn the queen’s prerogative (Hatjield MSS. ii. 154, 186). But Sidney, who from the first had disliked him as belonging to the faction of his enemy, the Earl of Ormonde, was in no humour to brook opposition from him, and a charge being preferred against him by the attorney-general, Thomas Snagge [a. v.], of remissness in the execution of the duties of his office and of maintaining any cause that touches his countrymen ‘how foul soever it be’ (Cal. State Papers, Irel. Eliz. ii. 124, 126), he was in April 1578 suspended from the mastership of the rolls (Cal. Plants, Eliz. No. 3267). He found, however, a friend in Sir William Drury [q. v.], and in September received permission to repair to England to plead his cause with Burghley (ib. No. 3509). He succeeded in clearing himself of the charges preferred against him by Snagg ; but returning to Ireland, and being reinstated in his ortice, he found a bitter enemy in Sir Henry Wallop [q. v.], who protested strongly against a concordatum of a thousand marks that had been allowed him (Cal. State Papers, Irel. Eliz. ii. 223). He was with the army under Sir William Pelham [q. v.] in Munster during the summer of 1580, corresponding regularly the while with Burghley, to whom he sent Dr. Sanders’s ‘ sanctus bell, and another toy after the manner of a crosse supporting a booke,’ discovered at Castle Island (ib. ii. 236), from which it may be inferred that so far as his religion was concerned there was nothing to find fault with. His misadventure in the matter of the cess did not prevent him generously pleading the cause of Chief-justice Nicholas Nugent [q.v.] to Burghley (ib. ii. 300), and it was probably owing to this circumstance that he was fiercely denounced by Wallop as ‘ a solicitor for all traitors ‘ (ib. ii. 415). Even his successful management of Fiagh MacHugh, the O’Conors, and Kavanaghs, as reported by the council, received from Wallop a sinister interpretation. ‘The cawse,’ he wrote to Walsingham, ‘ that moved him to apprehend the bad fellowes we comende him for in owr joynt letter, grywe by menes that I dyd openly in counsell, the end of the last terme, charge him upon his evell delynge with us bothe in impoynyng and crosynge owr doynges, that he was a coinon advocate for traytors and evell men, that he never apprehendyd, or cawsed to be apprehended, anye traytor, rebell, or evell dysposed parson, nor ever woulde come to the examynatyon or araynement oft* any traytor or conspyrator ‘ (ib. ii. 428). It might have been deemed by Wallop sufficient pledge for his loyalty that he was the author (ib. iv. 292) of the extraordinary trial by combat in September 1583 between Teige MacGilapatrick O’Conor and Conor MacCormack O’Conor (Cal. Carew MSS. ii. 361), in which both combatants lost their lives.

With the arrival of Sir John Perrot as <3eputy in 1584 White's prospects improved. From Perrot he received the honour of knighthood at his taking the oath in Christ Church on 21 June. His gratitude naturally inclined him to take the part of the lord deputy in the many disputes in which the latter was involved almost from the beginning of his government. But neither his gratitude nor his admiration of Perrot's good qualities blinded him to the defects in his character (cf. Cal. State Papers, Irel. Klis. iii. 138). Going the Leinster circuit in the autumn of the same year (1584), White caused forty-eight of the hundred and eighty-one prisoners sent up for trial to be executed, and in the fulfilment of his duty even ventured to visit the redoubtable Fiagh Mac-Hugh O'Byrne in his fastness of Ballinacor, ' where law never approached ' (ib. ii. 531). In December he was sent down into Connaught in order to investigate the charges of extortion preferred against the late governor, Sir Nicholas Malby [q. v.], and on 15 July 1585 was appointed a commissioner for compounding for cess in that province (ib. ii. 542; Cal. Plants, No. 4745). In September 1586 he and Sir Lucas Dillon attended the lord deputy thither, greatly to the annoyance of Sir Kichard Bingham [q. v.], who confidentially described them as l fit instruments ' in Perrot's hands to discover anything against him (ib. iii. 182). Dillon besought Burghley not to let ' the place of our birth scandalise our faithful service ; ' but the fact that they were regarded as wholly subservient to Perrot rendered any cordial action between them and the English section in the council impossible. Everything that White did was misinterpreted. His account of the quarrel between the lord deputy and Marshal Bagenal in the council chamber, though certainly the fairest, was impugned, and an attempt even made to deprive him of the custody of Duncannon Fort, which formed part of his estate at Dunbrody, under the pretence that ' it was unmeet that the same should be put into the hands of any of this country's birth ' (ib. iii. 449). Perrot's successor, Sir William Fitzwilliam, shared the general prejudice against him, alleging that neither he nor Sir Lucas Dillon would set their hand to any letters ' wherein Sir John Perrot is mentioned not to their liking' (ib. iv. 116). In 1589 he was included in the commission for effecting a pacification with the Burkes, whom the alleged arbitrary conduct of Bingham had caused to revolt. In announcing the ill-success of their efforts to Burghley, he remarked that there was a general inclination to lay the blame on Bingham; for himself, he afterwards inclined to take Bingham's part in the matter, as being in his opinion ' altogether inclined to follow the mildest course ' (ib. iv. 161, 263, 276). Shortly afterwards he was involved in the revelations of Sir Denis O'Roughan in the charge of high treason preferred against Perrot, and Fitzwilliam, who was apparently too glad of an excuse for removing him, caused him in June 1590, though extremely ill, to be placed under restraint, at the same time taking effective measures to pn>v en t any personal application on the part of his son to the queen (ib. iv. 343, 354, 357). Two months later he was sent over to England, and, after examination by Sir John Popham (1531 P-1607) [j. v.], was committed to the Marshalsea (ib. iv. 3~), 388). In a subsequent examination in the Star-chamber he admitted that Perrot had complained that the queen’s fears hampered his service; but otherwise nothing of material importance was elicited from him (ib. iv. 439), He was not deprived of his office, and, being apparently allowed to return to Ireland, he died there shortly afterwards, at the end of March cr the beginning of April 1593 (cf. Cat. Fiants, Nos. 5820, 6836).

White married a niece of Arthur Brereton of Killyon, co. Meath, by whom he had two sons Thomas, educated at Cambridge and died in November 1586, and Andrew, likewise educated at Cambridge,who succeeded him and two daughters, one of whom married Robert Browne of Mulcranan, co. Wexford, the other being the wife of Christopher D’Arcy of Platten, co. Meath.

This brilliant ad captures the key argument about same-sex marriage beautifully:

(Pointed out by .)

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