Monthly Archives: November 2021

Art at the Imperial War Museum North, in Manchester

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The first leg of my ill-fated trip to Buxton last weekend was an early flight to Manchester, and I decided I should take the opportunity to sample its cultural delights. There is a lot to see in Manchester but I rapidly zeroed in on two particular possibilities: the John Rylands Library in the middle of the city, and the Imperial War Museum North, out at Old Trafford.

The John Rylands Library was a bit of a bust, frankly. I really wanted to see Papyrus 52, the oldest surviving fragment of the New Testament in the world (be honest – how many of you knew that was in Manchester?) but it turned out that the papyrus gallery is not being reopened to the public until December; I was three weeks early. In any case, I got there at 11.15 to discover that it closes for a long lunch break at 12. Luckily my lunch date, Lee Berridge, was able to move his schedule around and meet me a bit earlier, and then kindly drove me out to the IWMN after a very nice meal.

This was a lot more satisfying. I am only mildly fascinated by collections of military memorabilia, but I am still a little fascinated, and there is plenty of that at the Imperial War Museum North. It also tries to look at the bigger picture of the impact of military service and war on families and civilians. It's not completely successful – there is one embarrassing dead-end gallery about the contributions of eastern Europeans to the second world war effort for instance – but it's not completely uncritical either.

What made the museum for me was the art collection. My attention was grabbed by the very first painting I saw as I came in the door, which seemed an eerily familiar landscape.

This turns out to be “Land Heals, Memories Remain”, a 2018 painting by Jen Gash. The accompanying description explains that

Gash’s painting reflects on the First World War Battle of Kosturino as it impacted on the landscape and communities at the Balkans Front. More than 100 years on, the conflict continues to shape and score the physical and social character of the region.

During the Battle of Kosturino, the inexperienced 10th (Irish) Division faced an invading Bulgarian Army, resulting in heavy losses. Hard pressed by disease and the enemy, they fought over treacherous and often impossible terrain. Their defeat led to the complete withdrawal of allied forces from Serbia. This battle is a forgotten story of the conflict and the experiences of soldiers on the Balkans front are not well remembered.

I am sure that it has indeed been forgotten by many people, but not by me. My grandfather led the last stage of the Allied retreat from the battlefield in December 1915, and I went to visit the scene in 2007. I felt an electric shock of recognition.

I'm going to single out just a few of the other art works that struck me.

This is a 1918 painting by Flora Lion of the women’s canteen at the Phoenix Works in Bradford. It captures a moment when, because of the war, new social roles were opening up for women, especially perhaps young women. I love the dynamic of the two women whose arms are linked, and the other with a dangling teacup looking wistfully away.

This grim picture shows the Death Cart in the Jewish ghetto of Łódź in Nazi-occupied Poland. The artist Edith Birkin, then a teenager, lived there from 1941 until 1944, and then survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. She painted this in the early 1980s. It leaves little to the imagination.

As sadly could have been predicted, the Imperial War Museum has very little to say about Ireland. It does have a couple of interesting paintings.

“Street Incident, Londonderry [sic]”, a 1973 painting by Gladys Maccabe, captures well how squaddies in Northern Ireland seemed to exist in some parallel time stream. I remember Anne, on an early visit to me in Belfast, commenting that it was very weird to see soldiers in jungle camouflage patrolling the streets – but it obviously worked, because everyone was ignoring them as if they were not there. The IWM says that Maccabe “maintained a deliberately balanced, unpartisan viewpoint”. Hmm, just check out the title of the painting again for a sec…

This is “The Grass Grows Along The Peace Line”, a 1989 painting by John Keane which combines a Belfast peace line with a collage of obscured newspaper headlines. The first, but not the last, peace line built in Belfast after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was between the White City and Serpentine Gardens in North Belfast, a block from the first house Anne and I owned.

Keane’s art really struck me. The IWM doesn’t go into his (lefty) politics in depth, but his work speaks for itself. Here to finish with is his “Scenes on the Road to Hell”, painted in 1991, showing Kuwaiti children celebrating victory and a burnt out Iraqi tank. A picture really can be worth a thousand words.

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COVID, day 3

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Well, feeling no worse today, if also no better; sniffly and sneezy. I have had much worse flu than this. (But it would certainly have hit me much harder without the vaccinations.)

Anne had her test today, and we expect it will be positive. F’s test was negative, as anticipated, but now he has gone into the same isolation at home as when he was the only one infected, a few weeks back. U shows no signs of being affected; we have not yet been able to sign her up for a test – since she doesn’t have a phone, the tracing system doesn’t spot her immediately.

Lots of fluids and painkillers. And we just got a massive grocery delivery of oven-ready meals for F and U – Anne and I have largely lost our appetite, and I proved yesterday that I am not really up to cooking

And I am certainly not up to much else, for the time being. We had originally scheduled to visit my relatives near Aalst tomorrow – they called and cancelled while I was in London because they had non-COVID colds; we’d certainly have had to cancel anyway. (They have recovered well, apparently.)

A Beautiful Mind

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A Beautiful Mind won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2001, and three others: Best Director (Ron Howard), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly as Alicia) It lost in four categories, two of them to that year’s Hugo and Nebula winner, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which also won four Oscars that year.

The other four Oscar nominees were The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which I have of course seen, and Gosford Park, In the Bedroom and Moulin Rouge!, which I haven’t. The other 2002 films I have seen are Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Donnie Darko, Monsters Inc, Not Another Teen Movie and Storytelling. I love FOTR, have affection for Not Another Teen Movie, but am not especially wowed by any of the others, including A Beautiful Mind. IMDB users rank A Beautiful Mind 2nd on one ranking and 11th on the other, behind FOTR both times. Here’s a trailer.

We have no actors here who have appeared in Doctor Who, but several returnees from previous Oscar and Hugo/Nebula winners, most notably Russell Crowe, the central character John Nash here, and also the title character of last year’s winner Gladiator.

There’s been a somewhat longer gap since we last saw Christopher Plummer, here psychiatrist Dr Rosen, as Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music – 36 years, which is the longest interval I’ve so far seen between top billed roles.

Ed Harris, the sinister Parcher who is the product of Nash’s delusions here, was the equally sinister Cristof in The Truman Show two years ago.

Judd Hirsch, mathematician Helinger here, was the psychiatrist in Ordinary People, 21 years ago.

Victor Steinbach is Professor Horner here and was Mikolaj Ternovsky in 2010, but you know what, I have COVID and I’m not able to find pics of him in either role quickly.

I confess that I was not hugely impressed by A Beautiful Mind. It is a biopic of mathematician John Nash, who suffered from schizophrenia for much of his life; a story of romance triumphing over adversity, but you won’t learn much from it, or indeed you may learn the wrong things from it, about mental illness, mathematics, John Nash, or Alicia Nash. Film makers, even makers of biopics, are not obliged to stick rigidly to the historical record. But a lot of Truth here has been sacrificed for Art, leaving only a basic glurge plot about love triumphing over health issues, with some special effects for the central character’s delusions.

As so often, my biggest problems with the film include race and gender, combined in the depiction of Alicia Nash. Jennifer Connolly certainly deserved her Oscar as the only interesting character in the film. But the fact is that in real life Alicia Nash was from El Salvador, and spoke English with a Latin American accent. There is no hint in the film whatsoever that she was anything other than a WASP. We have not had such an egregious example of white-washing in an Oscar winner since All the King’s Men eliminated the entire African-American population of the state in which it was set. And Alicia was herself a gifted mathematics student, but we see nothing of that here.

(And I don’t think there is a single non-white speaking part; Princeton has had at least a handful of black students from the 1940s onwards.)

The real John Nash’s love life was just a little more complicated than is depicted on screen. He had long running affairs with several other men, and had a child by another woman before he met Alicia. He was once arrested for indecent exposure. He and Alicia formally divorced before getting back together again. Apparently the film makers felt that it would be too difficult to depict his bisexuality without implying that it was linked to his mental illness (a link which was mistakenly made by many of those who treated him). They certainly did not even try to do so.

It’s difficult to put mathematics into a mainstream drama. But again, the film-makers did not try very hard. There are a couple of mutterings about game theory, but otherwise it’s an activity done by white men behind the scenes, except when Nash starts writing on windows. I think that A Theory of Everything did it rather better, though I will also admit that perhaps Stephen Hawking’s theories are more telegenic than Nash’s.

Schizophrenia cannot in general be cured by the treatment portrayed in the film. Nash struggled with it for decades. He himself felt that the natural hormonal changes of aging eventually enabled him to reject his delusions; be that as it may, a recovery such as his is unusual. And while the manifestation of those delusions in the personalities of the sinister Parcher, friendly English Charles and Charles’ niece Marcee is compelling cinema and well executed, it really isn’t the lived experience of most people with schizophrenia and wasn’t the lived experience of Nash himself.

Nash’s hallucinations were much more of voices and weird ideas about politics, which is fairly “normal” for his condition. Rain Man wobbled a bit on the reality of autism, but was basically honest about it. A Beautiful Mind, again, went for Art rather than Truth, leading to heaven knows how many ignorant and stressful conversations between well-meaning people who think they know all about schizophrenia from having seen the film, and desperate people who are actually trying to manage its effects in their own lives.

I am not going to totally dump on the film. The acting is good, the music is good, and the cinematography is great – in particular Princeton emerges as something of a character in its own right. (Though again, Nash’s professional life included many stops other than Princeton – but not the Pentagon.)

Incidentally, I make this the seventh biopic to win the Oscar, the first for 24 years, and I would put it in the lower half, after Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia, The Last Emperor and The Life of Emile Zola, but ahead of Patton and The Great Ziegfeld. Overall I’m putting it in the bottom 15% of my list, after Mutiny on the Bounty but ahead of American Beauty.

Next up is Chicago, of which I have higher hopes.

The film is based on a prize-winning biography with the same title by Sylvia Nasar, the second paragraph of whose third chapter is:

What he saw was a genteel, prerevolutionary village surrounded by gently rolling woodlands, lazy streams, and a patchwork of cornfields.2 Settled by Quakers toward the end of the seventeenth century, Princeton was the site of a famous Washington victory over the British and, for a brief six-month interlude in 1783, the de facto capital of the new republic. With its college-Gothic buildings nestled among lordly trees, stone churches, and dignified old houses, the town looked every inch the wealthy, manicured exurb of New York and Philadelphia that, in fact, it was. Nassau Street, the town’s sleepy main drag, featured a row of “better” men’s clothing shops, a couple of taverns, a drugstore, and a bank. It had been paved before the war, but bicycles and pedestrians still accounted for most of the traffic. In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald had described Princeton circa World War I as “the pleasantest country club in America.”3 Einstein called it “a quaint, ceremonious village” in the 1930s.4 Depression and wars had scarcely changed the place. May Veblen, the wife of a wealthy Princeton mathematician, Oswald Veblen, could still identify by name every single family, white and black, well-to-do and of modest means, in every single house in town.5 Newcomers invariably felt intimidated by its gentility. One mathematician from the West recalled, “I always felt like my fly was open.”6
2 See, for example, Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem (New York: Penguin, 1993); Ed Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office? (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1987); and recollections of Nash’s contemporaries, including interviews with Harold Kuhn and Harley Rogers and letter from George Mowbry, 4.5.95.
3 F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Scribner, 1920).
4 Albert Einstein, quoted in Goldstein, op. cit.
5 As recalled by her niece Gillian Richardson, interview, 12.14.95.
6 Donald Spencer, professor of mathematics, Princeton University, interview, Durango, Colorado, 11.18.95.

I got a lot more out of the book than the film. It is honest where the film is not about Alicia’s origins, John Nash’s sexuality and the nature and course of his illness and career. It goes a bit into the mathematics without trying too hard; in the end, the non-specialist has to take the word of the specialist that this was all Really Important Stuff.

But where the book excels is in its examination of the social and political construction of the environment where Nash worked. It had not occurred to me that the Princeton of Einstein (and Nash) was very different from the Princeton of Woodrow Wilson, just a few decades before. Nasar maps out very carefully how the decision of a few intellectual centres of excellence to invest in mathematics – or rather, in mathematicians – was driven by wider political and social currents, including McCarthyism and antisemitism  (Nash himself also lurched into antisemitism, and not only when deluded). Her behind-the-scenes account of how Nash almost didn’t get the 1994 Nobel Prize is one of the most gripping things I’ve ever read in a scientific biography. (Yeah, I know it’s not technically a Nobel Prize. Sue me.)

Some of Nash’s friends queried whether the biography was ethical, given that it was written without his consent or cooperation. In fact his attitude was studiedly neutral, and Nasar clearly had full cooperation from his colleagues and lovers, which he could presumably have deterred if he had really wanted to. He was apparently pleased enough with it in the end, and enjoyed the film too, though he commented (rightly enough) that it wasn’t really about him.

Here’s a lovely short video of Russell Crowe talking to John and Alicia Nash when they visited the set. Unfortunately we can’t hear what they are saying. The Nashes died in a car accident in 2015, returning from the ceremony where he had been awarded the Abel Prize

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)

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COVID, day 2

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I’m not going to do tediously long updates but it’s maybe useful just to keep track. Did not feel any worse for most of today, and felt up to making my own beans-on-toast dinner – but doing that really wiped me out. I put curry powder in the beans but was not able to really taste it, which is a telling symptom. Poor Anne has a cough too now and will get a test tomorrow. F had his this afternoon and seems fine, as does U.

I am a bit puzzled about how the tracking system actually works. My Coronalert app reset itself completely yesterday afternoon, which apparently happened last time too, when F got his diagnosis. It took with it the only record I had of my positive test apart from an ambiguously worded text message. Presumably there is some record somewhere in the system, but I don’t have it.

(It says to stay in isolation for 10 days if you had a positive diagnosis, not because, as I would have expected.)

Friday reading

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Current
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve
River of Gods, by Ian McDonald

Last books finished
Doctor Who – Ghost Light, by Marc Platt
Ghost Light, by Jonathan Dennis
A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar

Next books
Iron Council, by China Miéville
The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots, by Laetitia Coryn and Philippe Brenot

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Sweeney Todd & Other Stories, by Neil Gaiman

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Second frame of third section ("Holly's Story", by Holly Gaiman and Michael Zulli):

Another of the Gaiman rarities that I got in a Humble Bundle years ago, and am rapidly clearing from the electronic unread shelves. This has three and a half sections, all illustrated by Michael Zulli:

0) an introduction to the historiography of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street;
1) the best bit, where Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean go looking for the original Temple Bar structure, then located in the grounds of Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire (since then, it has been moved back to London and reassembled near St Paul's Cathedral);
2) "Babycakes", a brief but effective polemic about animal testing;
3) "Holly's Story", text from a dream shared by Gaiman's then five-year-old daughter, which is about as coherent as you would expect (ie not very).

I don't think I'd have paid much money for a paper copy of this, and I don't think I paid much for the electronic copy either. It doesn't seem to be more widely available.

This was the shortest book on my shelves acquired in 2015. Next is (gulp) John L. Wright's Hugo finalist story, One Bright Star to Guide Them.

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My tweets

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  • Thu, 12:28: RT @xhacka_olta: Same old fake news this time in the front page of a respected paper as The Times! And btw I am not a “he” but a “she” who…
  • Thu, 12:56: RT @AdamBienkov: Just the Culture Secretary there, trying to police what the BBC’s political editor should and shouldn’t be tweeting. https…
  • Thu, 16:05: RT @mercedeslackey: Before all else: trans women are women, and trans men are men. This is something I fiercely believe, and will always su…
  • Thu, 17:11: yes, again https://t.co/HRekNbsw9h A different perspective on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
  • Thu, 18:00: RT @Berlaymonster: There’s going round the bucket to kick it. Then there’s going endlessly around the bucket without a plan to kick it. T…
  • Thu, 18:20: RT @Mij_Europe: Last plug for my ⁦@FT⁩ piece on EU side of NIP debate. Interestingly, EU discussion on options for short-term retaliation h…
  • Thu, 18:24: Blake’s 7 Annual 1982, eds Grahame Robertson and Carole Ramsay https://t.co/3pjW4J0Phd
  • Thu, 18:35: Voters for the @BSFA Awards – please do consider this wonderful book for the Best Non-Fiction category. (More than half of it is non-fiction!) https://t.co/8qOb0JMQkF
  • Thu, 18:49: COVID, day 1 https://t.co/t2B7JLeinE
  • Thu, 19:38: RT @StephenFarryMP: Serious discussions are happening with European Commission and European Parliament as to how to give NI a voice re fort…

  • Thu, 20:48: Novacon 50 Review Palace Hotel Buxton Derbyshire 12-14th November 2021 https://t.co/ipIfNhRNxP The bad as well as the good.
  • Fri, 09:22: RT @TomMcTague: Time to pay attention. It is now more than possible, even likely, that by 2025 Sinn Fein will lead the govt in Belfast *&*…
  • Fri, 10:45: RT @J2onyabike: THE LITTLE WHITE ENVELOPE: “It’s just a small, white envelope stuck among the branches of our Christmas tree. No name, no i…

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COVID, day 1

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So, I wrote yesterday that I was “Still waiting very anxiously as of this writing for the results of my return-to-Belgium test taken this morning. I feel about as grotty as I usually do after a series of late nights with friends, capped by Eurostar yesterday evening.”

I woke up, still not feeling in top form and still with no test result, had breakfast and got on the train to work, assuming that I would get a negative test result during the commute and get through the morning with coffee as usual. As the train pulled out of our local station I checked the Coronalert app for the umpteenth time, expecting either yet another blank or else clearance as a result of yesterday’s test. But no. It said that my diagnosis was positive and I must isolate for the next ten days.

Shit.

I got off at the next stop and got the first train home again, logged into email and started converting all of the in-person meetings I had planned for today and tomorrow into virtual meetings. I had a bit of a cough, but felt that I could probably power on through. And I actually did do my first scheduled meeting, with a group of MPs from the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee of the U.K. House of Commons, who were visiting Brussels; the Foreign Office is still able to set up a video link at short notice.

But as the morning wore on, I started to feel more and more grotty, with chest pain and general fatigue, and shortly after noon I admitted to myself that I was not going to do anything more at work this week, cancelled everything else and went to bed, where I have stayed. At the moment it’s no worse than a medium attack of flu. But I will listen to my body and take it easy.

Given the five-ish days of incubation, it is very likely that I was infected at Novacon. Two other attendees also had positive diagnoses today. I did have a negative test result on Sunday morning, but I don’t know if that excludes my having picked it up earlier. Anyway, the con has sent around an email to inform all members. I do hope that I managed to avoid passing it on to anyone in our London office, where I spent most of Monday and Tuesday.

So there we go. In the meantime B has also had a high-risk contact and is confined to her room in the Foundation in Tienen, which will frustrate her mightily; at least I can read, or talk to people, so she has it much worse. U was with us anyway due to a suspected case at her end of the Foundation; they called this morning to say that the people concerned had negative tests so U could go back. Ah, I said, I have news for you; she can’t. So Anne, F, U and I are stuck here for the time being. The others will be able to leave the house as soon as they get negative tests, but the system is creaking at the moment under the highest case load for over a year.

Very cheered by the outpouring of good wishes on social media; much appreciated. I hope I won’t have to do many more updates like this one.

Blake’s 7 Annual 1982, eds Grahame Robertson and Carole Ramsay

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Second paragraph of third section (a short story, "Energy Eater", by Mike Wild, originally commissioned for the "real" 1982 Blakes 7 Annual before it was cancelled):

Avon picked himself up from the floor and looked around. The others were all there: Dayna, slumped forward over a console; Tarrant, spread-eagled near the weapons station; Vila and Sooh-Ling [sic], half-sat, half-lying against a bulkhead like two rag dolls. Avon scowled, his feelings of confusion turning to anger. They had been attacked without warning. Somthing had cut them down as easily as if they were puppets whose strings had been severed.

Well. Here we are. Forty years on, just in time for the Christmas market, is the Blake's 7 annual we never got in 1981 thanks to the entire cast being killed off on Gauda Prime Day. It's 250 pages of sheer fannish goodness, roughly equally composed of features about the show and original fiction (including by of this parish), also with some gorgeous art. I enjoyed it immensely, including the What Happened to Jenna story, the story of Servalan's daughter, and the reminiscences of people involved with making the show, especially Michael Keating. There are good pieces on the special effects, the locations and of course the magazine. It was also interesting to discover (though I'm aware that this has been well known for years in the community) that the production team were hoping against hope that Jan Chappell would change her mind and do at least a few episodes as Cally before being killed off; originally in Animals, it would have been her rather than Dayna who was Justin's former lover, which would have been a lot less skeevy.

But look, if you loved Blake's 7 back in the day and you wish there had been one last annual in your Christmas stocking forty years ago, go over to Lulu and order yourself a copy. It's not cheap; but it is worth it. I'm nominating this for the BSFA Awards in the Non-Fiction category, and I hope you will too.

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My tweets

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  • Wed, 12:26: Last year, the Spanish Comisi�n de Arbitraje, Quejas y Deontolog�a del Periodismo found completely in my favour when I complained that OK Diario had published information about me that was completely untrue. OK Diario then complained that they had not had a chance to respond. https://t.co/FDVMEaCmLP
  • Wed, 12:56: RT @301N: Very important thread. Well done Nicholas https://t.co/LK3h1eAPWn
  • Wed, 18:09: RT @APCOBXLInsider: JOB ALERT Interested in EU affairs and consultancy? #APCO Brussels could be the place for you. We are hiring for sev…
  • Wed, 20:11: 610 days of plague https://t.co/hceUhU4sZS
  • Thu, 10:09: I just got a positive diagnosis for COVID. I’m feeling generally OK, just a bit of a cough at the moment, but obviously will take it easy and work from home for ten days. Massively inconvenient, but plenty of people have had it worse.
  • Thu, 10:45: RT @worldcon2021: Only 2 days left to vote for @thehugoawards! It’s too late to mail more paper ballots, so vote ONLINE and update your v…
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610 days of plague

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As previously noted, I had hoped to be able to stop this series of posts if there was no big surge in COVID numbers, and declare the pandemic over as a constant concern. But that’s not where we are. The government have just annouced that we’re going back to mandatory teleworking four days a week in Belgium. I am in a special situation where I am arguably working for two different employers, so I’ll see if I can get away with two days a week in Brussels, but I am not very hopeful.

I’m just back from five days in England, where for once I managed to do the Day 2 test (the last couple of times that I went to London, I left so early on Day 2 that the test arrived after my departure). It was gloriously negative.

Still waiting very anxiously as of this writing for the results of my return-to-Belgium test taken this morning. I feel about as grotty as I usually do after a series of late nights with friends, capped by Eurostar yesterday evening.

Belgian cases, hospitalisations and ICU beds are all showing a steady increase of around 27% at the moment; two more weeks of that and the caseload will exceed the record of November last year, so I can see why the government felt that something had to be done. Today’s numbers are:

10283 cases (weekly average from 3-9 days ago), comparable with 8 Nov and 23 Oct last year, when hospital numbers were 6893 and 3649, ICU numbers 1464 and 573, and deaths 173 (!) and 35. Likely to pass November 2020 peak of 15967. (Spring 2020 figures are unreliable.)

2693 in hospital, not yet above the April peak of 3215 but likely to surpass it in the next few days. Nowhere near November 2020 peak of 7461. (April 2020 peak was 5759.)

557 in ICU, way below the April peak of 947, never mind the November 2020 peak of 1470. (Which was higher than the April 2020 peak of 1286.)

25.6 fatalities (weekly average from 3-9 days ago), some way below April peak (42) let alone November 2020 (202) or April 2020 (282).

So, you know, it’s not as bad as a year ago, let along in Spring 2020, but it’s still bad.

And everyone needs to get vaccinated and continue being careful.

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December 2013 books and 2013 books roundup

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This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days, I've been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I've found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

My travels that month were an awkward work trip to New York followed immediately by a sad trip to England for my aunt's funeral. (Straight off my transatlantic flight, I changed my shirt in the back of my taxi from Heathrow to the memorial ceremony in the Horniman Pavilion.) Little U got a special laptop for her birthday, I got a special Christmas present, and we were visited, as so often, by H who took one of the best family pictures we've had (though I've pasted U's head in from a different shot).

To get you in the Christmas mood, here's "Fairytale of New York" in Irish:

I read 22 books that month.

Non-Fiction 3 (2013 total 46)
Tardis Eruditorum vol 4: Tom Baker and the Hinchcliffe Years, by Philip Sandifer
Information is Beautiful, by David McCandless
Stuff I've Been Reading, by Nick Hornby

Fiction (non-sf) 5 (2013 total 44)
Eyeless in Gaza, by Aldous Huxley
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Popinjay, by Iona McGregor
The Truth Commissioner, by David Park
The Devils, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

SF (non-Who) 8 (2013 total 64)
The Just City, by Jo Walton (feedback on unpublished manuscript)
The Philosopher Kings, by Jo Walton (feedback on unpublished manuscript)
Patternmaster, by Octavia E. Butler
Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
Looking for Jake and other stories, by China Miéville
The Father Christmas Letters, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Next Generation, vol. I, by John Francis Maguire (provisionally classified as sf)

Doctor Who 4 (2013 total 71, 83 councting non-fiction and comics)
Dancing The Code, by Paul Leonard
Death and Diplomacy, by Dave Stone
City of the Dead, by Lloyd Rose
The Men Who Sold The World, by Guy Adams

Comics 2 (2013 total 30)
Animate Europe! (responsible editor Hans H. Stein)
Le Chat du Rabbin tome 1, by Joann Sfarr

~6,800 pages (2013 total ~67,000)
5/22 (2013 total 71/257) by women (McGregor, Butler, Rose and two more)
1/22 (2013 total 11/257) by PoC

The best of these were all sf: Rendezvous with Rama, a re-read, which you can get hereThe Just City, which you can get hereThe Wise Man's Fear, which you can get here. To my surprise I bounced off Patternmaster, but you can get it here.


I failed to do a proper 2012 books roundup at the time, managing only a summary. So here is what I would have written using the methodology I use now.

Total books: 257 – tenth highest of the 17 years I have been keeping track, so a minor tick below average. (Somehow this turned out to be 237 in previous reports, but it was definitely 257.)

Total page count: ~67,000 – ninth highest of the last 17 years, so firmly in the middle.

Diversity:
71 (28%) by women – higher than any previous year, lower than most subsequent years, augmented by 10 Agatha Christie novels.
11 (4%) by PoC – more than any year before 2009, less than any other year since.

Most books by a single author: Agatha Christie (10), followed by Terrance Dicks (7), Jonathan Gash (6), Philip Sandifer (5), Cressida Cowell, Gary Russell, Ian Rankin and Neil Gaiman (4 each).

Doctor Who fiction

Novels, collections of shorter fiction, etc excluding comics

2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
18 32 32 51 39 43 59 71 75 80 71 71 179 27 28 5 1
7% 14% 12% 21% 18% 15% 20% 28% 29% 27% 26% 21% 48% 11% 14% 3% 1%

All Who books including comics and non-fiction

2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
25 43 42 55 42 54 68 83 76 87 78 81 180 49 32 5 1
9% 18% 16% 23% 20% 19% 23% 32% 29% 29% 28% 23% 49% 21% 15% 3% 1%

Fourth highest tally, third highest percentage. (Third and second, counting comics and non-fiction.)

Top Doctor Who books of the year:
The first four volumes of Elizabeth Sandifer's Tardis Eruditorum. (Vol 1: reviewget it here. Vol 2: reviewget it here. Vol 3: reviewget it here. Vol 4: reviewget it here.)

Honourable mentions:
Nothing O'Clock, by Neil Gaiman (reviewget it here)
Harvest of Time, by Alastair Reynolds (reviewget it here)
The Doctor's Monsters, by Graham Sleight (reviewget it here)

Enjoyed rereading:
Human Nature, by Paul Cornell (reviewget it here)
Escape Velocity, by Colin Brake (reviewget it here)

The one you haven't heard of:
Revenge of the Slitheen, a good Sarah Jane noveliastion by Rupert Laight, who I recently discovered died in 2018 (reviewget it here)

The one to avoid:
A Big Hand for the Doctor, by Eoin Colfer (reviewget it here)



Non-Whovian sff

2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
114 77 108 68 80 130 124 64 62 78 73 78 54 75 68 79 76
43% 33% 41% 29% 38% 45% 43% 25% 24% 26% 26% 23% 15% 32% 33% 55% 51%

Third lowest tally and fourth lowest percentage ever.

Top SF books of the year:
The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss (Vol 1: reviewget it herereviewget it here)

Honourable mentions:
The Just City, by Jo Walton (reviewget it here)
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, by Lois McMaster Bujold (reviewget it here)

Enjoyed rereading:
Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke (reviewget it here)
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin (reviewget it here)
The Moment of Eclipse, by Brian Aldiss (reviewget it here)

The ones you haven't heard of:

Two short story collections by the much-missed Eugie Foster, Returning My Sister's Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice (reviewget it here) and Mortal Clay, Stone Heart and Other Stories in Shades of Black and White (reviewget it here).

The one to avoid:
Toward the End of Time, by John Updike (reviewget it here)





Non-fiction

2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
50 49 50 57 37 47 48 46 53 69 66 94 70 78 70 42 42
19% 21% 19% 24% 17% 16% 16% 18% 20% 23% 24% 27% 19% 33% 34% 29% 28%

Fourteenth highest tally and percentage of 17 years, below average.

Top non-fiction book of the year:
A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf (reviewget it here.)

Honourable mentions to:

A History of the World in 100 Objects, by Neil MacGregor (reviewget it here.)
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (reviewget it here.)
The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, by William Dalrymple (reviewget it here.)
Tell My Horse, by Zora Neale Hurston (reviewget it here.)

The one you haven't heard of:

The Crocodile by the Door, by Selina Guinness (reviewget it here.)

The one to avoid:

“I have an Idea for a Book …” : The Bibliography of Martin H. Greenberg (reviewget it here.)


Non-sfnal fiction

2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
40 45 36 26 28 42 41 44 48 48 50 59 24 33 35 9 19
15% 19% 14% 11% 13% 14% 14% 17% 19% 16% 18% 17% 6% 14% 17% 6% 13%

Sixth highest tally and fourth highest percentage ever.

Top non-genre fiction of the year:
The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston, though in fact it turns out that there are other stories which had not then been published (reviewget it here.)

Honourable mentions:
Housekeeping, by Mailynne Robinson (reviewget it here.)
Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel (reviewget it here.)

Enjoyed rereading:
The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco (reviewget it here.)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie (reviewget it here.)

The one you haven't heard of:

The Popinjay, by Iona McGregor (reviewget it here.)

The one to avoid:
The House of the Seven Gables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (reviewget it here.)

Comics

2020/ 2019/ 2018/ 2017/ 2016/ 2015/ 2014/ 2013/ 2012/ 2011/ 2010/ 2009/ 2008/ 2007/ 2006/ 2005/ 2004/
45 31 28 29 27 18 19 30 21 27 18 28 6 20 6 8 8
17% 13% 11% 12% 13% 6% 7% 12% 8% 9% 6% 8% 2% 8% 3% 6% 5%

Third highest tally and fourth highest percentage.

Top comic of the year:
The Blue Lotus, by Hergé (reviewget it here)

Honourable mentions:

The Adventures Of Luther Arkwright, by Bryan Talbot (reviewget it here)
The Hive, by Charles Burns (reviewget it here)

The ones you haven't heard of:
Misschien/Nooit/Ooit, by Marc Legendre and Kristof Spaey (reviewhere, here and here)

The one to avoid:
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, by Hergé (reviewget it here)



Making up the numbers: Observatory by Daragh Carville (reviewget it hereMeeting the British, by Paul Muldoon (reviewget it here).

My Book of the Year

A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf:  a tremendous, passionate, witty and forensic analysis of the barriers faced women who try to get anywhere in literature, or indeed in almost any other way of life. One of the great feminist texts, and at 112 pages mercifully succinct. I wished I had read it twenty-five years earlier. Get it here.

Other Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest.
2004: The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (reread).
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea
2007: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
2008: The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (reread)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray
2009: Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (had seen it on stage previously)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al.
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë
2013: See above
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel. However I did not actually blog about these, being one of the judges at the time.
– Best book I actually blogged about: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull

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Shadowboxer, by Tricia Sullivan

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Mya’s muscles burned with the effort of dragging the injured man. Beside her, Mr. Richard did nothing to help. The altitude had set him gasping for breath from the moment Mya’s meditation had brought them to the forest. In the outer world it was rainy season, but everything was different here. Sometimes when Mya came to the immortal forest she found lush mangroves, sometimes bamboo jungle. Today it was cold and the air was thin. Trees spiked the blue sky, ending in the snowfields of the Himalayas. There were fir needles under her slippered feet.

A good read, about a young American MMA fighter who goes to Thailand and gets mixed up with a plot to steal people's souls. Both physical fighting and combat with ghosts described in detail. Well paced and engaging.

The writing of this book was one of the threads in the Requires Hate affair a few years back, but it was good to read it on its own merits.

This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Shanghai Sparrow by Gaie Sebold.

book cover
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Novacon

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Simply tremendous to get together with a lot of fen at Novacon this weekend, in the somewhat old-fashioned Palace Hotel in Buxton. I am a huge fan anyway of Guests of Honour Christopher Priest and Claire North, both of whom gave amusing speeches detailing their problems with the publishing industry; a surprise appearance from Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo, whose husband has just published a science fiction novel; a recording of the Octothorpe podcast with Marguerite Smith standing in for absent Liz Batty; and much planning ahead for next year’s Hugo administration and for the ever more energetic Glasgow 2024 Worldcon bid. And the delight of just hanging out in the many public seating areas with old friends, and even new friends. Many many thanks to the organisers for bringing us all back together.

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1459522001652129795
https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1459848544949522432
https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1459907764608802824
https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1459870144646242308
(First of a thread)

Let’s hope this is the first reunion of many.

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Discipline or Corruption, by Constantin Stanislavsky et al

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Second paragraph of third chapter ("Easy Entertainment", by Karen Cooper):

To be ambitious and hopeful about your future is very commendable. The dreams and aspirations of each individual are the driving force towards the progress of each nation and towards the evolution of mankind.

I'm going to pull together material from a couple of earlier posts here, to give you the full picture.

On 22 January 1972, Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, was spattered with ink on arriving at the Egmont palace in Brussels to sign the treaty admitting the UK to the European Communities. It's a striking moment and the press photographers were well placed:

heath Heath Ink

I have attended at least a dozen events in the Egmont Palace since moving to Brussels in 1999, so I know the scene of the event very well; and I now smirk every time I wander up to the foot of the grand staircase in the entrance hall.

The ink-thrower had registered as a photographer from a non-existent newspaper, the England-Sweden Times, which is how she managed to be in the press scrum, conveniently placed for both ink-throwing and photography. She gave the name Karen Cooper, but it turned out that her name was really Marie Louise Kwiatkowski, born in Murnau, Germany (presumably the Murnau near Oberammergau, just north of the Austrian border) on 8 January 1941, a registered resident of Sweden but living in London.

And her protest was not, in fact, an anti-European one. There were anti-European protesters outside the palace, led by Christopher Frere-Smith, who was arrested, but she was not one of them. Instead, and this is where it gets a bit weird – well, here's the Glasgow Herald's version:

herald

So, she was protesting that the gummint had personally stolen her plans for the redevelopment of Covent Market into a conference centre – in other words, not actually a protest against government policy, but a gripe that the government had agreed with her preferred outcome without giving her credit. Here is the transcript of ITN's News at Ten coverage of her eventual conviction and sentence:

itn1
itn2
itn3

"Andrew" here is presumably Andrew Gardnerfuture author of Harry's GameMichael Palliser, or by Sir John Beith? Walter Scheel, the German foreign minster, quipped that all future German ambassadors should be chosen for their physical similarity to the foreign minister of the day, in case this should happen to him or his successors. (Scheel also suggested that they try and pass off the incident as honoring an ancient Norwegian custom of throwing ink at people to whom you wish the best of luck.)

See also the legal analysis (in French) here, pp, 321-323, which asserts that Kwiatkowski was not prosecuted under the 1852 law against attacking foreign heads of government because Heath himself did not wish to press charges, and not (as another bit of Belgian mythology has it) because the law applied only to Heads of State and Heath was not the Queen (it seems clear that the law would have applied to him as well).

As for Marie-Louise Kwiatkowski, here's a photograph from June 1972 found on eBay:

4499471

[eBay description] This is an original press photo. The Girl who threw ink over Mr.Heath is thrown out of Britain: German-born- Marie-Louise Kwiatkowski, 31, the girl who threw ink over Premier Edward Heath in Brussels five months ago, and was three times refused entry into Britain, sneaked back here at her fourth attempt wearing a dark wig to fool the immigration officials, Karen Cooper, the name she used, arrived back in this country aboard a passenger ship from Ansterdam and then hitched several lifts to London five days ago. Yesterday the Special Branch moved into the London hotel, where she was escorted to Heathrow Airport and put on a flight to Frankfurt. Photo shows Karen Cooper (real name Marie Louise Kwiatkowski) is pictured in these two photos at her London Hotel yesterday. On the left she is seen wearing the clothes and wig she wore to cover her long fair hair when she entered the country five days ago, and on right as she really is.

The taking of the photograph is the subject of a somewhat incomprehensible article in Der Spiegel, whose text has got mixed up with an entirely different story involving nude photography and the Norwegian artist Gerd Tinglum.

More coverage, in order, from the Times, 24 January 1972 (two days after it happened):

Times-19720124p5

From the Guardian, 1 March:

Guardian-19720301p2

From the Times, 26 April (my fifth birthday):

Times-19720426p5

And from the Times Diary column, 24 June:

Times-19720624p14

(Nora Nicholson has the leading guest role in a 1971 episode of Here Come The Double Deckers, "The Helping Hound".)

I hate linking to the Daily Mail, but for once they have the best roundup of all of the information on this in a piece published in 2016, a year after my original blog posts (but I think based on original research). Karen Cooper / Marie-Louise Kwiatkowski took her own live in a Swedish prison in 1976, having married George Martin but facing charges of theft and arson. George Martin, who appears to have escaped any punishment for helping her to forge her press pass (and I bet he bought the ink himself), is not this chap, not Basil Brush's scriptwriter, not the Beatles' manager, but in fact a Russian who had been born in Harbin, then in Manchuria, and grew up in Tianjin, a bit further south in China.

The book Discipline or Corruption, published in 1967, is basically the bible of George Martin's cult-like Institute for Personal Development, which combined a reverence for the works of Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski with prejudice against gays and an obsession with transforming the world through the redevelopment of Covent Garden. Yes, really. To Slanislavski's essay on Ethics and Discipline, Martin and four of his women colleagues, including Karen Cooper, add their own personal accounts of develeopment and the need for us all to reject corruption and embrace Stanislavski. (And Covent Garden). It's earnest and a bit dull; the Sixties produced much more exciting stuff than this.

Now. As far as I can tell, there is almost no evidence that Heath – or indeed anyone in the 1970-74 Tory government – stole any plans for the Covent Garden redevelopment. The history is difficult to reconstruct at this distance, but as far as I can see from here (note future MEP Lord Dartmouth, Princess Diana's step-brother, hiding behind his mother in one of the photographs) and also here, the massive redevelopment plans for Covent Garden had been agreed in 1968, before the government came to office; but by early 1972, all concerned were preparing the ground for dignified retreat, paving the way for the creation of the streetscape that we know today. It would have made more sense (admittedly, only a little more) if Kwiatkowski had protested Heath's likely dumping of the plans rather than his supposed "theft" of them. However the Institute for Personal Development crowd were obsessed with Heath, and Karen Cooper actually published a book about him, making various unfounded allegations. This generated a brief flurry of interest more recently which has now died down.

George Martin and Susanne Harris, one of the other co-authors of Discipline or Corruption, bought the island of Stora Ekholmen in Stockholm harbour in 1965 for the Institute; but they do not seem to have got very far. Swedish sources suggest that at least one of them was still living there as recently as April 2019. Nothing much more, however, was heard from the Institute for Personal Development.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelves. Next on that list is Exploding School to Pieces: Growing Up With Pop Culture In the 1970s, by Mick Deal.

book cover

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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring won the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 2001 (the last before the category was split into Long Form and Short Form), and the Nebula for 2002 (awarded in 2003) It also won four Oscars. IMDB users rank it top film of 2001 on one system but only fourth on the other, behind Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Thir13en Ghosts (which I had not heard of) and Donnie Darko. For the Nebula, it beat Shrek, The Dead Zone episode “Unreasonable Doubt” and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Once More, with Feeling”.

For the Hugo, it beat, in the following order, Shrek again, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Monsters, Inc. and “Once More, with Feeling” again. I haven't seen any of The Dead Zone, and I'm not sure if I have seen Shrek – I think I've been in the room while other people's children were watching it without paying too much attention – but I've certainly seen the other three. “Once More, with Feeling” is one of my favourite Buffy episodes, but I think I'd have voted with the crushing majority that gave the Hugo to The Fellowship of the Ring on the first count. It was also far ahead at nominations stage. (“Once More, with Feeling” got the second highest number of first preferences, but was overtaken by the other films in the counts for later places and ended up fifth out of five, which I think is an injustice.)

I usually start with actors who have appeared in earlier films that won the Hugo, Nebula or Oscar, but I'm going to step slightly outside that for Elijah Wood, so memorably Frodo Baggins here and in the next two films; he was the kid playing video games at the start of Back to the Future II back in 1989, when he was eight.

We've seen John Rhys-Davies, Gimli here, as Sallah in the two Hugo- and Nebula-winning Indiana Jones films, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

 

Ian Holm is the only cast member with a speaking role in an Oscar-winning film. Before being Bilbo here, he was Abrahams' coach Mussevini in Chariots of Fire, as well as of course being the android Ash in Alien.

 

According to legend, Christopher Lee, Saruman here, was an uncredited and non-speaking palace guard in Olivier's Oscar-winning 1948 Hamlet

Slightly surprisingly there is only one crossover with Doctor Who, and there it's a voice-only role; Ian McKellen, Gandalf here, was the voice of the Great Intelligence in The Snowmen (2012), though to be really meta, he also appeared the following year as himself playing Gandalf in The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.

 

I saw this in the cinema when it first came out, and loved it then, and enjoyed the whole trilogy in 2005, and twenty years on I love it still. Of course I know the original book backwards, so I was poised to be hyper-critical of ways in which the film failed to live up to expectations (as the Bakshi version largely failed). I'm also still a fan of the BBC radio version from forty years ago, which is surely a high water mark for dramatisation of any novel in any medium. And in general I start these reviews with things I didn't like so much, so I'll do the same here.

Though there's very little to object to. Yes, we lose the Elves in the Shire (though they are in the extended edition), the Old Forest, Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-Wight, which are really vivid parts of the book, but IIRC the BBC and Bakshi did the same; I think it would be difficult to dramatise Bombadil without being twee – he fulfills a function in Tolkien's mind and on the page, which sensible scriptwriters have resisted adapting.

(There is a hilarious adaptation of Bombadil in Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney's parody, Bored of the Rings. “Toke a lid, smoke a lid, pop the mescalino! …Hop a hill! Pop a pill! For old Tim Benzedrino!”)

The fervent Tolkien fan must also twitch at the infantilisation of the characters of Merry and Pippin, who in the book are well abreast of Frodo's plans to the point of maturing their own plan to travel with him, like it or not, but are set up in the film as mere comic relief. At the same time, fervent Tolkien fans know and expect a significant future narrative trajectory for them both. (Also, re Billy Boyd's accent – lots of planets may have a North, but even a small patch of hobbit territory in Middle Earth has a Scotland.)

The last and most trivial ground of complaint is that the timescale of the book is drastically compressed – seventeen years elapse between Bilbo's party and the formation of the Fellowship in the original novel, whereas in the film we get the sense that it's only a matter of weeks.

OK, onto the good stuff, and there is a lot of it. The sense of scale is in general very well done. In particular, making the hobbits and dwarves look shorter than humans, orcs, elves and wizards is a cinematic masterpiece. There are one or two moments where it slips (meaning distance shots of the Fellowship where it's fairly obvious that the hobbits and Gimli are being played by shorter standins, and a slightly awkward overlay at the Council of Elrond). But for most of the three hours (four if you watch the director's cut) it works well and convincingly. Likewise the battle and chase sequences have occasional weak moments, but the tolerant viewer will ignore them for the sake of the greater spectacle.

Dramatising Isildur at the beginning is a great move, setting the epic tone which would have been lost if we had just jumped straight into the birthday party. At the same time, the first reveal of the Shire is an amazing piece of establishment and world-building. In general the places of Jackson's Middle Earth look beautiful and they look like you wanted Tolkien's Middle Earth to look. New Zealand has a starring role in all three films.

Boosting the role of Arwen is also frankly an improvement on the book. As Una McCormack has observed, there are more named horses than named women in The Lord of the Rings. It remains a story about male chaps having male adventures, but Jackson has mildly redressed the balance. It’s also entirely right for dramatic purposes to relocate Boromir’s death from the beginning of The Two Towers to the end of The Fellowship of the Ring.

All of the performances are excellent, starting with Elijah Wood, who was still a teenager when filming began, and ending with Cate Blanchett, who at 30 successfully conveys millennia of authority. I think Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn isn't quite as interesting as Robert Stephens in the BBC audio, but that's a high bar.

And, well, the music.

F, having previously read The Hobbit but not LOTR, watched it with me and enjoyed it. So it's not just me.

Two more notes.

Here's a brilliant blog post by Dimitra Fini, looking at how Jackson's imagery of the hobbits hiding from the Black Rider derives from Bakshi and ultimately from the early twentieth century art of Arthur Rackham.

And here's Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jack Black infiltrating the Council of Elrond.

You're welcome.

Of course I went back to re-read the book, for the first time since 2004. The second paragraph of Chapter III, "Three is Company", is:

‘I know. But it is difficult to do both [go quietly, and go soon]’ he [Frodo] objected. ‘If I just vanish like Bilbo, the tale will be all over the Shire in no time.’

A couple of points struck me in the light of having rewatched the film. The first is that the foreword to the second edition and the prologue are both in their different ways integral to the text. The foreword is a curious piece of soul-baring which tells us how not to read the book and refuses to tell us how we should read it.

The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them. As a guide I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving, and for many the guide was inevitably often at fault. Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. But even from the points of view of many who have enjoyed my story there is much that fails to please. It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved. The most critical reader of all, myself, now finds many defects, minor and major, but being fortunately under no obligation either to review the book or to write it again, he will pass over these in silence, except one that has been noted by others: the book is too short.

And a moving note on personal experience:

An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous. It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the events of times common to both were necessarily the most powerful influences. One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

(Though it’s telling that the “close friends” don’t seem to include Edith. The survivor is Christopher Wiseman.)

I’ve noted some points of difference with the film above, but I’ll also note here that the hobbits we hear about in the Shire are almost all chaps. It would be nice to know more about Melilot Brandybuck, who dances the Springle-ring with Everard Took. (Some have speculated.)

Anyway, I’ll get onto The Two Towers in due course, but first the 2001 Oscar winner, A Beautiful Mind.