Non-fiction 6 (YTD 14) Inside the Stargazers’ Palace, by Violet Moller Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Kevin Decker and Ryan Parrey War Childhood: From Sarajevo to Syria, Memories of Life and Hope, by Jasminko Halilović Eastern Nights and Flights, by Alan Bott Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations, by Terri Hooley and Richard Sullivan From “Narnia” to a “Space Odyssey”: Stories, Letters, and Commentary By and About C.S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke, ed. Ryder W. Miller
Non-genre 5 (YTD 10) Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H.G. Wells Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott The Secret Places of the Heart, by H.G. Wells The Queen’s Gambit, by Walter Tevis
SF 10 (YTD 20) Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell The Professor in Erin, by L. McManus [Charlotte Elizabeth McManus] (did not finish) Drowned Country, by Emily Tesh “Hell is the Absence of God”, by Ted Chiang Five Ways to Forgiveness, by Ursula K. Le Guin Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 6) Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker
Comics 2 (YTD 4) De bondgenoten 1, by Brecht Evens The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Richard Dinnick et al
5,800 pages (YTD 13,000) 8/25 (YTD 18/54) by non-male writers (Moller, Alcott, Aoki, Tesh x2, McManus, Le Guin, Lee) 3/25 (YTD 7/54) by non-white writers (Aoki, Chiang, Lee) 5/25 rereads (Light From Uncommon Stars, Silver in the Wood, “Hell is the Absence of God”, Childhood’s End, Mission: Impractical) 233 books currently tagged unread, down 14 from last month, down 76 from January 2024.
Reading now The Research Magnificent, by H.G. Wells Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
Coming soon (perhaps) Sky Jacks!, by Andy Diggle et al Oh No It Isn’t!, by Paul Cornell The Child of Time, by Jonathan Morris et al A Christmas Carol, by Jaime Beckwith and Leslie Grace McMurtry
The Dramatic Works of Denis Johnston: Radio and Television Plays Bealby, by H.G. Wells The Undying Fire, by H.G. Wells Joan and Peter, by H.G. Wells
Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by Dr John Barton The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne The Vegetarian, by Kang Han Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al Voyage to Venus, by C.S. Lewis
John Dee was a unique figure in his own time, but in the breadth of his interests, which are expressed in his writings and the library he amassed, he epitomises the dizzying scope of intellectual knowledge in this period. The most important autobiographical source we have is the Compendius Rehearsall, a wordy (brevity was not one of Dee’s strengths) curriculum vitae describing his ‘studious life, for the space of halfe an hundred yeeres’, along with extracts of his diaries and two manuscript copies of his library catalogue made in 1583 before he left for Poland.¹ This is an unusually rich amount of source material for someone in this period, especially the diaries, which give us a rare view into the private life of this intensely confounding man. The personal nature of some of the entries – he described his children’s injuries and maladies in detail, he was interested in his wife’s menstrual cycle and noted when she got her periods,* and he recorded their involvement in a wife-swapping incident in Bohemia – were distasteful and confusing to many historians, especially those viewing him through the prism of traditional science. Added to this, Dee spent the last decades of his life pursuing knowledge by talking to angels through a medium or ‘scryer’. This was a problematic, marginal activity that caused him serious difficulties; it has only become more problematic over time, as science has moved away from religion. It condemned Dee in the eyes of many historians of science and made him vulnerable to all sorts of interpretations – in the early twentieth century, he was taken up by the occultist poet-mountaineer Aleister Crowley, which did nothing to enhance his credentials. * He also recorded her pregnancies and miscarriages. Serious study of the female body and its workings is a relatively recent phenomenon; today, Dee’s interest appears far-sighted rather than strange. (See Angela Saini, Inferior. London: 4th Estate, 2017.) ¹ CR, p. vii.
As a lapsed historian of science, especially astronomy, I always like to keep an eye on things in that domain; this book, published last year, looks at astronomy in the immediate aftermath of Copernicus, through the focus of seven northern European locations, telling a story which is unfamiliar to most people from a slightly different angle. The chosen locations include Leuven (here ‘Louvain’), so it was of particularly local interest to me; also Prague, which we visited last year, John Dee‘s house at Mortlake, Tycho Brahe’s observatory-statelet on the island of Hven, and the fictional Atlantis of Francis Bacon. (The other two are Nuremberg and Kassel in Germany.)
The Leuven chapter did give me some more insights into our local history – although the Mercator museum is in Sint-Niklaas, it was in Leuven that he did most of his best known work in the 1530s and 1540s, and collaborated closely with the astronomer Gemma Frisius (and John Dee came to visit).
But I wasn’t totally convinced that the organisation of the book around geography really helps the reader’s understanding all that much. In the end, the history of ideas is a history of people, and the stories are stories of humans rather than of places, and it gets a bit confusing when the same person pops up non-chronologically in different chapters.
Also for us locals, it would have been nice to be more specific about the street addresses where these various individuals lived and worked, in case there is anything left to see today.
But I can’t complain too much; it’s a clearly written book which takes us from point A to point B efficiently, and certainly fills in a lot of blanks which I had not even realised were blank. You can get it here.
Current The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
Last books finished Eastern Nights and Flights, by Alan Bott The Secret Places of the Heart, by H.G. Wells Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee The Queen’s Gambit, by Walter Tevis Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations, by Terri Hooley and Richard Sullivan
Next books Sky Jacks, by Andy Diggle et al The Research Magnificent, by H.G. Wells Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch
He turned from the window on hearing a knock at the door. MacFirbis came in. Had the Herr Professor passed a good night, he asked in German; was he well? And the Professor, declining to speak his own language, answered in Irish that he had slept soundly and felt in good health.
I was inspired to seek this out by reading Jack Fennell’s anthology, A Brilliant Void. Originally serialised in Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin newspaper before the First World War, and then published by M.H. Gill in 1918, it’s the story of a German professor of the Irish language, who is visiting Dungannon, Co Tyrone, falls and hits his head, and awakens in a parallel universe where the Irish side won the Battle of Kinsale in 1601. Ireland has subsequently developed as a civilised and powerful state, proud of its Gaelic heritage, ruled as a constitutional monarchy by the High King in a rebuilt Tara and with the provinces ruled by junior monarchs.
Our hero has a series of increasingly treacherous adventures, being mistaken for a German spy (including by the German ambassador) and becoming involved with romantic dynastic conspiracy between the different clans of historians, as well as a spot of guerrilla gardening. He also has no idea what has happened to him, and is very confused by the absence of any familiar Irish landmarks constructed after 1601. This is all very amusing and really quite fun.
The geography in the book is somewhat confused – starting from Dungannon, we are told that it’s only 30 miles to Westport in Mayo (in fact it’s more like 150 miles, 240 km) and the route that is taken from Dungannon to Tara and Dublin doesn’t make much sense. Possibly the author decided at a very late stage to make the location of the story Dungannon, the ancient capital of Ulster, rather than Rathcroghan, the ancient capital of Connacht; though even that is 60 miles / 95 km from Westport. It’s odd; as a Mayo woman herself she must have known the geography well.
The first 22 chapters are online here, and I calculate that that takes us roughly 80% of the way through the book. Unfortunately I have not been able to find the last 20% online anywhere, and paper copies of the one and only edition published in 1918 are selling for vast amounts online, so I will have to remain in suspense about the ending until I find it in a decent Irish reference library. Though it’s pretty obvious what is going to happen; there will be a rousing climax and then the protagonist will return to our timeline – the author says as much in the introduction.
McManus died in 1944 (at the age of 91) so A Professor in Erin has long been in the public domain; some enterprising publisher – perhaps even Gill Books, who brought it out in the first place 106 years ago, and are still going strong – could probably profitably revive it.
Second paragraph of third story (“The Age of Science”, by Frances Power Cobbe):
For obvious reasons the particulars of this most marvellous invention, and the name of its author, must be withheld from the public till the patents (and the enormous profits) be secured to the Company which is invited to undertake to work it (with limited liability). We are only permitted by special favour to hint that the natural Force relied on to set the machinery in action is neither Electric, Magnetic, nor Galvanic; nor yet any combination of these; but that other great correlated imponderable agency, whose existence has been for some time suspected by many intelligent inquirers, called the Psychic Force. That no scepticism may linger in the minds of our readers, we desire to add that we have at this moment in our hands a complete transcript of a newspaper bearing date January 1st, 1977. As the printed matter of this gigantic periodical equals at least in bulk the whole of Gibbon’s History, or Mr. Jowett’s edition of Plato, we cannot attempt to do more than offer our readers a few brief extracts.
Jack Fennell has been fighting the good fight to uncover the historical traditions of Irish science fiction for many years, and this is quite an extraordinary collection of stories from various writers, many of them women and radicals, from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and all of the stories are firmly on the science fiction rather than fantasy side of the divide.
The potted biographies of the authors frequently spurred me to seek more information from Wikipedia, and I realised the depth of my own ignorance of the science fictional side of the cultural revival – which is ironic, because in my PhD thesis I made the closely related argument that the pro-science agenda of revolutionary Irish nationalism had been ignored.
I was particularly intrigued by Clotilde Graves (1863-1932), a distant cousin of Robert Graves, who wrote plays as “Clo Graves” and novels as “Richard Dehan”, cropped her hair short, wore men’s clothes and smoked cigars in public. One of her plays compared marriage to prostitution and her work is generally feminist. I don’t think I had heard of her before.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations by Terri Hooley and Richard Sullivan and Ganny Knits a Spaceship, by David Gerrold.
After the success of Emily Tesh’s first novel, Some Desperate Glory, at last year’s Hugos, I went back and reread her previous two publications, the Greenhollow Duology, a pair of fantasy novellas published in 2029 and 2020. (Actually I got them for Anne for Christmas, in the confident and correct expectation that she would enjoy them too.)
The second paragraph of the third section of the first of the two chapters of Silver in the Wood is:
The cry was coming from somewhere outside. Tobias groaned softly as time sped up again to let him hear it. The wound in his thigh was aching, and not with the dull throb of healing pain. Who was disturbing him now? Hell, who was there left who even knew his name?
I wrote of it in 2021:
Short and sweet. Lovely fantasy story of contemporary England with m/m romance told from the point of view of the Green Man himself.
To expand on that a bit, it’s really very magical in several ways. Tobias, the Green Man protagonist, forms a deep and understatedly romantic friendship with a folklorist called Silver who moves into his woods (hence the title); when Silver mysteriously vanishes, his mother comes on the scene and we move into sorcerous retrieval.
The second paragraph of the third section of Drowned Country is:
The silence lengthened. Silver knew this tactic intimately but crumpled anyway. “Well, what?” he said.
Two years later, Silver and Tobias are no longer on good terms, for reasons that gradually become clear; and Silver’s mother summons them to a blasted English seaside resort, which people who know more than me tell me is rather similar to Whitby, to investigate the disappearance of a young woman. But it turns out that the young woman herself has her own agenda, and the story becomes a surprising twist on the standard vampire narrative.
This is all very different from Some Desperate Glory, butwhat all three shareis a strong yet clear-eyed sympathy for her characters by the author, combined with a tremendous sense of place. Tobias’s woods, Silver’s home, and the various seaside locations are all vividly and economically realised, and the two novellas tell quite big stories in a small number of pages. You can get Silver in the Wood here, and Drowned Country here. And Tesh’s second full novel, The Incandescent, comes out in May.
I rather cheated on my lists by bumping Silver in the Wood to the top of my pile of unread books by women, even though I had already read it. Next on that pile is Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott.
See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in today’s Poland. This is a case where you would think that only one thing had ever happened in the country’s history…
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
Night
Elie Wiesel
1,301,250
28,893
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
John Boyne
893,261
15,839
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Heather Morris
1,063,084
7,136
Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History
Art Spiegelman
352,319
11,169
The Complete Maus
Art Spiegelman
236,184
9,215
Schindler’s List
Thomas Keneally
162,837
8,261
Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
Art Spiegelman
153,093
7,736
Salt to the Sea
Ruta Sepetys
232,282
3,802
Art Spiegelman (deservedly) does well here, if not quite as dominant as Marjane Satrapi was for Iran. But it’s clear that the winning place goes to Elie Wiesel’s Night. All eight of these books are about Nazi Germany and the Second World War, and seven of them are about the Holocaust.
I wasn’t quite sure about Salt to the Sea, which centers around the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, but apparently the characters spend a lot of the book getting to and then hanging around in what is now Gdynia (then Gotenhafen), so I’m allowing it on the list.
I disqualified several books which have Polish authors, and so are tagged “Poland” by LT and GR users, but are not actually set in Poland. These were Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, in which the words “Poland” and “Polish” do not even appear; The Last Wish and Blood of Elves from the Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, which may have roots in Slavic mythology but are clearly set in a fantasy world; Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly, which seems to be more set in Germany than anywhere else; and The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, which is mainly set in the USA.
Well, that was grim. Next up, Morocco, then Angola and Ukraine.
First frame of first page (the third page, which I’d usually select, is a bit graphic):
I used to be weak.
I have been hugely impressed by the previous graphic novels of Brecht Evens, but I was not quite sure about this one, which is the first part of a promised two-part series. Our protagonist, 10 year old Arthur, lives on the Breton coast with his father. (Yep, Arthur of Brittany, though it’s not clear what to read into that.) His father brings him up in the knowledge that they are fighting a peculiar battle at the front line of the war between Good and Evil, and then he disappears, leaving Arthur to navigate a world where the neighbours are presumptively all spies for the dark side.
Arthur’s father is clearly clinically paranoid, and it’s not yet clear how Evens is going to resolve the plot; it could go well or badly, to be honest. But as usual, what makes the book is Evens’ fantastic art, drawing perhaps on James Ensor but with very much his own twist on it, often conveying a great deal with just a few lines, capturing character traits and settings with complete conviction. It’s a gorgeous run of 288 pages, and I hope it all makes sense when the next volume comes out.
The Dutch title means “The Allies”, but the French title, Le Roi Méduse, means “The Jellyfish King”. Heaven knows how they will translate it into English. Meanwhile you can get it in the original Dutch here and in French here.
This was my top unread comic which is not in English. Next on that pile is Panter, also by Brecht Evens.
These two books jointly won the 2022 (and so far last) Otherwise Award, formerly the Tiptree. I had read Light of Uncommon Stars previously, but it was from one of my Hugo years so I didn’t write it up at the time and have returned to it now.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Sorrowland:
At least summer brought an end to the dreary dead fawn show, and Vern was able to get some work done. She tied one babe to her hip and the other to her back in a way that made it possible to walk ten or even fifteen miles to forage without tiring.
I rather bounced off Solomon’s first two books, An Unkindness of Ghosts and her novelisation of the .clipping song The Deep. But I found this worked much better for me – like the other two, it furiously addresses race and gender and historical oppression, but somehow seemed more under control. The protagonist is a very young black woman, escaping a cult by fleeing into the nearby wooded wilderness where she gives birth, and her allies and enemies as she undergoes strange physical changes as well. It still got a bit off the rails towards the end, but most of it made sense in a very angry way. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Light from Uncommon Stars is:
Once common in LA’s Eisenhower years, just a few of these giant donuts remained in greater Los Angeles. There were Kindle’s Donuts, Dale’s Donuts, and Randy’s Donuts, of course. Donut King II was in Gardena. In La Puente, there was the drive-through Donut Hole.
This worked less well for me, both when I first read it in 2022 and again three years later. There are a couple of elements that work really well – the very sympathetic portrayal of the trans protagonist, and the life of Asians in contemporary California, and there’s some good stuff about violin playing. But the two main plot lines are about a music teacher who sells her pupils’ souls to the Devil, and a doughnut restaurant which is really a front for a stranded alien starship, and both seemed to me rather silly; my disbelief rapidly became unsuspended and didn’t pick up again. Obviously my tastes are in the minority here, because it was the runner-up for the Hugo after A Desolation Called Peace, which I enjoyed much more. You can get Light from Uncommon Stars here.
There was an unusually strong overlap between the 2022 Otherwise Award and that year’s Hugos. As mentioned up top, co-winner Light From Uncommon Stars was a Hugo finalist; the honor list included Lodestar finalist Cemetery Boys and Hugo finalist She Who Became the Sun, by Shelley Parker-Chan, and seven other books that I have not read. The Clarke Award that year went to Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles, the BSFA Award to Shards of Earth, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and the Nebula to A Master of Djinn, by P. Djèlí Clark.
I’ll do a write-up of the Tiptree / Otherwise Awards as a whole soon, but just to note that this takes me to the end of a reading project that I started in 2017 with A Woman of the Iron People, back when the world was a very different place.
Back in September 2015, I was lucky enough to get a look at the Doctor Who set in Cardiff, including the TARDIS. This was just after filming had been completed on The Husbands of River Song. I took loads of photos, but the studio lights were off so it was all a bit dark and the pictures are out of focus. However, looking at them the other day, I realised that there is enough detail to make out the titles of most of the books on the TARDIS bookshelves. Lesson learned – if I ever have another chance, I’ll make sure to get better and more complete shots.
I took photos of two sets of bookshelves, and the books on this one are much less easy to distinguish than the other. On the top shelf, beside the wooden horse, are two volumes of a History of England, Vol II to the left of Vol I, and three volumes of what looks like the collected works of some author (or possibly “Philosophical Works“), Vol VIII, Vol X and Vol VII.
On the middle shelf, I can’t make out the book on the left; the next two appear to be The Holy Bible, Vol I and Vol II; another two that I can’t make out, and then The Holy Bible Vol IV followed by Vol III. The two paperbacks to the left of the skull are Term of Trial, by James Barlow, and a combined Penguin edition of D.H. Lawrence’s short novels St Mawr and The Virgin and the Gipsy. I can’t make out anything of the next two titles, to the right of the skull, but on the spine of the last fully visible book, the middle word is Plays.
On the bottom shelf, the light is too bad to see any titles clearly.
The other bookshelf that I photographed is much clearer, thanks to all of the books being paperbacks and most of them being Penguins. I can identify all 35 books on the top shelf, and 25 of the 30 on the bottom shelf with reasonable guesses at two of the other five.
On the top shelf we have:
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
Hard Times, by Charles Dickens
Selected Short Stories, by Guy de Maupassant
The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy
King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard
Man and the Vertebrates: 1, by A.S. Romer
The Political Economy of Growth, by Paul A. Baran
New Horizons in Psychiatry, by Peter Hays
Roman Britain (Political History of England 1), by I.A. Richmond
The Simplicity of Science, by Stanley D. Beck
Language in the Modern World, by Simeon Potter
Family Policy, by Margaret Wynn
Mister Johnson, by Joyce Cary
The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
Elizabeth and Essex, by Lytton Strachey
Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake
The White Monkey, by John Galsworthy
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Bliss and Other Stories, by Katherine Mansfield
The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh
Introduction to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, by Peter L. Berger
Birth Control in the Modern World, by Elizabeth Draper
Modern Science and the Nature of Life, by William S. Beck
The True Wilderness, by H.A. Williams
The Reader’s Guide, edited by Sir William Emrys Williams
Organic Chemistry Today, by F.W. Gibbs
Maid in Waiting, by John Galsworthy
To Let, by John Galsworthy
Left Luggage, by C. Northcote Parkinson
In Chancery, by John Galsworthy
A Little of What You Fancy, by H.E. Bates
a second copy of In Chancery, by John Galsworthy
A Breath of French Air, by H.E. Bates
When the Green Woods Laugh, by H.E. Bates
Blood Rights, by Mike Phillips
The lower shelf is more out of focus, but I’m pretty sure that we see:
Shardik, by Richard Adams
Debbie Go Home, by Alan Paton
a second copy of Shardik, by Richard Adams
two copies of The Wild Cherry Tree, by H.E. Bates
Birds of America, by Mary McCarthy
The Group, by Mary McCarthy
one that I have difficulty reading but it might be The Innovators by Michael Shanks
The Chemistry of Life, by Steven Rose
Voters, Parties and Leaders, by Jean Blondel
one that I cannot read
A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes
Anna of the Five Towns, by Arnold Bennett
Britain on Borrowed Time, by Glyn Jones and Michael Barnes
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves
another that I cannot read, though the author’s first name looks like “Henry” or possibly “Hilary”
North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell
a book by H.E. Bates whose title is unreadable, but it seems very odd that the Doctor would not have a copy of The Darling Buds of May despite having all four of its sequels, so that’s probably it
The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James (upside down)
two copies of The Cold Moons, by Aeron Clement (the title of the second book is unreadable, but Aeron Clement’s name is clear, and he only wrote one book, so it’s got to be a duplicate)
a second copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy
Three Plays by John Webster (The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Devil’s Law-Case)
Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens
Owls and Satyrs, by David Pryce-Jones
a third copy of Shardik, by Richard Adams
a second copy of A Little of What You Fancy, by H.E. Bates
The N****r of the Narcissus, Typhoon and Other Stories, by Joseph Conrad
finally, one more that I cannot read, though the author’s first name looks like “Henry”.
So: there’s a fair number of classics; a lot of middle-brow twentieth century literature (H.E. Bates, John Galsworthy); very little science fiction or fantasy (apart from Shardik, of which the Doctor has no less than three copies, and two copies of The Cold Moons, a Watership Down-style novel about badgers [edited to add: Rich Horton points out that Gormenghast surely counts too]); lots of well-meaning Penguin 1960s and 1970s sociology; some rather odd popular science books; only two history books (Roman Britain and Elizabeth and Essex); and precisely one book about religion (The True Wilderness, by H.A. Williams), though of course there’s a multi-volume Bible on the other shelf.
Unfortunately I think the Glyn Jones who co-wrote Britain on Borrowed Time is not the same person who wrote The Space Museum. That would have been nicely recursive.
There were more books in the TARDIS than this, as you can see from this screenshot from The Husbands of River Song, but I’m happy to have salvaged some information from my own archives.
The person in whom these calamities originated was Mr. Falkland’s nearest neighbour, a man of estate equal to his own, by name Barnabas Tyrrel. This man one might at first have supposed of all others least qualified from instruction, or inclined by the habits of his life, to disturb the enjoyments of a mind so richly endowed as that of Mr. Falkland. Mr. Tyrrel might have passed for a true model of the English squire. He was early left under the tuition of his mother, a woman of narrow capacity, and who had no other child. The only remaining member of the family it may be necessary to notice was Miss Emily Melville, the orphan daughter of Mr. Tyrrel’s paternal aunt; who now resided in the family mansion, and was wholly dependent on the benevolence of its proprietors.
I was reading this at the rate of a chapter every couple of days since November, as part of the same group who have previously read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Our Mutual Friend and The Monk. I must say that a group read like this is a great way to maintain the pace of reading a heavy text and exchanging insights on plot developments and social commentary. Having read work by his wife and daughter, I was also interested to see how Godwin himself came across.
So, first of all: it’s not really all that good as a novel. The protagonist, Caleb Williams, acquires a rich patron, Mr Falkland; discovers Falkland’s dark secret, which is that he committed a murder and allowed two other people to be executed for it; and then flees Falkland’s wrath for the rest of the book, pursued by the sinister thief-taker Gines.
The long chase is not really very interesting – Godwin could have made it more vivid with descriptions of landscape and townscape, but instead just has Caleb hiding, being found by Gines, fleeing and hiding somewhere else all over again. There’s one good bit set in London (which had me looking up sources on the historic synagogues of the city). The chase sequence is reminiscent of the one in Frankenstein, but his daughter did it better.
The moral core of the book is the relatively short section where Caleb is imprisoned unjustly, and faces Falkland’s wrath through the justice system. Godwin was determined to expose the ways in which the judicial system in England served only to impose the will of the rich on the poor. The sections where Caleb is in prison are footnoted as if to say “I am not making this bit up”. There is a wronged young woman character who also dies tragically in prison. It appears to be impossible to hold Falkland accountable for his wrongs. These sections are passionate and fluent.
(I did wonder also if there was a bit of a spurned lover vibe between Caleb and Falkland.)
It’s also mercifully short, and we rather dragged it out by reading only four or five pages a day. Next time I’d prefer to do it a chapter at a time, though I realise that Caleb Williams has only 42 chapters, including the postscript but not the prefaces. Anyway, you can get it here.
Of these, the three men and the boy consider themselves the most pertinent. They stand round a table of yew set with shards of tortoiseshell, and bicker.
This is the first of a trilogy about Odysseus’ wife Penelope, waiting for him to return to Ithaca (if he ever will), balancing the interests of the suitors who have come to try and persuade her to marry them, narrated by the goddess Hera who is observing closely and just occasionally interfering to counter the interference of Athena, Artemis and the others.
Ithaca is being raided by pirates, supposedly Illyrians from the north; it doesn’t take the reader, or Penelope, long to work out what is really going on – one of the suitors is behind it; it takes a lot longer to sort out, given the male domination of legitimate violence, even in a kingdom ruled by a woman. In the meantime Clytemnestra has fled Mycenae and her vengeful children, and the consequent instability is spreading west to Ithaca too. It’s all convincingly told, in the constraints of myth.
I have generally enjoyed Claire North’s books, and I enjoyed this too; and now that I realise there are another two books to go, I’ll be getting them. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on that pile is Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb.
Current DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke The Secret Places of the Heart, by H.G. Wells
Last books finished Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Kevin Decker and Ryan Parrey Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott War Childhood: From Sarajevo to Syria, Memories of Life and Hope, by Jasminko Halilović “Hell is the Absence of God”, by Ted Chiang Five Ways to Forgiveness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Next books Hooleygan: Music, Mayhem, Good Vibrations, by Terri Hooley Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch
Lady Beach-Mandarin always had her luncheons in a family way at a large round table so that nobody could get out of her range, and she insisted upon conversation being general, except for her mother who was impenetrably deaf and the Swiss governess of her only daughter Phyllis who was incomprehensible in any European tongue. The mother was incalculably old and had been a friend of Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset; she maintained an intermittent monologue about the private lives of those great figures; nobody paid the slightest attention to her but one felt she enriched the table with an undertow of literary associations. A small dark stealthy butler and a convulsive boy with hair (apparently) taking the place of eyes waited. On this occasion Lady Beach-Mandarin had gathered together two cousins, maiden ladies from Perth, wearing valiant hats, Toomer the wit and censor, and Miss Sharsper the novelist (whom Toomer detested), a gentleman named Roper whom she had invited under a misapprehension that he was the Arctic Roper, and Mr. Brumley. She had tried Mr. Roper with questions about penguins, seals, cold and darkness, icebergs and glaciers, Captain Scott, Doctor Cook and the shape of the earth, and all in vain, and feeling at last that something was wrong, she demanded abruptly whether Mr. Brumley had sold his house.
Ellen Sawbridge, aged 18, marries Isaac Harman, who is rich, twenty years older and receives a knighthood on their wedding day. After bearing him four children, she undergoes an epiphany; she discovers the need to exert her own individuality and do her own things, and also realises that her husband’s wealth is based on ruthless exploitation of the workers in the chain of cafes that he owns. “She began to read more and more in order to learn things… and less and less to pass the time.”
Helping her in this process is George Brumley (a viewpoint character in a novel by a writer whose middle name was George and was born in Bromley), a widower who is deeply in love with Lady Harman and of whom Sir Isaac becomes (justifiably) very jealous. I thought that the personal journeys of the two protagonists were very nicely and credibly done, without too much of the speechifying that many of Wells’ political characters are prone to indulge in.
Unfortunately the novel is colossally spoiled by the casual and systematic anti-semitism in the portrayal of Sir Isaac Harman. The word ‘Jew’ is never directly used, but there is constant insinuation about him; the pointiness of his nose (and of his children’s noses); his unsporting attitude to sports; his obsession with wealth; his accent. Adam Roberts has gone into this at much greater length (also he didn’t like the rest of the book as much as I did).
It would be possible to do a perfectly good dramatisation of this story with the anti-semitism removed; though you would have to change the title. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile is The Secret Places of the Heart.
So, on my way back from Gallifrey One, the top Doctor Who convention in the world, having had as usual a whale of a time. Though I will start with two less happy things. First, my back has been playing up for the last few weeks, so I was very careful not to overdo it, and napped during the day a bit more than usual (to compensate for sleeping worse). In 2009 and again in 2013, I had back problems which were serious enough to keep me off work for ten days each time, so I know the danger signs and am religiously doing my stretches.
The second less than happy thing was the announcement that the 2028 Gallifrey One will be the last. Mostly the same team have been running it since 1991, and they prefer to conclude the series rather than hand over the reins. Understandable, but there was a palpable air of sadness and shock in the hall as the announcement was made. Apparently there are moves to assemble a replacement structure, and with four years to go, there is time. Meanwhile we are all grateful for the immense amount of work put in by the team over the decades.
A lot of other things went well. For the first time since 2012, I got a room at the conference hotel, and that makes a big difference to lugging things around. Though the escalators between the lobby and the ballroom floors were out, so we got used to the labyrinthine alternative routes.
Outside the hotel, I had breakfast most days at Denny’s about half a mile away, and that was tremendously good value, setting me up well so that I didn’t need as much of the hotel’s somewhat inflated bar food. Other places I ate:
The Getty Museum Cafe, for lunch on Thursday, which was fine
Jino’s Pars, for dinner on Saturday with Jon Arnold, about a mile from the Marriott, yummy Persian food
Blu Jam Cafe, in Downtown LA on Monday morning, a substantial brunch which was too substantial for me to finish
Wolfgang Puck in Terminal 7 at LAX for a late lunch as we left, where they charged me $33 for a small sad overcooked chunk of salmon which took over half an hour to arrive. When I complained they refunded half the price.
Also apparently there were two earthquakes in Malibu late Friday and early Saturday, but I must admit I failed to notice.
One other thing that went well, not especially related to the convention: I got an eSIM for my phone, and that meant that i had cheap data for he entire trip. Based on the recommendation of my former colleague Robert, I went with Airalo, who also offer coverage in China where I will go next month. I’m sure there are others available, but I was very satisfied with what I had.
So: H and I travelled on Wednesday this time, to have got over the jetlag by the time the convention started on Friday morning, and I had a very pleasant Wednesday evening in the bar with Nicola Bryant, Andrew Smith (writer of Full Circle), Big Finish writer Lisa McMullin and others.
Formal shot with Nicola Bryant – many more photos but all in my shipped baggage as I write from HeathrowAndrew Smith signs the novelisation of Full Circle, published 42 yeas ago when he was 20.
I took fewer cosplay photos than in previous years, but as usual the effort put in was impressive.
Amy and VincentTime LordA SilentDoctors & coK-9 variationsDodoThe unseen villain of Rogue. Fluent in many languages and scolds you for not doing your homework, before eating you.
The great set-pieces of the convention are the presentations by the stars, and I got to most of them, back permitting. Sylvester McCoy, in an amazingly high energy performance from a man who has recently turned 80, wandered around the audience in his session, and H got this great photo of me asking him about Vision On, to which he gave a good five-minute answer.
H got to do a script reading with Colin Baker:
Wendy Padbury and her daughter Charlie Hayes were an effective double-act, Charlie threatening to ask her mother to tell us everything she knows about astrophysics.
Louise Jameson was also charming, but complained facetiously when her Leela clothing got a round of applause: “Upstaged by a costume!”
The headline star this year was not either of the Doctors present (Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy) but Steven Moffat, who did a solo Q&A, commented on a showing of Boom!, crashed Jenna Coleman’s Q&A, did a small group analysis of The Girl in the Fireplace and signed my copy of the novelisation of The Day of the Doctor.
As well as seeing lots of old friends I made new friends as well. Here Ruadhri from London, who was doing a series of mini-interviews with participants for later publication, has the tables turned on him by Jack from Boston.
Altogether I had a really good time and hope that I can make it to the last three, in 2026, 2027 and 2028.
On the Thursday before it all started, I decided to go to the Getty Center, a half-hour’s drive north – I had planned to do that last year, but it is closed on Mondays so I went to LACMA instead that time. I am therefore now equipped for many weeks of my #Thursdayart posts, which you may have seen on my social media channels. The Getty Villa is still closed after last month’s fires, but its sister institution is fine; head literally in the clouds on a very rainy day.
After the Rijksmuseum, which we had visited only a few days before, the Getty is rather exposed as what it is, the perpetuation of a rich man’ whims rather than the nation-building project over in Amsterdam. But there is plenty of good stuff; the five I picked for social media posts were:
Van Gogh’s Irises, very much the star of the show
I was fascinated by the human detail in The Bird Catchers, painted by by François Boucher in 1748.
I envied the relaxation of Princess Leonilla of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, painted by Franz Xavier Winterhalter in 1843:
And finally here’s a bust of Felix Mendlesohn, from 1848 (just after his death) by Ernst Friedrich August Rietschel.
But plenty more where all of that came from.
Yesterday, for my last morning, I braved the public transport system (cheaper now that I am over 55!) and ventured downtown to The Last Bookstore. I didn’t actually buy anything, but I always find bookshops good for recharging.
It too has unusual artworks. Going up the stairs you will meet Nuestra Señora La Reína de la Librería Última de Los Ángeles:
And at the top you will see “Diagnosis” by Jena Priebe and David Lovejoy.
Got back to the hotel in time to chat with my old friend D, who then dropped me to the airport. And 14 hours of travel and 3 hours of sleep later, here I am in Heathrow. See you soon.
This was a two-part Twelfth Doctor story from Series 9 in 2015, set in the early 22nd century in a base under a Scottish reservoir, and also in 1980, in the abandoned village that was there before the reservoir was built. I don’t appear to have written it up at the time – I was a bit sparing when the last name on the screen was my first cousin, which may have been too cautious of me.
The TARDIS, with the Twelfth Doctor and Clara on board, arrives in the year 2119, in an underwater base under siege from ghosts, which appear linked with a mysterious alien vessel at the bottom of the lake. The crew of the base start getting picked off one by one. The Doctor goes back to 1980 to try and sort things out, but apparently returns as a ghost. The trouble is being caused by a semi-dead alien called the Fisher King, but I confess I did not really follow that part. Eventually all is resolved with the use of time paradoxes – the Doctor has a breaking-the-fourth-wall conversation with the viewer about who really wrote Beethoven’s music. There are some very good shots of Capaldi in particular.
Notably, Cass, the woman who takes command of the crew for most of the story (after the original commander is an early victim) is deaf, played by deaf actor Sophie Leigh Stone, and communicates with everyone else by signing through an interpreter.
I also noted with interest that two characters played by actors of Asian heritage, Zarqa Ismail and Arsher Ali, are given the thoroughly Anglo names Tim Lunn and Mason Bennett. (I don’t think we ever find out Cass’s first name.)
The writer was Toby Whitehouse, who also wrote School Reunion, one of my favorite New Who episodes; Greeks Bearing Gifts, one of my favourite Torchwood episodes; the series Being Human; and the New Who episode The God Complex, which I didn’t rate as highly and have written up here along with its Black Archive.
Rewatching Under the Lake / Before the Flood, I would rank it as average or slightly below. Over on X/Twitter, it did better, at 120th of 309 Who stories in @heraldofcreatio’s poll. Anne could not remember having seen it first time round. I find the plot decently sfnal and the base well realised, but the energy somehow not quite there, and the means and motivation of the alien menace obscure. Full marks of course for the portrayal of Cass’s disability, which we’ll get back to.
Ryan C. Parrey and Kevin S. Decker have done a solid though relatively short Black Archive on the story. The first chapter is an introduction which briefly touches on bases under siege, evil capitalism, and the reversed sequence of the narrative.
The second and longest chapter, “The Bootstrap Paradox”, goes in detail into the exploration of time paradoxes in this story and in other Doctor Who stories, and the extent to which they also carry the freight of moral dilemmas.
The third chapter, “‘Only Room for One Me’”, looks at Clara’s arc overall in the wider Doctor Who narrative. Its second paragraph is:
“This two-part story contributes important elements to Clara’s arc during her time with the 12th Doctor, an arc that begins before Danny’s death and that sees Clara act on her fascination with the Doctor’s power and responsibility. Making a conscious decision to leave certain inhibitions behind after Danny dies, she experiments here and elsewhere in series nine with, in effect, becoming the Doctor.
Incidentally I am writing this at Gallifrey One, where Jenna Coleman as usual is charming the participants.
The very brief fourth chapter, “Ghosts in the Machine”, looks at the ghosts in the story as compared to other Who stories, and unpacks how they are not really ghosts.
The fifth chapter, “New Waste Lands”, which is also short, looks at the alien Fisher King and successfully explained to me what is actually going on in the story, better than the script did.
The sixth and best chapter, “The Case of Cass”, looks at the varying ways that disabled people are portrayed in the media, especially in Doctor Who, coming to the conclusion that Cass is uniquely well depicted in this story. Hard to disagree with that, and it’s well argued.
The seventh and concluding chapter takes us back to ethics and invokes Jean-Paul Sartre.
I rate this about average of the Black Archives, but with significant bonus points for the discussion of disability. You can get it here.
The key maintains a direct link with the TARDIS at all times. Even if the TARDIS is isolated by a temporal disturbance the key should be able to summon it back (see Case Study, page 32). Conversely, the TARDIS can be concealed, a second out of sync with your current time zone, using the key as an anchor.
This is one of those really lovely BBC spinoff books, looking in detail at the TARDIS, presented as an operator’s manual and pulling together all the TARDIS lore from the first 55 years of Doctor Who (it features Jodie Whittaker but not any of her stories). None of this is new, but it’s put together very imaginatively and entertainingly. I had forgotten that many of the early stories include a TARDIS malfunction of some kind, and the authors heroically retcon everything together, even the Eye of Harmony from the TV movie. A lovely effort. You can get it here.
Most people called it the Jewelled City, because they had no imagination of their own and just picked up on what some down-market visnews journalist correctly thought would make a catchy slogan. The planet had originally been colonised as a source of jethryk, but the mining boom had long since died out, and it reverted to being just another human world. Nowadays there were no more jewels around than there were in any other colonial capital.
I never had the pleasure of meeting David McIntee, but we were Facebook friends for years, and like many others I was shocked and saddened when he died last December, two weeks before his 56th birthday. He wrote twelve Doctor Who novels between 1993 and 2004, one of which (Autumn Mist) is among the very few Doctor Who stories set in Belgium. My favourite is The Face of the Enemy, set while the Doctor and Jo Grant are off in Peladon, so that UNIT has to bring in the Master and some bloke called Chesterton and his wife to help out.
Mission: Impractical is the last of the Sixth Doctor novels that I read a decade ago, failed to write up at the time and have now reread again. It’s a comedy heist story, not usually one of my favourite sub-genres, but done very well here. The cast of characters includes Sabalon Glitz and his sidekick Dibber, who appeared in a couple of TV stories, and Frobisher, originally a DWM comic strip companion, who is a shape shifting alien Whifferdill and prefers to take the shape of a penguin. There are also Ogrons and an ancient artifact which is the McGuffin. McIntee had a good ear for dialogue and robustly characterizes both the continuity characters and the bad guys who turn up in this story, and the settings are vivid. So I am ending this mini-project on a high note.
The purchase link says it’s out of print and that Amazon doesn’t know of any second-hand copies. But who knows, you may be lucky?
I find that I also never wrote up some of the early Bernice Summerfield books, so I will do them next, possibly alongside the early Big Finish audio adaptations.
Three stories here. The title story by Andy Diggle and Craig Hamilton brings Lady Christina de Souza back for a space heist with the Doctor, Amy and Rory, and raised a smile or two. The second, “Space Oddity” by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Horacio Domingues, is an excellent tale of the Vashta Nerada and an early undocumented Soviet space mission. The third, “Time Fraud” by Richard Dinnick and Josh Adams, has bird-like aliens and fake Time Lords. You can get it here.
Next in this series is Sky Jacks!, by Andy Diggle, Eddie Robson and Andy Kuhn
Big Finish had a First Doctor sale last month, and I took advantage of it to get hold of some of the audios I would have liked to have caught at the time. This is the first of three quartets of First Doctor Companion Chronicles, each featuring an original series actor and a guest performer, in this case released in October 2015 (so I am some way behind).
The Sleeping Blood, by Martin Day, has Carole Ann Ford as Susan travelling with her grandfather before they arrive on Earth, and looking for medical treatment when the Doctor is struck down by a mysterious infection. She ends up at a medical facility where the local security team are fighting off a mysterious terrorist (both the terrorist and the head of security are played by Darren Strange). It’s a smart Doctor-lite script, exploring truth and trust and the use of violence, and giving Ford a bit more space to perform than she really got on screen.
The Unwinding World, by Ian Potter, has Vicki telling the story of how she, together with the Doctor, Ian and Barbara, are stuck doing grunt work on a boring but repressive planet. This is framed as a conversation between Maureen O’Sullivan and Alix Dunmore, who plays the all-powerful computer and a couple of other female parts. I started off wondering exactly what was going on, but then realised that a nicely constructed plot – expressed basically as a dialogue – was coming to a clever and satisfactory conclusion.
The Founding Fathers is one of two stories in this set by Simon Guerrier, sequels to The War to End All Wars, with a framing narrative where Steven Taylor, having retired as king of the planet of the Elders/Savages, is engaged in long conversations with the copy of the Doctor’s brain made by Jano long ago. The main plot element is a flashback to a Doctor-and-Steven trip to Paris in 1762, where they encounter Benjamin Franklin and give him pointers on the future governance of the American colonies and also electricity. But there’s a subsidiary plot set on Steven’s planet, where his granddaughter Sida (played by Alice Haig, now Alice Tate, who does all the female characters) is listening and learning.
Finally, in Simon Guerrier’s The Locked Room, we get not only the First Doctor returning in the flesh, but also the Vardans, of all monsters, to trouble Steven and Sida on their home world, which is of course itself in the middle of a huge political crisis involving them both in different ways. The soundscape of all of these is vey good, but I felt this was particularly impressive, where two actors in adjacent sound booths summon up an entire planet under threat. Peter Purves’ version of Hartnell is uncanny as ever.
So, basically my mini-project of catching up with Big Finish’s First Doctor stories is off to a good start. You can get this set here.
Current Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott Five Ways to Forgiveness, by Ursula K. Le Guin War Childhood: From Sarajevo to Syria, Memories of Life and Hope, by Jasminko Halilović
Last books finished A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell The Professor in Erin, by L. McManus [Charlotte Elizabeth McManus] (did not finish) Drowned Country, by Emily Tesh Inside the Stargazers’ Palace, by Violet Moller Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee TARDIS Type 40 Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson and Mike Tucker Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Kevin Decker and Ryan Parrey
Next books The Secret Places of the Heart, by H.G. Wells DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee “Hell is the Absence of God”, by Ted Chiang
Then she heard applause. The applause of centuries.
This is the fourth book in the Lychford series, where once again the village is under attack from hostile magical forces and the three women who have become the central characters of the series have to try and stop it. It’s lyrically done, with the old world’s natural crumbling being given extra momentum by the external threat; characters float in and out of different stages of awareness – there’s a sympathetic portrayal of dementia – and it all comes across beautifully. Quite a short book but it packs a lot into its 162 pages. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham.
A Portuguese slogan had been painted on the side of the plane: “We carry not only passengers but solidarity”. Indeed, about half the passengers were from aid organisations. People were flooding into Mozambique and we pompously called ourselves ‘solidarity workers’.
This is the autobiography of Hans Rosling, the Swedish scientist whose Factfulness was my book of the year for 2018. I must admit that I had given no thought at all to how one might become a guru of data visualisation, so it was fascinating to read of his career in public health in Sweden and the developing world.
The moral core of the book are the third and fourth chapters, recounting his experience of working as a District Medical Officer in northern Mozambique, in a situation where to describe resources as scarce and medical facilities as overstretched is something of an understatement. I must say that the end of the third chapter made me cry on the train, which I don’t often do.
Apart from that, it’s a good account of a professional doctor shuttling around the world and accommodating himself to different cultures, and to the rapid changes in societies (including Sweden) brought about by economic growth and technical innovation. There is a very entertaining encounter with Fidel Castro in Cuba. And then thanks to his son’s software skills, he found that he was famous, and his medical career turned into something quite different. He doesn’t go on about his success of middle age; he knew we would be much more interested in how he got there.
I had high expectations of this and they were more than fulfilled. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2021. Next on that pile is the English translation of The Burgundians, by Bart van Loo.
The Hadza or Hadzabe people (meaning ‘people’) have inhabited the area around LakeEyasi in Tanzania, south of the Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Crater, for tens of thousands of years. Archeological findings show that this area has been inhabited by hunter-gatherers, such as the Hadza, for at least 50,000 years, while the Bantu people came to this region much later, about 2,000 years ago. There is a (not widely accepted) theory that the entire human race consists of three ‘branches’: the Hadza people, the Jul’hoan people of Namibia, and all other people. This idea is based on the fact that the Hadza and Jul’hoan use clicks in their speech, as well as having the most divergent known mitochondrial DNA of any human population, indicating that they are descended from those that first separated from the rest of the human ‘tree’.
Along similar lines to the same author’s Atlas of Unusual Borders, this brings together trivia about language isolates from all over the globe. It’s much the same story over and over again, for 230 pages, but the message is clear: language diversity is part of human experience, and that can include ancient languages which are just about hanging on in their native places, but also new-ish creoles which have been created to help communication.
There were a lot more cases that I had not heard of here than in the same author’s Unusual Borders book. Most of these would be well enough known in their own countries (most Poles know about Kashubian, for instance). But almost every country seems to have some linguistic quirk hidden in a corner. (For instance, the Germanic section ends with French Flemish.)
I did wish Nikolić had gone a little more into unusual grammar or phonology. The front cover of my copy of the book references the ǃXóõ language of Namibia, which has the most phonemes of any known tongue – 87 consonants, half of which are clicks, 20 vowels, and two tones by one count. There must be a few more like that. Information is of course difficult to come by.
Some of the languages are illustrated with a paragraph from The Little Prince, which does help a little with getting a sense of the structure. Again, I’d have liked to see a bit more here, for instance emphasising the words for “sunrise” would give you a better feeling for how the language works.
However, I don’t know of any other book quite like this and I’m glad to have it. You can get it here.
An early Valentine’s weekend up north (sorry, Dutch-based chums, this was a just-us romantic weekend and we didn’t see anyone else) to visit a few museums.
Accommodation: IBIS Leiden Centre, cheap and cheerful.
Friday lunch: Tapa Thai, Stationsweg 3, Leiden; decent value, rice a bit dry. Friday dinner: Surakarta, Noordeinde 51-53, Leiden; very satisfactory Indonesian, helpful explanations of unfamiliar food. Saturday lunch: The Rijksmuseum Cafe; friendly service and filling victuals Saturday dinner: Verboden Toegang, Kaiserstraat 7, Leiden; hearty stuff, good service, better value than I would get in PLux. Sunday lunch: Pieterskerk Cafe, quiet and healthy.
The National Museum of Antiquities: the Bronze Age
This was what sparked the idea for our trip, a big exhibition about the Bronze Age in Europe, bringing together some prize exhibits from other museums, and basically selling the message that the Europe of 3000 years ago had intense internal cultural links and also communications deep into Asia.
The hit of the exhibition is is the Nebra Sky Disc, from 1600-1800 BC, the oldest known visual representation of the universe from anywhere in the world. Found by illegal treasure hunters in East Germany in 1999, sold by them as soon as they dug it up, recovered by Swiss police in a raid in Basel in 2002, now permanently on display in Halle (but on loan to Leiden). Some of you may have seen it in the British Museum last year.
It’s a truly striking artefact. You know exactly what it is meant to be. The makers have communicated their interest in the night sky to you directly, 3,600 years on.
There are a couple of other personal artefacts that spoke to me. The Mold gold cape, for instance, from about the same time as the Sky Disc but found at the far end of the trade routes, in Wales, on loan from the British Museum:
Or the Schifferstadt Sun hat, one of four such hats found in France and Germany, perhaps for celebrants to wear at ceremonies welcoming / summoning the return of the Sun?
Just a week ago, on 2 February, worshippers paraded around our local chapel bearing candles to celebrate the arrival of spring. I bet that ceremony has been going on longer than Christianity in our part of the world.
Another stunning display has six ceremonial (magic?) swords, made in the same East Anglia workshop, found separately in England, France and the Netherlands, brought together here for the first time.
They are not practical for combat, but instead were all found ritually placed into damp ground and abandoned; one of them (the second from the right) was carefully and perhaps ritually warped before the deposition. A sacrifice of weapons, specially commissioned from Norfolk, to show unity with the land? Though I cannot be the only visitor who thought of Monty Python:
We tend to think of Bronze Age archaeology as concerned with beautiful material artfacts, like the gold and weapons above and the torcs and bracelets below. And they are lovely.
But a couple of other exhibits really got me.
It’s a stone from a grave in Anderlingen, Germany, with three figures on it. One has outstretched hands, one has an axe, one has a robe. Are they fighting? Dancing? Worshipping? All three? Something else?
But what got to me most was the reconstruction of women’s clothing from grave goods.
On the right, we are told, is the oldest dress in the Netherlands, from 800 BC near Eindhoven. Enough survives to be sure that there was a check pattern coloured by cochineal and wode; this high status woman was buried in her favourite clothes..
But on the left we have the Egtveld Girl, found in Denmark with her clothes in good preservation. She wore a belt with a big gold disc, and a short corded skirt. She was only a teenager, but had moved around a lot in her short life. Her skirt is surely made for dancing; to move from the sublime to the ridiculous, here are my own colleagues performing “Hips don’t lie” by Shakira:
Anyway, it’s a tremendous exhibition, and you have five more weeks to go to it.
The National Museum of Antiquities: the rest
To be honest, we didn’t see a lot of the permanent collection, but this piece really jumped out at me, at the end of a small gallery of cameos:
It is the Gemma Constantiniana, created by the Senate of Rome as a trophy for the Emperor Constantine in 315 after he vanquished his rival emperor Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. Drawn by (male) centaurs, trampling Maxentius, Constantine and his fmily ride to glory and accept a triumphal wreath from an angelic figure.
What happened to it in the next 1,300 years is obscure, but it came into the hands of the Dutch East India Company in 1628, possibly via the collection of Pieter Paul Rubens. They decided to sell it to the Mongol Emperor Jahangir, who was a big collector, and packed into the cargo of the East India Company’s biggest ship, the Batavia. However, the Batavia was wrecked off the coast of Australia, and the surviving passengers held hostage by mutineers until reinforcements arrived a year later.
The Gemma Constantiniana was successfully salvaged, but Jahangir had died (he had actually died before the Batavia left) and his heir Shah Jahan (builder of the Taj Mahal) was less interested in that kind of thing, so it returned to the Netherlands and is now on permanent display in Leiden.
Two other great cameos survive, one of Augustus in Vienna and one of Tiberius in Paris. They have less exciting histories.
The Rijksmuseum
We had missed out on the Rijksmuseum on our 2023 trip to Amsterdam due to poor planning on my part. But it’s less than an hour by train and we grabbed the opportunity yesterday.
Wow. The Rijksmuseum is very big. We stayed in it for almost five hours (including a lunch break) but it still wasn’t enough. Despite knowing the Netherlands well, I think it may have been my first visit. I hope it will not be my last.
Starting with the Night Watch – carefully protected from the public, which is probably just as well as it allows you to take it all in. But I guess I hadn’t realised that it is in a genre of squad portraits. Here is another by Bartholomeus van der Helst, the Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Münster, from 1648:
On the cuirasse of the large chap on the right, you can see the reflections of three of his neighbours.
Also up in that gallery there is a little Vermeer alcove with seven of his household scenes. There’s something very attractive and eye-catching about his use of light. The Milkmaid is (by a small margin) my favourite.
Much much food for future #ThursdayArt posts here (I do this occasionally on most of my social media channels). Three other things at the Rijksmuseum that made me stop in my tracks:
This isn’t Great Art, but it’s the transom of the English navy’s flagship, the Royal Charles, captured by the Dutch in 1667, in full sight of the impotent English leadership. When he heard the news, Samuel Pepys lamented, “I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone…” and warned his family that he himself, as a senior naval administrator, might be the target of political violence. It was the worst ever defeat for the English navy in home waters. The Dutch used the captured flagship as a party boat for a while, but scrapped it a few years later, saving the stern for public display.
Both Anne and I stopped and went ‘gosh’ when we saw this 1815 portrait of Emma Jane Hodges, daughter of the Anglo-Dutch painter Charles Howard Hodges. She was born in 1791 (so is 24 here) and lived to 1868; she did not marry, and left her collection of her father’s paintings to the Rijksmseum. Something about the use of light and the expression on her face really grabbed us.
And the third thing that grabbed me goes without saying. Most of the Van Goghs in Amsterdam are (unsurprisingly) in the Van Gogh Museum, but the 1888 Wheatfield really calls out to you across a crowded room.
Other things that caught our eye in the Rijksmuseum:
Lots of model ships!
In the navy – Yes, you can sail the seven seas In the navy – Yes, you can put your mind at ease In the navy – Come on now, people, make a stand In the navy, in the navy
Two different but similar treatments of St Ursula with her virgins.
One of several magnificent doll’s houses (the Dutch royals are really into them).
Also a brilliant exhibition of American photography, and much else that I ran out of energy before recording.
I should say two more things. First, the 18th-century art is really not a patch on the 17th-century Golden Age stuff. It picks up again during and after the Napoleonic wars, but it’s as if the artistic impulses were exhausted after Remrandt, Vermeer and all those folks.
Second, there was a very interesting section about art and Dutch colonialism in Asia and the Americas (apart from the Caribbean and Suriname, I had forgotten that they occupied a large chunk of Brazil for 24 years). The commentary is frank about the nature of colonial exploitation and the human damage done by the enterprise.
Wereldmuseum Leiden
We had been to what used to be the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden back in 2021, but returned to it for a temporary exhibition on gold. Lots of gold to see here, including these reliquaries:
And Thom Puckey’s sculpture, The Wife of the Alchemist, dedicated to the legend of Perenelle Flamel.
Also one can never get enough of the Buddha Room.
The Observatory and Hortus Botanicus
Not the best of weather for the Leiden botanical gardens, but the observatory had a nice little art exhibition about time and science and plants.
Here at the entrance is a fantastic rotating assembly of lenses with spotlights shining through them, by Jos Agasi.
And this is very simply the decay of a shoe over the ages, by Oscar Santillán.
The Pieterskerk
The deconsecrated Pieterskerk was the last of our tourism stops; it has a nice corner dedicated to the Pilgrim Fathers who worshipped there.
And then home. It’s a bit more than two hours to drive for us; for those of you coming from further away, there’s a direct train connection to Schiphol airport, and plenty to see (and eat and drink). Recommended!
See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50% is actually set in Canada, as explained further below. This is a case where the winner is way ahead of the field, and also where the winner is really not in the least surprising.
L.M. Montgomery does pretty well here. I was looking back to see if we have had any other countries so far with seven out of eight books by women writers, and to my surprise the answer is yes, there have been four of the previous 38: South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran. Which might not be the four you would have guessed.
The top two books tagged “Canada” by LT and GR users by score were The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, and Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, neither of which is set in Canada at all as far as I remember. The setting of Room, by Emma Donoghue, is not specified geographically as far as I can tell, and I thought quite carefully about whether to qualify it or not; but it’s based on events in Austria, and although the film was made in Canada, it is explicitly set in Ohio. On the other hand, my memory of Station Eleven is that most of it is set on what is now the Canadian side of the lakes, so I let it through.
Two more Margaret Atwood novels, Oryx and Crake and The Testaments, are set or mostly set in what is currently the United States, but who knows where we may be in a few weeks’ time? That still leaves her The Blind Assassin, which is explicitly set in Ontario. Alias Grace missed the cut by a hair’s breadth.
Next up: Poland, then Morocco, Angola and Ukraine. But I’m going to skip next week as I’ll be at Gallifrey One.
Key sections of the lengthy technical document focussed on a comparison between setting up a Stormont-run RHI scheme, or a grant-based scheme, called a challenge fund. The challenge fund would competitively allocate the available funding from the Treasury each year, allowing the market to provide the most cost-effective means of using the money. Once the funding ran out each year, it would shut, making it impossible to overspend. The alternative, an RHI scheme, would by contrast provide ongoing payments over 20 years to each boiler owner, with the payments linked to how much heat they produced. Having examined the numbers, it was clear to CEPA that the challenge fund provided vastly superior value for money.
This is a tremendous expose of the colossal scandal that brought down the Northern Ireland power-sharing executive government in early 2017, taking another three years before it was restored (and then it was gone again in two years, being restored only a year ago). The guts of the story are that a subsidy for using renewable heat sources for commercial purposes was perversely structured so that the state effectively paid users to burn biomass; “cash for ash” as it was dubbed.
McBride was at the forefront of breaking this story through the News Letter, and the BBC was also particularly strong on the case (to the point that when I bumped into Arlene Foster in 2019, with a BBC journalist by my side, she chatted pleasantly with me while totally cutting my companion). It still doesn’t get to the bottom of the question – did anyone consciously legislate for this bottomless subsidy to arise? – but there is one obvious key beneficiary.
Once it became clear that far from subsidising the vast cash giveaway, the UK government was going to claw it back from the Northern Ireland budget, the shit hit the fan and politicians and ministers began manoeuvring not just to avoid blame but also to extract the maximum amount of money from the system before it was closed. As a BBC journalist put it:
‘Those ongoing costs are likely to be at least £400 million. That could have paid for the new Omagh Hospital, the dualling of the A26 at Frosses [between Ballymena and Ballymoney], the York Street Interchange and the Belfast Rapid Transit System. With £15m left over.’
McBride despairs over the incompetence of the Civil Service in allowing the system to have arisen in the first place, and the incompetence of ministerial oversight. Jonathan Bell, the DUP minister who actually exposed the scandal in the first place, is himself exposed as bad-tempered and over-indulging in alcohol, under-briefed and displacing responsibility. Arlene Foster, on whose watch the scheme was set up and who then became First Minister, seems to have been curiously indifferent to the potential problems.
If Arlene Foster had followed the example of Peter Robinson, and stepped aside for a few weeks for a preliminary investigation to clear her of personal misconduct, devolution would have continued and the DUP would likely still be the largest party in Northern Ireland. As it was, she let ego override strategy, not for the first or last time. Sinn Fein also come in for criticism for their management of the financial side, and for the fact that ministerial decisions are still apparently being signed off by non-elected individuals.
I won’t embarrass them, but I am glad that the two people who I know best out of the whole disappointing story, a senior DUP special advisor and a senior civil servant (now retired), come out rather well; my DUP friend was only peripherally involved by all accounts, and my civil servant friend was one of the first to realise how badly things had gone wrong and, crucially, to accept responsibility.
I felt at the time that it was actually quite healthy for a Stormont government to fall over an actual issue of governance, rather than something related to the Norn Iron Problem – the only precedent is the deposition of John Miller Andrews in 1943. McBride however shows that the Norn Iron Problem includes the problem of a very small pool of political and administrative talent in a territory with such a small population, and this was one of the factors in the RHI scandal.
This is something that I have observed in my dealings with other small states. The issue isn’t whether the polity is economically viable, it’s whether there are enough smart people around to run it properly. I think the critical mass is probably around 2 million, the size of Slovenia, unless you have positive immigration boosting the numbers (eg Luxembourg). Northern Ireland, at 1.7 million, isn’t quite there yet.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019; you can get it here. Next on that pile is A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell.
End of this very enjoyable series of graphic novels, which tells the story of the reawakening of King Arthur as an evil undead monster and the efforts of our plucky heroes (grandma, grandson, grandson’s girlfriend) to contain the situation. Loads more archetypes from English cultural history get thrown in here, notably King Lear and T.S. Eliot, and the ending is suitably dramatic and more or less final. It’s nice to see a project like this reach a satisfying ending. You can get it here.
As to the others… Bảo Duy was endearing but reckless, and Lành was extremely difficult to deal with or protect, which added to the annoyance.
A lovely dark story about four women from different Vietnamese spacefaring clans, who get thrown together to ward off an unspeakable horror which threatens them all, with undercurrents of deadly inter-clan politics and internal romance. The protagonist is subtly coded as autistic as well. The novella is often the ideal length for a story like this, allowing the writer to put in enough world-building and characterisation and yet not get lost in too long a plot. You can get it here.
Current A Brilliant Void, ed. Jack Fennell Inside the Stargazers’ Palace, by Violet Moller Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee
Last books finished The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells Ithaca, by Claire North Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin De bondgenoten 1, by Brecht Evens Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Richard Dinnick et al Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh
Next books Doctor Who: TARDIS Type Forty Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott
