Non-fiction 4 (YTD 36) Flying from Malone, by Guy Warner Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences, eds. Bernard Grofman and Arend Lijphart Ten Years to Save the West, by Liz Truss The Myth Makers, by Ian Potter
Non-genre 4 (YTD 18) Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame, by Ag Apolloni The Virgin In The Garden, by A.S. Byatt
SF 8 (YTD 47) Unraveller, by Frances Hardinge To Shape A Dragon’s Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose The Sinister Booksellers of Bath, by Garth Nix I AM AI, by Ai Jiang Linghun by Ai Jiang If Found Return to Hell, by Em X. Liu The Death I Gave Him, by Em X. Liu Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E. McKenna
Doctor Who 4 (YTD 16) Ruby Red, by Georgia Cook Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood, by Keith Temple Doctor Who: The Myth Makers, by Donald Cotton
Comics 4 (YTD 18) Your Wish is My Command [Shubeik Lubeik], by Deena Mohammed The One, by Si Spurrier et al Barnstormers: A Ballad of Love and Murder, by Tula Lotay and Scott Snyder Bea Wolf, by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet
7,300 pages (YTD 34,400) 13/24 (YTD 63/137) by non-male writers (Truss, Howard, Byatt, Hardinge, Blackgoose, Jiang x 2, Liu x 2, McKenna, Cook, Mohammed, Lotay) 5/24 (YTD 21/137) by a non-white writer (Blackgoose, Jiang x 2, Liu x 2) 3/24 rereads (Doctor Zhivago, Fear of the Dark, Doctor Who: The Myth Makers)
307 books currently tagged unread, down 2 from last month, not tallied in June 2023.
Reading now Godkiller, by Hannah Kamer
Coming soon (perhaps) The Malignant Truth, by Si Spurrier et al The Ultimate Treasure, by Christopher Bulis The Waters of Mars, by Phil Ford Caged, by Una McCormack Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Stephen Wyatt The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith The Combined 2001 Election, by NISRA Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece, by Jonathan Bardon How to be Invisible: Lyrics, by Kate Bush Comparing Democracies: Elections and Voting in Global Perspective, eds. Lawrence Leduc, Richard G. Niemi, Pippa Norris Darkening Skies, by Juliet E. McKenna Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz Who Runs the World?, by Virginia Bergin L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by Mariana Mazzucato The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse All Change, by Elizabeth Jane Howard The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones Hard to Be a God, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch South, by Ernest Shackleton Monica, by Daniel Clowes Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
[Doctor Who] The Ultimate Treasure by Christopher Bulis (1998)
One of the things that has puzzled me about the stucco artist Jan Christian Hansche is that there are very few other examples of ceilings with his sort of sculpture anywhere. He told the Brussels authorities in 1661 that his work was admired in Germany, Austria and Italy; but where?
Via the Internet Archive, I’ve found a 1903 article about stucco ceilings in a building called “Weißer Engel“, “White Angel”, in Quedlinburg in eastern Germany. The article was published in a journal called Die Denkmalpflege, and is by Paul Schwarz who describes himself as “Oberlehrer”, a senior teacher, at the Quedlinburg Gymnasium (grammar school). Schwarz leads off by comparing the stucco in Quedlinburg with the works in Kleve, now destroyed, which he knew were by Hansche. The Quedlinburg stuccos have survived, and the Weißer Engel haus is now a home for people with learning disabilities where you can hire the room with the stucco ceiling for events. Here are two nice photos from the local websites:
Schwarz says that the house was built in 1623, and believes that the stucco panels must have been installed at the time of construction. There is no date and no signature, which would be unusual for Hansche who usually did put both the date and his name or at least initials somewhere on the ceiling; and 1623 would be too early for him, as his earliest surviving work is dated from 1653 and he continued working until the 1680s. And Quedlinburg is 300 km east of Olfen, Hansche’s birthplace, and 350 km east of Wesel, the easternmost known work that he did. But there is a striking similarity of execution.
There are two rows of six panels in Quedlinburg, and Schwarz’s article include photographs of seven of them. The first six tell the story of Tobit – an interesting choice for a traditionally Protestant town; Tobit is accepted as canon by Catholics but not by most Protestants.
Tobit is blinded by a bird defecating into his eyes. Lots of domestic details.Tobit’s son Tobias bids farewell to his parents, to travel to Ecbatana with the disguised angel Raphael.Tobias is greeted by his relatives in Ecbatana.
Five of the other six stuccos show the five senses, and again Schwarz has published photographs of three of them, and we can see a fourth in the tourism photos:
Taste
Also visible in one of the more recent tourism photos above (here rotated 180 degrees)
HearingSightSmell, from the tourism photos and rotated 180 degrees.Also from the tourism photos, Taste, Smell and Hearing.
And the sixth in this row is a bird packing at its own breast, with the motto “Nosce Te Ipsum”, “Know thyself”.
Schwarz says somewhat sniffily that the Quedlinburg stuccos much better executed than the ones in Kleve; I agree that they are a bit more adventurous and better framed, and it seems to me that the distance, the likely date and the lack of a signature all point to these being by a different artist. But there seems to be no information about who that could have been.
Quedlinburg is a good five and a half hours drive from here, and not really close to anywhere else (almost exactly half way between Leipzig and Hanover), so my opportunities for a site inspection are limited.
My Brexit referendum campaign started with a hurried and unplanned departure from Europe. It was February 2016, and we were on a half-term family holiday in Paris. The tiny Airbnb I’d found on the top floor of an apartment block near the Arc de Triomphe looked much more attractive in the photos than it turned out to be in real life. We had only been there a few days when the call came from London: Prime Minister David Cameron had completed negotiations on his new deal with the European Union. He was convening an urgent Cabinet meeting the following day to showcase it and fire the starting gun on the promised referendum on the UK’s continued membership of the EU.
Liz Truss is the only British prime minister that I have actually met. (By contrast, I met Garret Fitzgerald and John Bruton many times, took Micheál Martin punting once in Oxford, and also have had a handshake with Albert Reynolds and a conspiratorial wink from Bertie Ahern.) We were both student Lib Dem activists in the early 1990s, though she is a bit younger than me, and I was in the room when she made her famous speech calling for the abolition of the monarchy in 1994:
I congratulated her on her speech, though not long afterwards we found that our views diverged, and I never heard from her again.
As you may be aware, she failed to last even two months as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister back in 2022, but ably laid the foundations of failure that Rishi Sunak and his party are now digging even deeper. Her failure really should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Matthew Parris wrote about her rise and inevitable fall during that long hot summer two years ago. Here is the whole piece, but the first of many juicy quotes is:
In Times columns I’ve offered my first impressions of this candidate. They were that she was intellectually shallow, her convictions wafer-thin; that she was driven by ambition pure and simple; that her manner was wooden and her ability to communicate convincingly to an electorate wider than the narrow band of Tory activists was virtually non-existent; that she was dangerously impulsive and headstrong, with a self-belief unattended by precaution; and that her leadership of the Conservative Party and our country would be a tragedy for both.
Most, but not all, of this analysis is borne out by later history and by Truss’s own book, which I have now read. (I got it for free, don’t worry.)
The format of the book is a little unusual. The very first chapter is about her meeting with the Queen, and the Queen’s death two days later. Elizabeth II’s last words to Truss were “Pace yourself.” “Perhaps I should have listened”, she reflects, in a rare moment of self-examination.
The chapters on her political career in government, which form the meat of the book, are sandwiched between incoherent political rallying calls for Conservatives to get their act together and defeat the Left at home and China abroad. The first of Matthew Parris’s allegations, lack of intellectual depth, is amply borne out by these more polemical sections. One is reminded of the old saying that while the problem with liberals is that they only read liberal literature, the problem with conservatives is that they read no literature at all. It’s not that she doesn’t really engage with the arguments made by her opponents; she doesn’t even really engage with the arguments of those she thinks she agrees with.
Her account of her time as a minister under Cameron, May and Johnson (for all of whom she retains a certain loyal affection and sympathy) is surprisingly dull, because she didn’t achieve very much and wants to blame other people for that. She is clearly, as Parris points out, unable to communicate clearly outside her own office, and fails to put the hours in behind the scenes to build up what we in our business would call a stakeholder coalition. She seems to believe that having been put in charge is sufficient for everyone to start doing what she wants them to do. In real life, this is never the case, even in the most autocratic power structures.
She writes of one night that she lay awake worrying about a prison officer, injured in a riot, but apart from that, there is a surprising lack of reference to the human dimension of her policies. There are almost no personal glimpses of colleagues and few of her family. One doesn’t get much sense of Truss as a social animal from her own account. Maybe she just isn’t; but for me that’s one of the crucial political skills.
And these things all collide when tragedy strikes and she becomes prime minister. She explains at great length how the economic plans that she and Kwasi Kwarteng proposed weren’t really all that radical, but simply misunderstood and subjected to unfair criticism; but I think even sympathetic readers (which I am not) will be lost by her depiction of a grand Left Woke conspiracy to kill growth which includes the Bank of England and the financial markets. I was irresistibly reminded of the French presidential election debate in 2012, when the challenger François Hollande killed incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy’s attempt to fight back with the telling line, “Ce n’est jamais de votre faute!” – “It’s never your fault!”
In Truss’s world, it’s never her fault either.
In summary, this is a not very good book written by a person who was completely unsuited to the job which she had so ruthlessly pursued. It is clearly intended for the American right-wing conference circuit market – there are many explanations of basic British political concepts for the American reader, and also the annoying and frequent use of “math” rather than “maths”. You can skip it in good conscience; you haven’t missed anything. If you really want, you can get it here.
I think there is also some cause for reflection about how political parties should choose their leaders. Part of this is about having a good team of candidates, which the Conservatives have not had in recent years. But I am also unconvinced that a ballot of party members is such a good way of identifying a good potential prime minister.
The Conservative system allows MPs to winnow down the candidates to two, who are then voted on by party members. A contested vote among members has happened four times; twice party members confirmed the MPs’ vote, and chose leaders who went on to win the next election (Cameron in 2005 and Johnson in 2017), and twice they chose the candidate liked by fewer MPs, who then failed and was booted out before the next election (Duncan-Smith in 2001 and Truss in 2022). Three leaders were elected without the need to consult members, Howard (2003), May (2016) and Sunak (2022); none of them was able to win the next election either, though May (who was also supported by MPs when they voted) came closest.
I don’t fundamentally mind if the Conservatives choose internal systems which increase their chances of electoral failure, but it’s probably not a brilliant thing overall for democracy.
‘I didn’t – but ages. He was sort of a friend of Angus’s.’
Once again I have hugely enjoyed this, the fourth volume of the Cazalet Saga, set in 1945-47, about an upper-class family recovering from the war, particularly concentrating on the women and especially on the three cousins Clary, Louise and Polly, though with one very sympathetic male character, Archie, who is a close family friend. The dismay of the slow realisation that life will not return to the old ways, encapsulated by the Labour election victory, rang very true, as did the disintegration of Louise’s marriage, clearly and painfully based on the author’s marriage to Peter Scott. There is one particularly lovely chapter about Polly unexpectedly finding her destiny, and the Archie/Clary thread twists through the book, along with many other sidetracks into the extended family. I don’t think you could read this without having read the previous three, but I do recommend them all. One left now, All Change; but you can get this one here.
Gorgeous story, set in 1923, where a stunt pilot and a runaway bride fly across the south-eastern United States, bringing havoc and romance in their wake. Tula Lotay’s art is particularly gorgeous and sensuous, and suits the sultry climate of the setting perfectly. There’s a Bonnie and Clyde vibe, and evil detectives, and everything. Great fun. You can get it here.
Promises Stronger than Darkness by Charlie Jane Anders
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Two cute young Makvarians surround her and gaze adoringly while she keeps their cups overflowing with Yuul sauce. All three of them kiss each other with their mouths full of the spicy, tart liquor, in the gloomiest corner of the sleaziest nightclub at the bottom level of Vandal Station, the Bump Dump. Thaoh has attached new gems to her strong cheekbones and jaw, bigger than the ones Tina used to wear.
The Sinister Booksellers of Bath by Garth Nix
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“That was stupid of me,” muttered the left-handed bookseller to himself. Hefting the William IV truncheon, he slowly turned on the spot, taking stock of his surroundings.
Unraveller by Frances Hardinge
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Maybe Nettle was right. Maybe they were heading to a new captivity. But at least they were doing so in style.
Abeni’s Song by P. Djèlí Clark
Second paragraph of third chapter:
But just as she had begun the face-off, the old woman ended it. Her eyes gave one last sweep across the village before making a loud humph! Without another word, she hiked up her long dress and started walking forward. No one got in her way—everyone moving quickly to let her pass. It wasn’t hard to tell where she was going, because her eyes were fixed on the large round building ahead.
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose
Second paragraph of third chapter:
But then Crow, who came flying to Masquapaug from the lands west of the sunset, taught the first people how to dance. Nampeshiwe’s Mother came to watch their dances. Nampeshiwe’s Mother said to the people, “Your dancing is beautiful. You must teach me your dancing. I would know how it is done.”
Liberty’s Daughter by Naomi Kritzer
Second paragraph of third chapter:
I was really surprised to hear from you, because Dad told me you were dead. Should I have thought of a more tactful way to say that?
Current Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E. McKenna The Virgin In The Garden, by A.S. Byatt The Death I Gave Him, by Em X. Liu
Last books finished Ruby Red, by Georgia Cook Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale Bea Wolf, by Zach Weinersmith and Boulet Doctor Who: Planet of the Ood, by Keith Temple Ten Years to Save the West, by Liz Truss Linghun by Ai Jiang If Found Return to Hell, by Em X. Liu Doctor Who: The Myth Makers, by Donald Cotton
Next books The Myth Makers, by Ian Potter The Combined 2001 Election, by NISRA Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse
When I finished the books on my shelves acquired in 2016, I knew I had mislaid several about elections and boundaries, and to my delight I located those a couple of weeks ago and am now going through them.
This is a collection of no less than 18 essays on electoral laws by the top-ranked political scientists of the day (early 1980s, published in 1986). All but one of the authors is male; all but one of the authors is white. The third chapter is a reflection by Maurice Duverger on “Duverger’s law”, first proposed by him forty years earlier, which pointed out (though in terms that are disputed) that majoritarian electoral systems tend to go with strong two-party political systems, whereas proportional electoral systems tend to go with multi-party political systems. The second paragraph of the third chapter, which includes a quote in the middle, is:
Certain errors of interpretation have resulted from my own tentative and imprecise formulations. An example is the alleged difference between “Duverger’s law” on the plurality rule’s tendency to create and maintain two-party systems and the “hypotheses” concerning the tendency toward multipartism of proportional representation and the two-ballot majority system, Riker’s (1982a; see also, chapter 1) analysis of this distinction is the most recent instance. In 1951, I did say in Political Parties that the former was “the closest to a sociological law among all the generalizations suggested in this book,” but this remark did not have the significance that was later attributed to it. It simply reflected my cautious attitude which was a reaction to the criticisms of the propositions that I first stated in 1945 at a conference at the University of Bordeaux (Duverger, 1946a, 1946b), where I presented the con-sequences of the three electoral systems as a “threefold sociological law.” I already discarded this expression in the paper presented at the 1950 Congress of the International Political Science Association which merely mentioned “three formulas” (Duverger et al., 1950, p. 13). But later I used it again in the first edition of my handbook Droit Constitutionel et Institutions Politiques which propounds “three sociological laws defining merely basic tendencies that interact with national and social factors” in terms which have hardly changed since then.
(1) Proportional representation tends to lead to the formation of many independent parties, . . . (2) the two-ballot majority system tends to lead to the formation of many parties that are allied with each other, . . . (3) the plurality rule tends to produce a two-party system (Duverger, 1955, p. 113).
In the more recent editions, the second law is formulated as follows: “The two-ballot majority system tends to produce multipartism tempered by alliances.”
The thing about Duverger’s ‘law’ is that it’s obviously true except when it isn’t. Majoritarian systems don’t always lead to concentration around two alternatives – Canada and India, and even the UK to an extent, have seen the two-party system rise and fall and rise again. And nobody ever mentions Malta, which despite having a proportional election system very similar to Ireland’s, has a rigid binary political divide – the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party between them have won literally every parliamentary seat since independence sixty years ago.
In general I found that the arguments here were largely in issues that I considered in my 20s, soon after the book was published, and a lot of it seemed very old-fashioned. There is a lot more experience of democratic systems now than there was in 1985, given that we have had an end to single-party politics in most of Eastern Europe, and the debate between whether proportional or majoritarian systems are better is basically over, after the failure of the 2011 referendum in the UK and the Trudeau government’s decision not to proceed with reforms in Canada in 2015. There’s also a lot of discussion of peculiar US electoral practices that the rest of the world is unlikely to copy.
Still, there were a couple of chapters that really stood out. One, by Gordon E. Baker, looked at the revolution in reapportionment in the US, and made the point that the shift to insisting on numerically equal populations in each state’s Congressional districts, plus various other contradictory court findings, has actually made it more difficult rather than easier to draw fair boundaries. Forty years on, I fear that this hasn’t changed. And Peter Mair has a lucid paper on gerrymandering in Ireland with multi-member constituencies and the Single Transferable Vote.
However, there’s also a crashingly unreadable review of (then) recent literature compiled by Taylor, Gudgin and Johnston (who were all capable of much better); and the most annoying thing about my 2003 reprint is that the OCR’ed typesetting has been poorly edited and the placement of the letter ‘f’ is irritatingly off-centre in the words “of” and “if”.
As I said, this is one of a cache of election-related books that I’m now going through. Next up is Comparing Democracies, edited by Lawrence LeDuc, Richard G. Niemi and Pippa Norris. But you can get this one here.
If I had continued the listing, seven of the next eight books are by Haruki Murakami.
The only one of these that I have read is Memoirs of a Geisha and I was pretty unsatisfied by it. The rest all seem legit enough – they are set in Japan or somewhere like it. Before the Coffee Gets Cold starts in Korea but at a quick glance spends most of the book on the other side of the straits.
Next: the Philippines, but since next Sunday is the last day of the month when I will do my usual book round-up, that will be in two weeks’ time.
OK, I can’t possibly not comment on the recently concluded first full series of stories featuring Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor and Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday. In summary, it srted a bit wobbly, had some super peaks in the middle, and ended (for me) a bit flat.
Ncuti Gatwa is great as the Doctor, and while I am of the old-school that prefers my Doctors not to have emotional vulnerability, I felt that he covered it off very well. Like all the lead actors so far, he is very watchable. The eye is drawn to him no matter where he is on the screen. I thought the chemistry with Gibson was great as well, and I am glad that she will still be around for at least some of the next series.
The two opening stories, both shown on Eurovision night six weeks ago, were OK but both were a bit silly. The actual premise of Space Babies is very silly indeed, but was executed with poker faces by all concerned. The flaw in the plot (alas, not the last time I will use that phrase) is that if Jocelyn has been hiding in a storage room all along, why did she not make herself known earlier?
Though it was good to see Golda Rosheuvel, the first of many excellent guest stars this series, Jocelyn here after enjoying her in the title role in Queen Charlotte. She was also a hospital doctor in two episodes of the second series of Torchwood.
Apparently a novelisation of Space Babies will be one of three published this summer, written by Angela Rumfitt who is a pioneer of the New Gross. Appropriate enough for a monster made of snot.
The Devil’s Chord has a really sinister plot, with music being removed from the world; Big Finish has sometimes dared to play with the soundscape of the fictional universe, but this is the first time that the TV show has really gone there. This time it was the execution that was a bit silly, with Jinkx Monsoon really chewing the scenery as the Maestro.
The returning figure from the show’s history that really took me by (pleasant) surprise was June Hudson, in her first appearance on screen at the age of ninety-something; she did all the costume design for late 1970s and early 1980s Who, and also for Blake’s 7. She is the only character actually killed in the 1963 part of the episode.
Then we get onto the good stuff, with a run of four brilliant episodes. Boom is not silly at all; it’s a tense story of potential sudden death in an awful war zone, where although we know that it’s only the third episode of eight in the season, the threat of disaster is real. Probably the darkest episode of the season.
The standout guest star is Varada Sethu, who is apparently joining next season as a new companion, but here playing the quietly desperate Mundy Flynn. She was great in Andor too.
I was in Glasgow planning the Worldcon for the showing of 73 Yards, and a bunch of us clustered together to watch it in someone’s room. This too was tremendous, a Doctor-lite episode that called on Gibson (who turned 20 last week) to portray her character aging through the decades, with one of those timey-wimey plots that can actually go awry rather easily but in this case didn’t.
This time the old school actor who I cheered for was Siân Phillips, who was of course Livia in I, CLAVDIVS, almost half a century ago, but has done some more recent Big Finish work as well. She too is in her nineties but clearly in her element as the sinister old woman in the pub.
Though I was also unnerved by the resemblance between Aneurin Barnard, as the fictional prime minister Roger ap Gwilliam, and Irakli Kobakhidze, who in real life is the prime minister of the Republic of Georgia.
Prime Minister of GeorgiaFictional UK prime minister(I may have those captions the wrong way round.)
73 Yards is also getting an early novelisation, this time by the series script editor Scott Handcock, who is a lovely chap though I have had mixed feelings about his previous books.
We watched Dot and Bubble in Antwerp before dental emergency brought a premature end to our romantic getaway three weeks ago. This was a return to the format of Blink, with the Doctor and Ruby participating in the story only by video until the end. Russell T. Davies doesn’t always get his social commentary right, but this was well done.
And full marks to Callie Cooke in her central role as Lindy Pepper-Bean. As she pointed out in the Unleashed episode following this, Carey Mulligan went on to big stardom after Blink. We’ll watch Callie Cooke with interest.
And the fourth in a good run of four episodes was Rogue, in which it turns out that aliens in the Doctor Who universe are also fans of Bridgerton. This had particularly good emoting from Ncuti Gatwa, suddenly taken by feelings for Jonathan Groff’s Rogue, but also had Millie Gibson playing Ruby pretending to be an alien pretending to be Ruby, and getting away with it. The contrast between spaceship and 1813 was well done.
Jonathan Groff of course was the very first King George in Hamilton, and so his voice was the first heard by the audience. I felt that (unlike Jinkx Monsoon) he avoided chewing the scenery here.
And I also cheered for Indira Varma, the Duchess here, but previously seen by me in Game of Thrones and the first season of Torchwood.
Rogue will also get the novelisation treatment, by the episode’s writers, Kate Herron and Briony Redman.
The Legend of Ruby Sunday summoned back lots of old favourites – UNIT, Mel, the recurrent character of Susan Twist, and most of all, Gabriel Woolf – another actor over the age of 90! – as Sutekh. It looked good, sounded good, and had a good twist, but there wasn’t a lot of substance; it was running around for the sake of running around. I hoped this would be put right this weekend.
And I’m afraid it wasn’t. Empire of Death was a real mess. The visuals were superb (as we have come to take for granted, now that we are Disneyfied), and the lead performances were great as usual. I also loved the explicit throwbacks to Pyramids of Mars, one of my favourite Old Who stories.
But the plot was very weak. As soon as people started disintegrating into dust, I knew that they would all be resurrected. Why should Sutekh care about Ruby’s unknown mother? (And indeed why could he not use the available technology to find her?) What was the point of the devastated future world with one inhabitant? And I missed the explanation of the snow, and of various other things.
I do have sympathy for the narrative of finding Ruby’s parents by DNA. My longer-term readers may recall that I myself identified the parents of a baby abandoned in a park in Philadelphia in 1917, using DNA samples and genealogy sites, who turned out to be a local musician and an airplane executive cousin of my grandmother’s; I’m in touch with the baby’s three children, now all in their 70s, and I have met with one of them and introduced her to other relatives.
I’ve also done it for another woman much closer to Ruby Sunday’s age, and for a couple of other cases that I have not reported here. So that’s one part of my own real life that I have now seen brought into a Doctor Who plot; and it could have been done much worse.
Still, I had been hoping for better.
Lots of people have been raking the episodes in order of preferences, so I will do the same.
In an insomniac moment recently, I hit upon the memoirs of Herbert Hoover as a potential cure. The second volume of three, which deals with the successful years of his political career, starts with him organising at very short notice a visit to California by King Albert I and Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians. This was in 1919, and the royals had arrived in Washington the very day that President Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a cerebral haemorrhage, so all of their official engagements in the capital had been cancelled; and the King and Queen knew Hoover from the war, where he become famous for his role coordinating international aid for Belgium.
Hoover managed to get accommodation for the royals in Santa Barbara, by promising official Belgian awards to everyone who helped. This led to a political problem (pages 8-9):
From the City Hall we went to the Palace Hotel, where we had engaged rooms for the King’s use prior to a public luncheon in his honor… I had no sooner returned to the King’s rooms than the Mayor descended upon me with the Order of the Crown, second class—glittering star, red ribbon, and all—in his hand, and a troubled look. The King had just put it on him. And the very next day, he was coming up for reelection. He felt certain that if he faced over a thousand people and reporters at the luncheon with this display of feudalism on his breast, he would lose thousands of votes. It was an emergency that called for quick action.
I suggested to His Honor that certain European cities had been decorated for valor; Verdun, for example, had received the Croix de Guerre. Why should he not speak at the luncheon, refer to this precedent, and go on to grow eloquent over the great honor conferred on the City of San Francisco? The Mayor thought this a stroke of genius. When he rose to speak, he held up the Order for all to see and in most eloquent terms accepted it on behalf of the city of which he had the honor to be chief magistrate, I sat next to the King, who turned to me and said, sotto voce, in the colloquialism of his youthful period as an American railroad man:
“What in blank is he talking about?”
“Pay no attention to the Mayor,” I replied. “He has his troubles. I’ll explain later on.” Which I did. The King was so interested that he asked me to telegraph him the result of the election. I was happy to inform him next night that the Mayor had been retained in office by an unusually handsome majority.
I had forgotten this episode when later I was called on to serve as pallbearer at Mr. Rolph’s funeral—he died Governor of California. On his breast was the button of the Belgian Order of the Crown.
We can date this precisely, because official records indicate that the election for mayor of San Francisco was on 2 November 1919 and that James Rolph won it with the biggest majority of his five victories for that position. (His opponent was Handsome Gene Schmitz, who had been previously sacked as mayor and imprisoned for extortion in 1907.)
But I was intrigued by a couple of points here.
Surely Hoover would have spoken French well enough for the King to speak to him discreetly in that language rather then in colloquial English?
And what did Hoover mean by King Albert’s “youthful period as an American railroad man”?
The first question is easy to resolve from the first volume of Hoover’s memoirs. His linguistic gifts were in fact minimal. Although lists of presidential trivia celebrate him as the only Chief Executive who spoke Chinese, he himself is much more modest (p 36):
With a natural gift for languages she [Lou Hoover, his wife] made great progress in the most difficult tongue in the world. I never absorbed more than a hundred words. But all our life afterwards she kept that hundred words in use between us by speaking Chinese to me on sotto voce occasions.
As for French, he notes (p 20) that he studied both French literature (which he passed) and German (which he failed) at Stanford, where he was in the very first class after the university opened in 1891. But I suspect that this French literature course may have been in English. In 1899 in China (p. 36) he notes:
I had armed myself with a supply of cheap paper translations of Balzac, Dumas, Zola, Victor Hugo, Rousseau, and Montaigne, so that I made at least a beginning of an education in French literature. It subsequently traveled the more solid road of Voltaire, Mirabeau, the Encyclopedists, and the other Revolutionaries
There is no suggestion of his reading the books in the original.
Between 1907 and 1912, Herbert and Lou Hoover translated the Latin text De re metallica by Georgius Agricola (Georg Bauer) into English. Hoover notes (p. 118) that he mainly worked on the technical terms, while “Mrs. Hoover’s ability to read German and some French helped greatly”, which suggests that he was not comfortable with either language. In 1915 in Paris, after a day of fruitless negotiation with the French government, he notes with relief (p. 169) the intervention of a banker, “an elderly and distinguished looking Frenchman, who spoke perfect English”.
Although most Americans of his class would have been taught some French at school, Hoover lost both his parents before his tenth birthday, was adopted by an uncle in Oregon and then dropped out of high school to work in the family business. And being taught a subject does not mean that you learn it. He must have had at least tourist level French, but it was clearly not a working language for him, any more than Chinese was.
Going back to the question of King Albert’s days “as an American railroad man” (my fingers itch when typing that word, for me of course it’s usually “railway”): this story was told by the King to Hoover at their the first meeting in person (p. 186 of Hoover’s first volume):
When he was heir apparent, after his education at Oxford, the old King Leopold had sent him to get some American experience under the tutelage of James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway in which Leopold had a large interest. The Prince wanted no tourist visit, so he got from Mr. Hill a job as a fireman on the railway. He told me that it was the happiest period of his life. He even made up his mind to abandon his Belgian nationality and become an American. He was sure he would be promoted to be an engine driver in a few years and possibly a railroad president sometime. He thought either of them was a better job than that of being a king. Soon after he began to evidence such yearnings, the Belgian Minister at Washington turned up at Missoula and ordered him, on behalf of the King, to stop dreaming and go straight home. So ended his independence.
Well. The future King’s visit to America in March to June 1898 is very well documented – his diary (in French) has actually been published (with notes in Dutch, sorry). He went all over the country, from coast to coast, dipping into Mexico and Canada (and also visited two brothels in Seattle). James J. Hill and his sons are mentioned several times as offering him hospitality, but there is nothing about working as a fireman, and no mention of Missoula, Montana (the Great Northern Railway’s main junction point in the northwest).
I have not found any reliable record that Albert visited America other than in 1898 and 1919, and his life is pretty well documented. The story he told Hoover is simply inconsistent with his own diary of the trip. I think that he was playing a joke on Hoover in 1915, to exaggerate his affection for America. Obviously he did not say “what the blank…?” at the San Francisco lunch, but something much stronger. However there are plenty of other ways in which he could have picked up the English vernacular, including for instance the brothels in Seattle. So it’s a nice story, recounted by a king to a future president, but I suspect it is fictional.
Next in the Year Two sequence of Eleventh Doctor comics from Titan, following from The Then and the Now, with Abslom Daak, the mysterious Squire and Alice the librarian now joined by River Song to work out what the Doctor was up to during the Time War. Some great references to past stories, though I’m a little uneasy with the somewhat harsher characterisation of the Doctor. Scrapes through the Bechdel test.
This had been the case in June 1921, when Alan Cobham had arrived initially “in a field near Balmoral where an aeroplane had once landed”, off-loaded a quantity of The Times and had then flown to join the other three aircraft at Aldergrove for re-fuelling. Noel Smith was taken to inspect a possible landing ground at Balmoral and had commented that the ground had seemed a bit soft, especially for heavy aeroplanes. He added that the maximum dimensions of an airfield need be no more than 800 yards square and that pilots overflying the city had been instructed by the Air ministry to keep their eyes open for likely sites.
This is a very short book on the brief moment in 1922-23 when Belfast had the first municipal airfield in the UK, on the land that is now the Taughmonagh housing estate at the top of the Malone Road. (Oddly enough, I attended Taughmonagh school for a couple of years when I was very little.) The money to make it operational was invested by the city council (then known as the Corporation) and there were regular flights to Liverpool and then to Glasgow.
It was opened with much fanfare, the Lord Mayor of Belfast making the inaugural flight to Liverpool and back. But this was not the easy “hop into the air, point in the right direction, land safely” routine that we’re used to now. This map gives a sense of how pilots had to navigate by landmarks, which meant of course that they needed to stay below cloud level.
The idea was to cut the Belfast to Liverpool journey to an hour and a half from the all-day or overnight boat journey, shipping mail, newspapers and the occasional brave person to England and then to Scotland. But the market was not strong, and facilities at the Liverpool end notably poor – although the planes took off from Aintree racecourse, they then had to land again at Southport beach for mail and newspapers.
The Malone airfield lasted for just a year. The Taughmonagh ground was soggy and muddy, and the weather was terrible. There were no catastrophic accidents, but the small planes of the day got tossed around by the wind when they landed. Warner does not put it in these terms, but I suspect the pilots hated it and didn’t want to fly there. The Aldergrove airfield, now Belfast International Airport, was much better, and there were already plans to create reclaimed land on the shore of Belfast Lough for the site where what is now Belfast City Airport (aka George Best) was eventually built in the 1930s.
Again, Warner doesn’t put it in these terms, but this was obviously a prestige project set up by the municipal government and in particular by the new Lord Mayor, William Turner, immediately after Partition and the creation of the Irish Free State, to tie Belfast and Northern Ireland more tightly to the UK and to escape Dublin. For most of the twelve months that the airfield operated, the Civil War was raging on the other side of the Border. Turner got a knighthood out of it in 1924.
This is a nice wee book, lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs and newspaper clippings, and not too difficult to get second hand, especially from sellers who have signed up for EU VAT…
Собирать гардероб пришел Дворник Маркел. Он привел с собой шестилетнюю дочь Маринку. Маринке дали палочку ячменного сахара. Маринка засопела носом и, облизывая леденец и заслюнявленные пальчики, насупленно смотрела на отцову работу.
The yard porter Markel came to put the wardrobe together. He brought along his six-year-old daughter Marinka. Marinka was given a stick of barley sugar. Marinka snuffed her nose and, licking the candy and her slobbery fingers, watched frowningly as her father worked.
I first read this at least 35 years ago, possibly longer, and my copy still smells of the mildewy second-hand bookshop where I got it, probably in Cambridge. It’s a great book. There’s a wonderful human story in the transition from the fading empire to the brutality of the Communist regime, with people clinging to what crumbs of comfort they can, especially each other.
Although the title of the book is Doctor Zhivago, it’s just as much Lara’s story; she’s there at the beginning and the end, and has a more complicated life, with the climax of the story coming when three of her lovers end up in the same place at almost the same time. A lot of her story is unstated – for instance, when she is first seduced by Komarovsky, it happens entirely off screen, where most writers today would go into explicit erotic detail about the encounter. But we know perfectly well what has happened.
There is also a tremendous sense of place. Moscow, the steppes, the fictional towns that Yuri and Lara end up living in, are all vividly described, and although if you’re not used to Russian nomenclature you can get lost among the characters (most of whom have at least three completely different modes of address), you can’t get lost among the locations.
I haven’t seen the film (which lost the Best Oscar to The Sound of Music, though it won just as many awards on the night), and given that it’s three hours long, I am a little intimidated; but I really enjoyed revisiting the book after a third of a century. You can get it here.
This was the top book on my shelves that I had previously read but not reviewed here, and is not by Terry Pratchett. Next on that pile is The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.
Shen Zaiwang: I was born in Caijiaya, Xing County, Shanxi Province at the end of 1948. It was a liberated area at that time, and before that it was an anti-Japanese base, called the Jinsui Revolutionary Base. When I was born, my father was the political commissar of the Jinsui Military Region and the secretary of the Jinsui Party Committee. There were many children in our family at that time, and before I was born, my father gave my elder brother to his comrade-in-arms Sun Zhiyuan in the Jinsui Military Region and named him Sun Ju. After I was born, he decided to give me to another comrade-in-arms – this comrade-in-arms had fought with him in the Daqingshan Anti-Japanese Base, and his name was Zhang Dazhi.
Second paragraph of third section of vol 3 (interview with Wang Xiaoda):
Wang Xiaoda: Yes. I am a pure Suzhou native. Suzhou is an ancient city of culture. In my family, from my great-grandfather, grandfather, father to me, we are basically all scholars. In his early years, my great-grandfather Wang Tongyu was only a teenager, and he wore a cotton robe to be an apprentice at the Shanghai Manufacturing Bureau founded by the Westernization Movement in the Qing Dynasty. My great-grandfather had expertise in mathematics and cartography, so he established himself there. Because of this expertise, he was discovered by Wu Dacheng, a senior official of the Qing Dynasty, and was recruited to be his staff. My great-grandfather helped Wu Dacheng do a lot of things, some of which were even recorded in history.
All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays by Niall Harrison
Second paragraph of third review:
There are rough edges. At times, In the Palace of Repose reminds me of Kelly Link’s first collection, Stranger Things Happen (2001), as an example of work by a writer exploring her options and her strengths – although where Link was exploring the possibilities of story structure, Holly Phillips is more concerned with tone. Her great gift is her ability to capture the feel of things: the smells and textures of places, and the nuances of moods. The stories in In the Palace of Repose are linked by some shared concerns, such as the experiences of young women and the appeal of the fantastic, but most of all by the intense sensory experiences they evoke. Unusually, it is not a richness born of lyricism, for the most part; rather, it comes from her ability to pick exactly the right word or phrase for the job at hand.
A City on Mars, by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Second paragraph of third chapter:
On the assumption that this is undesirable, you’ll want something to bind all comers together. We’ve seen more than one proposal for what one author called an “unchastity belt”—a sort of elastic band for two. Another concept is the “snuggle tunnel” for anyone who’s ever wanted to experience lovemaking in a narrow, poorly ventilated pipe. There’s also the 2suit, which would keep a couple connected via Velcro straps. And then, best of all, in the immortal words of engineer and futurist Dr. Thomas Heppenheimer, writing from the glorious 1970s: “One way to enjoy such zero-g delight will be in a space Chevy van.”
A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, by Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan
Second paragraph of third essay:
In subsequent interviews, Atwood herself has repeated the phrase, or versions of it, though whether because she sincerely believes what she said, because it has become part of her ‘brand’, or because, as I have come to suspect, she simply likes winding up critics of genre, is not clear.
The Culture: The Drawings, by Iain M. Banks
Second paragraph of third chapter:
When I was doing my own bit of physical law revising for my SF books, I deliberately set the near-theoretical limit of interstellar velocity at a value which would mean it would take roughly as long for a starship to travel to the far side of the galaxy and back as it used to take a sailing ship to circumnavigate the Earth; it was a value that felt right, and – in fiction – that’s often all that matters. There are – again in fiction – lots of ways of achieving this kind of technically ludicrous velocity. one old favourite is hyperspace -where the assumption is usually that the value for c is much higher, or there’s warp-drive, which implies it’s possible to distort that fabric in such a way as to told distant points together temporarily, so making a tourney from one to another possible without having to cross the intervening space … or there’s the rather more recently fashionable and – as these things go – slightly less scientifically dubious idea of using singularities or wormholes to short-circuit space-time (there’s also the distantly related possibility of using other universes to apparently travel within this one, rather as one might apparently travel though time using the same technique – as Marcus Chown explained in Science, New Scientist, 28 March 1993.
Ahmed is sitting in front of one of the antique QD-LED monitors, data streaming down the screen like amber rain, bathing his face in amber light. Ahmed Andrushchenko is not a man who is well in the head, and lately his periods of lucidity have grown fewer and farther between. But Johnson doesn’t mind his company. Plus, the man’s obsessions with all the ways history might have gone, but didn’t, help to pass empty hours when the comfort of the sea and the village sounds drifting down from above and up from below, the motion of the barge on the waves, are not sufficient. Almost always, he’s harmless enough, is Ahmed Andrushchenko, and when he begins drifting towards the bad days, Johnson always manages to keep him from tearing up the cabin they share below the markets. Different rhythms soothe different people, and Ahmed says that Johnson’s voice soothes his tattered mind.
I felt a bit guilty about not really understanding this book. It’s an ambitious cross-time dark agencies story set in various places around the world, notably Dublin and New England; but I really didn’t get what was going on. But then I checked the other online reviews and most readers had the same reaction. Second in a series apparently, but that’s no excuse. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is How to be Invisible, by Kate bush.
Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
Cormac McCarthy
168,930
11,681
Mexican Gothic
Silvia Moreno-Garcia
362,558
4,857
All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy
125,880
10,836
Esperanza Rising
Pam Muñoz Ryan
103,664
11,005
Well, it’s nice when it works out that the top book is a Mexican novel by a Mexican writer; and it’s even better that it’s magical realism. We do see a real skewing in the systems, though; Like Water for Chocolate was second to different books by USA authors on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, with The Pearl by John Steinbeck winning on LT and the controversial American Dirt on GR.
I’m disqualifying Blood Meridian because it looks like most of the parts of Mexico where it is set are now in the USA. I have a question mark against All the Pretty Horses as well, but it does seem to be mostly set south of the border. Not so Esperanza Rising, which is mainly set in California. But I’m glad to see as recent a novel as Mexican Gothic on the list.
I’m ashamed to say that the only one of these I have read is The Pearl, and that was a very long time ago.
In Belfast in April, I spotted that Waterstone’s was selling a CD copy of the Big Finish audio drama “The Battle of Giant’s Causeway”, by Lizzie Hopley, which came out earlier this year. The story reunites the Eighth Doctor, played by Paul McGann, with his audio companions Charlie Pollard and the alien C’Rizz, played by India Fisher and Conrad Westmaas respectively, to a conflict between Sontarans and Rutans playing out at the Giant’s Causeway in 55 BC. I didn’t buy it in Belfast, but I got it from the Big Finish website as soon as I got home.
It’s charming to have the old gang back together again, fifteen years after C’Rizz was written out of the Big Finish continuity, but a lot of plot is left unexplained, presumably because it’s the first story in a series. I bounced off it, I’m afraid, because I was less than impressed by the throwaway remarks in the script about Celts and Ireland.
At 7:30, we have this exchange:
Doctor: “Humans are one of the deadliest life forms I know. No offence, Charlie.” Charlie: “Oh, none taken.” Doctor: “This is 55 BC. The reign of the warrior race. The Celts are definitely vying for most barbaric.”
Nobody’s perfect, but it’s news to me that the Celts were particularly barbaric by the standards of 55 BC, and it grates to have the Doctor declare this as a fact without supporting evidence. Indeed, Charlie Pollard clearly thinks differently at 9:40 when the travellers discover a pile of corpses on the Giant’s Causeway:
C’Rizz: They’re soldiers! Judging by their armour. Doctor: Not just soldiers. They’re legionnaires. Except… Charlie: Roman legionnaires? Goodness. C’Rizz: Are legionnaires not Celts then? Charlie: Oh, Romans are far more deadly.
This however is not endorsed by the Doctor. We progress a bit further when the Doctor and Charlie confront the Sontaran commander for a bit of exposition at 21:45.
General: We plan a revenge raid against the Celtish devils at dawn. Charlie: The Celts did not kill your Sonturions. tell them, Doctor. General: Sonturians? Doctor: It’s a long story. But. It appears you lot are a battalion from Sontar that somehow travelled back in time to Earth in the distant past, met some Romans, lost all sense of identity and purpose, and now think you’re part of the first Roman invasion of Britain. Doctor (thinking): Actually that means – that this isn’t where you landed. Why target Ireland? Even the Romans weren’t that stupid.
The whole scenario is weird anyway; at the time of Julius Caesar’s raid into Britain in 55 BC, it would have been impossible for Roman troops to seriously mount a similar exercise in Ireland. Even with that in mind, perhaps my hackles were up, but the line that invading Ireland is in itself a particularly stupid idea landed rather badly with me; along with the explicit assumption that Ireland is part of Britain.
And a third line from the Doctor at 40:15, where he refers to “Rutans and Sontarans in Celtic Britain”, also landed badly with me.
The Giant’s Causeway is not in Britain. Ireland is not in Britain. Celts were frankly about as barbaric as Romans. It’s a shame that the script for this play says otherwise, and it’s a real shame that these words are put into the mouth of the Doctor. Big Finish normally does better than this.
Second paragraph of Part III (on All Hallows in the Tower):
Before long, the early wooden structure was replaced by a stone church, which was enlarged and altered over the centuries. The church’s tower was rebuilt in 1659, following a devastating fire, an, along with some sections of the church’s outer walls, was all that survived the blitz of 1940-41. Interestingly, it was from the top of the tower that Samuel Pepys watched the Great Fire consume London in 1666, noting in his diary for 5 September, ‘I up to the top of Barkeing steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; everywhere great fires … the fire being spread as far as I could see it’.
I still aspire to take some time off one of these years and do some writing about my Tudor ancestor, but it’s receding a bit into the distance right now. In the meantime I still have plenty of books on the period to read. I’m also of course fascinated by London as a place, even though I haven’t actually been since November.
This is a nice little guide book to the sites in London with strong Tudor associations. The longest section looks at ten houses and palaces where substantial parts of the fabric survive from Tudor times or earlier, of which I think I have been to three – Eltham Palace, the Tower of London and Westminster Hall. Of the rest, I am now particularly keen to visit the Guildhall and Hampton Court. The next section looks at thirteen churches, where I think the only one I have been to is Westminster Abbey, though in general they have been much more messed around with since. And the final section runs through the museums in London with substantial Tudor content, starting of course with the British Museum and the Museum of London, but also looking at the Museum of the Order of St John and the Garden Museum which were not previously on my list.
It’s a breezy gazetteer, which assumes that the reader already has a decent framework knowledge of the Tudor period (as I like to think I do). I would have preferred, however, to have a geographical structure rather than a thematic one; I felt that we jumped around the map rather a lot. But these things are difficult to organise – certainly I scratched my head a lot when planning how to present the Hansche ceilings.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves; you can get it here. Next on that pile is Hallelujah: The Story of a Musical Genius & the City That Brought His Masterpiece, by Jonathan Bardon.
The messenger Father Kleinsorge had sent—the theological student who had been living at the mission house—had arrived at the Novitiate, in the hills about three miles out, at half past four. The sixteen priests there had been doing rescue work in the outskirts; they had worried about their colleagues in the city but had not known how or where to look for them. Now they hastily made two litters out of poles and boards, and the student led half a dozen of them back into the devastated area. They worked their way along the Ota above the city; twice the heat of the fire forced them into the river. At Misasa Bridge, they encountered a long line of soldiers making a bizarre forced march away from the Chugoku Regional Army Headquarters in the center of the town. All were grotesquely burned, and they supported themselves with staves or leaned on one another. Sick, burned horses, hanging their heads, stood on the bridge. When the rescue party reached the park, it was after dark, and progress was made extremely difficult by the tangle of fallen trees of all sizes that had been knocked down by the whirlwind that afternoon. At last—not long after Mrs. Murata asked her question—they reached their friends, and gave them wine and strong tea.
This is a searing and vivid piece of journalism, in which the stories of six victims of the Hiroshima bomb are told in detail. Five are Japanese, and the sixth is a German Jesuit priest. One of the Japanese is a Methodist minister, two are doctors and two are women, one a widow, one a young factory worker. You immediately notice of course that these are chosen to appeal to an American readership – for instance, two Christians out of six is probably somewhat higher than the general ratio within the population of Hiroshima, then or now.
And yet it’s excusable; the point of the writing is to make the reader think about what nuclear war would mean for people like them (i.e. New Yorker readers), and it works very well – the instant agony of the explosion, followed by the horrible deaths of many of the survivors over the following days in a city whose infrastructure has been pulverised and poisoned. There were of course other terrible bomb raids in the Second World War and before and after, but I don’t think it is wrong to look at Hiroshima in particular. It was the first atomic bombing, and it was worse hit than Nagasaki both proportionally and absolutely. It matters.
Hersey concentrates on the six core characters of his narrative, but it’s not difficult to find other details of tragedy from that day. For instance, Hiroshima’s mayor, a Christian who had resisted Japanese military excesses against their own civilian population in the 1930s, was eating breakfast outdoors that sunny morning with his son and granddaughter, and they were instantly fried by the blast; his wife, who was inside the residence, survived for a month before dying, and their daughter who came to Hiroshima to nurse her also later died of secondary radiation. And there are two hundred thousand more stories like that from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of which will never be told.
There’s no explicit judgement here about nuclear weapons, or indeed about war as a whole. But there doesn’t need to be. Anyone making policy decisions (or even just aspirations) about war needs to be aware of the consequences, and here those consequences are described by some of the people directly affected. You can’t really do more than that.
Hersey’s Hiroshima was published as a single edition of The New Yorker in 1946, and I had read a hardback copy as a teenager. I suspect that the version I read did not have the update in the current edition which follows the protagonists in the four decades after 1946, but the edition you can get from Amazon now does have those stories; or you can read the original on the New Yorker website.
On one of my visits to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, maybe in 1997, there was a large exhibit about the reconstruction for display of the Enola Gay, with no reflection of what it had been used for, and I was frankly nauseated. Hiroshima is mentioned in its current resting place at the Udvar-Hazy Centre near Dulles Airport, but only briefly.
Which meant that the time of the 8th Prophet was imminent.
It is years since I last read this, but I remembered it as one of my favourite Pratchett novels and approached with some caution, lest I find out (as I sometimes do) that a thing I once loved has been visited by the Suck Fairy when I was not looking. But, whew, it’s still brilliant, and still I think my favourite Pratchett novel.
It’s not just that the satire is richly detailed, and lands some good blows on both sides of the religion debate (although more on one side than the other). It’s the relationship between the acolyte Brutha and the tortoise-incarnate god Om, which has both of them changing and maturing to become better beings. I cannot think of another Pratchett novel which has such an attractive narrative arc for two central characters. Love, whether ἔρως or φιλία, was a theme that he tended to shy away from, but he does it very well here.
On top of that there are the little touches which I still find hilarious after all these years – the Pointless Albatross; the god-eat-god world out there; the philosophers; the wrong sort of ash; the fate of the tortoise. I loved this book when I first read it, probably thirty years ago soon after it was published, and I love it now. You can get it here.
Small Gods was my top unreviewed Discworld book; next on that pile is Night Watch.
Last books finished Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak Your Wish is My Command [Shubeik Lubeik], by Deena Mohammed Flying from Malone, by Guy Warner The One, by Si Spurrier et al Electoral Laws and their Political Consequences, eds. Bernard Grofman and Arend Lijphart To Shape A Dragon’s Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose
Next books Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E. McKenna Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse
Second frame of third story (“Food for Thought”, written by Nick Briggs, art by Colin Andrew)
This had been on my shelves for ages, a compilation of six graphic stories from Doctor Who Magazine in 1993-95, featuring the first five Doctors. My particular discovery is Colin Andrew, a Scottish artist who did a total of six Doctor Who strips, two of which are collected here (see frame above); I think he captures both form and movement really well, and experiments with the boundaries of the frames on the page with interesting results. (Not everyone thinks so; I found another online review which says that his art is the weakest point of the book.)
I think most people will agree that the two Second Doctor stories by Warwick Gray, now known as Scott Gray, are the high points – especially the exploration of Doctor vs Daleks in the last one, “Bringer of Darkness”. There is lively commentary at the back from writers and artists (except Colin Andrew, who had died before this collection was put together), including an apology from Nick Briggs for his sexist portrayal of Polly in what is still his only comics script, thirty years on. This had lingered quite a long time on my shelf but was worth the wait. You can get it here.
This was my top unread English-language comic – next on that pile is Monica, by Daniel Clowes
Well, not a single one of my predicted six potential Clarke finalists made it. I did better last year, but I was on the jury. The shortlistees placed 4th, 5th, 9th, 18th, 63rd and 67th of my stats ranking of the submissions list.
Goodreads
LibraryThing
raters
rating
owners
rating
Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
45631
4.14
732
4.09
The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler
19281
3.95
789
3.96
Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh
8016
4.06
551
4.05
In Ascension, Martin MacInnes
6436
3.82
271
3.71
The Ten Percent Thief, Lavanya Lakshminarayan
536
3.83
41
3.50
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Isabel Waidner
322
3.86
35
4.00
So the last two of these will be the ones that nobody saw coming.
The launch event for Taste of Herz Dining Experience Group’s new product was about to begin. Already, over a million people had registered their participation online, and some important guests had been invited to the Experience Centre itself to attend it in person.
The Sound of Children Screaming, Rachael K. Jones
Second paragraph of third section:
Michelle wears the armor of an elementary school teacher: an A-line dress in an ocean print, a blue cardigan to match. She bears no weapon but a sharp-edged teacher’s tongue that cuts through noise like scissors.
“Son of a bitch. They don’t care about us,” Same Kind curses. Creature says, “Well, guess our world has already been destroyed. We’re the two sole survivors.” Same Kind nods and says, “This is probably the cause of the trouble.” Then adds, “But what you say is different from what’s in the Bible. I understand you mean we are taking Noah’s Ark, but then where is the dove?” What kind of weapon is the Bible? What kind of epidemic is Noah’s Ark? Why mention a dove? Creature thinks painfully after hearing Same Kind’s remarks. It vaguely remembers some past events but all miss the point. It says tentatively, “Then there should be gender differences. In this kind of situation, the common arrangement is having one man and one woman.” Same Kind asks cautiously, “What situation?” Creature loses its composure again. What is gender? And what should a man and a woman do? A mass of obscure, remote clouds with fuzzy edges surges through its mind. This turbulence clashes with the tranquil space. Language kills! Creature looks nervously at Same Kind, finds that it is awkwardly eyeing it back.
“How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” by P. Djèlí Clark
Second paragraph of third section:
Trevor called out an order and smiled. “That I can’t tell you yet. But I’ll be able to show you soon enough.”
“The Mausoleum’s Children”, by Aliette de Bodard
Only two sections, so this is the third paragraph of the first section:
A fitting reminder of her life so far, she supposed.
“Better Living Through Algorithms”, Naomi Kritzer
Second paragraph of third section:
“It’s not a productivity app! It’s a wellness app,” Keith said, like that made it better.(The only thing I hate more than productivity apps are wellness apps.) “It will make you happier! Healthier! I’ve established three new good habits since I started using it—I floss daily, I have increased my fiber intake, and I go for a walk at lunchtime!”
We took a quick break to Antwerp last weekend, with the aim of looking at several of the museums there, though the Rubenshuis is closed until September. Unfortunately I had a dental emergency after we had visited the Royal Museum of Fine Arts (generally known as KMSKA) and we had to cut our trip short. But what we saw, we liked.
I was fascinated to learn that one of the KMSKA donors was Marie Bonaparte Wyse (1831-1902), born in Waterford to a niece of Napoleon’s and her English soldier lover; a notable hostess of Parisian literary salons, a novelist and journalist whose second husband was prime minister of Italy twice. The KMSKA keeps her bust and a portrait in a room dedicated to its donors; slightly in a corner, I felt, for such a remarkable woman.
The KMSKA has a ground floor of Old Masters and an upper floor of moderns, including James Ensor, and we took a good two and a half hours over it. I took a few photos but where the museum itself has made a better image available online, I’m using that.
Going into the museum you’re pretty much confronted with Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi. There’s a lot of Rubens elsewhere in Antwerp, and indeed there are a lot of Adorations of the Magi by Rubens, but KMSKA lucked out with this one – which is also the subject of a Suske en Wiske comic that I read many years ago.
My eye was also caught by a couple of lesser known pieces among the Old Masters. This is an Annunciation in the style of Rogier van der Weyden, but probably by one of his followers, dating from the 1400s. It’s actually really small, possibly larger on your screen than it is in real life, and I loved the fine detail, including the glimpse of landscape through the window and the vase in the foreground.
The Tower of Babel is a well-known topic, and the more famous versions are by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. But his son Jan Brueghel the Elder did one too, somewhat in his father’s shadow; a river flowing past it, and a tunnel leading to it, with human figures running around organising things in the foreground.
Sticking with the family, I also loved Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Census at Bethlehem – this is a copy of his father’s well-known painting, though art historians think he was working from his father’s sketch book rather than from the painting itself./i
Moving forward in time, I was glad to see Theo van Rysselberghe represented; he is one of my favourite fin de siècle Belgian artists. This is a pointillist portrait of 23-year-old Marie Sèthe, a Frenchwoman and student of van Rysselberghe’s who was about to marry Belgian artist Henry van de Velde. French Wikipedia has a really interesting article about her links with William Morris and Aubrey Beardsley, and how she has been erased from art history.
At least Marie Sèthe is generally referred to by her own name in descriptions of this painting. Another of van Rysselberghe’s subjects, also married to one of his fellow artist friends, is simply referred to as “Mme Constantin Meunier”. With some effort, I tracked down her real name which was the rather lovely Léocadie Gorneaux, but she seems to have been even more erased from history than Marie Sèthe. This is from before van Rysselberghe’s pointillist period, but I think it’s a great portrait all the same.
And we have no name at all for Léon Frédéric’s nude model, who is visibly embarrassed that she is going to be preserved in full glory for the centuries; I found this a really striking painting. Its title is “Pudeur” in French, “Schroom” in Dutch, parsed as “Timidity” in the museum’s English translation though I’d have gone for “Modesty”, with overtones of reluctance and hesitation.
There are a couple of more recent artists whose style is less naturalistic and who caught my attention. Here’s James Ensor (KMSKA claims to have more art by him than anywhere else), with a bowl of azaleas:
Marc Chagall has a cat at his window:
And finally for now, Jan Brusselmans loves the colours and geometry and light in the Pajottenland, the area immediately west of Brussels.
Anyway, well worth the journey, even if the journey was curtailed.
Other Antwerp notes: We stayed at the Leonardo Hotel near the station at De Keyserlei 59, in a room at the back looking onto the Queen Astridplein. No air conditioning, and when we opened a window to avoid suffocating, the noise from the square was pretty loud. Would not really recommend, though bed and breakfast were decent enough. Nice Asian food, Malaysian dinner at the Kuala Lumpur, Statiestraat 10, on the first night and Japanese lunch at Umi Sushi, Groenplaats 8, before my dental problems became unignorable.
I would also add that thanks to the Belgian health system, my dental emergency was dealt with briskly and efficiently by the duty dentist in our municipality, who looked about 15 but clearly knows her stuff. She did the job for €102, of which €92.50 has already been refunded through the insurance system.
This is the Black Archive monograph about the Peter Capaldi story from his middle season which introduces Maisie Williams (also Arya in Game of Thrones) as Viking warrior girl Ashildr, who dies in the course of the story and is resurrected by the Doctor. I didn’t write the TV story up at the time of watching, though I did enjoy it. I felt it blended humour with drama, and enjoyed the knowing subversion of tropes about Vikings and other classic fantasy themes.
Also I am a big fan of Williams, whose scenes with Charles Dance in the second season of Game of Thrones, were truly electrifying; they were filmed when she was 14.
As it happened, I had visited the Doctor Who studio in Cardiff just a couple of weeks before The Girl Who Died was shown, and bits and bobs from the story were still around, notably the Viking ship which I thought was a bit small (as indeed turns out to be the point).
Tom Marshall has taken a story about which there isn’t frankly, all that much to say, and projected onto it his own strong interest in Norse folklore and its reception. This kind of approach has been tried by a number of previous Black Archives, but it’s rarely very successful in my view. Luckily this is one of the exceptions, as Marshall unpacks not only the story’s portrayal of the Vikings but also our understanding of them, veering into the political side of the topic without losing touch with Doctor Who.
To be honest, I’m feeling a bit lazy, so I’m (mostly) cutting and pasting the chapter summaries from Marshall’s introduction, which frames the book as exploring the story’s navigation between Vikings and humour.
Chapter 1 examines how the story deviates from the typical popular culture take on Vikings and assumptions about both heroic masculinity and history itself.
Chapter 2 looks at the story’s championing of playful, irreverent humour in the face of toxic masculinity, especially in the context of the modern-day far right’s unhealthy obsession with Vikings.
Chapter 3 delves into the multiple ways in which the Doctor and the mythological Óðinn resemble each other, and to what extent this illuminates the former’s depiction here as a healer-trickster. Here is its second paragraph, with the quote it introduces:
Why might the Doctor choose to impersonate Odin specifically, rather than another Norse god such as Freyr or Þórr? His choice is far from random; indeed, there is a long history of comparisons between the two. Setting to one side Hartnell’s categorising of his character as a ‘wizard’ and other nods in this direction over the years3, the Doctor was first explicitly compared to the wizard-like god Óðinn as early as 1988, even before the seventh Doctor’s Odinic qualities manifested in TV stories drawing on Norse mythology such as The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and The Curse of Fenric, not to mention the appearance of explicitly Odinic imagery in the novel Timewyrm: Revelation (1991). Writing that the Doctor ‘is the best possible example of the shaman, the wizard-king, the wise magician’, James L Hodge grants that any comparisons with the Arthurian Merlin are ‘not too far off’4 but sees Norse mythology as providing an even more apt analogue:
‘the most potent wizard, king of the gods, master-by-force-of-knowledge-and-intellect is none other than Odin, chief of the Norse gods […] Odin has concentrated on mastery of lore, acquisition of knowledge, and a forewarning of the future. He rules more by the power of what he knows, and can therefore do, than by his physical power […] Just so, the [Doctor] confronts opponent after opponent whose arrogant plans go aground on some esoteric reef of the [Doctor]’s immense, technical knowledge’.5
3 E.g., Ben Jackson bluffing that the Doctor is a wizard in The Smugglers (1966) episode 2, or the description of the Doctor as ‘the great wizard Quiquaequod’ in The Dæmons (1971) episode 4. He is also regularly described as a ‘magician’ in The Time Warrior, a story to which The Girl Who Died bears some resemblance. 4 Amusingly, Hodge’s article appeared around 18 months before the revelation that a future incarnation of the Doctor was fated to become Merlin in Battlefield (1989). For more on the Doctor’s connections with Merlin, see Purser-Hallard, Philip, The Black Archive #34: Battlefield. 5 Hodge, James L, ‘New Bottles – Old Wine: The Persistence of the Heroic Figure in the Mythology of Television Science Fiction and Fantasy’, Journal of Popular Culture 21:4, p40 (emphasis in original).
Chapter 4 deals with the titular ‘girl’, Ashildr, and particularly with the way her transgressive gender identity contributes to the story’s queer subtext.
Chapter 5 draws these strands together in an analysis of the episode’s denouement: not only the means by which the alien threat is defeated, but also the Doctor’s morally complex act of resurrecting Ashildr.
An appendix looks at the link between the baby’s speech, as reported by the Doctor, and the normal metre of Norse poetry.
As I said, I found this a satisfying read, slightly to my surprise. You can get it here.
