November Books

Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 48)
Isaiah Berlin, by Michael Ignatieff
Washington, D.C.’s Vanishing Springs and Waterways, by Garnett P. Williams
Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee
Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response, by Tony Connelly

Fiction (non-sf): 4 (YTD 24)
A Man of Parts, by David Lodge
Dear Old Dead, by Jane Haddam
Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle
Mutiny on the Bounty, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 69)
The Deepest Sea, by Charles Barnitz
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl
The Knight of the Swords, by Michael Moorcock
The Queen of the Swords, by Michael Moorcock
The King of the Swords, by Michael Moorcock

Doctor Who, etc: 3 (YTD 48)
Short Trips: Indefinable Magic, ed. Neil Corry
A Life Worth Living ed. Simon Guerrier
Doctor Who: The American Adventures, by Justin Richards

4,900 pages (YTD 53,600)
2/16 (YTD 57/214) by women (Lee, Haddam)
0/16 (YTD 16/214) by PoC

Reread: 1 (YTD 12): Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Reading now
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
Everfair, by Nisi Shawl
Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, by Philip Sandifer

Coming soon (perhaps):
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham
Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden's Concordance Unwrote the Bible by Julia Keay
The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig
Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories, ed. John Joseph Adams
The Autumnlands, Vol. 1: Tooth and Claw, by Kurt Busiek
The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons
Het genootschap van Socrates by Yves Leclercq
It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis
The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal
Julian, by Gore Vidal
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield
"Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber
Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams
Quoth the Raven, by Jane Haddam
Looking For JJ, by Anne Cassidy
The Island Of Doctor Moreau, by H.G. Wells
Daystar and Shadow, by James B. Johnson
Planesrunner by Ian McDonald
Le Mariage de Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
The Universe Between, by Alan E Nourse
Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
So, Anyway…, by John Cleese
Toast, by Charles Stross
Tangle Of Fates, by Leslie Ann Moore
Spirit, by Gwyneth Jones
Re:Collections, ed. Xanna Eve Chown
A Life in Pieces, by Dave Stone (2005)

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Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Orlando’s history plays with the notion that genetic inheritance can be pooled (just as sexual orientations can be crossed) in the identity of one person. So, after living for generations, Orlando is both an exceptional individual, and the summation of her whole family’s history. But the inheritance is not usually as joyously resolved. In the novel of her family, To The Lighthouse – a novel split down the middle – the splits between husband and wife, parents and children, past and presaent, generate a violent sense of conflict and a painful desire for resolution: ‘For what happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what I feel was the other; and then they fought together in her mind, as now.’ This ‘violent’ conflict of feelings is given to the modern, post-war artist, trying to make her peace with her Victorian inheritance by turning it into her material. It is also the conflict of the twentieth-century daughter, torn between the sympathies she feels arising from ‘the mysterious kinship of blood’, and the quarrel of the generations: ‘that’s what you feel … that’s what I feel.’

I’m a late convert to Virginia Woolf. Since I started bookblogging I have read Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves, Selected Essays and Between the Acts, and I have enjoyed them all. There is something about the Modernists that really ticks my boxes (as opposed to the nineteenth-century Romantics who I often find impenetrable). I guess I should look out for Orlando next.

Lee’s biography of Woolf was published in 1996, and I see there have been a couple more since; but this is pretty comprehensive, covering 59 years in 770 pages. Woolf bitterly regretted not having had a formal education, but maybe her more chaotic intellectual upbringing was a necessary precursor for her genius to take the shape that it did. Certainly being brought up with and mixing with writers gave her a keen understanding for the writer’s life. Lee does a really good job of mapping the literary interactions between Woolf and her family, friends and lovers, from the day she was born to the day she died. I learned a lot about the micro-geography of Bloomsbury and its satellite territories, and it was all very interesting.

Lee devotes appropriate but not obsessional attention to Virginia’s half-brother’s sexual abuse of her and her sister; she rightly puts more time into elucidating Woolf’s experience of mental illness, which hit her repeatedly as an adult and prompted her suicide at the fear of yet another debilitating breakdown. I feel a lot of Woolf’s work is translucently teetering on the edge of experience, and this was a good explanation of how that came to be. Though of course, a lot of other people have similar experiences and do not achieve the same fame; it doesn’t explain how she became a great writer, but it does I think help explain why she became the great writer that she did.

My one minor disappointment with Lee’s book is that I didn’t feel Woolf’s feminism was really put into context, apart from her fleeting engagement with the suffragettes and her later entanglement with Dame Ethel Smyth. Did she interact with or influence other feminist writings of the day? Were her friends and lovers (other than Ethel Smyth) also feminists? She is portrayed here as rather a lone voice in the wilderness.

However, otherwise this was a very satisfying read about someone I had wished I knew more about, and whose books I will now read with greater understanding and even more enthusiasm.

This was the top unread book by a woman on my shelves. Next on that list is Looking For JJ, by Anne Cassidy.

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The Irish and Belgian approaches to Brexit

I have both Irish and Belgian citizenship, and as luck would have it there are two recent publications examining how both countries are dealing with Brexit.

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response, by Tony Connelly

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The essential problem is this. Since Ireland and the UK joined the EEC together in 1973, all trade between both countries has come to be governed by shared membership of the single market and customs union. There are no barriers to that trade. Exports and imports flow back and forth across the Irish Sea, and back and forth over the land border. Britain has said it wants to leave the single market but still access it, or to have the closest possible trading relationship with it. Norway is not a member of the EU, but it is a member of the European Economic Area, an organization that brings together the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). That means it is regarded as part of the EU single market and as such enjoys full free-trade access and participates in areas such as research and development, education, social policy, the environment, consumer protection, tourism and culture (though it does not participate in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)). In return, Norway must accept the four freedoms (free movement of people, goods, capital and services); it must pay into the EU budget; and it must accept the body of EU law without having a seat at the table. These are things that the UK has so far refused to countenance.

Reviewing an earlier book by the same author ten years ago, I concluded:

If Connelly’s journalism is as good as this, then RTÉ have an important asset – not just for the domestic Irish audience, but for explaining Europe better to the English-speaking world (a job which the British media dismally fails to do).

My confidence was justified; this is an excellent read. There are two distinct strands of analysis, each done in satisfying detail: i) the inside baseball story of how Irish, British and EU officials dealt with the problems thrown up by Brexit, particularly those relating to Ireland; and ii) an examination of how different Irish economic sectors are affected by Brexit.

I learned much more from the second of these strands. I had no idea that the ducks farmed on the Monaghan/Tyrone border are so dominant in the Asian market. I had no idea of the Irishness of most Cheddar cheese, or that nobody outside the UK and Ireland buys Cheddar. I had no idea about the deep resentment of the Irish fishing industry over the Common Fisheries Policy. I had some idea of the complexities of the cross-border and croos-Irish Sea livestock trade, and of the intricate history of the Common Travel Area, but Connelly’s book enlightened me still further. Put simply, Brexit is a massively disrupting factor for the Irish economy, and the Irish government is right to demand more than magical thinking about the border from London before moving to discussion of the future trade relationship. (NB that what is required for now is not a complete solution, but an outline which goes further than the magical thinking on offer so far.)

However, I was more interested in the first strand, not least because I know several of the protagonists. I had been wondering if there was ever a serious possibility that Ireland might be tempted to align with the UK against the rest of the EU, to enable a better deal for the departing Brits. The answer is pretty clear: Dublin had gamed out the consequences of a Brexit vote long in advance (unlike London) and came to the conclusion that their negotiating power would be better aligned with the other 26 member states rather than the UK; the rest of the EU would be more likely to offer solidarity than the British. This was not without its challenges – the rest of the EU needed educating and convincing about the specifics of the Irish situation; some Irish officials did start to look at ways of managing the border, but were reined in by a government anxious not to surrender its negotiating capital; EU Commissioner Phil Hogan, though no longer an Irish government official, emerges as a key figure stiffening spines in both Dublin and Brussels.

The other reason that there was no prospect of Ireland aligning with the UK against the rest is that the British government at central level has absolutely no clue about either part of Ireland. (The DUP deal is less important here than the absence of an Executive in Northern Ireland.) The British Embassy in Dublin is mentioned precisely once, which indicates the value placed on the FCO by Whitehall today. One anecdote, already much-quoted but I’ll quote it again, is especially cringeworthy:

In July [2016], an official in the Department of the Taoiseach received a curious email. It came from the diary secretary of David Davis, the Secretary of State for DexEU – aka ‘Minister for Brexit’. The email read: ‘The Secretary of State has told me he wants to meet Kenny. Please let us know if Kenny is available.’ A senior diplomat immediately wrote to a British official further up the Whitehall food chain. ‘The message was sent [back],’ recalls the diplomat, ‘(a), the Taoiseach is not Davis’s interlocutor and (b), you don’t refer to the Prime Minister of a country by his surname.’

In recent weeks British commentators have been reacting with fury to their discovery that Ireland is an independent country which will pursue its own self-interest. So much for that special relationship. This is an excellent book, and fairly short too.

Towards a Belgian Position on Brexit: Actively Reconciling National and European Interests, by Alexander Mattelaer

Even shorter is a 20-page paper from the Egmont Institute, released only today, about the Belgian approach to Brexit. Here is the second paragraph of the third section:

This section disentangles the complex debate about how to approach Brexit from a Belgian perspective into three distinct conceptual approaches. Firstly, the Belgian government can use its voice in the European Council debate on Article 50 to relentlessly pursue its national interests. Alternatively, it can set its national interests aside in favour of the greater European good. Or thirdly, it can choose to keep a low profile and let the European institutions and other EU member states determine the Article 50 agenda. All three options have their own merits and drawbacks. Of course, these different ways of approaching Brexit are but caricatures for describing a reality that is always infinitely more complex. Yet as the diplomatic challenge for Belgium boils down to an exercise in balancing different impulses, it is enlightening to discuss these options as distinct ideal-types.

It’s a much more academic and theoretical piece than Connelly’s book, but it addresses the same question that I found so interesting in the Irish case: given Belgium’s huge exposure to the UK on trade, and its historical dependence on the UK for security, was there ever any chance of Belgium allying with the British (and perhaps the Irish, in this scenario) against the rest? Mattelaar doesn’t examine the history of any particular approach along these lines by the British (probably because there wasn’t one) but does look at the tension between the self-interest of an EU member state and the policy of supporting the EU as a bloc in the Brexit negotiations. Having more or less admitted up front that this is a straw-man dichotomy, it does not take him long to conclude that these two things are pretty much aligned in the case of Belgium, and that the government’s policy therefore makes sense. (No political actor in Belgium, as far as I am aware, has suggested otherwise.) He does also look at the exposure of different parts of Belgium (Flanders/Wallonia; textiles; fisheries) to Brexit, before concluding that actually the differences are not all that great. The meat of the paper is on pages 8 to 11, immediately following the paragraph I quoted above. It’s very much worth reading to understand the Belgian approach to Brexit.

I have not yet found anything that explains the British approach to Brexit. I will keep looking.

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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl

Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘Did Mr Wonka do it, Grandpa?’

When I first read this book, aged 7 or so, I was expecting horror – good old Puffin Post had published an excised chapter, “Spotty Powder”, back in 1973, concerning the fate of another obnoxious child visitor, Miranda Piker, and it is much darker than any of the bits that made it into the final book. The chill that went down my back as I read it has stayed with me for 43 years:

There was a moment’s silence. Then, far off in the distance, from somewhere deep underground, there came a fearful scream.

“That’s my husband!” cried Mrs Piker, going blue in the face. There was another scream.

“And that’s Miranda!” yelled Mrs Piker, beginning to hop around in circles. “What’s happening to them? What have you got down there, you dreadful beast?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Mr Wonka answered. “Just a lot of cogs and wheels and chains and things like that, all going round and round and round.”

“You villain!” she screamed. “I know your tricks! You’re grinding them into powder! In two minutes my darling Miranda will come pouring out of one of those dreadful pipes, and so will my husband!”

“Of course,” said Mr Wonka. “That’s part of the recipe.”

You can read it here (NB although that page claims the chapter was only rediscovered in 2005, I have very vivid memories of reading it in 1973).

In fact I was both relieved and slightly disappointed that none of the four nasty children in the published text suffers quite as horrible a fate, and they all get out alive at the end (whereas one gets the distinct sense that Miranda and her father won’t).

It’s really difficult to read the original novel now without seeing clashing visions of Gene Wilder and Johnny Depp being Willy Wonka, and of the 1971 Oompa-Loompas vs Deep Roy. It’s a story where the grotesque, benevolent but also threatening Wonka uses the Oompa-Loompas as agents of moral justice, bringing about the downfall of evil (gluttony, parental indulgence, excessive use of chewing gum and too much television) and the triumph of impoverished virtue (Charlie and his family, who are otherwise not all that interesting). But this is in the context of a dystopian consumerist society, whose tastes Wonka is pandering to, a course that he expects Charlie to take up in due course; and a close examination of how Wonka runs his factory is also rather uncomfortable.

So, like most of Dahl’s better stories, it’s a fairy tale with a troubling core.

The is the most popular book in my library that I had not yet reviewed on line. Next in that pile is Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift.

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Sunday reading

Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
The Bounty Trilogy, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
Everfair, by Nisi Shawl
Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, by Philip Sandifer

Last books finished
Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee
Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle
Corum: The Prince in the Scarlet Robe, by Michael Moorcock

Next books
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Kevin Birmingham
Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden’s Concordance Unwrote the Bible by Julia Keay
Re: Collections, ed. Xanna Eve Chown

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Everfair map confusion – what do you think?

I’m just starting Nisi Shawl’s Everfair, which made the Nebula finalists this year (but missed the Hugos, finishing 8th on the Best Novel ballot). The frontispiece is this map, which I found a little confusing:

The book is an alternate history where the Fabians create an idealistic colony in the Congo, and the map shows the different stages of its territorial expansion.

The problem is that the map legend has four colours, but the map itself seems to have only three.

My best guess is that the south-eastern corner is the 1893 first buy, the 1897 second buy is missing (I don’t see anywhere on the map coloured that dark), the north-east is the bit conquered by 1904, and the western spur the land offered in 1914.

Maybe it will become clear as I read the book.

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It Happened One Night (1934)

It Happened One Night won the Oscar for Outstanding Production in 1935. Eleven other films were in contention; I won’t bother listing them. Frank Capra also won the Oscar for Best Director, Clark Gable for Best Actor, Claudette Colbert for Best Actress and Robert Riskin for Best Adaptation (now Best Adapted Screenplay), a sweep which has been repeated only twice since (by One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs). It ranks top of the films of 1934 on IMDB. I cannot recall ever having heard of it before starting this project.

I really enjoyed it. This was the first Oscar-winning film that I felt I could inflict on my wife without having to make too many excuses for it being a creation of its own times. As usual, I’m going to take the bits I liked least first.

Alcohol: It’s rather extraordiary to today’s sensibilities to see Peter Warne very drunk on his first appearance, and both he and Andrews père get drunk, on their own, in later scenes. In a film made in 2017, these would be clear signals of alcoholism. It’s very difficult to comprehend how alcohol abuse could ever have been portrayed as a heroic characteristic to the extent that it is here. Daniel Grossvogel has an interesting comment on this in his book Marianne and the Puritan: Transformations of the Couple in French and American Films (p. 32 if you want to check):

[Peter] is also granted the generic masculine resort to drink: Hollywood long accepted as an unvarying semiotic that the male’s hard drinking was an instance of manliness – a tough remedy used as a form of valiant concealment. But whereas the manly hero remains sober even as he drinks, comedy makes Peter truculently tipsy rather than sorrowful.

Whitewashing:The story takes us from Miami to New York, ie through the heart of the Old South, and we see precisely one black character, a cook at the first stop played by Ira “Buck” Woods, in his first (uncredited) screen role; he went on to be a leading man in black cinema in the 1940s, though his most durable work is probably the vocals for Tom’s performance of “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” in the 1946 Tom and Jerry short Solid Serenade.

Landscape: California does not look much like the East Coast. There are mountains in the establishing scene with the yacht supposedly in Miami (which has no mountains). The roads are Western rather than Eastern. The railway train is branded “Southern Pacific”. Note how even the scenes supposedly set in New York do not use establishing shots of famous landmarks.

The Battle of the Sexes: I thought I really wasn’t going to like this aspect of the film at first. Ellie escapes the physical control of her father in the first scene, and almost immediately slips involutarily into Peter’s guardianship. But actually her plot line turns out to be one of emancipation and personal choice, ultimately supported by her father, ending with (very tastefully implied offscreen) glorious sex with Peter. The turning point in a way is when after Peter, having bragged about his hitch-hiking skills, fails to get them a lift, she succeeds immediately by showing her leg to the next driver.

Ellie: I proved once and for all that the limb is mightier than the thumb.
Peter: Why didn’t you take off all your clothes? You could have stopped forty cars.
Ellie: Well, ooo, I’ll remember that when we need forty cars.

I once hitch-hiked across a medium-seized country (Heilbronn to Berlin, and back) with a woman called Ellen with whom I had a slightly spiky relationship, but I hope I was less smug (I was only 19).

The Inspiration for Bugs Bunny: Yes, really. Clark Gable with the carrots.

The Contemporary Technology: The bus itself is rather a star – brilliant early twentieth-century creaky technology. I watched the film on a transatlantic flight where I had three seats to myself – United Airlines not being so popular these days – but I bantered a bit with the chap across the aisle about how British Airways (or basically any other airline) are much better. Back in the old days if you wanted to travel from Miami to New York you became part of a community for the day and a half (maybe two days, in the 1930s) of the trip. That little social laboratory is conveyed very well.

While we’re on the technology, let’s shout out for the autogyro in which Ellie’s imminently spurned lover arrived at their wedding. They were used a lot in the 1930s before helicopters overtook them. I remember one being featured on Blue Peter in the 1970s.

There’s a scene with Ellie’s father on a plane as well, and the use of telegraph and the print media to carry the news of her disappearance. (It was obviously a slow news week that week, if she made the front pages.)

The Music: Unless I missed something, the sound apart from the opening titles is entirely diegetic. Clark Gable mockingly sings “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf”, which had only come out the previous year. A group of passengers on the coach sing “The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze” rather wonderfully. (Wikipedia says that Walter O’Keefe made the song popular in 1934, which would make it tricky to explain why it’s sung in a film largely made in 1933; Wikipedia is however wrong, as O’Keefe actually released it in 1928 and again in 1932. I can’t be bothered to correct Wikipedia; feel free to do so yourself.) Most joyfully, Frank Capra the director provides the third verse of “Flying Trapeze” in a cameo.

The Comedy: Once Gable and Colbert have got over the setup, they are a great double-act, the best scene perhaps being where they are interrogated by detectives looking for her and put on a convincing performance of being a squabbling married couple. There are some other great sparking moments, including Peter’s threat to undress in front of Ellie (apparently sales of undershirts in America plummeted as a result), and this exchange:

Ellie: Would you believe it? This is the first time I’ve ever been alone with a man!
Peter: Yeah?
Ellie: It’s a wonder I’m not panic-stricken.
Peter: You’re doing alright.
Ellie: Thanks. Nurses, governesses, chaperones, even bodyguards. Oh, it’s been a lot of fun.

I’m also going to shout out to Roscoe Karns, as creepy fellow-passenger Shapeley, who was also a senior officer in Wings and therefore (I think; I haven’t been keeping track) is the first actor to appear in two winners of the Best Picture Oscar or equivalent.

Basically this was a lot of fun, more than I expected it to be from the first fifteen minutes. Next up is Mutiny on the Bounty.

I tracked down the original story, “Night Bus”, in the anthology No, But I Saw The Movie, edited by David Wheeler. The original author was Samuel Hopkins Adams, and it was originally published in Cosmopolitan, though Dell then brought it out as a standalone a year later. He made his name thirty years before as a young journalist investigating patent medicine scams, and also wrote risqué novels in the 1920s. None of his work is in print but some of the stories (not this one) are available electronically through various means.

The film sticks surprisingly closely to the 50 pages, the biggest deviations being i) Peter is a chemist, not a journalist, with a new process that will make him rich and turns out to be a college friend of Ellie’s cousin; i) the bus passengers are stranded on an island when the river floods and Peter steals a boat to get himself and Ellie away, rather than driving across country; and ii) modern technology resolves the story when Andrews père records his conversation with Peter on a dictaphone and plays it back to Ellie to convince her of Peter’s character – no autogyro here. But the “walls of Jericho” punchline is in the original. Two weak points in the film script are explained better in the story – Ellie goes to the Windsor Hotel in Jacksonville to take a bath (also she owns the hotel), which is why they miss the bus; and the larcenous driver Danker is portrayed more as knave than fool. Also interesting to note that “Ellie” is short for “Elspeth” not “Ellen” in the original story, and her father has two very Scottish middle names. Was their Scottishness too difficult for Hollywood to handle in the 1930s?

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

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Doctor Who: The American Adventures, by Justin Richards

Second paragraph of third story:

It had been a terrible accident: a whole section of the tunnel roof had collapsed suddenly, without any warning. Diggin a new subway under New York City was always going to be dangerous, but Pete never expected it to be this dangerous. He never expected three of his fellow workers to be killed in the process – and he certainly never expected to see one of them again, just a couple of months later.

A collection of six short stories featuring a companionless Twelfth Doctor visiting the USA at different points in history from 1815 to the present day. I’m afraid this is definitely at the potboiler end of Richards’ range (which is considerable: I think he overtook Terrance Dicks as the writer with most Doctor Who books to his credit some time ago). The Doctor has very little of Capaldi’s characterisation, and a couple of the stories are very weak plot-wise. Younger American fans will be please to have the Doctor visit their country, but there’s not much here for the rest of us.

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The Deepest Sea, by Charles Barnitz

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Sygtrygg was glad to be getting back to what he understood best: the organisation of a vik. The like of his mood hadn’t been seen since before Orm’s death. With the responsibilities of lord had come the grim business of settling troubke instead of starting it, and Sygtrygg has never been stellar in that role. Now that he was busy outfitting the ships, he made jokes, displayed unaccustomed largesse to his thanes and thralls, and once burst into song in the hall, startling everyone into a silence so awful you could hear the thatch mice moving in the roof.

This had been on my list of science fiction and fantasy books set in Ireland for a very long time, and I must admit I've found so many of those books to be stereotypical Celtic misht rubbish that I was reluctant to pick this one off the shelf. My heart sank further when I was confronted with the maps at the front of the book:

Naíll? Ernhaim Macha? An umlaut in Eöganachta?? Where is Drogheda?

Meanwhile, in the English Kindgoms (sic) Jarrow has mutated to Yarrow and moved to the wrong Newcastle. And I don't think Northumbria was exactly there.

But in fact it's much much better than I expected after this unpromising start. Barnitz has done a good job of a light-hearted historical fantasy novel set around the archipelago, with lots of different eight-century tribes and customs, which actually seemed to me to be straight historical fiction until the dragon came into the story about half way through. It’s a coming of age novel that doesn’t take itself too seriously but is nonetheless a fun read. I’d read more by this author.

This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is The Universe Between, by Alan Nourse.

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Isaiah Berlin, by Michael Ignatieff

Second paragraph of third chapter:

By May 1915 the Baltic was under German naval blockade and the timber trade was at a standstill. Mendel [Isaiah Berlin’s father] had managed to re-orient the business away from export to supplying the Russian railroads, but still a large portion of his timber was sitting in local yards. When a fire wiped out his stock, Mendel accused the German owner of the yard of setting it deliberately; the German retaliated by denouncing Berlin to the police, for setting it to claim the insurance. By then imperial Russia was in full retreat along the eastern front and the German armies were within twenty-five miles of the city.

This biography was published in 1998, the year after Berlin’s death, many years before Ignatieff took the Canadian Liberal Party to their worst result ever. I confess that although I have been involved with politics for most of my adult life, I’ve had very little time for political philosophy. After reading this biography, I’m willing to concede that I may have missed out. Berlin’s work on liberal political philosophy in an age of political extremes was of crucial importance to steer between different brands of totalitarianism in the years leading up to the Second World War, and to give the West friendly criticism during the Cold War. His life as an academic was not particularly interesting, but his life as a Russian emigrant who became a loyal British subject (yet always conscious of his origins) it fascinating. The relationship he had with Russian literature was crucial to his philosophy, and his most famous phrase, “The Hedgehog and the Fox” comes from an essay on Tolstoy. His November 1945 meeting with Anna Akhmatova in Moscow had profound effects on them both. Ignatieff clearly admired and loved Berlin, but is not uncritical of his political philosophy which he says looked more at the negative case of illiberalism than the positive case for liberalism; I don’t feel qualified to judge.

There is one truly hilarious anecdote which I had not heard before. In the later stages of the Second World War, Berlin was posted to the British Embassy in Washington D.C. and wrote detailed and insightful reports back to Whitehall. Winston Churchill, hearing that Mr Berlin was in London for a few days, invited him for lunch with the Chief of the General Staff and others. But the lunch guest, surprisingly to Churchill, had a strong American accent and yet was only able to give vague and disappointing answers to Churchill’s questions about the political and economic situation across the Atlantic. It turned out that there had been a mistake; Churchill had invited not Isaiah Berlin, but the composer Irving Berlin, author of “White Christmas”. It seems too good to be true, but it’s well documented.

This was my top book acquired in 2010. next on that list is Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, by Jane Hirshfield.

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A Man of Parts, by David Lodge

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The best of his novels about men seeking to understand what was wrong with contemporary society, and to find some useful role for themselves in it, was Tono-Bungay, published in 1909; in fact he regards it as his best novel of any kind, judged by normal literary criteria. The novels that followed were more polemical and discursive, and, with the exception of Ann Veronica, which was centred on its heroine, their heroes were so humourlessly high-minded that he privately referred to these books as his ‘prig’ novels. The New Machiavelli, Marriage, The Passionate Friends, The Research Magnificent were some of their titles, all about men progressing from youth to maturity who were to some extent idealised versions of himself: taller, more handsome, from a higher social class, and considerably more punctilious in their relations with the opposite sex. These men invariably experienced a conflict between their personal sense of mission, whether intellectual or political, and their desire for union with a particular woman. Usually the woman proved to be an obstacle to the fulfilment of the mission, which could only be overcome by her being converted to it or by dying or by some act of renunciation by the hero.

This is a fictional biography of H.G. Wells, by David Lodge, many of whose novels I read in my early 20s and none since. Wells comes across as a well-meaning and very intelligent chap, not very self-aware, committed to his writing, to his politics, and to liberating women from the shackles of conventional sexuality; this last activity left several of them pregnant. Since it’s a novel rather than a biography, it’s a bit difficult to judge by the standards of biographies: all I can say is that I was entertained by it, I learned a lot about Wells’ life and work from it, and I hope that most of what I learned was true.

This had bubbled to the top of my lists of books acquired in 2013 and non-genre fiction recommended by you. Next respectively on those lists are Planesrunner, by Ian McDonald, and Le Mariage de Figaro, by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. (I may have to read the latter in English when I get to it, but I’ll try the French version first.)

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Sunday reading (a day late)

Current
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (a chapter a month)
Virginia Woolf, by Hermione Lee
Corum: The Prince in the Scarlet Robe, by Michael Moorcock

Last books finished
Washington, D.C.’s Vanishing Springs and Waterways, by Garnett P. Williams
Dear Old Dead, by Jane Haddam

Next books
Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle
Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: Notes on Science Fiction and Culture in the Year of Angry Dogs, by Philip Sandifer
Everfair, by Nisi Shawl

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Cavalcade: film and theatre script

Cavalcade won the Oscar for Outstanding Production in 1934 (the first year in which a printed publication, in this case Time, referred to the Academy Awards as the Oscars, though apparently Walt Disney was already talking about getting an Oscar in 1931). For once, I’ve actually heard of one of the other nominated films, 42nd Street. The others were A Farewell to Arms, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Lady for a Day, Little Women, The Private Life of Henry VIII, She Done Him Wrong, Smilin’ Through, and State Fair. Cavalcade won two other Oscars, Best Director (Frank Lloyd) and Best Art Direction (William S. Darling). The time period of eligibility was the uniquely long 1 August 1932 to 31 December 1933, so that they could switch to calendar years from 1934 onwards. I think most people would agree that the eligible film from that period which has proved to have the most staying power was the original King Kong, which of course got no nominations at all.

Although it’s a Hollywood film, it’s based on a hit West End play by Noël Coward and all the actors are English. Rather like Cimarron from two years before, it’s a family saga, but this time set in London in the years from 1889 to 1933, consisting of a series of vignettes about the Boer War, Queen Victoria’s death, the Titanic, the First World War and the consequent social disruption of the 1920s. I find it really curious that a portrait of English life (or rather of Noël Coward’s concept of upper-class English life) had such drawing power in Depression-era America. Perhas it was received as a fantasy about what life is really like in Britain. As noted below, I thought the movie was considerably more upbeat than the play.

The only Coward play I had previously seen was Blithe Spirit, in Belfast when I was a teenager; I’m trying to track that down – could it have been the Glasgow Citizens Theatre production of 1985, starring Ciaran Hinds, transported across the North Channel? It is much more coherent and less lavish than Cavalcade. Edited to add: On reflection, I think I have the wrong city, and it was the 1985 Gate Theatre production in Dublin that I saw as a teenager.

Things to note, starting with the bits I didn’t like as much:

Whitewashing: This is my sixth Oscar-winning film and so far we have seen precisely one black speaking character (and a few Native Americans), in Cimarron. The non-white population of London wasn’t huge in the 1899-31 period, but it wasn’t zero either. Having said that, the jazz band in the climactic final scene (see video below) does include several black musicians, so we are scoring a bit better than Broadway Melody.

Staginess: As with the previous year’s Grand Hotel, this was adapted from a stage play, and not everything worked as well on the screen. In particular, oddly enough, I am sure that the occasional shift of scene between family life and the music hall (or other entertainment venue) was carried out much more smoothly in the theatre, even though it would have been much less naturalistic. I thought that Clive Brook, starring as Robert Marryot, particularly didn’t seem to catch the camera terribly well. It is of course a challenge to do a film-of-a-play, but my feeling is that Grand Hotel managed the transition better.

Class politics: The central characters in the film are the upper class Jane and Robert Marryot, and the Bridges family, where parents Alfred and Ellen start as the Marryots’ servants and daughter Fanny ends up as their son’s lover. Coward (and screen adaptors Reginald Berkeley and Sonya Levien) were trying I think to treat the relationship in a natural realistic way, but it still comes across as a bit forced in the early scenes, and the social disruption of the 1920s is shown rather than told. Having said that, Una O’Connor is solid throughout as Ellen Bridges, and Herbert Mundin hams it up very attractively as Alfred.

Coherence: As with Cimarron, it’s a bunch of scenes strung together over three and a bit decades of action, which is a serial violation of the classical unities. I think in general it’s carried off a bit better than Cimarron. There is a huge jump across the whole 1920s taking us from the end of the first world war to the present day (ie 1933), and a bit of a big jump between 1900 and 1908. There is a very silly filmed sequence of knights and ladies riding across a pleasant landscape to break up the scenes (a literal cavalcade, to match the title).

Gay visibility: A very very brief late scene is set in a gay club in London. This goes further than Wings, six years before, which had a gay couple in a Paris club and a rather chaste same-sex kiss.

Performance: The standout here is Diana Wynyard, then aged 27, playing Jane Marryot who starts the story aged 31 and ends it in her 60s. I found her very convincing as wife, mother, mistress of the household and Victorian woman adrift in the twentieth century. She gets all the best lines and best scenes, and she gets the most out of them. (Unfortunately I couldn’t find any videos of her parts which could easily be included here.) I’ve noted Herbert Mundin as Alfred Bridges already. Special shout outs also to Ursula Jeans as Fanny Bridges, and to John Warburton (who much much later appeared in a Star Trek episode) and Margaret Lindsay as the doomed lovers on the Titanic in this scene (apologies for spoiling the punchline there):

Music: Long long ago I saw the 1969 film Oh! What A Lovely War, which I now realise drew on the tradition of showing and telling the story of conscription and combat through music which Cavalcade must have been an early part of. Both film and play use music to be more critical of militarism than the wording of the dialogue given to the characters. Some of the songs are traditional, some are original to Coward. The high point musically (and there are no low points from that point of view) is at the end, with Ursula Jeans as the servants’ daughter Fanny Bridges, having achieved stardom on the stage and the love of her parents’ masters’ son, singing the chilling “Twentieth Century Blues”:

This is followed by the final scene of Jane and Robert Marryot seeing in the New Year for 1933, looking forward rather happily if with regret for their losses over the years. It’s a sentimental and mildly uplifting end for the film.

After some reflection, I went and sought out the original Coward play. This is the opening of the third scene:

Principals: JANE MARRYOT, MARGARET HARRIS, EDITH HARRIS (aged 10), EDWARD (aged 12), JOE (aged 8), ELLEN.

SCENE: The same as SCENE I [the Marryots’ drawing-room].

TIME: About five o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, May 18th, 1900. When the lights go up EDWARD and JOE MARRYOT and EDITH HARRIS are discovered playing soldiers on the floor. EDWARD is aged twelve, JOE eight, and EDITH HARRIS about ten.

JOE (shooting off a cannon): Bang –bang, bang, bang.

EDITH (giving a little squeak): Oh –oh, dear!

The original play (it says in my book) cost thirty thousand pre-war pounds and kept a cast and back-stage crew of three hundred employed at Drury Lane for over a year – a spectacular in the line of the more modern West End musical. It’s particularly impressive when you remember that these were the first years of the Great Depression. The play opened just before the 1931 election which saw former Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald returned to power at the head of a mostly Conservative coalition. It was received as a patriotic, nationalist piece in tune with the needs of the times, much to Coward’s dismay; he thought he was just writing a piece about the impact of the times on an ordinary (read upper-middle-class) family, and to my eye he was attempting to portray the inevitability of the dissolution of old social structures, and to challenge the audience to get to grips with how the world was changing.

I think he was right to be dismayed. The play is more cynical than the film. The theatrical Diana Wynyard repeatedly makes anti-war comments, and is repeatedly proved right. A couple of grim scenes from the play did not make it to the film – an early fake bucolic musical number, and a scene where the teenage Marryot sons engage in dissolute behaviour with their friends. And the ending is truly chilling. The two final scenes were flipped in the film. In the original, the Marryots see in 1930, much diminished in health and happiness. Jane’s final words are:

Now, then, let’s couple the Future of England with the past of England. The glories and victories and triumphs that are over, and the sorrows that are over, too. Let’s drink to our sons who made part of the pattern and to our hearts that died with them. Let’s drink to the spirit of gallantry and courage that made a strange Heaven out of unbelievable Hell, and let’s drink to the hope that one day this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness and peace again.

It’s a bleak end to her role in the play. In the film, the pessimistic impact is deadened by Robert repeating “Dignity, greatness and peace” back to her, and a crowed scene of revellers singing “Auld Lang Syne” before the final titles. In the orignal play, the final song, “Twentieth Century Blues”, comes after rather than before the Marryots’ New Year scenem with some difficult but bloodcurdling stage directions:

SCENE: A Night Club.

TIME: Evening –1930.

This Scene begins with a night club in which FANNY is singing, seated on a piano. The decoration is angular and strange, and the song she is singing is oddly discordant.

TWENTIETH CENTURY BLUES

VERSE

Why is it that civilised humanity
Must make the world so wrong?
In this hurly burly of insanity
Your dreams cannot last long.
We’ve reached a headline —
The Press headline –every sorrow,
Blues value is News value tomorrow.

REFRAIN

Blues, Twentieth Century Blues, are getting me down.
Who’s escaped those weary Twentieth Century Blues.
Why, if there’s a God in the sky, why shouldn’t¹ he grin?
High above this dreary Twentieth Century din,
In this strange illusion,
Chaos and confusion,
People seem to lose their way.
What is there to strive for,
Love or keep alive for? Say —
Hey, hey, call it a day.
Blues, nothing to win or to lose.
It’s getting me down.
Blues, I’ve got those weary² Twentieth Century Blues.

When the song is finished, people rise from table and dance without apparently any particular enjoyment; it is the dull dancing of habit. The lights fade away from everything but the dancers, who appear to be rising in the air. They disappear and down stage left, six ‘incurables’ in blue hospital uniform are sitting making baskets. They disappear and FANNY is seen singing her song for a moment, then far away up stage a jazz band is seen playing wildly. Then down stage JANE and ROBERT standing with glasses of champagne held aloft, then ELLEN sitting in front of a Radio loud speaker; then MARGARET dancing with a young man. The visions are repeated quicker and quicker, while across the darkness runs a Riley light sign spelling out news. Noise grows louder and louder. Steam rivets, loud speakers, jazz bands, aeroplane propellers, etc., until the general effect is complete chaos.

Suddenly it all fades into darkness and silence and away at the back a Union Jack glows through the blackness.

The lights slowly come up and the whole stage is composed of massive tiers, upon which stand the entire Company. The Union Jack flies over their heads as they sing ‘God Save the King’.

THE END

¹ The film version has “didn’t” rather than “shouldn’t”.
² The film version ends “escape those dreary Twentieth Century Blues“ rather than “I’ve got those weary Twentieth Century Blues”.

Given the necessary scale of the theatre production (drawing-room, crowds, music-halls and the Titanic), it has been staged only a handful of times since the original 1931 West End production (including the two film adaptations). It’s an ambitious and vicious piece which would reward a determined and talented director. I’d pay money to see it on stage.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

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Washington, D.C.’s Vanishing Springs and Waterways, by Garnett P. Williams

Second paragraph of third section:

The accompanying map (fig. 1) shows the downtown area’s original streams and shorelines, to the extent that I have been able to locate them. The original boundaries and features of figure 1 are based on the maps of A. Boschke (1856-58), James Kearney and others (1838), A. C. Harmon (1931), James R. Dermott (1797), Joseph M. Toner (E. F. M. Faehtz and F. W. Pratt, 1874), Arthur B. Cutter (1952), Campbell Graham and S. T. Albert (1849), William T. Partridge (1895?), And. Ellicott (1792; Upper Anacostia), the map accompanying the Commissioners Proceedings of 1793, on several references cited in this paper (especially Hines, 1866; Proctor, various dates; Taggart, 1908) and on anonymous articles in the Evening Star. The canal routes are based on Boschke’s 1856-59 map. Present-day features and shorelines were taken from the U.S. Geological Survey’s 1:24,000 scale topographic map “Washington, D.C., and Vicinity” (1965).

My investigation of the pre-urban hydrogeography of the capital of the United States brought me eventually to this paper published by the U.S. Geological Survey in 1977 and written by Garnett P. Williams, better known for his 1997 book Chaos Theory Tamed. It’s a brief, fact-filled yet entertaining survey of the historical evidence of D.C.’s waterways, starting with the springs and working up through the streams, creeks and canals to the Anacostia and Potomac rivers. The Franklin Square springs get half a page, and there is also a description of the stream that they fed, called Goose Creek. “At F Street, near Ninth Street [immediately north of the future site of Ford’s Theater], the ravine carrying the stream was some 14 feet deep. (This was quite hazardous at night, with no street light. On one occasion, Mr. Philip Fendall, a leading member of the bar, fell in and broke his leg in two places.)” However, it was entirely filled in during the mid-1800s. Such is the fate of watercourses which compete with property developers.

Garnett regrets that so many of the old streams have been filled in (the fate of Goose Creek) or covered over, mostly to become sewers, and points to Rock Creek as an example of how a different path could have been chosen. (My comment: of course, Rock Creek is mostly elevated above the flatter topography of the city centre, so it was bound to be more robust in the face of humanity.) He points out how central the vanished waterways were to the city until the later part of the nineteenth century – the White House and Washington Monument were both up against the river shore (the future sites of the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials under water), and the old canal (obsolete almost as soon as it was built) cut through the heart of the city.

And he concludes that the rivers in particular filled in and narrowed because of massive deposits of sediment, “made available to the rivers over the last 200 years by man’s carelessness”, and calls for more sensitivity to the natural waters of the landscape in city planning. He has a point.

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A Crocodile in the Fernery: An A-Z of Animals in the Garden, by Twigs Way

Third entry:

Assapanick

On 26 July 1788 William Thornton, American physician and architect of the U.S. Capitol, wrote the following to Dr Lettsom, English amateur botanist. ‘I have sent you four assapanick or flying squirrels and four ground squirrels. The flying squirrels are a family, male and female, with two young ones; the young are very easily tamed; the ladies here have them running all over them, and carry them in their pockets or bosoms, with a small collar of leather round their necks, and a little chain. They do not bite, but soon grow familiar. The old ones and ground squirrels are more difficult, but may, by constantly handling them in gloves, be tamed. You may keep the old, male and female, of the flying variety, and one of each sort of the ground, to breed.’ Lettsom took his correspondent at his word and installed the squirrels in his large Surrey garden as a delight to his visitors, friends and family. Here they joined his tortoises, pyramidal bee-houses, and the collection of mangle-worzels that this eccentric man was attempting to introduce into England.The assapanick were apparently a success in their new home and word spread of these charming and hardy pets. Fifty years later the fellows of the Zoological Society were recording that there was no creature ‘more graceful, or one better fitted for a lady’s pet’. Its diminutive size, the singularity of its form, the expression of its physiognomy, the vivacity of its motions, and the gentleness of its disposition all combine to render it one of the most interesting as one of the most beautiful’. Lady’s pet or not, President Theodore Roosevelt also took to the assapanick, continuing the tradition set by Dr Lettsom by allowing the creatures run of the house and gardens.

I knew the delightfully named Twigs Way almost thirty years ago when we were both postgraduate students in Cambridge, and a few years ago decided to renew acquaintance via the first two of her dozen or so books on the history of gardening. This is a rather nice little listing of peculiar choices of garden pet made throughout history – not straying far from the UK (though clearly the Assapannick is an exception) and only occasionally varying from the concept of what we might agree on as a pet (Charles Darwin’s obsession with worms is a bit of a stretch).

It doesn’t claim to be more than what it is, a collection of anecdotes, some of which cast new light on historical figures (the poet Cowper and his hares; the diarist John Evelyn and his bees and tortoise; the gardener Gertrude Jekyll and the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti both kept rather surprising menageries) and some of which are just “Gosh!” stories, like Charlemagne’s elephant or the Duke of Richmond’s moose. And I confess I had not heard of the assapanick before (you can find it also on a list of words which sound rude but are not).

This was the shortest book of those I acquired in 2010 and had not yet read. The next in that sequence is Daystar and Shadow, by James B. Johnson.

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