- Thu, 18:04: I Love the Bones of You: My Father And The Making Of Me, by Christopher Eccleston https://t.co/lNKHPwxiR7
- Thu, 19:04: RT @TolkienSociety: Christopher Tolkien has died at the age of 95. The Tolkien Society sends its deepest condolences to Baillie, Simon, Ada…
- Thu, 20:48: The EU Is Going to Miss the U.K. When It’s Gone https://t.co/lvo4VSJ2rq Good piece. I agree.
- Fri, 07:50: RT @clarkesworld: Our statement on Isabel’s story. https://t.co/f8NUNlrCim
- Fri, 10:45: RT @simonjhix: The last day of UK MEPs in the EP in Strasbourg. I was an intern in the EP during my PhD in 1994, and got to know many great…
- Fri, 11:31: RT @pmdfoster: It beggars belief that we’re back to ‘no deal’ threats again – and cab ministers who say trading with EU on WTO terms “isn’t…
- Fri, 11:41: RT @DavidHenigUK: I’ve seen this movie before. Turned out the opening scene was misleading. https://t.co/uE9mk1Y2NF https://t.co/9fqY3tM74J
Monthly Archives: January 2020
I Love the Bones of You: My Father And The Making Of Me, by Christopher Eccleston
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The first thing I committed to memory wasn’t the lines of a play, it was the names of the Busby Babes. There was a drawer in my mum and dad’s bedroom and whenever I got the chance I’d go rooting. I’d find sets of false teeth, ties, photos, watches, United programmes, leather lighters from the ’70s, all sorts. It was fascinating. Boredom was our ally back then — we had nothing else to do so exploring the house was an inevitability.
This was the last book I finished in 2019, and the best of the Doctor Who biographies and autobiographies that I read last year (the others were by or about John Leeson, Mary Tamm (v1, v2), Robert Holmes, Matthew Waterhouse, Peter Davison and Andrew Cartmel). There’s actually not all that much in it about Eccleston’s performance as the Ninth Doctor. He devotes a short chapter to it, praising Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffatt, Euros Lyn and Billie Piper, and I guess letting his silence speak for the rest. He bookends that chapter with the experience of watching his own stories with his own young children, fifteen years on, which I found a very effective device to tell what the show now means to him. I’m looking forward to seeing him at Gallfrey One next month.
The guts of the book are about Eccleston’s own somewhat tortured soul, and its roots in the life experience of his father, a factory worker whose talents were suffocated by the class-ridden social structures of mid-twentieth century Salford. He goes into moving detail about his own experiences of mental illness and particularly anorexia; it’s tough but fascinating to read. He is disarmingly frank about his own failures and successes as an actor; always of course in the context of a profession which is rigged in favour of thin people with posh accents – he forced himself to become thin but could never be posh. Another moving passage describes his relationship with Trevor Hicks, who he portrayed in Hillsborough; the two became friends to the point that Eccleston was Hicks’ best man at his wedding. But the most gut-wrenching sections are the passages about his father’s gradual descent into dementia, and the consequent slow death of normal family life. The timing of the various incidents is a bit confusing – few dates are given, and we jump around quite a lot in the thirty years of his career; but reading between the lines it looks like his father’s sharpest decline coincided with the 2004-05 filming of Doctor Who.
This is not a fluffy book, but it’s a very thoughtful one, angry in places and always passionate. You can get it here.
My tweets
- Wed, 18:35: Wednesday reading https://t.co/0Itp44pJmu
- Wed, 20:48: Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True https://t.co/77gWrTgULv Chilling.
- Thu, 09:13: RT @GuitarMoog: If you think Spain’s handling of Catalunya is a blueprint for how central governments ought to deal with independence movem…
- Thu, 10:45: Racism Fight Over Romance Writers of America, Explained https://t.co/6lxU1Ljf3j A very good and detailed explanation of the RWA affair.
Wednesday reading
Current
Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver
The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
Selangor, by Gerry Barton
Last books finished
Roots and Wings: Ten Lessons of Motherhood that Helped Me Create and Run a Company, by Margery Kraus
The Last Days of New Paris, by China Mieville
Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, by James Hadley Chase
In the Heat of the Night, by Jon Ball
Distaff: A Science Fiction Anthology by Female Authors, eds. Rosie Oliver & Sam Primeau
Sirius, by Olaf Stapledon
Backstop Land, by Glenn Patterson
Next books
The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen
The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant
My tweets
- Tue, 12:56: A scandal in Oxford: the curious case of the stolen gospel https://t.co/yRG2z8pFnx Incredible story.
- Tue, 13:26: RT @julian_glover: Utterly magnificent stick the knife in and twist ending to a Times obit today https://t.co/dPVKd65T6j
- Tue, 13:33: RT @pmdfoster: So. Some personal news. After 21 brilliant years @Telegraph I am moving on – to @FT to take up a new role as public policy e…
- Tue, 18:02: The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border, by Garrett Carr https://t.co/ZLTdPrxXxL
- Wed, 10:33: RT @SamuelMarcLowe: Some thoughts from me in today’s FT Trade Secrets newsletter, which you should subscribe to. https://t.co/XzQLvD7DmJ h…
- Wed, 10:45: The Home Assistants of Death?! | The Collection: Season 14 Announcement Trailer https://t.co/GI4Vb2pbUT OMG this looks irresistible!
The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border, by Garrett Carr
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Or perhaps that's old news, they became a couple months ago. They are not in a pub. They are at her kitchen table eating dinner with her parents. There is polite intergenerational conversation. They all agree that reinstating border controls will be bad for business. He has just gotten a job with a wholesale supplier, delivering animal feed to farms both sides of the border. Her mother asks about this, she approves. It's all quite pleasant but there are sideways glances between the young couple. She lives with her parents and he lives with his, this is limiting, as you can imagine. Their toes tap soundlessly inside their shoes.
As Brexit looms at the end of this month, this book looks at what life is actually like along the Irish border, the author walking and camping (and occasionally canoeing) along the entire disputed length of it. He goes from south-east to north-west, so starting with the bits I know best and taking me into less well charted territory; it's a lovely series of vignettes of the realities of the land, and the brutal history that goes along with it. There is a particularly memorable sequence in the middle that segues from Barry McGuigan as hero to Sean Quinn as villain. The section on the cave networks which are literally undermining the border between Cavan and Fermanagh is also pretty memorable. A good book to give to anyone who doesn't really understand the Ireland/Brexit relationship, and isn't all that interested in the politics. You can get it here.
My tweets
- Mon, 12:56: RT @shellkryan: This is a thread on the UK Hostile Environment and universities and a recent experience I had as an immigrant in the UK. A…
- Mon, 16:05: In Roald Dahl’s Car https://t.co/n7huQxxmvY Great short piece.
- Mon, 17:11: “I’m not transphobic, but…”: A feminist case against the feminist case against trans inclusivity… https://t.co/cWLAD2x8xa
- Mon, 18:55: Dragonworld, by Byron Preiss (did not finish) https://t.co/Jdf9qGfGt2
- Mon, 19:12: RT @remkorteweg: In 1666, Charles II – after having regained the throne – granted the city of Bruges/Brugge, as a token of gratitude, the…
- Mon, 19:30: RT @apcoworldwide: We are delighted to announce that we’ve strengthened our social impact capabilities through the acquisition of The Tembo…
- Mon, 20:48: Librarian found Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn manuscript in her attic https://t.co/ff2nvi42lr Wow!
- Tue, 10:45: Here Are 20 Headlines Comparing Meghan Markle To Kate Middleton That Might Show Why She And Prince Harry Are Cuttin… https://t.co/ZKLo1TkRT1
Dragonworld, by Byron Preiss (did not finish)
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Amsel came out of the house, carrying a barrelful of scraps to be buried in his garden patch for mulch. He sat down on a weathered wooden bench and took a deep breath, watching it frost in the early-spring air. It was his habit to listen to the flowing water and the singing birds for a short time in the morning. Amsel was a small man, small and wiry, with a great explosion of white hair under a floppy hat, and a face that could claim any age from thirty to fifty. He was dressed in loose-fitting green and brown clothes, covered with pockets. In the pockets were all manner of things: a thong-bound parchment notebook, a quill pen which carried its own ink supply (Amsel’s own invention), a lodestone, a small hammer (for chipping off interesting rock specimens), a small net of tanselweb (for capturing interesting insect specimens), and a pair of spectacles (also Amsel’s invention). He believed in preparing for any eventuality.
I got a third of the way through this and decided I didn't care any more. It's a fantasy novel about various human kingdoms under threat from dragons and from each other, but it failed to excite me and so I'me leaving it be. If you want, you can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2016. Next on that pile is Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt.
My tweets
- Sun, 12:54: Map of Glasgow docks, 1901. Blue dot shows the location in the SEC Centre where I am currently sitting. https://t.co/Dw2L5zYE55
- Sun, 12:56: RT @ScottHech: I represented the man who this ex-NYPD detective lied into a violent felony indictment. Michael Bergman completely fabricate…
- Sun, 14:48: All about the Hugo Awards https://t.co/nHuL2cL3LG Nice video from@CoNZealand.
- Sun, 15:42: Doctor Who: The Target Storybook, ed. Steve Cole https://t.co/OJDDzMkwDc
- Sun, 16:05: Operation Backfire https://t.co/GrFiLUzfU8 Great LRB article by Francis Spufford – from 1999! – about the rise and… https://t.co/PVCWLaNxZ3
- Sun, 17:08: Sad to reflect that this is probably my last hour in the UK as an EU member state. Sorry, everyone.
- Sun, 20:58: RT @JenniferMerode: One EU diplomat recently told me recently ‘when we negotiate a future trade deal with the UK, we are also negotiating t…
- Sun, 21:07: Very sorry to hear this. I dealt with him only in my capacity as Hugo Administrator in 2017, when he was added to t… https://t.co/wURLXyRMtp
- Sun, 22:18: RT @natural20: Honestly, I assume everyone I follow here or who follows me knows Glinner is a bigoted arse who shouldn’t be followed, yeah?…
- Mon, 10:45: Harry and Meghan are Taking on the Corporate Press – Fighting for Issues which Should Matter to Us All… https://t.co/uhBa37iH83
Doctor Who: The Target Storybook, ed. Steve Cole
Second paragraph of third story ("Save Yourself", by Terrance Dicks):
The Doctor felt tired, as if he'd been waiting here a lifetime.
I loved this. It's a collection of Doctor Who short stories, edited by Steve Cole with contributions from Joy Wilkinson, Simon Guerrier, the much-missed Terrance Dicks, Matthew Sweet, Susie Day, Matthew "Adric" Waterhouse, Colin "Sixth Doctor" Baker, Mike Tucker, Cole himself, George Mann, Una McCormack, Jacqueline Rayner, Beverly Sanford and Vinay Patel. It's a bit invidious to single out individual stories, but I will anyway: Terrance Dicks last controibution to the Whoniverse expands the concept of Series 6B, with the Second Doctor on mission for the Time Lords; Susie Day looks at the Fourth Doctor and Romana punting; Una McCormack looks at the back story of Clive from the TV episode Roseyou can get it here.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle about this book before it came out. One particular veteran Who writer had been invited to contribute, but his story was not published because at least one of the other contributors objected to his views on trans rights, and threatened to withdraw her own story if his was included. More power to her; in her place I would also have objected to this particular writer's views on Islam. And good for the publisher for making the right choice when confronted with a dilemma of principles.
My tweets
- Sat, 12:19: RT @hinge_xanderl: @Bob_Fischer @revcindy1 @BBCTees Excellent! Wonder if Cindy remembers anything about “Life with Johnny”, one of William…
- Sat, 12:56: RT @alexandreafonso: A thread about why Germany did not invade Switzerland during World War 2. https://t.co/kFvGL6kj40
- Sat, 14:41: RT @BelTel: Alliance leader Naomi Long to take up justice minister post https://t.co/f1ukLzGms9 https://t.co/SeJfr65VY9
- Sat, 14:48: RT @MSmithsonPB: What Trump told pollster Frank Luntz his middle initial J stood for. This from Vanity Fair https://t.co/YovOZ11mV4 https:…
- Sat, 14:48: RT @StratagemNI: @AlexMaskeySF is elected as Assembly Speaker #niassembly https://t.co/2wBqJGZLR7
- Sat, 15:15: RT @DarranMarshall: January 11th 2016 & 2020. Arlene Foster becomes NI First Minister on the fourth anniversary of first becoming First M…
- Sat, 15:36: RT @osd1000: @DarranMarshall @nwbrux Fourth anniversary of fourth First Minister first becoming First Minister.
- Sat, 16:05: RT @IanMcKellen: 20 years ago, I arrived New Zealand to begin filming “The Lord of the Rings.” I joined the cast on January 10, 2000. Durin…
- Sat, 16:36: RT @ianjamesparsley: So there you have it: FM – Foster (DUP) dFM – O’Neill (SF) Justice – Long (Alliance) Economy – Dodds (DUP) Finance -…
- Sat, 16:51: RT @DarranMarshall: A majority of the new Ni Executive ministers are female – including the top two roles. @DUPleader @moneillsf @DianeDodd…
- Sat, 17:09: RT @HackneyAbbott: So, when Meghan likes avocados, they fuel human rights abuses, drought and murder. But, when Kate likes avocados, they a…
- Sat, 18:39: RT @HackneyAbbott: Spot the difference between the @DailyMailUK treatment of Kate and her “baby bump” and their attack on Meghan on exact…
- Sat, 20:01: My week on Twitter : 17 Mentions, 1.15K Mention Reach, 76 Likes, 36 Retweets, 107K Retweet Reach. See yours with… https://t.co/5oeOBufBHv
- Sat, 20:48: RT @comedylopez: Witnessed the most amazing thing on the train to Edinburgh yesterday. A guy boarded in Wigan & sat opposite me. He went to…
- Sun, 10:45: RT @FinancialTimes: “At the risk of sounding insane, paying towards world-class universal healthcare and the construction of 68 Métro stati…
September 2004 books
Back at work, I continued lobbying for a Commission cabinet position until it became obvious that this was not my year. (I have not seriously tried again since.) I had another op-ed on Macedonia as the political situation there took another twist. I travelled to Moldova, Belfast and ended the month in Portugal, with a day trip to the Hague. A writer whose books I don't especially like rather sweetly got in touch and offered to send me some more so that I could make a more informed judgement; I accepted. And we celebrated little U's christening (Guy Van Haver, the local priest, retired in 2008 and sadly died last year).
My September 2004 reading:
Non-fiction: 2 (YTD 32)
Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic, by Christopher Stephen
The 9/11 Commission Report
SF: 8 (YTD 57)
The Warrior's Bond, by Juliet McKenna
The Tale of the Next Great War, ed. I.F. Clarke
Star Trek: Enterprise – The First Adventure, by Vonda N. McIntyre
Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett
To The Nines, by Janet Evanovich
The Gods Themselves, by Isaac Asimov
Downbelow Station, by C.J. Cherryh
Brother Berserker, by Fred Saberhagen
Comics: 2 (YTD 4)
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Marjane Satrapi
The Sandman: Endless Nights, by Neil Gaiman
4,300 pages (YTD 36,400)
5/12 by women (YTD 29/108)
1/12 by PoC (YTD 2/108)
The best of these were Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, the first half of Marjane Satrapi's memoir of growing up in Iran, a milestone in comics which you can get here9/11 Commission Report, which notably fails to make any connection between the September 2001 attacks and Iraq – you can get it here.
My dislike of The Gods Themselves is well recordedTo The Nines – I had enjoyed several earlier books in the series but this one put me off the rest. You can get them here and here.
My tweets
- Fri, 14:41: RT @MatthewOToole2: Not quite breaking news but I’m delighted be asked to serve the proudly diverse and shared community of South Belfast,…
- Fri, 16:48: RT @chimenesuleyman: LET ME TELL YOU about this Turkish breakfast show that shits all over Trisha—Ready? So, this woman comes on looking fo…
- Fri, 18:29: The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey https://t.co/yDyNYVdJaa
- Fri, 18:58: RT @skydavidblevins: BREAKING: The deal is done. Sinn Fein accepts a draft agreement to restore devolution in Northern Ireland. The DUP had…
- Fri, 20:03: RT @JudiciaryUK: The judgment in Samira Ahmed v BBC handed down by Judge Harjit Grewal in the Central London Employment Tribunal is now ava…
- Fri, 20:58: RT @apcoworldwide: We are saddened to learn of the passing of Harold Burson. He was an amazing luminary in our industry and an inspiration…
- Fri, 23:01: RT @indiaknight: God, it’s not hard. He was lost. He married a woman who made him feel found. She said ‘what if we lived another way?’. It’…
- Sat, 10:31: September 2004 books https://t.co/WJft0C1rgj
- Sat, 10:45: What happened to RWA — why romance’s biggest community is in shambles https://t.co/LKxiWydwyl A good summary.
- Sat, 10:51: And so it begins… @Glasgowin2024 https://t.co/HKMBPe7DVh
The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey
Second paragraph of third chapter:
"Splendid!" Perveen clapped. Alice was just the remedy she needed for her dark mood.
First in a series of mystery novels set in 1920s Bombay, featuring a Parsi woman lawyer as the protagonist. I wasn't hugely impressed. The actual murder doesn't happen until almost half way into the book, and I was thoroughly unconvinced by both the investigation and the resolution. Our heroine is able to triumph partly due to rather improbable violations of procedure by the police. There's also an intrusive backstory about her brief marriage to a chap from Calcutta. (And at the end we are told that the murderer is being let off with a pretty light sentence, which is incomprehensible.)
The author has clearly done her research into Bombay of the period, and wears it very heavily. There's an awful lot of Hind-splaining to the reader – the phrase "as you know, Perveen" comes perilously close to being used more than once, and Mistry seems to be unaware that Urdu and Hindi are so close to each other than some linguists consider them the same language (and the divergence between them was even less in the 1920s than it is now).
So I finished it, but don't recommend it particularly. If you want to, you can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a writer of colour. Probably will go for The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen, next, but there are alternatives to hand as well.
My tweets
- Thu, 12:33: RT @LaResnick: I’m very sad to announce that my dad died very early today, January 10, 2020, a little after midnight. He was diagnosed in…
- Thu, 12:56: The woman saving Georgia’s lost cheeses https://t.co/PJoPmerBUt Story of the day.
- Thu, 18:09: Two Being Human novels: Chasers, by Mark Michalowski and Bad Blood, by James Goss https://t.co/wGSueSdfT7
- Thu, 19:04: RT @cstross: My first hard disk, a 10Mb device, cost £370 in 1986. My most recent is an SSD, a 2Tb device (200,000 times the capacity), th…
- Thu, 22:46: Just in case anyone thought that the “let’s move forward together” narrative is unproblematic… https://t.co/rcTDOpMTRJ
- Thu, 22:52: RT @plantingforbees: Stormont: Draft powersharing agreement tabled to restore devolved government in Northern Ireland | UK News | Sky News…
- Fri, 06:54: RT @SophieLong01: Not even thirty days between Tory majority and a deal at Stormont. Lesson to be learnt.
- Fri, 08:13: RT @PhilipPullman: Of course Meghan Markle is attacked by the British press because she’s black, and of course Prince Harry is right to def…
- Fri, 08:35: RT @mickfealty: Good to see @DUPleader selling this deal. We need to put this culture war to bed, and the best unionism can do is stop taki…
- Fri, 10:45: RT @afranciswrites: I want to address the false narrative that authors refused to work with Suzan Tisdale only because they feared backlash…
Two Being Human novels: Chasers, by Mark Michalowski and Bad Blood, by James Goss
Second paragraph of third chapter of Chasers:
She realised she was fiddling with her neck. 'Calm down, Mitchell,' she said.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Bad Blood (actually labelled chapter 41):
'Good to see I'm not the only one chuffing away like a chimney,' said Denise, smiling. 'I approve.'
It's actually seven years since I read the first of the three Being Human novels, all by stalwarts of the Doctor Who writing scene, but it was nice to return to them.
Chasers picks up the storyline from the previous book about George (the werewolf) being asked by lesbian friends to father their baby. There is also a creepy chap who befriends Mitchell (the vampire) for ulterior motives. It's decently done but not spectacular. You can get it here.
I had higher hopes of Bad Blood, as James Goss is one of my favourite writers, and it did not disappoint. Annie (the ghost) is visited by an old friend who doesn't know that she is dead, and the three housemates are sucked into a bizarrely sinister bingo night. Tightly written and very vivid, as I have come to expect from Goss. You can get it here.
Bad Blood was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and Chasers was my top unread book acquired in 2012. Next on those piles respectively are Demon in Leuven, by Guido Eekhaut, and A Popular History of Ireland, by Thomas D'Arcy McGee.
My tweets
- Wed, 12:56: From Britain to Israel, the Ayia Napa rape case is a universal story to feminists worldwide https://t.co/g7rNNkSYTb Indeed.
- Wed, 13:00: RT @bbcdoctorwho: Today we’re remembering the First Doctor, born to the cosmos 112 years ago #DoctorWho https://t.co/GRIqIy0iTS
- Wed, 16:05: Fighting the good fight for Scotland https://t.co/nuG0kzqfmu @AlynSmith‘s valedictory thoughts as he leaves the European Parliament.
- Wed, 19:43: Wednesday reading https://t.co/X7J27fhMhd
- Wed, 19:44: RT @PabloPerezA: PM Johnson: “We were in school together” President von der Leyen: “Same school, but not at the same time” @vonderleyen an…
- Wed, 20:26: RT @MichaelAodhan: GOVT MUST LIVE UP TO ITS NI BREXIT COMMITMENTS “Today we had a momentous occurrence where NI MPs were united in laying…
- Thu, 04:48: My week on Twitter : 91 Mentions, 20.1K Mention Reach, 235 Likes, 55 Retweets, 124K Retweet Reach. See yours with… https://t.co/8G5l03zwGw
- Thu, 09:12: RT @alexstubb: I am obsessive about the books I have read. I keep all of them. I feel they are a part of who I am. Our ”library” contains o…
Wednesday reading
First weekly roundup post of the year.
Current
Roots and Wings: Ten Lessons of Motherhood that Helped Me Create and Run a Company, by Margery Kraus
Miss Shumway Waves a Wand, by James Hadley Chase
Last books finished
Auguria, Tome 1: Ecce signum, by Peter Nuyten
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang
Seraphina, by Rachel Hartman
Auguria, Tome 2: Gaeso dux, by Peter Nuyten
Auguria, Tome 3: Fatum, by Peter Nuyten
Land of Terror, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Demon in Leuven, by Guido Eekhaut
Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins
As Time Goes By, by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Matthew Dow Smith
“Home is the Hangman”, by Roger Zelazny
Next books
The Last Days of New Paris, by China Mieville
The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen
My tweets
- Tue, 12:56: RT @klara_sjo: After the kill, the house rabbit attempts to dispose of the body. https://t.co/NoNuVlYG4f
- Tue, 16:05: The forgotten history of Constance Markievicz, the first female MP https://t.co/lu9EU3OGdg @AnnaCafolla writes for… https://t.co/UTTwr5Ps3o
- Tue, 17:11: What the death of iTunes says about our digital habits https://t.co/C8inT8llVs Funny and perceptive.
- Tue, 17:19: RT @higginsdavidw: 75% of RIC officers were Catholic. Most of them joined what was the police force of the day to serve their communities a…
- Tue, 19:17: BSFA Long List – Goodreads/LibraryThing stats https://t.co/nGWnJwz5OU
- Tue, 20:48: Jailed Catalan MEP elected head of regionalist group in Parliament https://t.co/VO8P9LaFBO Another trriumph for Spanish diplomacy.
- Wed, 10:45: Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall https://t.co/SHtyewbtss Sexual harassment and fame.
BSFA Long List – Goodreads/LibraryThing stats
The BSFA Long List is out. Here are the 46 Best Novel nominees, ranked by the product of their number of owners on Goodreads and LibraryThing.
| Goodreads | LibraryThing | ||||
| owners | av rating | owners | av rating | ||
| The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood | 367,235 | 4.23 | 1,433 | 4.14 | |
| The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E Harrow | 107,406 | 4.16 | 416 | 4.21 | |
| Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir | 57,334 | 4.27 | 378 | 4.29 | |
| The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie | 41,565 | 3.99 | 518 | 4.03 | |
| Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky | 24,419 | 4.11 | 172 | 3.94 | |
| The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell | 21,329 | 3.76 | 169 | 3.68 | |
| The Future of Another Timeline, by Annalee Newitz | 21,024 | 3.84 | 154 | 3.94 | |
| The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley | 13,664 | 4.02 | 161 | 3.81 | |
| The Heavens, by Sandra Newman | 10,758 | 3.43 | 139 | 3.20 | |
| The True Queen, by Zen Cho | 6,614 | 3.93 | 147 | 3.88 | |
| Gun Island, by Amitav Ghosh | 7,895 | 3.73 | 74 | 3.88 | |
| Do You Dream of Terra-Two?, by Temi Oh | 6,231 | 3.66 | 68 | 3.36 | |
| The Secret Chapter, by Genevieve Cogman | 7,097 | 4.30 | 48 | 4.50 | |
| Infinite Detail, by Tim Maughan | 3,994 | 3.80 | 73 | 4.21 | |
| The Rosewater Insurrection, by Tade Thompson | 3,520 | 4.07 | 69 | 3.81 | |
| A Song for a New Day, by Sarah Pinsker | 4,293 | 4.16 | 55 | 4.50 | |
| Salvation Lost, by Peter F Hamilton | 4,959 | 4.38 | 47 | 3.92 | |
| Atlas Alone, by Emma Newman | 3,356 | 4.08 | 59 | 4.21 | |
| The Divers’ Game, by Jesse Ball | 4,696 | 3.58 | 39 | 3.65 | |
| Deeplight, by Frances Hardinge | 4,376 | 4.33 | 39 | 4.25 | |
| Cage of Souls, by Adrian Tchaikovsky | 4,369 | 4.17 | 36 | 4.19 | |
| Zed, by Joanna Kavenna | 5,792 | 3.41 | 24 | 4.00 | |
| David Mogo, Godhunter, by Suyi Davies Okungbowa | 2,340 | 3.58 | 50 | 3.30 | |
| The Rosewater Redemption, by Tade Thompson | 1,775 | 4.12 | 33 | 4.25 | |
| Fleet of Knives, by Gareth L Powell | 1,508 | 4.02 | 38 | 4.00 | |
| The Migration, by Helen Marshall | 1,755 | 3.53 | 32 | 2.83 | |
| Cygnet, by Season Butler | 1,998 | 3.57 | 24 | 3.67 | |
| No Way, by SJ Morden | 1,126 | 4.08 | 22 | 4.00 | |
| Zero Bomb, by MT Hill | 711 | 3.21 | 18 | 3.00 | |
| The House of Sundering Flames, by Aliette de Bodard | 630 | 4.11 | 18 | 3.90 | |
| Beneath the World, A Sea, by Chris Beckett | 536 | 3.65 | 20 | 3.13 | |
| The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man, by Dave Hutchinson | 364 | 3.84 | 19 | 4.50 | |
| Snakeskins, by Tim Major | 532 | 3.66 | 12 | 3.50 | |
| Shadows of the Short Days, by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson | 512 | 3.72 | 11 | – | |
| Always North, by Vicki Jarrett | 523 | 3.80 | 3 | – | |
| The Green Man’s Foe, by Juliet E McKenna | 136 | 4.42 | 9 | – | |
| Star Path, by W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O’Neal Gear | 257 | 4.33 | 4 | – | |
| Lost Property, by Laura Beatty | 174 | 3.00 | 4 | – | |
| Stormtide, by Den Patrick | 331 | 4.02 | 1 | – | |
| In The Slip, by FD Lee | 32 | 4.00 | 3 | – | |
| Stillicide, by Cynan Jones | 8 | 4.00 | 12 | 3.25 | |
| Rise, by Kim Lakin-Smith | 19 | 3.67 | 4 | – | |
| Celebrity Werewolf, by Andrew Wallace | 13 | 4.67 | 4 | – | |
| The Best of Us, by Karen Traviss | 395 | 4.45 | – | – | |
| Big Red, by Damien Larkin | 53 | 4.56 | – | – | |
| The Community, by Joe Hakim | 7 | 3.33 | – | – | |
I've bolded the top quartile of each column. Only two books get four our of four – The Ten Thousand Doors of January and Gideon the Ninth.
Weird that no LibraryThing users at all have so far picked up Karen Traviss's The Best of Us. Its Goodreads owners seem to like it.
Just for comparison, last year's winner was 16th out of 45 on the corresponding ranking of the 2018 long list27th place of 48, and the 2016 winner 26th out of 34, So this tabel is of limited predictive value.
My tweets
- Mon, 12:56: Watch A-ha’s “Take On Me” Video Newly Remastered in 4K …. and Learn About the Band’s Struggle to Make the Classic… https://t.co/5ld9XL9wnM
- Mon, 15:17: RT @IFAD: #Peppers are believed to be one of the first plants to have been domesticated, and chili pepper seeds from over 6,000 years ago h…
- Mon, 16:05: A tremendously useful list of eligible stories for the 1945 Retro Hugos. https://t.co/8tWLauW1pL
- Mon, 17:11: How to Explore the Solar System in Google Maps via Hyperspace https://t.co/C3ltKW7v0k Hooray!
- Mon, 18:13: August 2004 books https://t.co/frZANR0Nnt
- Tue, 08:36: RT @CoraBuhlert: Introducing the 1945 Retro Hugo Spreadsheet and Retro Science Fiction�Reviews https://t.co/UAeJEDloxs
- Tue, 10:45: RT @sophie_aldred: You needn’t have been nervous; you were Wicked! In every sense. https://t.co/pYTa2sDcLD
August 2004 books
I spent most of August 2004 on holiday, but this was also the moment that I set my long-laid plans to join the cabinet of one of the new members of the European Commission in motion. (Those plans failed.) I also set up and publicised my Interactive Language Quiz, based on the instructions from a McDonald's toy. While on holiday we published reports on Macedonia and Georgia, and I had an op-ed on the Macedonian local government reform plans (rather a good one, if I say so myself). Once I got back to work, my new intern, K, a Slovenian, arrived. The month ended with me doing an RTÉ interview on the tenth anniversary of the IRA ceasefire with Albert Reynolds and John Hume – sadly, Hume was already showing his illness. (I saw him in person in Brussels a few days later in early September and drew the same conclusion.)
Cute picture: young F, recently turned 5, trying his hand at archery.
I took advantage of the holiday to read 18 books.
Non-fiction: 4 (YTD 30)
The Political Animal, by Jeremy Paxman
The Revolution of America, by Guillaume Thomas François Raynal
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, by Niall Ferguson
Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson
Non-genre: 4 (YTD 11)
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Don Quixote (part 1), by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The Accusers, by Lindsey Davies
Scandal Takes a Holiday, by Lindsey Davies
Scripts: 1 (YTD 1)
Hard To Swallow, by John Dowie, illustrated by Hunt Emerson
Poetry: 1 (YTD 1)
Lucky Dip, by Ruth Ainsworth
SF: 8 (YTD 49)
The Year of Our War, by Steph Swainston
Felaheen, by John Courtenay Grimwood
Beyond Infinity, by Gregory Benford
After the King: Stories in Honour of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Jane Yolen
Way Station, by Clifford D. Simak
The Demolished Man, by Alfred P. Bester
Year's Best SF 21, ed. Gardner Dozois
The Dream Millennium, by James White
5,200 pages (YTD 32,100)
5/18 by women (YTD 24/96)
none by PoC (YTD 1/96)
Links above to my reviews, two of three links below to Amazon.
Lots of good books this month, but I'm picking out two quirky ones that stick in my mind: the Abbé Raynal's penetrating analysis of the newly founded United States, which you can get for free here, and Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Felaheen, which you can get here. Least favourite book of the month: tremendously disappointed by Lindsay Davis' The Accusers
My tweets
- Sun, 13:11: What if we re-run the Boundary Commission for 650 MPs, 18 in Northern Ireland? https://t.co/RCBQOFXCCq
- Sun, 16:05: Tales from the Coffeeshop: A PR disaster of nuclear proportions https://t.co/a00qKzjMuP My favourite Cypriot commen… https://t.co/XKu2c8ggqq
- Sun, 19:33: RT @MatinaStevis: #BREAKING: #Iran announces complete withdrawal from nuclear deal https://t.co/vFCABeU0vC via @NYTimes
- Sun, 20:48: How Rose Hudson-Wilkin Became Britain’s First Black Female Bishop And A Chaplain To The Queen https://t.co/1vZTzht1iE Interesting profile.
- Mon, 10:45: How did Africa get its name? https://t.co/x1B0t787Co or rather, names.
What if we re-run the Boundary Commission for 650 MPs, 18 in Northern Ireland?
Rumours started last week suggesting that the newly re-elected British government now plans to drop the current Boundary Commission proposals to cut the House of Commons to 600 MPs, and to start a new revision process which would keep the number of MPs at 650. It was always going to be a stretch to get 50 MPs to vote for their own abolition, so I am not at all surprised that this is where we will end up. Remember that the orignal plans to cut the number of seats by 50 were killed by a disagreement between the then coalition parties, and that the current proposals got mired in the general Brexit malaise, as well as a particular Northern Ireland wrinkle that I'll discuss briefly below.
There is no particularly good historical reason for Welsh over-representation. No policy decision was ever made for that purpose. It happened because successive Boundary Commissions found their maps easier to draw with more seats, and then one thing led to another. The effect is to help the Labour Party, a little, in that its MPs represent seats with an average electorate of 72,180, while Conservative MPs have an average electorate of 74,621. (Since you asked, for other parties with more than one seat: Lib Dems 68,218; SNP 69,678; Plaid Cymru 50,095; DUP 71,839; SF 72,547; SDLP 72,165. Smaller GB parties, apart from the Greens, also benefit from the status quo.)
So the four Boundary Commissions will likely be tasked to ensure that all seats should in principle be within 5% of the UK average (apart from the Isle of Wight and the two Scottish island constituencies). There is some extra wiggle room allowed for Northern Ireland, given the small number of seats and limited space, so seats can vary by 5% of the Northern Ireland average even if this takes them outside the limit of 5% of the UK average, if the Commission finds it necessary.
A quick aside on this point: I personally urged the Commission not to be shy about invoking this extra flexibility for the last round of revisions, in order to make its own work easier. The Commission did so for both its revised proposals and its final report, but this was challenged by an anonymous litigant in the courts through judicial review. The judge found that the Commission was not wrong to invoke the lower limit, but could have explained itself better. (See here, paragraph 48. The judge also found that the Commission should have taken responses in the final stage of consultation more seriously than it did, but did not strike down the final proposals, so they stand until parliament rejects them.) The numbers were particularly brutal last time – this time round, if we are working from December 2019 electorate figures or anything like them, it may well be possible to draw a map that does not need the extra flexibility that is permitted.
(There is a not very interesting discussion to be had about whether electoral boundaries should take account of the number of registered voters or the total population. Worldwide, about a third of countries allocate seats on the basis of the number of voters, and about half on the basis of total population. Personally I incline a bit towards basing them on the number of voters, which in the UK is just as easy, if not easier, to track, and also I don't really see why areas with larger non-voting populations – children and non-citizens – necessarily deserve greater representation. But I am not especially bothered.)
Coming back to the main point, what are the likely consequences for Northern Ireland if the government does proceed to direct the Boundary Commissions as described above? The first thing to note is that there is already a big problem with the sizes of the 18 constituencies. If we take the figures for electorate of each seat from the December 2019 election, we can see that East Antrim votes are worth 1.29 as much as Upper Bann votes (coincidentally, the same ratio as for Wales and England). NB that both East Antrim and Upper Bann are held by the DUP; looking at the five largest and five smallest seats, in both cases three are held by the DUP and two by SF, so this isn't especially a party political issue.
I should add a caveat that we don't have exactly the right figures to calculate with, so everything below needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. The Electoral Office has published the parliamentary electorate for the existing 18 seats and for the old electoral wards from which they are constructed; and the seats will be drawn to match the parliamentary rather than local government voters. British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens can vote in all elections; citizens of the other 24 EU countries can vote in local and Assembly elections, at least for now; expat voters can vote for Westminster elections, but not local or Assembly elections.
However the new seats will be drawn on the new wards, and the electoral office has published only the local government electorate for those wards, which will be larger than the parliamentary electorate. In some cases there are very big differences. Several of the old Dungannon wards recorded between 20% and 35% of local government voters who do not have parliamentary votes, a total of 2,600 voters; these were presumably mostly EU citizens connected with Moy Park.
Looking at the quota for the UK as a whole (the average electorate for the 647 seats apart from than the three island constituencies) we can see that eleven of Northern Ireland's 18 constituencies deviate from it by more than 5%. The UK-wide quota would be 73,290, so in principle each seat should have no less than 69,626 voters and no more than 76,954. Under the rules, Northern Ireland is allowed extra wiggle room, if necessary, taking the lower limit down to 68,293. (Which would mean that East Londonderry is actually OK; but I think the geography of West Tyrone means that it will have to change anyway.) This map shows the divergence from the UK-wide quota of each of the 18 Northern Ireland seats, and the table gives the same figures and also the number of voters by which each seat exceeds or falls short of the permissible size (including also the potential lower margin for Northern Ireland).
(Maps above and below adapted from the one on the Northern Ireland Assembly website.)
| Constituency | Dec 2019 Electorate |
% of UK quota | difference from upper/lower limit |
held by |
| East Antrim | 64,830 | 89% | -4,796 (-3,643) | DUP |
| Belfast West | 65,644 | 90% | -3,982 (-2,649) | SF |
| Belfast East | 66,245 | 91% | -3,381 (-2,048) | DUP |
| West Tyrone | 66,259 | 91% | -3,367 (-2,034) | SF |
| Strangford | 66,928 | 91% | -2,698 (-1,365) | DUP |
| North Down | 67,099 | 92% | -2,527 (-1,194) | Alliance |
| East Londonderry | 69,246 | 95% | -380 (OK) | DUP |
| Belfast South | 69,984 | 96% | OK | SDLP |
| Mid Ulster | 70,449 | 96% | OK | SF |
| South Antrim | 71,711 | 98% | OK | DUP |
| Belfast North | 72,225 | 99% | OK | SF |
| Fermanagh and South Tyrone | 72,848 | 100% | OK | SF |
| Foyle | 74,346 | 102% | OK | SDLP |
| Lagan Valley | 75,735 | 103% | OK | DUP |
| North Antrim | 77,134 | 105% | +180 | DUP |
| South Down | 79,175 | 108% | +2,221 | SF |
| Newry and Armagh | 81,226 | 111% | +4,272 | SF |
| Upper Bann | 82,887 | 113% | +5,933 | DUP |
| Total | 1,293,971 |
The good thing about this from the Boundary Commission's point of view is that there are a number of seats which will hardly have to change at all. There will have to be some smoothing at the edges, because the map of electoral wards, which are the building blocks for the constituencies, has been drastically changed and there is no seat whose boundaries exactly match the new ward boundaries. But if we colour in the under-quota seats in red, the over-quota seats in blue, and the within-quota seats in green, we can see that the question resolves into three distinct geographical challenges.
First of all, West Belfast is an isolated undersized constituency, at 10.3% below the quota. But it borders Lagan Valley, which is 3.5% above the quota. If 4,000-6,000 Lagan Valley voters could be found, conveniently located on the border with West Belfast, they could be moved in, keeping both seats within limits. The two wards of Derryaghy and Lambeg are conveniently located on the border with West Belfast, and together they have 5,440 local government voters (the number of Westminster voters will be a bit less), so I would not be surprised to see West Belfast being extended further south (as was proposed by the Boundary Commission for the 17-seat map).
That leaves two broad zones to consider. First, the south-eastern belt of six seats, three of them contiguous and over-sized (Newry and Armagh, Upper Bann and South Down) and three of them contiguous and undersized (East Belfast, North Down and Strangford). If the neighbouring seats of Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Lagan Vally and South Belfast are left largely alone due to already being the right size (apart from straightening out the boundaries for the new wards, and the adjustment to the Lagan Valley/West Belfast border mentioned above), there aren't a lot of solutions. I could see the following emerge:
- Upper Bann takes Tandragee and Loughgall, with upwards of 7,000 voters, from Newry and Armagh, which puts Newry and Armagh at the right number;
- Upper Bann then cedes Banbridge and Loughbrickland, with around 18,000 voters, to South Down, which puts Upper Bann in the zone;
- at the other end, North Down gives East Belfast the two western wards, Holywood and Loughview, with 6,400 voters, which sets East Belfast right;
- North Down must take the entire Ards Peninsula (once you've taken one ward you have to go all the way), with 18,000 voters, from Strangford, which puts it in the zone;
- Strangford now needs at least another 21,000 voters, and South Down needs to lose about the same number, and that means the seven or eight wards comprising Downpatrick and its immediate hinterland get transferred from South Down to Strangford (which really should be renamed East Down at that rate).
The northern belt of four constituencies is probably the most difficult to resolve. West Tyrone is 9.5% under the quota; East Londonderry 5.4% under; North Antrim 5.4% over and East Antrim, the smallest constituency, 11.4% under. There aren't enough voters there for four seats with at least 95% of the UK quota each (there are, just about, if we take the special lower limit for Northern Ireland, but even then I don't think the geography of the wards makes it possible). It's also difficult to justify much tinkering with the boundaries of the neighbouring seats, and even if we could, the wiggle room on their numbers is limited. My best guess would be that:
- a nibble is taken from Foyle to help the numbers – perhaps Eglinton ward, with 2,800 voters, annexed to East Londonderry, though it could be Slievekirk, with 2,600, added to West Tyrone;
- West Tyrone expands northwards by a couple of wards (certainly Park, with 2,600 voters, and either Slievekirk as noted above or Claudy with another 2,600) – it would probably have to be renamed Sperrin due to too much non-Tyrone territory;
- East Londonderry needs another 3,000-5,500 voters now,and that probably means Giant's Causeway and Kinbane, with 5,100 between them; that takes it almost to Ballycastle, so East Londonderry would probably get renamed Causeway Coast;
- North Antrim is now OK, on numbers, but cannot give any more ground to East Antrim;
- Neither South Antrim nor North Belfast has a lot to give, but I guess if all the necessary ward boundary adjustments are resolved in East Antrim's favour, it may only need another ward or two from one or both of its southern neighbours (Jordanstown from South Antrim? Carnmoney Hill from North Belfast?) to get the numbers to come out.
The changes to East Londonderry and West Tyrone/Sperrin in particular will look striking on the map, but actually will not involve all that many people owing to the sparse population of the areas concerned. The biggest single shift of voters would be in the south-eastern corner of Northern Ireland with Downpatrick moving from South Down to Strangford/East Down.
That's also the biggest political shift. Strangford/East Down certainly gets enough Nationalist voters for them to elect a Nationalist to the Assembly, and to give the DUP's opponents at Westminster elections a tactical boost; South Down on the other hand certainly loses a Nationalist seat at Assembly level. The Ards Peninsula moving into North Down at the cost of more favourable territory in Holywood certainly makes life interesting for Stephen Farry of the Alliance Party, but it's far from a killer blow. Those who feel that they may have something to lose from the process will of course have plenty of time and opportunity to make their voices heards.
This will be a lot less painful than the proposed maps when we were looking at a reduction in the number of seats from 18 to 16 or 17, and frankly I hope that something like this goes through. I think the 5% variation in constituency size is way too tight – worldwide, only the notoriously contested redistricting of the seats of the U.S. House of Representatives has a tighter margin – but I also think that we will probably need to see a couple of revisions go through with that unrealistic restriction before the powers that be catch themselves on and it gets changed. (I have been told that the Conservatives were originally looking at a 2% rather than 5% variation in constituency size, back in 2008; that really would have been difficult and painful to implement, and would certainly have meant breaching ward boundaries all over the place.)
So there we go. Of course, if the government sticks to the 600-seat commitment, rather than returning to 650 seats, the above speculation will be largely irrelevant. And if the 5% wiggle room is made more flexible, more imaginative solutions may be possible. In the end, rearranging boundaries for 18 seats is a lot less painful than chopping one, let alone two, from the map.
My tweets
- Sat, 15:28: A Man for All Seasons (1966) https://t.co/v6BQIBiser
- Sat, 20:10: This Video Was Made from 400,000 Photos of Comet 67p Taken by Rosetta https://t.co/MwY7S0esP1 Just amazing. Take th… https://t.co/tfxGLFPvQ7
- Sat, 22:47: Crumbs. https://t.co/7s4CqdlbWP
- Sun, 06:38: RT @CoNZealand: Nominations for the 2020 Hugo Awards, 1945 Retro Hugo Awards, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and Astounding Awar…
A Man for All Seasons (1966)
A Man for All Seasons won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1966, and picked up another five: Best Director (Fred Zinnemann), Best Actor (Paul Scofield), Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Bolt), Best Cinematography – Color and Best Costume Design – Color. Robert Shaw was nominated as Best Supporting Actor for Henry VIII, and Wendy Hiller as Best Supporting Actress for Alice More, but were beaten by Walter Matthau and Sandy Dennis respectively.
The other Best Picture nominees were Alfie, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, The Sand Pebbles and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – I have seen none of them. The IMDB rankings have A Man for All Seasons ranked 9th by one system and 20th by the other; the clear winner among IMDB voters, top of both lists, is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Other films ranked ahead of it on both systems are Persona, Blow Up, Andrei Rublev, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Fahrenheit 451, The Battle of Algiers, and Manos: The Hands of Fate. The only one of those I have seen is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is one of my favourite films (and did not get a single Oscar nomination). Other 1966 vintage films that I have seen include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, One Million Years BC, Carry On Screaming, and Daleks Invasion Earth 2015 AD. I will agree with IMDB voters that A Man for All Seasons is better than any of them except The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Here’s a trailer (post-Oscars):
I liked this a lot. It’s the story of Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia, and Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. The King assumes power over the Church in order to facilitate his marriage with Anne Boleyn; More cannot approve, and is tried and executed. The script is witty and also moving, and a big story is told without a huge budget (at $2 million, $16 million in today’s prices, less than any Oscar winner since Marty). I’m putting it in my top ten, at #7 as the list stands, below The Bridge on the River Kwai but above West Side Story.
I don’t think there are any actors returning from previous Oscar-winning films. The closest is Wendy Hiller, who was Eliza in the 1938 Pygmalion I watched recently, and is Alice More here.
However, I also like to track crossovers with Doctor Who, and we have a pretty big one: Richard Rich, the bad guy who betrays More, is played by John Hurt, who played the War Doctor forty-seven years later. It’s the only case of a TV Doctor with a speaking role in an Oscar-winning film (Patrick Troughton and Peter Cushing are both in Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet, but Troughton doesn’t speak and Cushing wasn’t a TV Doctor).
There are a few more. Cyril Luckham is Archbishop Cranmer here, and went on to play the White Guardian in Doctor Who:
David Collings is a King’s Messenger; he was in Doctor Who three times, in the Fourth Doctor stories Return of the Cybermen, heavily made up as the Vogan leader Vorus, and The Robots of Death, less heavily made up, as the homicidal Poul; and also heavily made up again as the title character of the Fifth Doctor story Mawdryn Undead. (He’s also Blake’s new sidekick in the very last episode of Blake’s 7.)
The Tower of London is full of Who; the jailer on the left is John Nettleton, who much later is the Reverend Ernest Matthews in the surreal Seventh Doctor story Ghost Light, and the Governor of the Tower is Martin Boddey, who plays the awful British civil servant Walker in the Third Doctor story The Sea Devils a couple of years later
There are several others who I wasn’t able to get a decent shot of from the film – Eric Mason is the executioner (but we don’t see his face), Graham Leaman and Trevor Baxter are extras, and probably I have missed some. There are also a lot of actors who I know from 1970s and 1980s TV as well – most obviously Leo McKern as Cromwell, but also Nigel Davenport, Corin Redgrae, Colin Blakeley and not forgetting Orson Welles as Wolsey.
I’m going to acquit the film of my usual charge of whitewashing. Thanks to the work of Onyeka and Miranda Kaufmann, we now know that there were a lot of black people around in Tudor London; but in 1966 this was not common knowledge. (John Blanke was identified in an academic journal as a royal trumpeter for Henry VII and Henry VIII in 1960, but I can forgive the film-makers for not being regular readers of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.)
It’s a rather male story (indeed, it’s a rather Thomassy story – More, Cranmer, Norfolk and Cromwell all shared the same first name). But the two major women are both very well drawn and portrayed. I’ve mentioned Wendy Hiller above; I’m developing a real crush on my aunt’s friend Susannah York; we saw her in Tom Jones a couple of years back, and here she is great again as More’s daughter Margaret.
And let’s not forget Yootha Joyce, later to achieve fame as Mildred of George and Mildred, who is the sinister petitioner Averil Machin.
The film is dominated by Paul Scofield as More, fully deserving of his Oscar. I see that he did surprisingly few films for an actor of his stature. I do remember him from Quiz Show as the father of the dodgy contestant, but I had forgotten that he was also the French king in Branagh’s Henry V.
He gets most of the good lines here. And they are good and memorable lines, applicable to the present day as much as to 1530.
Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!Wolsey: You’re a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see facts flat-on, without that horrible moral squint… With a little common sense you could have made a statesman.
More: Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?
More is a very attractive heroic figure. I suspect that the story was tremendously influential on the parents of the people I used to hang around with at Fisher House as an undergraduate: telling the story of genteel resistance to the Reformation on a point of principle. A Man for All Seasons is far from the first theatrical treatment of the story – William Shakespeare contributed a scene to a 1590s script which was not performed until 1964. Here’s the key speech, urging compassion for refugees, which has chilling resonances for today:
Much more recently, Jeremy Northam’s portrayal of More in TV’s The Tudors has generated a host of fanvids.
I should finish by noting the excellent cinematography of the film. As noted above, it was made on a virtual shoestring, and the various localtions do a lot of work, economically put together to make the visuals propely compliment the story. Georges Delerue’s music doesn’t quite rise to the level of being a star in its own right, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
It’s the third Oscar winner in five years to be set in Merrie Englande (after Tom Jones and My Fair Lady). Next up is In The Heat Of The Night, of which I know nothing at all. It’s less than two hours long, so I’ll hope to watch it on Eurostar next week. After that it’s back to Merrie Englande with Oliver!.
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) | Oppenheimer (2023)
My tweets
- Fri, 12:56: RT @MattSingh_: THREAD ON BOUNDARY CHANGES: Guido Fawkes is reporting that boundary changes will not now involve cutting the number of seat…
- Fri, 18:09: Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, by Stephen Zunes and Jacob Mundy https://t.co/eOsUt5k1nf
- Fri, 20:41: RT @bbcdoctorwho: On this day 50 years ago we first met the Third Doctor. Hai! #DoctorWho https://t.co/dgzCa1hdLu
Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, by Stephen Zunes and Jacob Mundy
Second paragraph of third chapter (and it's a long one, sorry):
The background to this logic is simple enough. There has long been a fear among French and U.S. strategists that without the monarchy, Morocco could slide into chaos or be taken over by elements that might not ensure continuity of Western interests. During the Cold War, left-wing nationalists were the threat. Now it is political Islam. The Moroccan monarchy has been more than willing to play up its alleged vulnerabilities—"apres moi, le deluge!"—to win over support. Although the popular Moroccan political imaginaire is not as limited as the West fears, the country's pivotal location at the mouth of the Mediterranean prioritizes stability over all other considerations. Considering the histories involved and the geopolitical context of the mid-1970s, it is clear that France and the United States were already predisposed to support Morocco's takeover of Spanish Sahara in 1975. Analyzing the intractability of the Western Sahara conflict, one group of scholars compare it with the equally deadlocked situation in Cyprus, where "mediation exercises tend to become embedded in broader geopolitical policies." In the case of Western Sahara, they note that "neither the United States nor France, the most important external powers in Maghrebi politics, has been prepared to make the fate of the Sahrawis the defining touchstone of its relations with Algeria and Morocco" (Crocker, Hampson, and Aall 2004, 33). Yet these authors do not go far enough. In this chapter, we show how the actions of the U.S. and French governments have profoundly determined the conflict's overall contours to such an extent, we believe, that one can hardly understand the past and present of Western Sahara without first incorporating this crucial dimension.
In my last job I did quite a lot of work on Western Sahara, advising the Frente POLISARIO on diplomatic strategy, and so this was a welcome return to one of the most fascinating dossiers I have worked on. In fact it takes the story only as far as 2008, so I particularly recall only the last couple of years here as I started working on it at the start of 2007.
Zunes and Mundy give a comprehensive account of how the Western Sahara conflict came to be. In a nutshell, Morocco elevated the annexation of the territory into a manifest destiny (which also incidentally includes the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, most of Mauretania and parts of Algeria). In the wake of a 1975 International Court of Justice ruling that Morocco (and Mauretania) had no serious claim to the territory, Spain none the less withdrew unilaterally, allowing Morocco and Mauretania to take over without a legal basis. The indigenous Saharawis had different ideas, and (with Algerian aid) defeated Mauretania and fought Morocco to a stalemate in 1991. The Moroccans have broken the promise to hold a delf-determination referendum, on which the ceasefire was based, and continue to colonise the coastal areas which they hold; meanwhile the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) controls around 20% of Western Sahara's territory, is recognised dipomatically by dozens of states and has full membership of the African Union. It is the largest territory outside Antarctica whose sovereignty is in dispute.
Morocco, however, has a fait accompli in occupying most of the territory (especially the useful bits) and also the full backing of the United States and France. The Western Sahara issue is tied very closely to the survival of the Moroccan regime (which has failed to deliver for its people in most other areas), and the Great Powers do not want to risk chaos at the mouth of the Mediterranean. Moroccan propaganda has it that the whole thing is cooked up by the Algerians; Zunes and Mundy demonstrate that the roots and substance of the Saharawi identity run much deeper, and that in any case continued support for the Saharawis is a strategic no-brainer for Algeria. It's a comprehensive account which also looks at the difficulties of finding a solution. You can get it here.
The depressing thing is that very little has changed in the meantime. Morocco's legal position with respect to the EU has been weakened by a ruling of the European Court of Justice, but the EU's own lawyers have been finding ways of wriggling around it. A brief moment of optimisim, weirdly enough, was President Trump's appointment of John Bolton as his National Security Adviser; Bolton had been chief of staff to James Baker when he was the UN's chief negotiator on the issue, and took a more nuanced and dynamic view of the situtation than was the American orthodoxy. However, Bolton's seventeen months in the Trump adminiistration were not exactly crowned with success. (My suspicion is that at present, US foreign policy on any place that the President hasn't heard of – in other words, most places – sits with Congress, which is thoroughly influenced by Morocco.)
This was the non-fiction book which had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is (gulp) The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant.
My tweets
- Thu, 13:02: RT @levarburton: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the state of race relations in America. One thing I learned from the success of ROOT…
- Thu, 13:10: RT @BBCArchive: #OnThisDay 1981: Carry On Thermocoupling: Kenneth Williams was a guest presenter on Tomorrow’s World. https://t.co/u0mlLnCZ…
- Thu, 18:53: Must-read thread. https://t.co/BJ1yoSFtS6
- Thu, 18:57: Wildthyme Beyond!, by Paul Magrs https://t.co/oawj7ZnzR1
- Thu, 21:19: RT @Hugo_Book_Club: Deciding not to gatekeep what it means to be a fan is what defines real Star Wars fans. https://t.co/Ci7dQAcSBH
- Thu, 21:19: RT @KeohaneDan: Stunned, a broadcasting legend. RIP https://t.co/so3J2oWZJt
- Thu, 21:30: RT @EmGusk: “The Wonder Years aired from 1988 and 1993 and depicted the years between 1968 and 1973. When I watched the show, it felt like…
- Thu, 21:39: RT @JacobOller: Asimov also sexually harassed hundreds of women. I spoke to author @nevalalee about it here https://t.co/oqBGagJDXG https:/…
- Thu, 21:44: RT @PennyRed: My relationship to #DoctorWho is not like other shows. It’s more like supporting a sports team. I don’t watch it because it’s…
- Fri, 10:45: Collector finds rare templates used to print first edition 1860s Alice In Wonderland books in a garage https://t.co/dfrvbQvJab Amazing!
- Fri, 11:39: RT @IFAD: “With the increased income, I am able to pay for my younger sister’s secondary studies. I save half of my income for my tomorrow …
Wildthyme Beyond!, by Paul Magrs
Second paragraph of chapter 3:
The other servants at Wherewithal House said, 'Don't be ridiculous, Mary. The girl is a beast, a frightful creature. She is spoiled and savage, the very worst combination possible.'
I wasn't really aware of the Iris Wildthyme books, another series that I obviously need to get to grips with for completeness, and picked this up at a book sale earlier in the year. It's the middle volume of a trilogy published in 2011, 2012 and 2013, and so I missed out on both the set-up and the conclusion. It's interesting enough that I will seek out the others; the concept is that Iris and her peculiar friends are trapped in a parallel universe while on our Earth fans and pro writers of her adventures are uneasily interacting with each other and with her story. You can get it here.
