• Silence of the lobbyists
  
  An irritated journalist writes.
  (tags: eu lobbying )
• Apple building barriers in the EU Single Market
  
  Looking forward to action from @GOettingerEU and @Ansip_EU!
  (tags: eu internet )
• The unreal Mars skyline
  
  Alas, too good to be true.
  (tags: astronomy )

• 52 pieces of advice for aspiring humanitarian workers
  
  So cynical, and yet so accurate!
  (tags: careersadvice )
• The missile that destroyed MH-17
  
  An impressive investigation.
  (tags: ukraine russia )
• From the archive: Beyond the Wall | The Economist
  
  Getting it right in 1989.
  (tags: eu russia germany history )
• Why the Republicans Won
  
  A general tour d’horizon.
  (tags: uspolitics )

I had most of yesterday morning free in London, and decided to try a commemoration of everyone's favourite blogger, Samuel Pepys. Insufficiently thorough research led me to this walk proposed by the Daily Telegraph, and so I set off to Tower Hill to give it a try.

Of course, this is the weekend of the immense poppy display at the Tower of London.

Non-UK residents may be unaware of this: a (ceramic) poppy for each of the 882,000 British soldiers who were killed in the first world war has been planted at the Tower of London, producing this tremendous sea of red. Even at 9 am yesterday, it was already crowded, and I shudder to think what it was like later in the day when the Prime Minister and his wife cam to place the last two flowers.

It is a moving display of collective remembrance.

I was less fortunate with Samuel Pepys. To begin at the end of his life, St Olave's Church, at the end of Seething Lane where he lived (just around the corner from Tower Hill station) is closed on Saturdays. The Monument to the Great Fire, which I first remember ascending when I was 15, is still there but surrounded by building work; I got a couple of decent shots though.

I walked along Cannon Street to St Paul's Cathedral, thinking of the Great Fire, and Pepys trying to get through to the proper authorities in the burning city:

…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."

The streets were a lot quieter than usual because of the Lord Mayor's Show and the various Remembrance Sunday events going on; the clouds were lowering behind New St Paul's, which was only half-built by the time Pepys died (and featured also on Doctor Who later that evening):

I went into St Paul's for perhaps the second time in my life – I think I went with my family when I was a teenager – and had a good look around. There was a remembrance concert starting at 1100, but the crowds were not yet thronging. I was particularly interested in contrast between the tombs of Nelson and Wellington, and Napoleon's tomb in Paris (which I've visited several times over the years). Nelson's tomb is the more similar to Napoleon's (and of course that's chronologically the wrong way round; Napoleon was still alive when Nelson was buried):

Nelson is very much in the place of honour, the focus of the crypt as a whole, giving him prime position as a supreme national hero; but the crypt itself is a very enclosed space, an element but only one element of a national place of worship. Napoleon occupies the central place in the Dôme des Invalides to the point that I'm sure many visitors think it was built for that purpose.

It is interesting to note that Nelson's sarcophagus had been commissioned almost 300 years earlier for Cardinal Wolsey, but was never used by him. Apparently it had been sitting around Windsor waiting for the right occupant.

Wellington, who presumably had more say in his arrangements than Nelson did, is in a less prominent place:

He is surrounded by the gradually decaying flags from his funeral in 1852, which look like campaign flags and make him appear to be in mute dialogue with his former colleagues. The places of his victories are inscribed around his sarcophagus. There is no mention of the fact that he served two terms as prime minister; it's the resting place of an old soldier who knew when his best days had been.

Somewhat ironic that Wellington and Nelson ended up so close to each other in death, in that in life they met only once, shortly before Nelson's was killed (he didn't know Wellesley, and had to ask who he was).

Anyway, back to Pepys. Having failed on his tomb, I did better on his birthplace in Salisbury Court off Fleet Street.

But I was not very satisfied. I felt that there must be some better guides to Pepys' London out there. And of course, once I got home, I found that there are: Glyn Thomas has compiled three excellent walks, one for Westminster, one for the west of the City and the South Bank, and one for the east of the City and Greenwich. Thanks to my recent change of job, it is likely that I will be in London a lot more often in the next year or so. Would others be interested in joining me in doing any or all of those walks, either on a winter weekend or a decently daylit evening?

Originally posted by at The Fall of the Wall, twenty years on

• Famous Films With A Letter Removed
  
  In case you hadn’t seen this!
  (tags: films funny )
• Latvia’s foreign minister comes out
  
  The more the merrier!
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality latvia )
• Laura Ingalls Wilder’s memoir Pioneer Girl
  
  The fact behind the fiction. (And shivers down the spine.)
  (tags: usa history )
• UK to pay £1.7bn EU bill in full despite Osborne’s claim to have halved it
  
  @traynorbrussels has the figures.
  (tags: eu ukpolitics )
• Who The Hell Keeps Calling Me?
  
  What it’s like to be doxxed by #gamergate.
  (tags: internet games )

• A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names
  
  More detail, maybe more than you want to read.
  (tags: sf )

• The Home Office admits it: Tough enforcement does not lower drug use
  
  What next?
  (tags: ukpolitics )
• In memoriam: Miljenko Dereta
  
  A great guy, gone too soon.
  (tags: serbia death )

Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
ℵ1
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
Empire of Death, by David Bishop

Last books finished
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years, by Philip Sandifer
θ2
ι2
κ2 (gave up, won’t finish)
λ2

Next books
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt
 
Books acquired in last week
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years, by Philip Sandifer
CHOOZ, by Santi & Bucquoy

• Foxes performs ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ on board the Orient Express – Doctor Who
  
  “There’s no stopping me!”
  (tags: doctorwho music video )
• The moving parts of the new European Commission
  
  In case you needed to know.
  (tags: eu )
• Old railway tunnels of Belgium
  
  What lies beneath.
  (tags: belgium rail )

• #Gamergate and the failure of ethics
  
  What ethics actually means, and what it is wrongly said to mean.
  (tags: internet games )
• Building an organisation to defend EU-wide rail
  
  A call to action from @JonWorth.
  (tags: eu travel rail )
• There’s A Bat Hospital In Australia That Takes In Abandoned Baby Bats
  
  Awww!!!!
  (tags: cute australia animals )
• The 20-metre boundary between Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire
  
  Carefully researched.
  (tags: maps england )
• Middle schoolers’ dreams of worms in space still alive despite rocket explosion
  
  Great headline!
  (tags: space )

• Goodbye Academia, Hello Happiness
  
  Emma’s declaration of independence.
  (tags: career )
• Why inequality matters – and how to tackle it
  
  Bill Gates on Piketty
  (tags: economics )
• Write All the Genres, Lois McMaster Bujold!
  
  Salute to a great writer.
  (tags: sf )

My question to the Member of Parliament for Eastbourne:

@nwbrux I was in Remembrance of the Daleks (part 2). Tiny role which made me appreciate I was likely the most unsuccessful actor in London!

— Stephen Lloyd (@StephenLloydEBN) November 2, 2014

The latest in Sandifer’s collections of pieces from his long-running blog, this time looking at the post-Hinchcliffe Fourth Doctor stories (and therefore including not only the Graham Williams era, but the first year of Jon Nathan-Turner’s producership). This includes some of the least popular stories ever (eg Underworld) but also some of the most (City of Death). Sandifer mounts a credible defence of Graham Williams – unfairly maligned by Nathan-Turner, and by fandom during the JNT era; dealing with appalling constraints both creative (instructed to tone down the violence after the Hinchcliffe years; then instructed to dial back the humour, which didn’t leave much) and technical (the show, and the BBC, simply running out of money). He also finds more evidence than I thought possible for the influence of Douglas Adams on the show, not only during his time as scipt editor, but both before and after. (And, of course, vice versa.)

Most importantly, he finds that Williams was compelled to turn Doctor Who into the Tom Baker Show, which is of course great for us Tom Baker fans, but not so great for the show’s long-term health. Nathan-Turner then took over and found himself in the same position as Innes Lloyd in 1966 – the show was defined around the lead actor; how to take it forward without him? One senses that Sandifer has more to say about JNT in future volumes, but here he concentrates on Christopher Bidmead’s contribution to Season 18. There are the usual excellent side essays – one previously unpublished on versions of Shada, several on comics, novels and other SF media (in particular Star Wars), an explanatory note on the Winter of Discontent, and what I think is the first write-up of a Big Finish play in this series of books (a lovely piece on The Auntie Matter).

I confess I was a little disappointed on one or two points. The pieces on The Invasion of Time and The Leisure Hive didn’t actually say much about either story, and I think both are interesting in their own right, for good or ill. Although he rightly singles out Lalla Ward for praise, I would have liked to read more about Louise Jameson and particularly John Leeson, who is given less page time than Matthew Waterhouse. A sequence of thought about David Fisher is started but not finished. There seems to be a lot of dialogue with Wood and Miles. And some of the key points about Williams and Nathan-Turner, summarised above, are repeated as often as you would expect in a series of blog posts, but perhaps more often than you would expect in a book that has been edited.

Still, if this is the weakest of the four volumes so far, that should in no way be considered faint praise; I’m nominating it enthusiastically for the BSFA and Hugo awards next year, and I hope you will too.

This is the very latest Doctor Who prose to be published, a short ebook by Holly Black, well-known horror writer for younger readers, which is actually a coda to the eleven ebooks published last year, one for each Doctor; presumably the whole lot will appear in paper as a collection soon. (My advice – buy it, but skip the rather weak opening story by Eoin Colfer.)

This is very good. We have a non-human protagonist and the Twelfth Doctor (between Deep Breath and Into The Dalek) having an adventure as a consequence of getting coffee at an interplanetary coffee joint, in which you find just precisely the sorts of aliens from both Old and New Who who you would expect to see stopping off for a break between adventures. The tropes of both the Whoniverse and sf more widely are beautifully handled and the story, though very short, packs a decent punch. Well worth the (very low) price.

I had not read any of Black’s work before, being a couple of decades out of the target readership, but if this is her standard I can see why she has a following.

• Heartbreak Hotel
  
  The betrayal: #gamergate.
  (tags: internet games )
• Shallow-buried stories of slavery in the South
  
  Frederick Douglass and Maryland. (And Ireland.)
  (tags: usa race )
• The Making of Ferguson
  
  The role of estate agents.
  (tags: uspolitics race )

This was given to us by a dear Alaskan friend in Bosnia back in 1998, and I read it pretty avidly then; my other half, however, gave it up as too awful after the second dead baby. (The second is not the last.) Rereading it, I still think it's a tremendous tour de force, an agonising story of poverty and how Ireland can wreck your family; I am perhaps a little better read in this sub-genre now, but it remains a classic.

If you haven't read it, it's the Pulitzer-winning autobiography of Frank McCourt, son of a Limerick lass and an Antrim lad, born in New York in 1930, but propelled back to Limerick by the Great Depression and by his father's alcoholism and utter inability to hold down a job. Angela, his mother, sometimes holds it together and sometimes doesn't; they are treated by church and layfolk as the undeserving poor; significantly, rather late in the book, Frank gets his first real break working for the remnant Protestant community of Limerick. There are some funny moments, but in general it's a grimly realistic account of the Years of the Great Test, and how they played out for the most vulnerable. (Perhaps a little exaggerated – I don’t believe a word of the Theresa Carmody subplot.)

So; I think it’s a great story about poverty and social exclusion, and the damage caused by addiction; I think one has to take it with a slight pinch of salt; but even without the pinch, it’s a compelling tale.

Having been disappointed with the first Twelfth Doctor novel I read, I can reassure you that Justin Richards (who I regard as New Who’s Terrance Dicks, in terms of his output of books and general ability to produce readable prose) is on form here, with the Doctor and Clara dropping in on the Paternoster Gang, who are investigating mysterious deaths linked to a carnival. Strax gets some particularly good lines (I see Jenny/Vastra fans complaining that we don’t get enough of them, so be warned) and there are also some great moments of horror, pitched well for the target age group. And we get cameo appearances from the other Doctors (or an alien pretending to be them) as well. Great fun.

• Frankenstein audio play by Big Finish
  
  Starring Arthur Darvill, Nicholas Briggs & Georgia Moffett.
  (tags: sf )
• Motor Directory for County Dublin 1911-12
  
  The 763 registered cars in Dublin, and their owners.
  (tags: ireland history )