This was a freebie book slipped into the goodie bag for a conference I spoke at in Camden, Maine, in early 2007. I confess that my knowledge of Maine is pretty much restricted to the two-hour drive through a snow-filled landscape from Portland airport to the conference venue, and my knowledge of print-making as an art is not a lot more than my knowledge of Maine, so it is not very remarkable that it took me five and a half years to get around to reading it. It was published in conjunction with The Maine Print Project, which was apparently the largest collaborative fine-arts project in Maine's history (this may not be a hotly contested claim to fame).

But it's a nice coffee-table book (if we only had a coffee-table), with some spectacular examples of lithography etc. I illustrate with the rather evocative "Dawn", by Will Barnet, which is actually on the book's cover, but there were half a dozen or more where I turned the page and gasped in delight; you will find most of them on the Maine Print Project site. The nineteenth-century section is interesting from a historical perspective, in that some of the artists illustrated were professional printers using their own equipment in their spare time, while others were ladies of leisure who came up the coast from Boston or even New York to sketch evocative images of he Main landscape on their lithographs. It's a nice book to have in the house.

And the moral is that if someone in Maine invites you to come look at their etchings, it's probably worthwhile accepting the invitation.

• Tim & Freya the full story & Conclusion!
  
  Couple break up on train, fellow passenger live-tweets it all.
  (tags: romance )
• TomTom Congestion Index
  
  Hooray! Brussels was most congested city 2011, now overtaken by Warsaw, Rome, Marseilles!
  (tags: belgium )
• George Monbiot – For Those Who Love Life
  
  Activists who are attacking the fish industry.
  (tags: environment )
• Despatches from Caledonia: It’s Not You, It’s Me. Officially.
  
  On being diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome at the age of 46.
  (tags: autism )

• 10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America
  
  “As Americans, we’re brought up our entire lives being taught that we’re the best, we did everything first and that the rest of the world follows our lead. Not only is this not true, but people get irritated when you bring it to their country with you. So don’t.”
  (tags: ushealth uspolitics usa )
• 10 Reasons Why Oxytocin Is The Most Amazing Molecule In The World
  
  “oxytocin is proving to be a crucial ingredient to what makes us human” – a strong claim, presumably other animals have it!
  (tags: chemistry )

• Game of Thrones Season Two RPG
  
  Season Two of GoT as an old-style video game.
  (tags: sf )
• John Quincy Adams’s Self-Assessment on His Birthday in 1812
  
  “I am forty-five years old— Two thirds of a long life are past, and I have done Nothing to distinguish it by usefulness to my Country, or to Mankind— I have always lived with I hope a suitable sense of my duties in Society, and with a sincere desire to perform them— But Passions, Indolence, weakness, and infirmity have sometimes made me swerve from my better knowledge of right, and almost constantly paralyzed my efforts of good— I have no heavy charge upon my Conscience—for which I bless my Maker, as well as for all the enjoyments that he has liberally bestowed upon me— I pray for his gracious kindness in future”
  (tags: usa )
• New study says American families are overwhelmed by clutter, rarely eat together, and are generally stressed out about it all
  
  “our country has 3.1 percent of the world’s kids — and 40 percent of its Little Tikes EasyScore basketball hoops. Many of them belong to 2-year-old Anjellisa Redfern.”
  (tags: children )
• When The Media Found Congressional Experts Interesting
  
  The conspiracy of silence.
  (tags: uspolitics )
• А is for Андроид
  
  The new Russian alphabet. (I especially like Щ for Щкайп.)
  (tags: internet computers linguistics )
• 573 – Look Mum, No Mermaids!
  
  Where to go for coffee in London.
  (tags: maps )
• Hubble Discovers New Pluto Moon
  
  …and that makes five.
  (tags: astronomy )

The language that I posted about last night is Marshallese (Kajin Majol), the indigenous language of the Marshall Islands. The “ri Majol” are therefore the Marshallese people. Congrats to and .

I cut and pasted the two articles from my source (a PDF of the 25 May edition of Marshall Islands Journal), so the orthography is as used in newspapers. This means that none of the diacritical marks of the standard language have been used: “ri Majol” should strictly be “ri M̧ajōļ”, with hooks under the M and l which your browser may not render (mine gets the ļ but not the M̧).

Actually, that’s a good excuse for a poll:

(Sorry, , no ampersands.)

Here's a language I hadn't come across before:

Jilnuul bojjan in ri Majol, rej kio mour im jokwe ilo United States, im kab jikin ko jet an, ekkar nan aer keidri ilo bonbon ko jimor, an US im kab <redacted>.

Bonbon eo an <redacted> nan 2011, ej ripoote 53,158 armij, rej kio jokwe ilo Aelon Kein. Bonbon eo an US nan 2010 ej ba bwe ear wor 22,434 ri Majol rej jokwe ilo United States im kab jikin ko an.

Bonbon kein ruo, elane kobaiki ippen dron, rej kwalok 75,592 ri Majol, ak 30 bojjan in jonan ro im rej jokwe kio ilo US im kab jikin ko an.

Bonbon eo an US nan 2000 eo, ej kwalok bwe ear wor 6,650 ri Majol ilo US. Bonbon eo an <redacted> nan 1999 eo, ear bune 50,840 ri Majol ilo Majol in.

Bonbon kein rej kwaloke 57,490. 6,650 eo im rej jokwe ilo US, rej tarrin in wot, 12 bojjan in woran aolepen ri Majol.

And the English translation:

Thirty percent of <redacted> now live in the United States and its territories, according to a comparison of the recent US and <redacted> national censuses.

The <redacted> census in 2011 reported 53,158 people living in <redacted>. The 2010 US census said there are 22,434 <redacted> living in the United States and its territories.

These two figures combine for a total of 75,592 <redacted>, with 30 percent being accounted for by those living in the US and its territories.

The 2000 US census showed 6,650 <redacted> in the US. The 1999 <redacted> census counted 50,840 <redacted>in the <redacted>.

These total 57,490. The 6,650 living in the US accounted for about 12 percent of all <redacted>.

Anyone like to guess who the "ri Majol" are? (And no sneaky Googling!)

This is the Wordsworth Classics edition of Antigone / Ἀντιγόνη, Oedipus the Tyrant / Οιδίπους Τύραννος and Oedipus at Colonus / Οἰδίπους ἐπὶ Κολωνῷ, all translated by Jamey Hecht. I took them fairly slowly, to let the blank verse translation sink gently into my mind.

I found Antigone / Ἀντιγόνη the most politically interesting of the three. The title character’s brother has died as a rebel against Creon, the king of Thebes; she wishes to give him decent burial, contrary to royal command. It’s quite a striking narrative of a woman demanding what we would now call human rights against the established political power (which claims moreover to have divine backing). Creon pushes his authority too far and suffers awful consequences.

I had read Oedipus the Tyrant / Οιδίπους Τύραννος previously in a different translation. I found it just as powerful here, with perhaps a better rendition of Oedipus’ increasing consternation and horror as the truth becomes clear to him. I did wonder if Sophocles’ audiences would have been in any suspense whatsoever as to what was going to happen; surely everyone going into the theatre would have been muttering “killed his father, married his mother” and just watching to see how well it was done?

Oedipus at Colonus / Οἰδίπους ἐπὶ Κολωνῷ seemed to me the weakest of the three, and I had to start it again after getting halfway through and realising I had missed most of the plot. Here the blind Oedipus has found refuge near Athens, but the factions in Thebes (his sons and Creon) have been told by an oracle that the resting place of his corpse will determine the victor in their struggle. Oedipus gets some good bitter speeches about how unfair life is in general, and his own in particular, but I found the play as a whole much more difficult to follow.

The decision to present the three plays in order of composition here did not work for me. For readers not passionately devoted to analysing how Sophocles’ writing style evolved over the decades of his career, it surely makes much better sense to order them by internal chronology, ie Oedipus the Tyrant / Οιδίπους Τύραννος first, then Oedipus at Colonus / Οἰδίπους ἐπὶ Κολωνῷ, then Antigone / Ἀντιγόνη last. This has the merit of explaining why Antigone’s brother was fighting Creon, and also puts the strongest plays first and last, which makes for a more satisfying experience as a reader.

The almost complete lack of stage direction offers a blank slate, but also a challenge, to anyone wanting to direct the plays today.

• Oh, (No) Canada!
  
  What if Newfoundland had become/remained independent?
  (tags: canada maps )
• Refused access: fighting for the right to travel on the buses
  
  London vs wheelchair user.
  (tags: disability )
• Ranked: Disney Princesses From Least To Most Feminist
  
  I think I have seen two of these films.
  (tags: films sexandgenderandsexuality )
• How to Kill a Troll
  
  Try love.
  (tags: internet )
• The woe that is in teaching English
  
  “It is an important step to move beyond nonsense about the decline of English and chin-wagging about the Young People, and to talk about the difficulty of mastering standard written English, which is no one’s native language.”
  (tags: linguistics )

…when you realise that your wallet is an hour away, at home, and you have invited someone for a business lunch at an expensive restaurant!

We watched the next in the Beeb’s current Shakespeare season in two goes over Sunday and Monday nights, and I felt that although enjoyable and dramatic – the tavern and battle scenes particularly well staged – it didn’t quite grab me in the same way that Richard II did.

has crystallised the problem for me. The production allowed Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff to dominate proceedings, which fundamentally unbalanced the play; it became a star vehicle rather than a historical drama. He is a powerful actor, and is good here; I was blown away by his Leontes in The Winter’s Tale which I was lucky enough to see on stage a few years ago, but genius sometimes needs discipline as well.

Of the other leads, a lot of Hotspur’s material was cut (I think two or three entire scenes from Act 4), though I actually felt that Joe Armstrong was more impressive in the role than either Tom Hiddleston as Prince Hal or the curiously subdued Jeremy Irons as the King. (And it was a nice touch to cast Armstrong’s real father Alun as his stage father Northumberland.) Michelle Dockery seemed to be phoning in her lines as Lady Hotspur much as she did in Hogfather. Let’s hope for better luck next weekend with H4P2.

Incidentally we watched the first ever episode of Black Adder last night with young F, who tolerated us explaining the Shakespeare jokes to him. It was first broadcast 29 years ago.

• Map of SNESteros
  
  Westeros meets Nintendo!
  (tags: sf )
• Crazy Ape, The Hunter of Bäckaskog, now known as “the Bäckaskog Woman”
  
  “the oldest and most famous skeleton found in Sweden”.
  (tags: archaeology )
• ‘Frankenstein’ Mummies From Bog Off Coast Of Scotland Show Mix Of Corpses
  
  It’s different in South Uist.
  (tags: archaeology )
• South Sudan: Celebrating One Year of Independence
  
  Quotes “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”.
  (tags: southsudan )

I’m really bad at getting to short stories – my middle-aged presbyopia makes reading magazines difficult, so I tend to catch up on this year’s short fiction by reading next year’s Hugo nominees (and occasionally Year’s Best anthologies). This is a set of ten short stories from PS Publishing’s PostScripts magazine sent to BSFA members three years ago, which I have only now got around to reading.

It wouldn’t really have moved me o take out a subscription. The clear majority of the stories in the anthology are horror rather than sf, and frankly gave me bad dreams last night. Only one of the ten is by a woman (Lisa Tuttle). Of the more sfnal stories, I had read Peter Hamilton’s “Footvote”, with his trademark misogyny and Europhobia, in a Dozois anthology; the only other one that made much of an impact on me was Stephen Baxter’s “Eagle Song”, which also has familiar themes from that author (grand sweeping historical montages, incomprehensible aliens) with some originality of format but ending the story only halfway through. Sorry if this sounds grumpy – this came for free, and sometimes you get what you pay for.

• We’re getting wildly differing assessments
  
  Getting the right news from the Supreme Court.
  (tags: blogging blog news ushealth )
• Well THAT didn’t end where I expected it to!
  
  Holly on the UK’s ludicrous “citizenship test”.
  (tags: ukpolitics migration )
• Stories, readers and authors on Jackanory 1966-70
  
  (tags: children television bbc )
• Stories, readers and authors on Jackanory, 1970-73
  
  (tags: television children bbc )
• Euro 2012 Story
  
  It’s a small world. (Especially if you’re talking about County Cork.)
  (tags: football ireland )

I noticed a couple of people linking to this article in the Telegraph, with the headline “Floods are judgment on society, say bishops”.

In fact the headline is rather misleading (or at least the plural noun at the end is). Most of the article is a quote from a leading evangelical bishop, who, amazingly for an evangelical, sees God as directly intervening in everything. Dog bites man, folks.

The other two bishops actually took a very different view from that implied by the headline. One said, “we are now reaping what we have sown. If we live in a profligate way then there are going to be consequences.” The other said, “Instead of living as if we owned the earth we need to recover a sense of being participants in a web of life with responsibilities to other life forms and to our children.”

The implication of both bishops’ statements is that the floods may well have been indirectly caused by human activity (though they are commendably cautious about specifying any direct link), and that in any case we should be careful about exploiting the environment.

I think that is a perfectly reasonable position, and it is instructive that the Telegraph chose to lump those statements together with the idea that the floods were caused by the debate about gay marriage. A cynic might suspect that the Telegraph wants its readers to mentally classify the concept of anthropogenic climate change in the same loony category as the idea of directly ordained meteorological divine vengeance.

Perhaps it is just that “Evangelical makes evangelical statements, two other bishops worry about climate change” isn’t as good a headline, though it would have been more accurate.

I actually can’t remember the last time I saw a story in the Telegraph that was worth reading. It is almost as bad as the Mail.

Edited to add: D’Oh! The article dates from 2007, as and point out in comments. Remind me not to bother responding to any future link to any article in the Telegraph.

Catching up here with several months' worth of the new Tom Baker / Louise Jameson audios, which are well worth investing in.

Wrath of the Iceni, by John Dorney, is the only Fourth Doctor story I can think of which is a pure historical – no sfnal elements at all apart from the Doctor and Leela, turning up in first-century Norfolk to encounter Boudica in the battle against the Romans. The story is a particularly good one for Leela, who becomes fascinated with the warrior queen (once it's been done, you realise that Boudica is the most obvious historical character for her to meet); and we get some twists on the "you can't rewrite history" theme. The first time I listened to it I was doing the family supermarket shoopping, and it seemed to me that the character development for Leela was too abrupt; listening to it again, while changing trains on a long journey through France (which I guess meant I was less distracted) it seemed to work much better. So a bit of a health warning that it depends on your frame of mind, but having read and listened to literally all the spinoff stories featuring Leela, I feel that this is one of the best ones for her in terms of character.

Energy of the Daleks was the first story Tom Baker recorded with Big Finish, but was released fourth in this sequence and also after the two Lost Stories. It has some good moments – notably the return of the Robomen – but some silly bits as well – at one point several characters teleport into someone's bed. Baker, Jameson, and particularly Nicholas Briggs as voice of the Daleks, author and director are clearly having tremendous fun, but I think it was wise to shift this one down the release order.

Alan Barnes has rarely disappointed me, and I'm glad to report that in his double story that ends this season, Trail of the White Worm/The Oseidon Adventure, he is on top form. Geoffrey Beevers returns as the Keeper of Traken Master, the idea being that he absorbed enough energy in The Deadly Assassin to become a bit less putrescent as the Doctor puts it. (There's nothing in The Keeper of Traken to contradict an earlier meeting between the Fourth Doctor and the Beevers Master.) In fact the standourt performance in Trail of the White Worm is Rachael Sterling, daughter of Diana Rigg who is to appear with her mother in a Mark Gatiss episode of the coming New Who season, playing a posh woman with more to her than meets the eye. The two stories are more separate than one normally gets in two-parters, though each still has both the Master (Beevers has good rapport with Baker, but isn't quite as evil as most Masters) and a wonderful demented colonel played by Michael Cochrane (who appeared twice in Old Who, as Charles Cranleigh in Black Orchid and Redvers Fenn-Cooper in Ghost Light). The Oseidon Adventure, not surprisingly given its title, is to a large extent a remake of The Android Invasion, with a lot of the same plot elements but doing it much better – particularly the confusion of identity of working out if you yourself may not unwittingly be your own android double.

I don't think any of these is really very penetrable for non-Who fans – perhaps the most accessible is Energy of the Daleks, which is also the least good. The others are all excellent news for those of us who are still in part in the Fourth Doctor era.

I had got hold of this book under the mistaken impression that it belonged on my list of science fiction and fantasy set in Ireland (which I need to update), but in fact there is no sfnal content at all, just a rather well-done story of three generations of women from an island off the Connemara coast; they go back and forth to America, the fall in love, they give birth to each other, one of them dies at the beginning of the book but we get flashbacks to her story throughout. Not what I expected, but not bad.

(, were you aware of this writer?)

A pretty short history of the Russian Orthodox Church from 988 to 1988, written of course just before the world changed; it's fasinating to remember the context of the Cold War and of those who attempted what we would now call Track Two diplomacy across the Iron Curtain.

The first half of the book is pre-revolutionary history, so a bit less controversial; House rather charmingly tries to draw parallels between Russian and English church history (it’s pretty clear that his audience is the liberal English churchgoer), such as the fact that Henry VIII and his contemporary Ivan the Terrible were married several times and reformed the church. Er, yes.

The second half of the book reflects House’s own experiences in outreach from the Anglican community and the World Council of Churches (for whom he worked) to the Soviet Union. He has to be a little guarded in what he says about those still living – who could know for sure what the outcome of перестройка would be? – but he is quite clear about the extent to which the Church was alternatively oppressed by and then forced into collusion with the Communist system.

It’s not a complete account, as House admits in the foreword; the Armenian, Georgian, Baltic, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist stories of religion in the USSR would all be a bit different (not to mention the complexities of Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova). And like most of us he has no inkling of the revival of the Orthodox church in the 1990s, and its unsavoury links with nationalism and closeness to the new regime. But you can’t expect that from 130 pages written in 1988.

This is a first-person narrative published in 1861 by an author who was herself born into slavery in North Carolina; having endured continual sexual harassment from her owner, and borne two children by his neighbour (who meantime got elected to the House of Representatives), she eventually managed to escape into hiding locally, and took refuge in a cramped space in her grandmother's attic for seven years before finally fleeing to New York, where she eventually became freed and a campaigner for education and emancipation. (It's interesting that women were so visible in the Abolitionist movement – cf Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Kemble.)

It's powerful stuff – Jacobs describes the violence inflicted on slaves in detail, and gives a broad enough account of their sexual exploitation by the white population to appall the northern women who were her primary target. The key point, that she comes back to over and over again, is that slavery acted to destroy families; and unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was constrained to give closure to Uncle Tom's Cabin by the constraints of the novel format, she can tell it like it is and also has the luxury of a narrative that stretches over decades, so it is all the more effective.

Despite her being deprived of formal education, Jacobs' style is fluent and eloquent; and any suspicion that there was a ghost-writer involved is laid to rest by reading her other writings available on-line – for instance her reply to a frankly awful piece by former First Lady Julia Tyler; here several of her letters to Harriet Beecher Stowe and others. Of the various slave narratives I have read over the last few years, I think this is the best.

Karen Armstrong’s books about religion have not always worked for me, but this one did the trick – a fairly intense account of how we think the books of the Bible came to be written, and how they have then been used by Jewish and Christian believers over the centuries. Most of it was material with which I was already familiar, but presented in quite and intense and engaging format. I had not previously considered Wycliffe’s links with the scholastic philosophers (which perhaps shows how little I had previously thought about him at all). Not really a book for beginners but an interesting perspective for readers who already know a bit about the subject.

I'd had this big book on Elizabeth I sitting on the shelves looking at me for some time, but when I eventually picked it up at the end of last month I realised that it is actually four separate books inside a single cover – Young Elizabeth (1971), Danger to Elizabeth (1973), Marriage with My Kingdom: The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth I (1977) and Elizabeth Regina (1980), all slightly updated in 2004 (so references to the horrors of the twentieth century have been updated to the horrors of the twenty-first).

The standout book for me, with a lot of material I hadn't really considered before, was the second, Danger to Elizabeth, which looked mainly at the relationship between Elizabeth and English Catholics, and gives quite a substantial and detailed description of Catholic operations inside England – largely a matter of attempting to service the spiritual needs of the recusant community, though of course often tangled up with the high politics of attempted regime change and foreign sponsorship. Plowden makes what seems to me an honest effort to disentangle these strands and to tell it from the perspective of both Catholics and the government; it also of course is a very important element of the Elizabethan approach to Ireland, where religion became integral to the conflict during Elizabeth's reign in a way that had not been the case before.

The first and fourth books, Young Elizabeth and Elizabeth Regina, cover the start and end of Elizabeth's life; decent enough retellings, but I've read better elsewhere, and I was a bit shocked that Plowden assigns some blame to Elizabeth for the abuse she suffered from her stepfather as a teenager. I guess attitudes were different in 1970.

The third book, Marriage with My Kingdom, is an interesting example of writing about something that never happened, Elizabeth's marriage. Plowden takes a decently comprehensive approach to the various suitors proposed for her, starting from her childhood as a marriageable princess (or alternatively a bastard daughter of Henry VIII depending on the year) and going right through to the Duke of Alençon in her late 40s. As noted above, Plowden doesn’t quite take on board the importance of Elizabeth’s teenage experiences in shaping her attitude toward sexuality and relationships, preferring to concentrate on what had happened to her mother and sister (one executed, the other trapped into a loveless and unsuccessful dynastic match). Sexuality is a complex thing and one can hardly blame Elizabeth for rejecting the narrow options which were made available to her if they were not right for her.

I also found myself wondering was why no foreign Protestant suitors ever got a look-in – Eric XIV of Sweden seems to have been a serious contender at one point, but Plowden minimises this, and there were surely other eligible Scandinavian, German or Central European princes who were the right age and religion. Yet it seems to have been only Hapsburgs or French princes who were under consideration. (And Robert Dudley of course.)

Anyway, good background reading, particularly the second book.

• Thank you for killing my novel
  
  The New York Times panned my book, then had to correct the review to fix all their errors. So why am I not angry?
  (tags: writing )
• Are the Black Jews Jewish?
  
  Indigenous Judaism in Africa.
  (tags: religion race )

As usual, I very much enjoyed this Torchwood novel by James Goss. Unusually, it has a very strong comedic element, not something that Torchwood always managed successfully and not something I’d seen Goss try at all. The beautiful concept is that Agnes Havisham, a stern and sarcastic Victorian lady, emerges from decades of suspended animation to do an official assessment of Torchwood, at the same moment as two separate alien threats emerge to torment the innocent citizens of Cardiff. Unlike his first book, Almost Perfect, we get a pretty satisfying exploration of Jack’s character from another perspective, and decent page time for Ianto, Gwen and Rhys too. Rhys gets a couple of particularly glorious moments. I felt the pacing of the plot a little uneven but the style very entertaining..

• Nathalie Rothschild: The Ironies Of An Orwellian Facebook Viral
  
  #fb The truth behind the Big Brother pic.
  (tags: internet books )
• Why I Won’t Be Blogging The Hugo Shortlist This Year
  
  Problems with PDFs.
  (tags: sf ebooks )
• DNSChanger Virus
  
  For once – a malware warning that is actually true!
  (tags: internet )

• That Would Be an Ecumenical Matter (4)
  
  Church and State see marriage in different ways; and Church and State are hopelessly tangled up.
  (tags: religion ukpolitics sexandgenderandsexuality )

• The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut (by the late great Nora Ephron)
  
  ““I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”
  (tags: humour )
• Five in the Colonies: Enid Blyton’s Sri Lankan Adventures, Randy Boyagoda
  
  The classic children’s author.
  (tags: books race )
• Not bored, but Libored
  
  “British banking continues to be insufficiently dull.”
  (tags: ulsterbank banks )
• This Week In Threat-Mongering – The Iran Version – democracyarsenal.org
  
  “If Burns is correct that Iran is America’s number one adversary in the world then truly the United States has little to worry about. Iran is a second rate military power, lacks an active nuclear program, is deeply isolated in the Middle East, has a poorly performing economy and has few allies or friends.”
  (tags: uspolitics waronterror iran )
• That Would Be An Ecumenical Matter (2)
  
  “What would Jesus have said about gay marriage?

  I don’t know, and neither does anybody else.”
  (tags: religion sexandgenderandsexuality )

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Interview (1927)
  
  The creator of Sherlock Holmes speaks.
  (tags: books )

I am joining the chorus of praise for the BBC staging of Richard II last weekend. The high point is certainly Patrick Stewart’s fantastic rendition of the “This Sceptred Isle” speech, as John of Gaunt, in the second act, but it’s all rather fantastic – especially Ben Whishaw in the title role and Rory Kinnear as Bolingbroke. It also rather obviously points up Shakespeare’s debt to Marlowe; Richard II is closer to Marlowe’s Edward II than it is to Richard’s actual life.

When I listened to an audio version as part of my run through Shakespeare a few years ago, I felt that there were two fairly big problems with the plot of Richard II. But the BBC production by Sam Mendes has dealt with both. First off, Whishaw gives a thoroughly convincing performance of a very bad king who is not such a very bad man, in a way that Rupert Graves didn’t quite manage in the version I had previously listened to. And second, Mendes’ decision to merge the two assassination subplots of Act 5 actually makes a lot more sense than Shakespeare’s original text, where the Aumerle plot really comes from nowhere and goes nowhere.

I was also moved to find out what happened to Mowbray, who just vanishes after having played such an important role in the first act. In real life, he died of plague in Venice a few months after his exile; it’s a bit of a shame that we don’t hear about that. Also in real life the Duchess of York died in 1392, several years before the 1399 revolution; but one doesn’t read Shakespeare for historical accuracy.

Anyway, well worth watching this. (See also , here.)

• Media information note, 2nd July
  
  “Ulster Bank payments follow in sequence after those of NatWest and RBS. This … in no way reflects the priority we attach to our Ulster Bank customers.” Oh yeah?
  (tags: ulsterbank )
• Ulster Bank could become Ireland’s first efficient bank
  
  “We’ve always been efficient at taking your money… We’re just not conscientious about giving it back.”
  (tags: ulsterbank )
• Me, Ulster Bank, What they’re doing wrong, and what we can do
  
  “I have had no access to my account via my card for nearly 2 weeks now. “
  (tags: ulsterbank )

I'm not going to read the last of this year's nominated works in the Best Graphic Story category, because for the last three years I dutifully ploughed through that year's Schlock Mercenary volume, found it dull and crudely drawn, and ranked it last (as did the Hugo voters two years of those three); and I don't see any good reason to put myself through that again.

I also find it difficult to compare an entire run of a graphic story with single volumes from series with which I am familiar and also a single volume from a series that I don't know. Even if you try to restrict your judgement to the material listed on the ballot paper, the fact is that your enjoyment and understanding of the volume in question is massively informed by your knowledge of how and if it fits into the wider narrative of the series as a whole (or even the author's work as a whole).

My votes in this category therefore leave me feeling a little uneasy. But I will cast them none the less as follows:

1) Digger by Ursula Vernon
2) The Unwritten (Volume 4): Leviathan, by Mike Carey, illustrated by Peter Gross
3) Fables (Volume 15): Rose Red, by Bill Willingham and Mark Buckingham
4) Locke & Key (Volume 4): Keys to the Kingdom, by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez

[no vote] Schlock Mercenary: Force Multiplication, by Howard Tayler

See also: Best Novel | Best Novella | Best Novelette | Best Short Story | Best Related Work | Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) | Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) | Best Professional Artist | Best Fan Writer | Best Fan Artist | Best Fancast | The John W. Campbell Award (Not A Hugo)

A problem with the Hugo category of Best Graphic Story is that the nominees are often very diverse in form. Here, for instance, we have the fourth of a six-volume sequence, itself consisting of six individual issues of which the first three are relatively distinct from each other and the last three more closely linked; but there is a lot of background knowledge for the new reader to pick up. I found the fourth in the sequence, involving a young boy and a ghostly soldier, particularly effective, and there is an excellent twist at the end. But there are some pretty gory moments as well, and the plot is necessarily incomplete. I don’t think I’ll look out for more of this series as a priority.

(I note that the author’s father won a Hugo for non-fiction in 1982 but has never even been nominated in the fiction categories.)

For what this is – a short New Who book aimed at people who don’t read that much – it is rather good, a story of the Tenth Doctor on his own, reprising the Krillitane plot from School Reunion with some extra wrinkles and a one-off young male sidekick who is into computers but lacks social skills. The prolific Justin Richards on a good day (it can’t have taken terribly long to write).