Since late 2003, I’ve been recording (almost) every book that I have read. At 200-300 books a year, that’s over 5,000 books that I have written up here. These are the most recent; I also record the books I have read each week and each month. These days each review includes the second paragraph of the third chapter of each book, just for fun; and also usually a purchase link for Amazon UK. (Yes, I know; but I get no other financial reward for writing all of this.)
I have a couple of other blogging projects. Every 1 January, I post about science fiction stories set in the year to come, but written more than twenty years before. So far I have done this for 2020 (little did we know…), 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.
I am also posting weekly analysis of the most well-known book set in every country, by the imperfect measure of ownership on the three main bookshelf sites, LibraryThing, Goodreads and Storygraph. You can find those posts here.
This WordPress blog replaced my Livejournal in March 2022. I was able to copy across all of my old Livejournal posts; unfortunately the internal links in old posts will still in general point back to Livejournal, and though I was able to import images, I wasn’t able to import videos, so it’s a little imperfect.
Comments welcome.
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When I first started watching The Invasion in 2006, I wrote of the animations:
Episode 1 is one of those for which the original video footage has been lost, and only the soundtrack survives. The DVD, however, includes an animation of the style used by the BBC for the Scream of the Shalka and Shada for it, and while it is not a patch on watching real actors deliver their lines, it is much more satisfactory than either soundtrack alone, or the animations generated by fans, or following along the BBC photonovels while trying to listen to the words. Well done to the animators.
The Invasion, from later in that season, leading up to The War Games, is quite a different matter. I’ve commented already on the brilliant idea of using animations for the two episodes (of the right in total) which are missing. I can bear to listen to an entire series in audio, but to mix audio and video is a different matter. I’ve tried the fan “reconstructions”, but don’t find them satisfactory; likewise watching the BBC photonovel combined with listening to the audio. But this format works, although of course once you get back to the live action episodes you realise what you are missing.
Kevin Stoney, as Tobias Vaughn, is a fantastic villain, and every scene with him is great to watch. He is a totally convincing invulnerable sinister scientist oligarch conspiring with the enemies of mankind, and yet achieves a certain measure of redemption at the end. He was, of course, also great as the super-villain Mavic Chen in The Dalek Master Plan, though Chen is quite a different character. (And he popped up in I CLAVDIVS as Tiberius’ court astrologer, Thrasyllus – who is indeed a historical character.) The story is really about Vaughn’s journey as much as about anything else.
Poor Jamie doesn’t get to do a lot, apart from canoeing and climbing up the liftshaft, but the other main characters are all great – Troughton as ever brilliant, but also Wendy Padbury as Zoe sparking a very very watchable rapport with Sally Faulkner’s Isobel Watkins – and incidentally saving the day and blowing up the Cybermen’s fleet with her Mental Powers of Calculation. And of course this is the first UNIT story, with the return of Lethbridge-Stewart (now a Brigadier) and the first appearance of Benton. Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier in particular gets some really good material to work with, a far cry from the cartoonish character of the Pertwee years. Again, the DVD reveals just how much fun the cast were having, especially thanks to the hospitality provided by the Guinness brewery where a lot of the action scenes were filmed.
Some reviewers have expressed bitter disappointment with the Cybermen, either that they don’t have enough screen time, or that they don’t look good, or (inconsistently) both. I don’t completely share those feelings. The Cybermen aren’t seen until the end of episode 4, but that’s really because we have not been told who is behind the invasion of the story’s title. It is a bit unfortunate that much of the action of blowing up spaceships, etc, happens off screen – but of course mediated through that new-fangled radar stuff. I also have the controversial view that the Cybermen redesign is better than the original version – I think supporting evidence is that the new version has survived through to this year.
The only other thing that really annoyed me was the cheery music accompanying the arrival of the soldiers for the final battle (apparently real soldiers from the real army). But the rest of the music is very good, and the whole thing is a jolly good package.
For my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:
The Cybermen are back (though not reallly for long) in The Invasion, and so are the villain and one of the heroes from The Daleks’ Master Plan, Kevin Stoney appearing as the rich mad industrialist Tobias Vaughn, and Nicholas Courtney making a return as Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, now promoted to Brigadier. (The first surviving shot of the latter is of his backside as he emerges from a piece of equipment).
Given how little we actually see of the Cybermen here, it feels more like The Avengers, with the Brigadier trying to stop Vaughn’s plan, though eventually relying on Zoe to destroy the approaching fleet (seen only on radar) and on the Doctor to talk Vaughn into renouncing his allies. Taking a longer view, it’s the most New Who-ish story so far, with an alien threat to contemporary Earth (which never happened in the Hartnell era, and only three times out of 21 Troughton stories, though it was a staple storyline of both the Pertwee years and of RTD) combined with recurring characters and family dynamics among the Doctor’s allies.
It’s a very slashtastic story as well, with the strongly sapphic dynamic between Zoe and Isobel Watkins matched by the Doctor and Jamie playing around in canals and tunnels (the Brigadier being the gooseberry) and even the weird powerplay between Vaughn and his increasingly panicky security man, Packer. The music is also particularly good, with the notable exception of the jaunty military theme which destroys the tension of crucial scenes in the last couple of episodes.
Rewatching it now, a couple of points occurred to me. The eight episodes are distinctly padded (as with the ten episodes of The War Games) by our regular cast running into trouble, getting captured, escaping and then running back into trouble again. But on the flip side, there is a lot of characterization – Robert Sidaway’s Captain Jimmy Turner is an alternative love interest for Isobel (Zoe looks distinctly put out, but which of them is she jealous of?) and the relationship between Vaughn and his sidekick Packer, played by Peter Halliday, is interesting too. But the fact that all the crucial action happens off screen in the final episode is a real letdown.
The novelization is one of those done by Ian Marter, who also played one of Tom Baker’s companions, Harry Sullivan. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
‘I thought we were going in there to find the lassies’, he complained.
Somehow Marter managed to find his creative spark for his last three novelizations, which are all cracking good reads. The Invasion, also from the 1968-69 season, also featured Jamie and Zoe, and concerned Cybermen invading a near-contemporary London; it also brought back the character of Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart as the Brigadier in charge of UNIT. This was an eight-part story when first broadcast, cut down for Marter’s 1985 novel to 160 pages, so a rather extreme compression. But somehow, Marter makes it work as he failed to with his previous Second Doctor stories; he had better material to start with, true, but the plot is somewhat easier to follow in his novel than in Derrick Sherwin and Kit Pedler’s original script. The villainous Tobias Vaughn, briliantly brought to life by Kevin Stoney on screen, is actually better in some ways here, with several hints that he has already become more—or perhaps less—than completely human, and his change of heart at the end of the story, when he turns on his Cyberman former allies, more consistently portrayed as a fanatic changing targets rather than as the human being brought to his senses whom we saw on television. At the same time, no written description can possibly convey Stoney’s sinister drawl, now available to all on a recently released DVD. There is also, unusually, an injection rather than a subtraction of humour by Marter, with a running joke about the awful tea in UNIT headquarters.
Rereading it, I am struck by the efficiency of Marter’s story telling – the eight episodes get 21 pages, then 25, 20, 19, 22, and the last three 17 pages each. Though perhaps this also illustrates that once he had cut out all the padding, there was a fairly lean story left to tell. You can get the novelization here.
Stephen Hatcher’s Black Archive on the story is a solid look at how The Invasion fitted and fits into the history of Doctor Who and pop culture of the day. The first chapter, “The Doctor, the Brigadier and the Swinging Sixties” makes the point that at the time it was written, the decision to exile the Doctor to Earth in Season Seven had been made, but Troughton and Hines had not yet decided to leave, so the story was potentially setting up a Two/Jamie plus UNIT plus Isabel Watkins dynamic for the next set of stories. That didn’t all come off, obviously, but it’s an unusual Who story in that it was written looking ahead to the future of the show; most of them aren’t.
The second chapter, “England Swings Like a Pendulum Do”, looks briefly at the previous Who stories set in the present day, whenever that happened to be, and then at the role of transistor radios and photographers, both crucial story elements of The Invasion, in making the Sixties swing.
The third chapter, “Doctor Who and the Playboys, Spies and Private Eyes”, looks at the crossover between TV spy shows and Doctor Who, notably The Avengers‘ episode “The Cybernauts” which shares significant plot elements with The Invasion. Also Robert Vaughn, lead actor in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., shares a surname with the villainous Tobias. Its second paragraph is:
The 60s was a period when the Cold War between the USA with its allies in NATO² and the Soviet Union and its fellow members of the Warsaw Pact was at its height. This prolonged period of antagonism between the nuclear-armed superpowers lasted from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Although for most of that period, hostilities were confined to ‘proxy wars’ like the Korean War (1950-53) and the war in Vietnam (1954-75), the Cold War was prone to heating up, in response to events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and Soviet actions in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Afghanistan (1979). Throughout the Cold War, the intelligence services of both sides are known to have been very active in keeping their respective governments aware of what the other side were up to. In Britain in particular, the revelation of the activities of the ‘Cambridge Spies’ – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – between 1951 and 1963, and the escape from Wormwood Scrubs of the double agent George Blake in 1966, heightened interest in espionage. And, in the same way that popular literature and cinema did before both the First and Second World Wars, film and TV responded to a time of international tension with an upsurge in spy fiction. ² North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
The fourth chapter, “Doctor Who and the Invaders from Space”, looks at the influence of Quatermass, the character of the Brigadier, and the odd resonance of the long-forgotten TV show Counterstrike.
The fifth chapter, “Doctor Who and the Captains of Industry”, looks briefly at boardroom dramas such as The Troubleshooters and The Power Game, and their real life counterparts.
The sixth chapter, “Doctor Who and the squaddies”, looks at the impact of National Service on Britain and in particular on director Douglas Camfield. This is perhaps the moment to acknowledge that Gareth Roberts was correct a few weeks ago to assert that Camfield was pretty right-wing, though the other members of the cast and crew say that he never let it affect his work.
The seventh chapter, “Absence of the Cybermen”, points out that although the Cybermen are only in the second half of the story, it nonetheless had a big impact on subsequent Cyberman stories.
A conclusion asserts briefly that
The Invasion is the Doctor Who story that brings together so much of what was good about 1960s film and television drama, and in doing so it may be the story from that era that is able to speak the most to twenty-first century audiences.
I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I will say that Hatcher has given me new appreciation for a story that I already liked anyway. You can get his Black Archive here.
I’ll also observe that this volume lifts the Second Doctor a little from his under-representation in the Black Archives. This is the first Black Archive about a Second Doctor story since 2019; it is the 84th in the series and The Underwater Menace was the 40th. 19.0% of his stories and 19.3% of his episodes have been covered in the series so far; this is the lowest of any of the first eight Doctors, and taking all Doctors into account, it’s more stories proportionally than the Tenth Doctor’s 13.5% and more episodes than the Ninth Doctor’s 15.4%, but less than anyone else except the special cases of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctors. (If you’re interested, apart from the special cases of the Eighth and Shalka Doctors, the Seventh Doctor is way in the lead.) I am not blaming anyone for this; I was looking forward to last year’s planned volume on The Enemy of the World, but it never appeared.
Doctor
Stories
BA’ed
%age
Episodes
BA’ed
%age
Eighth
2
2
100.0%
2
2
100.0%
Shalka
1
1
100.0%
1
1
100.0%
Seventh
12
8
66.7%
42
30
71.4%
Sixth
11
4
36.4%
31
14
45.2%
Fourth
41
13
31.7%
172
54
31.4%
Thirteenth
24
6
25.0%
26
12
46.2%
First
29
10
34.5%
134
48
35.8%
Third
24
6
25.0%
103
33
32.0%
Fifth
21
6
28.6%
68
20
29.4%
Twelfth
35
8
22.9%
36
10
27.8%
Eleventh
39
8
20.5%
39
10
25.6%
Ninth
10
2
20.0%
13
2
15.4%
Second
21
4
19.0%
119
23
19.3%
Tenth
36
5
13.9%
39
8
20.5%
Fifteenth
16
1
6.3%
18
1
5.6%
Fourteenth
3
0
0.0%
3
0
0.0%
As soon as someone does one of the Fourteenth Doctor episodes, he’ll zoom to halfway up the table.
Links about China and EU-China relations that caught my eye this week
1) A useful roundup from POLITICO on the big EU-China issue: the trade imbalance (I don’t know about you, but it comes up in every China-related meeting that I have):
2) An intriguing report from Reuters suggesting that some in China have got the hint, and that electric vehicle makers are being urged not to race to the bottom on price:
4) Fan culture meets Chinese history through the shitong nü. Fangirls offer ibuprofen at the tomb of Cao Cao, for his headaches. It’s a bit late – he died in 280 AD!
5) A fragment of Roman silk found on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert in 1914 shows just how ancient the trading and cultural links between China and Europe are, as my old friend Peter Stewart explains.
Current The Owned Continent, by Dave Keating Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife, by Sigrid Undset Sunak at 10: The Last Conservative Prime Minister?, by Anthony Seldon and Tom Egerton
Last books finished The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth Upon a White Horse, by Peter Ross Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr Gods and Monsters: Sutekh & Omega: Eltralla, by Ian Winterton, Mark Griffiths et al
Next books Fear Itself, by Nick Wallace Silent Earth, by Dave Goulson Léopoldville 60, by Baudouin Deville
I hugely enjoyed Jeff Smith’s Bone when it first came out, but am sorry to say that I was less impressed with this. It’s the first volume of two about Tuki, an ancient human hunter on the African plains, who is seeking a mythic herd of buffalo and accompanied by three children and by assorted hominids of other species. There is a lot of magic, which makes this a palaeohuman fantasy in a way. I felt that it lacked the humanity and humor that made Bone such a great work, and didn’t really get what the story was supposed to be about. Other people liked it more. You can get Tuki: Fight for Fire here.
This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen, by Kate Evans.
Second paragraph of third chapter (about Ian Paisley):
At the same time, Paisley was aggressive, mean, a bully, and gratuitously insulting. He made up mocking names for his opponents, like Donald Trump much later. For example, in one of the early issues of the organs of the DUP, the Protestant Telegraph, April 21, 1972, Paisley went on about “Hill-Billy” Whitelaw (for Viscount William Whitelaw, the first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland after Direct Rule was imposed in 1972), and “Liar Lynch” (for Jack Lynch, the Taoiseach of Ireland).⁴ He “generated fear” in everyone around him, as Eamon Mallie and David McKittrick put it in their BBC TV series on the Troubles.⁵ The journalist Eamonn Holmes has said recently that, “I defy anyone to say that lan Paisley in his prime was not scary.” ⁶ ⁴ The Protestant Telegraph, April 21, 1972. DS. ⁵ Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick, Endgame in Ireland (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001), 275ff. ⁶ Eamonn Holmes, “Clinton’s Men Tried to Arrest Me Under the Christmas Lights,” Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, eds., Reporting the Troubles: Journalists Tell Their Stories of the Northern Ireland Conflict (Newtownards, Northern Ireland: 2018), 158.
This is a sympathetic book by an outsider. Stormier is both a retired professor of history and a qualified psychoanalyst, and his previous books include two studies of Abraham Lincoln, two books on Christian fundamentalism, and an analysis of the psychological reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Here he gives us a historical account, with nuances rooted in psychology, of the personalities behind the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the process that led to it.
My own first thought on reading the book is that asking why the Good Friday Agreement talks succeeded is a very good question. Many, perhaps most, negotiations around deep-rooted conflicts fail. Look at Cyprus; look at the Israel/Palestine situation; look indeed at the current dynamic between the USA and Iran (I am writing this in mid-August but I think it will be the same when this appears in early September). Even South Africa, held up so often as a paragon of how to do it, had a collapse of the process in mid-1992 with awful violence resulting.
There were several junctures where the Northern Ireland process could have gone in a different and less successful direction, and it’s worth remembering that the timescale was quite short – it was only a decade since the Anglo-Irish Agreement, only twenty-five years since Sunningdale; these were closer to 1998 than 1998 is to us now.
Crozier’s main source for his book is John Alderdice, who was the leader of the cross-community Alliance Party from 1987 to 1998. Crozier interviewed Alderdice expensively and has also had a very good browse through his records. I myself worked very closely with Alderdice from 1993 to 1996, and we have stayed in touch since I left Northern Ireland in early 1997, so even where he is not explicitly quoted I recognized some of his thoughts and analysis coming through.
This is not a bad thing at all – if you have one excellent source to hand, you may as well use it, provided (as in this case) that it is tempered with other sources, in particular the first-hand published accounts of a number of the leading players, notably George Mitchell, and key biographical notes, notably Dean Godson’s on David Trimble (in which I believe I get a credit myself). There is still the occasional slip, and I think the book would have benefited from a final read-through by someone familiar enough with Northern Ireland to catch the occasional point of detail that has gone astray (eg Dolours Price becomes “Jean Dolours”).
The book starts with a 50-page profile of John Alderdice including an introduction to the Northern Ireland situation for beginners. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, who became a psychiatrist, married to a pathologist, but also committed to politics. I had not realized that his family and the Paisleys were near neighbors when he grew up in Ballymena, though there is a big generational difference between them (Ian Paisley was 19 years older).
We then get twenty-page pen portraits of the other leading political figures: Paisley, Adams, Hume and Trimble. Paisley’s participation in the Good Friday Agreement itself was marginal, but it cannot be denied that he is the most dominant Unionist figure, possibly the most dominant figure of any variety, during the Troubles and that Northern Ireland’s troubled psyche ran in tracks that he laid down. There is no mystery about Paisley. Adams is more enigmatic.
After a note about the role of women in the peace process, Crozier then looks at the sequence on the American side that brought Washington into the room, and at the confluence of events in 1994-1995 that led to the ceasefires. This was the period when I myself was most closely involved, and there are a couple of incidents where, while I wasn’t in the room where it happened, I heard about it shortly afterwards from one or more of the protagonists.
I sat on the back benches for the first six months of the 1996-98 talks chaired by George Mitchell. It was a morale-sapping experience, though I did have one good moment when John Alderdice presented a paper on decommissioning of arms that Stephen Farry and I had written, and received compliments from several of the other talks participants. (I think we later published it, but cannot remember where).
My most vivid memory is Jeffrey Donaldson vigorously defending the rights of Orangemen to march through Drumcree – this was 1996, the year that the march was first blocked and then forced through by the police). Nobody enjoyed that phase of the talks, with the DUP and Robert McCartney inside and Sinn Fein outside. McCartney in particular was a complete waste of space, droning on about the purity of his cause so monotonously that even his supposed DUP allies looked bored to death. I left in December, never to return.
However, the point made by Crozier (and not only by him) is that the psychological effect of having party leaders sitting and listening quietly (if not necessarily respectfully) to each other meant that everyone’s point of view received exposure, and it also established the place of action as that depressing room in Castle Buildings (where the ground floor was labelled ‘3’, and the talks took place two stories up on floor 5; we never discovered what lay beneath, but it was rumoured to be the government’s nuclear bunker). That in itself reinforced the credibility of the process, and made Paisley and McCartney look irrelevant once they left.
Post-1998 developments are handled rather quickly in Crozier’s book, which is a shame – the dynamics of the St Andrew’s Agreement of 2007 which brought the DUP into government directly with Sinn Féin, Ian Paisley sharing the top spot with Martin McGuinness, are an important part of the later story.
By then, John Alderdice had moved on to other roles (though he retained an important post as a monitor of paramilitary activity including decommissioning, the subject that Stephen and I had written for him about ten years before); and because Crozier’s main source is off the scene he doesn’t go much beyond the headlines. But this is a book about the Good Friday Agreement, not about Northern Ireland in the last forty years, so I accept it for what it is.
I was thrilled when I belatedly discovered that I had made the long list of nominees for Best Fan Writer in this year’s Hugos. In most recent years I have been ineligible because I was involved with administering the awards. This year, thirteen of you cared enough about my meanderings here and elsewhere to put me on your ballot. I am very grateful. Next year I will even vote for myself!
From the published numbers I can work out a fair bit about my votes. First of all, the total number of points in the system drops by five after I am eliminated, so that means that five of the thirteen votes were for me and no other surviving nominees at that stage. Thank you again!
The other eight votes added up to a total of 2.95 EPH points, and were distributed from me as follows:
0.8 to Örjan Westin 0.72 to James Davis Nicoll 0.5 to Roseanne Pendlebury 0.38 to Cora Buhlert 0.25 to Paul Weimer 0.16 to Jake Casella Brookins 0.08 to Brandon O’Brien 0.05 to Adam Whitehead
That adds to 2.94 rather than 2.95, because of rounding.
We know that those eight votes were worth 0.5, 0.33, 0.25 or 0.2 points each when they sat with me. There is only one combination of eight votes of those values that is worth 2.95 points:
3 votes worth 0.5 each 3 votes worth 0.33 each 1 vote worth 0.25 1 vote worth 0.2
A little bit of squinting and the following becomes clear:
Three votes were for me and one each of Örjan Westin, James David Nicoll and Roseanna Pendlebury. When I was eliminated they gained 0.5 of a point from those votes.
Two votes were shared by me and Cora Buhlert, and one or other of Örjan Westin, James Davis Nicoll, Paul Weimer and Jake Casella Brookins. Another vote was shared by me and the other two of those four. When I was eliminated, Cora gained 0.33 of a point and the other four 0.17 each.
One vote was shared between me, Örjan Westin, Paul Weimer and Brandon O’Brien. When I was eliminated they each gained 0.08 points from that vote.
One vote was shared between me, Örjan Westin, James Davis Nicoll, Cora Buhlert and Adam Whitehead. When I was eliminated they each gained 0.05 points from that vote.
The raw numbers of votes that I shared with other surviving finalists are as follows:
5 – nobody 4 – Örjan Westin 3 – James Davis Nicoll and Cora Buhlert 2 – Paul Weimer 1 – Roseanna Pendlebury, Jake Casella Brookins, Brandon O’Brien and Adam Whitehead
(Strictly, the votes are calculated by multiplying everything by 60, so as not to lose the fractions. The decimal conversion is what is reported, but it is not the actual calculation.)
If I’d had twice as many votes, I’d have been a finalist! (If.)
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
The Northern Ireland Assembly had an election in March 2007, the last one for which I did not do TV commentary, though I went over a few days later in the wake of P-Con and delivered a lecture about voting.
Apart from that, I had a day-trip to the Hague, and a longer trip to Vienna and Prishtina, all for work.
And I hired my first intern in the new job. J was an intelligent young woman who had tried various career options which didn’t work out, and was prepared to give working in international politics a fling. I’m glad to say that she caught the bug and is now a British diplomat. It also turned out that her elder brother was friends with their neighbour Rebecca Nation, the daughter of Terry Nation who wrote a lovely book for her, and J had played with real Daleks as a child. (For certain values of “real”.) I met Rebecca and Joel Nation earlier this year, and they were amused by the connection.
4,000 pages (YTD 18,400) 5/14 by women (YTD 17/59) None by PoC (YTD 2/59)
The two best of these were the excellent graphic novel Blankets, which you can get here, and Shapiro’s look at Shakespeare in 1599, which you can get here. I do not particularly recommend the novelisation of problematic Doctor Who story The Celestial Toymaker, but you can get it here anyway (at a price).
When the officer handed me my astrolabe, I resisted the urge to snatch it back. He was an old Khoush man, so old that he was privileged to wear the blackest turban and face veil. His shaky hands were so gnarled and arthritic that he nearly dropped my astrolabe. He was bent like a dying palm tree and when he’d said, “You have never traveled; I must do a full scan. Remain where you are,” his voice was drier than the red desert outside my city. But he read my astrolabe as fast as my father, which both impressed and scared me. He’d coaxed it open by whispering a few choice equations and his suddenly steady hands worked the dials as if they were his own.
I first readBinti on a transatlantic flight while reading up on Hugo-eligible short fiction for 2016. I wasn’t hugely impressed and have never really understood the general enthusiasm for it. When it made the shortlist for the BSFA Award, I wrote:
Some people have been raving about this, but I don’t really see why. The plot (plucky kid survives alien attack, makes peace between aliens and humans) is hardly original, and the fact that the protagonist’s tribal adornments uniquely give her protection against the aliens is pretty cliched. Yes, well written; yes, interesting characters; no, not a masterpiece.
By the time Hugo voting came around, it has already won the Nebula, and I wrote:
I expect that this will win, and indeed it has already won the Nebula. As I said when I read it for the BSFA vote, the plot (plucky kid survives alien attack, makes peace between aliens and humans) is hardly original, and the fact that the protagonist’s tribal adornments uniquely give her protection against the aliens is pretty cliched. But obviously it appealed to a lot of readers.
I re-read it again for this post, and did not like it any better. I would add that the writing style of the first few chapters is rather clunky, and the protagonist forgives the aliens rather rapidly for massacring most of her friends. None of the ideas are original or especially well executed. Obviously a critical mass disagrees with me, but there you go.
When the Hugo results came out, Binti had been only second at the nominations stage, but won a convincing victory on the final ballot.
I see that both Witches of Lychford and “The New Mother” were on the long list; I liked both much more. Emily Tesh keeps telling us to go back and read “Sorcerer of the Wildeeps”, and maybe I will.
Next in my sequence of joint Hugo and Nebula winners are the two from my own first year as Hugo administrator, “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar and Every Heart a Doorwayby Seanan McGuire.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 56) Théo Van Rysselberghe, ed. Paul Holberton Brian W. Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid Making Peace in Northern Ireland, by Charles B. Strozier The Invasion, by Stephen Hatcher The Compleat Angler, by Isaak Walton Hail, Penang!, by George Bilainkin Racebook, by Tochi Onyebuchi Upon a White Horse, by Peter Ross
Non-genre 6 (YTD 33) Autumn, by Ali Smith Sleeping Murder, by Agatha Christie Dead Lions, by Mick Herron Send Him Victorious, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth
Play 1 (YTD 2) Death and the King’s Horseman, by Wole Soyinka
SF 9 (YTD 65) Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker (did not finish) Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor Little Green Men and other stories, by Chris Boucher The Listeners, by James Gunn Last Exit, by Max Gladstone (did not finish) Blake’s 7: Their First Adventure, by Trevor Hoyle Blake’s 7: Project Avalon, by Trevor Hoyle Blake’s 7: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle
Comics 3 (YTD 23) Tuki: Fight for Fire, by Jeff Smith The Compleat Angler: A Graphic Adaptation, by Gareth Brookes and Izaak Walton Vos en Haas op zoek naar koek, by Sylvia Vanden Heede, ill. Thé Thong-Khing
~6,900 pages (YTD 56,700) 5/30 (YTD 84/234) by non-male writers (Smith, Christie, Okorafor, Colgan, Vanden Heede) 4/30 (YTD 24/234) by writers of colour (Onyebuchi, Matsumoto, Soyinka, Thé) 5 out of 30 reread (Sleeping Murder, The Day of the Jackal, Binti, The Eye of the Tyger) 187 books currently tagged unread, down 16 from last month, down 22 from August 2025.
Reading now Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr The Owned Continent, by Dave Keating Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife, by Sigrid Undset Sunak at 10: The Last Conservative Prime Minister?, by Anthony Seldon and Tom Egerton
Coming soon (perhaps) Gods and Monsters: Omega and Sutekh, by Ian Winterton and Mark Griffiths Fear Itself, by Nick Wallace Charles Darwin and the Silurian Survival, by L.D. Lapinski
Silent Earth, by Dave Goulson Christopher Priest: The Interaction, ed. Andrew M. Butler Agents, Adepts and Apprentices, by Kathryn Sullivan Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, by Paula Frederiksen
Léopoldville 60, by Baudouin Deville ”Seasons of Glass and Iron”, by Amal el-Mohtar Patchwork, by Kate Evans Raising Hare, by Chloe Dalton Midaq Alley, by Naguib Mahfouz The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi All That We See or Seem, by Ken Liu Jingo, by Terry Pratchett Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy Septology, by Jon Fosse Real Tigers, by Mick Herron Little Thieves, by Margaret Owen
Lebanon sits at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, with Syria to the east and north, and Israel to the south. It is an ancient centre of civilization and culture, and was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. It was established as a Christian-ruled protectorate in the nineteenth century and was then ruled by France from after the First World War until 1946. Its people mainly speak Arabic. It is believed that about a third of the population are respectively Shia, Sunni and various Christian denominations, with also an influential minority of the local Druze faith.
I have never been to Lebanon myself, though I love the food. It has a tragic recent history: a power-sharing arrangement between politicians of various Christian and Muslim traditions lasted until 1976, but proved unable to protect the country from internal instability and external attacks. The massive explosion at the docks in Beirut in 2020 (in which a friend of mine was injured) seemed indicative of the failure of the country’s governance.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Lebanon.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
An Unnecessary Woman
Rabih Alameddine
14,652
1,465
2,462
The Broken Wings
Kahlil Gibran
29,451
684
2,078
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
Rabih Alameddine
13,463
327
2,571
The Arsonists’ City
Hala Alyan
8,482
249
2,622
The Hakawati
Rabih Alameddine
4,660
1,008
701
The Gabriel Hounds
Mary Stewart
5,727
1,172
448
The Rock of Tanios
Amin Maalouf
8,446
684
353
A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return
Zeina Abirached
4,878
373
1,080
As sometimes happens, the three systems have three different winners. The LibraryThing winner, also this week’s overall winner, is An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine, about a widow in Beirut with few social contacts but a rich inner life. Alameddine was born in Jordan and partly grew up in Kuwait; but he identifies as Lebanese.
He has two other books in the table. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), which came out only last year, is about growing up and living in Lebanon over the last sixty years. The Hakawati is about a Lebanese man returning from America to be at his father’s deathbed.
I disqualified two of Khalil Gibran’s best known books, The Prophet and The Madman, because neither is sufficiently moored in real-world geography for me to allow them as set in Lebanon. However, The Broken Wings, this week’s Goodreads winner, is definitely set in Beirut.
The Arsonists’ City, this week’s StoryGraph winner, is about a Lebanese family who try emigrating to the USA and find it doesn’t work. As far as I can tell the US sections amount to less than half of the book. It owes its place on the list to the StoryGraph numbers; otherwise it would have slipped off the end.
I was surprised to see Mary Stewart’s name pop up here. The Gabriel Hounds, set in the 1960s, is about two British cousins who visit their mysterious great-aunt in the Lebanese mountains. It sounds like a lot of fun.
Amin Malouf is probably the best known Lebanese writer, but few of his books are actually set there. I disqualified his Samarkand, Leo Africanus, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, and Ports of Call before ending up with The Rock of Tanios, a novel set in Lebanon in the 1880s.
A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return also owes its place on the list to strong StoryGraph numbers. It is a graphic novel about life in Beirut. Zeina Abirached is the top Lebanese woman writer on the list (Hala Alyan identifies as Palestinian, and Mary Stewart of course was British).
The two books which fell off the list due to insufficiently strong StoryGraph numbers were De Niro’s Game, by Rawi Hage, and The Disoriented by Amin Maalouf.
I have already noted a number of disqualifications. The only other one that I scratched my head about was From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman, which is evenly split between Lebanon and Israel/Palestine – except that one of the Lebanon chapters is actually set in Syria, which must sink the strictly Lebanese part to below 50%.
The Middle East is not my area of expertise and I own few books with anything much about Lebanon. The one that I love is The Twenty-Two Letters by Clive King, about a boy who invents the alphabet in the city now known as Byblos on the Lebanese coast in about 1600 BC, though I don’t think it would qualify for my list even if it was better known, as much of the story concerns the journeys of the protagonist and his brothers elsewhere in the Levant. Clive King wrote it while working for the British Council in Beirut. His best known book is Stig of the Dump.
The other book almost entirely set in Lebanon that I used to own, but cannot now find on my shelves, is An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan, his account of being held hostage by Islamic Jihad from 1986 to 1990, and his friendship with fellow hostage John McCarthy. It won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize.
Coming next are three more conflict-riven countries, Liberia, the Central African Republic and Palestine, followed by Oman.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
February 2007 was the historic month that I joined Facebook. The travel highlight was a trip to the USA, taking in New York and Washington DC as usual, and finishing in very snowy Rockport, Maine, where I spoke at the annual Camden Conference.
Also more Doctor Who fan art from young F, this time a crossover with Spongebob – what if he partly changed his house into the Tardis?
Transatlantic travel and uninterrupted commuting by train allowed me to read 24 books:
7,900 pages (YTD 14,400) 8/24 (YTD 12/45) by women 1/24 (YTD 2/45) by PoC
The best of these was Julie Phillips’ biography of James Tiptree Jr / Alice B. Sheldon (get it here), though I also liked Elizabeth Bear’s Carnival (get it here) and About Time 4 (get it here) very much. I really hated The Catcher in the Rye (get it here).
Aha, she thought to herself. It’s the one with the knees.
I don’t seem to have written up the original TV story here at the time of broadcast, though I did include it in my list of Doctor Who stories for someone who hasn’t seen it yet. I rewatched it in advance of reading the novelisation. It’s the two-episode story (The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone) where River Song is busted out of jail by the Doctor and Amy, and the three find themselves allied with an army of clerics on a wrecked ship infested with Weeping Angels. It is scary, and well shot, and to be honest the plot doesn’t make a lot of sense when you hold it up the light and look for holes. But the pace is tremendous, particularly the sequence where Amy must find her way to safety while keeping her eyes closed.
It’s also the one with the controversial final scene where Amy tries to seduce the Doctor as a final fling before her wedding. Stephen Moffat has stated in retrospect that he got this scene wrong, and I agree with him. It’s not consistent with Amy’s character, and it makes her and the Doctor look both silly and stupid. Moffat has written some brilliant sex comedy scenes, stories and award-winning TV shows, but this is not one of them.
Jenny Colgan’s novelization sticks to the TV script but adds one very important nuance. This is River Song’s second appearance in the show, after her death in Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead. The following year’s stories had her origin as a major part of the overall series plot arc, as it turns out that she is actually Amy’s daughter with Rory. Colgan’s version of River Song is fully aware of this (as the viewers, and indeed probably the writer, in 2010 were not) and it adds nuance to her reactions and behaviour on being on an adventure with her own unwitting mother. Other than that, it’s a good bit of writing which does its best to cover for the vivid visuals of the original TV story. You can get The Time of Angels here.
As a bit of trivia, this is the first New Who story to have been adapted for print twice. Trevor Baxendale authored a photo-novel version for younger readers back in 2012, along with three other stories from that season – The Eleventh Hour (also by Baxendale), and Victory of the Daleks and The Lodger (by Peter Gutierrez). I have never seen any of these books in the wild – I saw a note somewhere that they were only sold in Australia. Six Twelfth Doctor stories have also had the photo-novel treatment.
“Moses, you reckon that’s where a witch’s heart is?”
I had zero expectations of this book, which I acquired through the Hugo Voter packet two years ago (part of Kelly Lonesome’s submission in the Best Editor Long Form category). I had other things on my mind that year and didn’t get very far into the BELF folder of the packet, but now it’s starting to surface in my overall reading list.
I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s a tautly written folk horror story, set mainly in Kansas shortly after the US Civil War, with a group of stragglers on a quest to catch (or alternatively rescue) a witch. There are ghosts, there are cute animals which suffer gruesome fates, there are viewpoint characters who get killed off, there are horrible secrets lurking in plain sight in the towns and farmsteads. Horror is not usually my thing, but this caught my imagination. Not for the faint-hearted, though. You can get Red Rabbit here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2024. Next on that pile is Septology, by Jon Fosse.
‘We’ve planned to take you to a show or two,’ said Raymond whilst Gwenda was drinking gin and rather wishing she could have had a cup of tea after her journey.
I had definitely read this as a teenager: the protagonist, coming to England for the first time (as she thinks) from New Zealand, buys a house with her new husband and immediately starts having flashbacks to witnessing a murder there when a small child. It’s really rather good – totally fair misdirection of the reader, Miss Marple doing her enigmatic yet clear thing, a suitably dramatic and entirely believable revelation at the end. I enjoyed it a lot when I was thirteen and I enjoyed it again now. You can get Sleeping Murder here.
This was actually the last Miss Marple book and indeed the last Agatha Christie novel to be published, coming out a few months after her death in 1976. It’s set during the Second World War, though, and was written between 1940 and 1950 (Christie scholars are divided on exactly when, but the start and end dates are agreed).
Current On a White Horse, by Peter Ross The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth
Last books finished Hail, Penang!, by George Bilainkin Dead Lions, by Mick Herron Blake’s 7: Their First Adventure, by Trevor Hoyle Send Him Victorious, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond Blake’s 7: Project Avalon, by Trevor Hoyle Racebook, by Tochi Onyebuchi Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto Blake’s Seven: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle Vos en Haas op zoek naar koek, by Sylvia Vanden Heede, ill. Thé Thong-Khing
Next books Fear Itself, by Nick Wallace Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife, by Sigrid Undset
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
Momentous times as I started my new job and new office. My first visitor was former Labour MP Dick Leonard. I travelled to London in the first week of January to meet new colleagues, and to Kosovo and Cyprus later in the month for business. Despite only just starting one new job, I interviewed for another when a long-dormant application came to life; I did not get it. I also had the miserable experience of having a laptop stolen at the Gare du Nord in Brussels.
Young F delighted us with this piece of fan art.
Now that I had started commuting largely by train, my reading rate shot up and I read 21 books in January 2007:
The narrator of the story is a science fiction writer living in Oxford. The writer is unnamed, but during the course of the story he mentions, familiarly, Jim Ballard, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, Mike Moorcock, and the author of a book called War with the Robots, which was a 1962 short story collection by Harry Harrison. This is the circle within which Oxford resident Brian Aldiss was moving at the time, so if not actually autobiographical, it certainly edges close to that territory.
This is quite a short book for such a long and significant career, but it’s a very good analysis of Aldiss’s work for those who already know it – I don’t think it would be, or is intended to be, a guide for the newcomer. Kincaid takes us through Aldiss’s life and writing, making the point that the key experience of his youth was his military service in Burma and what is now Indonesia, experiencing sexual freedom to an extent unthinkable in the 1940s England where he had grown up. He was born in 1925, so he was a very young soldier.
In fact, I think I am a bigger fan than Paul Kincaid. He finds quite a lot to criticise about many of the earlier books, and basically I like them more than he does. I admit that The Malacia Tapestry and The Eighty-minute Hour are not Great Literature, but I find them lots of fun. Having said that, I appreciated the dispassionate analysis of why some work has stood the test of time better than others.
A related point that had not really occurred to me before is that although the Helliconia trilogy was published almost exactly half way through his writing career, very little of his subsequent fiction writing was up to the level of the first few decades. This is excusable. He had achieved a lot of what he wanted, with very early success, and could afford to write what he pleased, even if it didn’t please other people. But reading this made me feel more like revisiting the earlier work which I haven’t read for decades than searching out the later writing which I have not read at all. You can get Brian W. Aldiss here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next, if I could have found it, would have been The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century. But I cannot locate it on the shelves, so instead next will be Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr.
The last three times Elisabeth’s been, he’s been asleep. He’ll be asleep this time too, when she gets there. She’ll sit on the chair next to the bed and get the book out of her bag.
Another of Ali Smith’s wonderful short novels, addressing post-Brexit Britain (published in October 2016), with the central theme the friendship between an old man and a young girl as she grows up. There’s also a fascinating meditation on the life and work of Pauline Boty, the only woman among the British Pop Artists, and lots of other gritty nuggets that make you stop and think a bit more about what you have just read. Quite a short book too, with a lot packed into it. Strongly recommended. You can get Autumn here.
This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Volume 2 of Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset.
One of the Telos novellas, which I had read years ago but not got around to blogging. By a particularly prominent author, with a foreword by Neil Gaiman that got a lot of attention at the time (before we knew, of course). There are a lot of ideas here – a chap from colonial India who is slowly turning into a tiger, a generation starship, a lion-woman princess, uploaded and downloaded intelligences; too much really for the given length, and perhaps not fully under control. You can get The Eye of the Tyger here (at a considerable price).
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
My final Crisis Group publication was a briefing on Kosovo. In my four years and eight months there, I had overseen the publication of 46 reports, 16 briefings and ten op-eds (in the last case, just counting those published under my own name; I was ghost-writer for a few more). Meanwhile I chose my new office, a serviced arrangement on Rond Point Schuman. In Belgium the big news was a hoax TV news programme announcing that Flanders had unilaterally declared independence. Gerald Ford died just after Christmas.
Anne’s sister joined us again for Christmas, which was just as well when one of the household had to be taken to casualty on Christmas Day itself (naming no names). The kids enjoyed themselves, though B’s behaviour was getting more and more difficult to manage:
7,400 pages (YTD 61,600) 4/20 (34/207) by women None (8/207) by PoC
For once I’m going to highlight one book I liked and two I didn’t, rather than the other way around. Norman Porter’s exploration of how to achieve reconciliation in Northern Ireland is very good and a partial recantation of his earlier views; you can get it here. I could not finish either Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee or Zeldin’s An Intimate History of Humanity. You can get them here and here.
2006 books roundup
This was the first year that I did a proper book roundup at the time. Reformatting that post to my current system:
Non-fiction 70 (34% – highest percentage of any year I have on record) Best of 2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea; The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century, by Robert Cooper The one you haven’t heard of: Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey into the Inferno of American Justice, by David Feige Worst of 2006: An International Relations Debacle: The UN Secretary-General’s Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus 1999-2004, by Claire Palley
SF 68 (33% – same as last year, a bit below average) Best of 2006 (not including rereads): The Wreck of The River of Stars, by Michael Flynn; Thud!, by Terry Pratchett The one you haven’t heard of: Impossible Stories, by Zoran Živković Worst of 2006: Galactic Patrol, by E.E. “Doc” Smith
Non-genre 35 (17% – about average) Best of 2006: The Warden’s Niece by Gillian Avery; The File on H, by Ismail Kadarë. The one you haven’t heard of: A Game With Sharpened Knives, by Neil Belton Worst of 2006: Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott
Doctor Who 28 (14% – this number got bigger after this year) Best of 2006: Evolution, by John Peel; Doctor Who – The Rescue, by Ian Marter Worst of 2006: (The Companions of) Doctor Who – Harry Sullivan’s War, by Ian Marter
Comics 6 (3% – lowest of any year I have on record) Best of 2005: The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon Worst of 2006: Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes (second year in a row that one of his books occupied this spot)
My second lowest percentage of books by women in all my years of monitoring, and pretty low on writers of colour as well.
Book of the year 2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea.
Singapore is a city-state on an island off the southern end of the Malay peninsula. Famously established by Stamford Raffles as a British port in 1819, it was actually under British rule for less than a century, from 1867 to 1963, with also several years of Japanese occupation during the second world war. For less than two years after the end of British rule, Singapore was one of the states in the federation of Malaysia, but declared independence on its own from 1965.
The People’s Action Party has been in power since before independence, regularly winning huge majorities in the legislature. Unlike most single-party states, Singapore has a strong market economy and a reputation for very low levels of corruption. Singapore has one of the highest PPP-adjusted GDP per capital numbers of any country in the world, certainly the highest in Asia (other competitors include Luxembourg and Liechtenstein).
Its official languages are English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil. I don’t have a lot of personal knowledge of it. It’s a constant reference point for my grandmother during the years she lived in Penang (1927-1931), which would have been just after Singapore eclipsed Penang as the most populous Chinese city outside China. I have been friendly with the contemporary sf writer Neon Yang since our Livejournal days.
See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Singapore.
Title
Author
GR raters
LT owners
SG reviews
Crazy Rich Asians
Kevin Kwan
559,748
7,372
91,168
Rich People Problems
Kevin Kwan
187,952
2,788
34,489
King Rat
James Clavell
45,455
3,196
2,100
Last Tang Standing
Lauren Ho
18,080
281
4,553
How We Disappeared
Jing-Jing Lee
12,315
326
2,670
Sister Snake
Amanda Lee Koe
5,329
147
2,279
Soy Sauce for Beginners
Kirstin Chen
8,034
198
1,066
The Original Daughter
Jemimah Wei
7,333
163
1,128
As with Denmark last week, people are generally pretty clear about which books are and aren’t set in Singapore. The clear winners are the first and third books in the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, about a young American woman’s culture shock encountering her boyfriend’s family (her in-laws in later books). The second book of the three, China Rich Girlfriend, is set in China as you might guess from the title. The writer, Kevin Kwan, was born in Singapore but has lived in the USA since he was 11.
King Rat was James Clavell’s first novel and is based on his experiences in a Japanese prison camp in Singapore during the second world war.
Last Tang Standing is a romance novel about the last unmarried woman in a large Singapore family. The author, Lauren Ho, has lived in Singapore for many years but describes herself as originally from Malaysia.
How We Disappeared is a novel about the Japanese occupation (and its penances two generations later). Jing-Jing Lee is the top woman writer from Singapore on this list. (The other three books below are also by Singaporean women.)
Sister Snake is about two women born as snakes in ancient China who live in today’s Singapore.
Soy Sauce for Beginners is about a Singaporean woman who moves home from America to run the family soy sauce business.
The Original Daughter is again about two sisters making their way in contemporary Singaporean society, though I don’t think either of them is secretly a snake.
Including the StoryGraph numbers made a bigger change than usual, bringing on the bottom three and losing Snake Agent, by Liz Williams, and two books by men, The Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell and the autobiographical From Third World to First by the country’s long time leader, Lee Kuan Yew.
I disqualified only three books for being insufficiently set in Singapore: China Rich Girlfriend as noted above, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal, which is set in London, and my friend Neon Yang’s fantasy novella The Black Tides of Heaven.
Coming next: Lebanon, Liberia, the Central African Republic and the State of Palestine.
Second paragraph of third chapter (“Théo Van Rysselberghe’s Work: A Study”, by Patricia van der Elst-Alexandre):
His portraits seem singularly real. Spread by a strong light source, shadows cut across the face, darkening the hollows, while the light illuminates the portions that are rounded and in relief. In no way does the artist try to idealize his sitters. Nor does the neutral background contribute to an embellishment of their image or disturb the spectator’s attention to the subject, who himself looks at the spectator intensely (Self-portrait with Pipe [Sketch], Spanish Woman).
Van Rysselberghe was one of the leading Belgian Neo-Impressionist painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one of the key movers in the group known as Les XX. He was particularly keen on pointillism for the middle part of his career. His work is mainly to be found in Belgium, the Netherlands and France – the National Gallery in London has one painting attributed to him, and Olivier Bertrand thinks it is really by someone else.
These are (mostly) my own photos of Van Rysselberghe’s work.
“Butchery in Tangier” (18821), representing his early visits to Morocco and his fascination with representing the light there. (In Gent.)“Pool in the Kempen” (wetlands region in Northern Belgium), one of his early landscapes (1882). (In Gent.)An early portrait (1882) of “Mme Constantin Meunier”, real name the rather lovely Léocadie Gorneaux, which I saw in Antwerp, shows the signs of Impressionism without the pointillism for which he became best known.Portrait of ten-year-old Marguerite van Mons (1886), just after the death of her mother. (In Gent.) Influenced by Whistler.Van Rysselberghe’s portrait of Maria Sethe (1891), which I also saw in Antwerp, is one of his key early Pointillist works.Valley of the Sambre (1890), a pointillist landscape. In Gent. Titled “A Reading” (1903), this is a gathering of his Belgian and French intellectual friends, listening to Émile Verhaeren (in the red jacket) reading from his latest work. They also include Maurice Maeterlinck (far left, hand on chin), Belgium’s only Nobel Prize winner for Literature, and Andre Gide (sitting down in the middle with a big moustache), on whom more below. I saw it in Gent last month.His “Standing Nude” (1919), which I saw in Haarlem, marks the point where he started shifting from pointillism to nudes.1918 portrait of Théo Van Rysselbergh, by Suzanne Weyher. (In Gent.)
Like (almost) all art books, this looks absolutely gorgeous, and traces Van Rysselberghe through his various phases and personal influences. He was particularly good at painting women, either nude or in respectable portraits, but I find his style always arresting and usually sympathetic.
The ten essays in the book are all well illustrated and mostly interesting. But I found some of the editorial choices made rather odd. The first chapter is on Van Rysselberghe’s fascination with Morocco, and the second on his professional relationship with Brussels art critic Octave Maus, the secretary of Les XX; then the third is a broader biographical piece. Why not put that first, to guide the non-expert reader?
Even more puzzling, a later chapter focusses on the correspondence between André Gide on the one hand and Van Rysselberghe and his wife Maria on the other. A cryptic sentence notes that “the warm relationship between Van Rysselberghe and Gide continued until the birth of his granddaughter Catherine in 1923; the pregnancy of his daughter Élisabeth out of wedlock displeased him”. The uninformed reader will wonder why Van Rysselberghe’s daughter’s pregnancy should affect his relationship with Gide; I think it would have been helpful context to note explicitly that Gide was Élisabeth’s lover and Catherine’s father. It was hardly a secret, and Catherine is thanked in the foreword for her help in setting up the exhibition (she would have been 83 in 2006, and lived to the age of 90).
The editorial credit is given to Paul Holberton in the front matter, but art critic Olivier Bertrand was the director of the 2006 exhibition and probably played an important role in putting the book together. He maintains a website devoted to Van Rysselberghe, on which he froths entertainingly about the mistakes made by other critics. You can get Théo Van Rysselberghe here.
Second paragraph of third essay (“Voodoonauts & Afrofuturist Dreaming: On Creating a Summer Workshop for Black Writers during a Pandemic”, by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu):
It is this reverence for the dream-scape through which I approach dreaming in all its meanings. I have a dream jar. It’s a tiny little vase in the shape of an elephant, my family’s ancestral totem, in which I place all my dreams written on sticky notes. When I’m goal setting, hoping, or even making a bucket list, I approach it as a spiritual practice. When I met Shingai Njeri Kagunda, a brilliant Afrofuturist writer from Kenya currently doing her MFA at Brown University, we talked a lot about Afrofuturist dreaming. To us, Afrofuturist dreaming is imagining what we want in the world for Black creators that doesn’t yet exist or is undervalued, and then manifesting it into a reality.
This is a collection of 18 short pieces (average seven pages each) by writers in Africa and of African descent, describing their experiences as creators and, most of all, as human beings during the pandemic. There is a strong representation from Nigeria, which is fair enough (one African in six is Nigerian), but there’s also a diversity of voices from around and beyond the continent. Stories of the individual writing process intertwine with personal loss and with political instability. It’s an enlightening and bracing read. You can get Bridging Worlds for free here, though I got it as part of the 2023 Hugo packet.
This was the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2023 (actually I had a couple of shorter ones in my catalogue, but could not find them). Next on that pile is Blake’s Seven: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
As previously mentioned, we started the month with a half-term break at my sister’s in Burgundy. Cluny is a remarkable town with a ruined abbey which dominates the urban landscape.
I moved my personal website to http://www.nicholaswhyte.info – I should start updating it a bit more often… I also visited London for orientation with the new job, and drove to the depths of the Ardennes for my last Crisis Group retreat. We got reports out on Serbia, Kosovo and Georgia, as my time with the organisation wound down.
The month ended dramatically. I had a work trip to Berlin which included, rather unusually, a meeting in the Defence Ministry (normally I end up farther east, between the Bundestag/Kanzleramt and foreign ministry). On my way out I asked the silver-haired colonel who I was meeting about the building’s history. He told me that it had originally been the headquarters of the German Navy from 1911, and was then the territorial army headquarters; and then became the centre of resistance to Hitler within the armed forces, in particular under Claus von Stauffenberg. “So after 20 July 1944, von Stauffenberg was shot in one of the courtyards,” indicating which one with a nod.
That wasn’t the really dramatic part. The really dramatic part was after I landed back in Brussels on an early morning flight and started driving the family car to the office. As I went through the Montgomery tunnel, I felt a sudden KCHUNK, and the car coasted to a halt on the uphill stretch. Phone calls to Touring, long wait while traffic pooled around me in one of the prime choke-points of Brussels suburbia, finally the Touring guy arrived and towed me to a nearby layby, more long wait while he fiddled with the distributor cap before shaking his head in bafflement and calling a pickup truck, more long wait for the pickup truck, which then couldn’t find the garage, probably because its driver was too busy talking to his girlfriend on his mobile phone to look for it properly, and eventually walked from the garage to my office with all my luggage from Berlin. The garage looked at the car for a few days and then confirmed that fixing it would cost more than we had paid for it, so since then I have largely commuted to Brussels by public transport.
In my office, my Macedonian intern E was doing handover to her successor, Belgian S. E has now moved to Budapest where her Belgian husband has a senior academic position. S now lives in Geneva, where he married a Quebecoise; their children’s French must be very interesting to hear. Here’s a picture of the three of us at a conference in the European Parliament where I was speaking that week, E on the left, S on the right and me sitting down. (And a bearded chap, who I don’t recognise, talking to us.)
I managed to read 27 books in November 2006, more than half of which were short Doctor Who books, mostly by Ian Marter.
6,000 pages (YTD 54,200) 1/27 (YTD 30/187) by a woman None (YTD 8/187) by PoC
Robert Cooper’s The Breaking of Nations was the best of these; you can get it here. Close behind is Skeletons on the Zahara, a tale of shipwrecked sailors sold into slavery; you can get it here. Claire Palley’s book on Cyprus is awful, but you can get it here. (I didn’t pay for it – a friend had been gifted a copy and passed it on to me.)
This was the first of the Thirteenth Doctor series of comics from Titan, the rest of which I had read and enjoyed, so coming back to the beginning now. This also exhausts the massive store of Doctor Who comics that I got from a Humble Bundle purchase in 2022, and it was certainly worth the rather minimal amount I paid for the lot.
This was an excellent note to finish on, as well. It’s a Christmas story, so reading it in the sunmmer wasn’t ideal; but Houser, who is one of the great Who comics writers, catches the Thirteenth Doctor’s voice absolutely perfectly. There is a fun plot as well to do with memory loss and a fake Santa Claus, but really you’re enjoying the ride. You can get Time out of Mind here.
This brings to an end my shelf of books that I acquired in 2022.
Last book acquired in 2022, read in July 2026 (Time Out of Mind)
Last book acquired in 2021, read in October 2025 (Het lijkt Washington wel)
I have got the gap down from 8 years for the 2010 books to two and a half years now.
My pile of unread books from 2023 is not as big as the 2022 pile was, only 25 of them – 14 non-fiction, 10 sf, and one poetry collection. Starting off the list are:
Bridging Worlds, ed. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki – the shortest book of those that I acquired in 2023 and have not yet read
Brian W. Aldiss, by Paul Kincaid – the non-fiction book that has lingered longest unread on my shelves
Twenty-first Century Blues, by Steve Walker – the sf book that has lingered longest unread on my shelves
Last Exit, by Max Gladstone – the top unread book of those I acquired in 2023.
Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972) won the 1968 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Japanese writer to do so. In his acceptance speech he makes the point that it was 55 years since it last went to “an Oriental“, which is rather shocking. His Nobel lecture is about Buddhism, suicide and poetry. Snow Country was his first well-known novel, from thirty years before (published in various formats up to 1937). The Chairman of the Nobel Committee said of it:
we see a brilliant capacity to illuminate the erotic episode, an exquisite keenness of observation, a whole network of small, mysterious values, which often put the European narrative technique in the shade. Kawabata’s writing is reminiscent of Japanese painting; he is a worshipper of the fragile beauty and melancholy picture language of existence in the life of nature and in man’s destiny. If the transience of all outward action can be likened to drifting tufts of grass on the surface of the water, then it is the genuinely Japanese miniature art of haiku poetry which is reflected in Kawabata’s prose style.
It has only two chapters; so here is the second paragraph of the third section of the first chapter:
He started back as he saw the long skirts – had she finally become a geisha? She did not come toward him, she did not bend in the slightest movement of recognition. From the distance he caught something intent and serious in the still form. He hurried up to her, but they said nothing even when he was beside her. She started to smile through the thick, white geisha’s powder. Instead she melted into tears, and the two of them walked off silently toward his room.
translated by Edward G. Seidensticker
Maybe I was just in a bad mood on the two nights I read this (I was reading it alongside Xenophon’s Ephesiaca, which is a lot more fun) but I found that this moved rather slowly for such a short book. The core plot is about a married man and his feelings for a sex worker who he meets in a mountain resort, and the actual places are described very effectively, but I found it difficult to get into the heads of the characters and might not have finished it if it had been longer. I can see also how the writer is co-opting the form of Western novel into a Japanese context (which in fairness is what the Nobel Committee wanted to celebrate). But it’s a rare miss for me in this sequence.
This was also my top unread book by a non-white writer; next on that pile is another Japanese novel, Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto. Next in my list of non-white-male Nobel Literature laureates is Wole Soyinka, and I have his Death and the King’s Horseman ready.
Current Racebook, by Tochi Onyebuchi Hail, Penang!, by George Bilainkin Dead Lions, by Mick Herron
Last books finished Little Green Men and other stories, by Chris Boucher The Compleat Angler, by Isaak Walton The Listeners, by James Gunn Last Exit, by Max Gladstone (did not finish) The Compleat Angler: A Graphic Adaptation, by Gareth Brookes and Izaak Walton Death and the King’s Horseman, by Wole Soyinka
Next books Blake’s Seven: Scorpio Attack, by Trevor Hoyle Inspector Imanishi Investigates, by Seichō Matsumoto Kristin Lavransdatter II: The Wife, by Sigrid Undset
I normally start my reviews by quoting the second paragraph of the third chapter, or equivalent, but I’m going to save the second section of Book 3 of the Ephesian History to the end, because it deserves special treatment.
I was inspired to get hold of this because when I visited Gent last month, I was struck by Joseph Paelink’s The Fair Anthia Leading Her Companions to the Temple of Diana in Ephesus, which represents a scene from the first chapter, and inspired me to seek out the source material.
It’s the story of Anthia and Habrocomes (the ‘H’ tends to get dropped in translation), who fall in love and set off on a largely involuntary saga of travels around the Eastern Mediterranean, where they are shipwrecked, separated, kidnapped, threatened with seduction, encounter sultry pirates, brigands, merchants and merchant’s wives, believe each other to have died and are finally reunited. Sorry to spoil the ending, but this is a book written in about 200AD and anyway it’s about the journey, not the destination. It is a tremendous romp speaking from the heart of the Eastern Roman Empire and looking back to a more adventurous era. I have seen the Ἐφεσιακά described as the earliest known novel; I’d like to know more about the competitors for that title, but I can sense a format pushing at the boundaries and trying to find out what it can do.
You can easily get the 1727 translation by John Rooke on the Internet Archive. John Rooke also translated Arrian’s account of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, but little else is known of him. My eye was caught by a couple of sentences in the preface:
I muſt not however omit acquainting my Readers, that I have given a different Turn to one Paſſage, towards the beginning ot the third Book, becauſe it would not have ſounded well in an Engliſh Ear; and whatever Toleration the ancient Greeks might plead, it is entirely repugnant to the Genius and Cuſtoms of our Country. Whoſoever underſtands the Original may eaſily find out the Deviation, and to thoſe who do not, the Knowledge thereof is no ways material: This I only add, leſt any ſhould pretend to accuſe me for want of Skill in the Language, and take this Paſſage for a Handle.
Believe it or not, the passage in question is the very second chapter of Book III. Bear with me as I present it below in the original Greek and in Rooke’s translation. The context is that Habrocomas has fallen in with a hot bandit chap called Hippothous, who now tells his own origin story. I have added emphasis to a couple of key points.
“My Birth,” says he, “I owe to Perinthus, a City near the Confines of Thrace, and I am one of her chief Citizens: You must have heard how famous a City Perinthus is, and how rich her Inhabitants. Whilst a Youth, I was struck with the Charms of a fair Virgin there, whose Name was Hyperanthe. When first I saw her lead up the Perinthian Maids in a Dance, I lov’d her, nor could contain my self longer than the Time when the Vigils of her Country’s Festival were solemniz’d. ’Twas then I approach’d her, and entreated her to be favourable to me. She no sooner heard my Moan, than she inclin’d to Pity, and promis’d whatever she might. Our first Loves begun with Kisses, Embraces, and many Tears from my Eyes. Afterwards, we could upon Occasion, retire from the World, and enjoy each other’s Converse, without Suspicion, by Reason of our tender Years.
Long had we indulg’d our selves with this Freedom, and long had we passionately lov’d each other, when some God envy’d our Happiness. For from Byzantium, which is not far distant from Perinthus, arriv’d a certain Man, named Aristomachus, one of the chief of the Place, fam’d for Wealth, and a haughty Carriage. He had scarce enter’d the City, but (as if by the Direction of some God) he fix’d his Eyes on Hyperanthe, then in my Company, and was instantly struck with Surprize at her Beauty, which indeed was most astonishing. He was desperately in Love, and unable to restrain the Violence of his Passion, and therefore declar’d himself first to the Virgin, but finding no Encouragement there, she rejecting his Suit, because of her steady Affection to me, he perswades her Father, a Man cruel and covetous, to commit her to his Care for her Instruction, he presenting to teach her the rules of exact Behaviour.
He no sooner gain’d his Wishes, than he first shut her up at Perinthus, and afterwards convey’d her to Byzantium. I follow’d; and leaving all my other Affairs, whenever Occasion offer’d, I never fail’d to visit her. But these Opportunities rarely happening, our Kisses became less frequent, and our Converse more difficult, for we were strictly watch’d. At last, able to endure this no longer, I fix’d my Resolution, went to Perinthus, dispos’d of all my Effects there, took the Money, and return’d to Byzantium, where (by Hyperanthe’s consent) with Sword in hand I enter’d the House of Aristomachus, by Night, burning with Wrath, and gave him his Death’s Wound, as he lay encircled in her Arms. All Things being then hush’d in Silence, I escap’d unperceiv’d, carrying my Hyperanthe with me, and reaching Perinthus that Night, we embark’d directly on board a Ship, which lay ready for us, and every Body being ignorant of what had happen’d, we design’d to pass over into Asia.
The Beginning of our Voyage was pleasant enough, but after we had pass’d by the Island Lesbos, a violent Gust of Wind attack’d us, and overset our Ship. I, with my Hyperanthe, endeavour’d to reach the Shore by Swimming, and whilst I supported her, my own Labour seem’d the less, but Night coming on, and my fair one’s Strength and Spirits failing, she perish’d in the Waves. I, with some Difficulty, drew her Body on Shore, and gave her Burial. I sigh’d deeply, and shed many Tears over her, and not having Time to erect a Monument, happen’d, by Chance, to find a Stone, fit for the Purpose, which I plac’d over her, and whereon I engrav’d this extempore Epigram, to the Memory of her unhappy Fate.”
For ever sacred be this Place ToHyperanthe’sName, Hippothousno Tomb can raise, Thy Beauties to proclaim. My fairest Flower, alas! is fled, By faithless Winds opprest, Remorseless Waves roll’d o’er thy Head And robb’d thy Mate of Rest.
“From that Time, I resolv’d not to return to Perinthus any more, and therefore directed my Course into the greater Phrygia and Pamphilia, where, distress’d by Want, and disorder’d in Mind, I betook my self to Robbing. I serv’d, at first, as a Guard to the Party to which I belonged, but having, afterwards, gather’d 62a Band of my own, in Cilicia; I became famous, ’till, at last, all my Companions were surpriz’d and slain, or taken, a little before I saw you. This is a brief Account of my Adventures: Now, my Friend, oblige me with yours, for you seem driven by some strange Necessity to travel.”
From the English translation alone, it’s a fairly standard story of love gone tragically wrong, one of several in the course of the Ἐφεσιακά. But the part that Rooke felt he could not translate directly into English is this: in the original Greek, it’s absolutely clear that Hippothous fell in love, not with a beautiful young girl called Hyperanthe but with a beautiful young boy called Hyperanthes (incidentally otherwise recorded only as a Persian name). He didn’t see a young girl dancing with the other maidens; he saw a beautiful young man (μειράκιον) exercising in the gymnasium (πρῶτα ἐν γυμνασίοις διαπαλαίοντα). This was what Rooke felt “entirely repugnant to the Genius and Cuſtoms of our Country”. It’s not the only case of same-sex romance (let alone lust) in the Ἐφεσιακά, but it’s the one where the reader is most clearly meant to sympathise with the unhappy lover. Incidentally the 1797 translation into French is perfectly clear that Hyperanthes is a boy.
Hyperanthes‘ epitaph in the English translation bears very little resemblance to the Greek original, except that the dead youth is compared to a flower in both, the name being an obvious enough play on ἄνθος meaning ‘flower’.
Anyway, this short romp from an earlier age is well worth seeking out. I have linked to the Rooke translation and the French version above, but there is also an educational edition which you can get here.
In anticipation of the 25th anniversary of my bookblogging, which will come in late 2028, I’m reposting my monthly summaries since November 2003 when I started. (I already did this in 2019-2023, but this gives me a chance to consolidate all the posts and links to this WordPress site rather than my old Livejournal.) Everything will be linked under the bookblog nostalgia tag.
The major personal developments for me in October 2006 were breaking the news of my imminent job change to colleagues and friends, and also finding a daycare place for B, whose behaviour was becoming too difficult for her special school to cope with. We had some diversion also at work when it was rumoured that we might get the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. (We didn’t.) My foreign trips were a rather weird one-day trip to Ankara, Turkey, (the only time I have been there); a much less weird conference in Chişinău, Moldova; and a half-term visit to my sister in Burgundy at the end of the month, taking in the Eiffel Tower en route (inspired by Barnaby Bear). Here’s the view from the top (well, as far as we could get), with F (aged 7) practicing to be a teenager.
Sadly this was also the month that we lost David Stewart, of Irish sf fandom.
As well as enjoying I, Claudius and the first episodes of Torchwood, I read 16 books that month.
As usual when confronted with a range of unwelcome alternatives, Mrs Thatcher tacked and veered from one point to another, interrupting Geoffrey Howe’s attempts at ordered exposition and from time to time bringing things back to square one with an observation of startling primitiveness. Why could we not redraw the border to exclude predominantly Catholic areas and relieve ourselves of the expense of paying social security to people who did not want to belong to the United Kingdom anyway? It was pointed out that this would not solve the problem: Catholic and Protestant communities were too intermingled in border areas; and even if adjustments were made to the border, the main body of Catholics lived in West Belfast and would remain within Northern Ireland. In that case, why not a wall through the centre of Belfast like the Wall through the Centre of Berlin? (No one seemed to want to comment on this). Following this line of thought, the Prime Minister asked why arrangements could not be made to transfer those members of the minority community who did not wish to remain under British rule to the Republic. After all, she said, the Irish were used to large scale movements of population. Only recently there had been a population transfer of some kind. At this point the silence round the fire became transfused with simple bafflement. After a pause, I asked if she could possibly be thinking of Cromwell. ‘Cromwell: of course.’ ‘Well, Prime Minister, Cromwell’s policy was known as “To Hell or Connacht” and it left a scar on Anglo-Irish relations which still hasn’t healed’. The idea of a population transfer was not pursued.
I am going to start by noting that a couple of my recent Facebook posts about Irish politics have attracted some tedious trolling from drive-by commenters. I will wield the block function more readily in future, for trolls of any variety. I will also note that the lastcouple of offenders were from one side rather than the other.
Several people had recommended this book to me as the authentic insider account of the negotiations behind the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1983-85. They were right; it’s absolutely what I wanted to read.
Goodall was the right hand of Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong, who was the brains behind the entire process; the story Goodall tells is one of constant negotiation between the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland office and the prime minister herself, plus occasional appearances from the Irish government, where Garret Fitzgerald as Taoiseach was closely engaged and senior officials very motivated to make things happen.
My basic question was, what was the origin of the Agreement, which gave the Irish state direct input into policy-making in Northern Ireland in the absence of a devolved government? The answer appears to be that Armstrong was the prime mover; after her second election victory, he put it to Margaret Thatcher that the only place in the world where British troops were being killed in anger was inside the United Kingdom, and something had to be done. He was also friendly with Dermot Nally, his equivalent on the Irish side, as both had been closely involved with the Sunningdale negotiations of 1973, only ten years earlier. But it helped that he had Thatcher’s complete confidence, and that she too saw the logic that something had to be done.
One widely circulated theory that I did not find much evidence for from Goodall’s account (though of course his is necessarily a partial view) was that the Americans had pressed the UK into signing the Agreement at the urging of John Hume. I am sure that Hume did his best to mobilise the Americans to that end, but without Armstrong there would have been nothing to mobilise about. There were several points when negotiations reached a low point, and it was Armstrong who decided to invest his personal political capital into saving the process. Hume was not close enough to the negotiations, let alone to Thatcher, to have been able to do that.
Anyone who subscribes to the very silly notion that Garret Fitzgerald and Fine Gael were crypto Brits should read this; it’s absolutely clear that the Irish government which he led pushed the case of Irish nationalism very effectively, and came out with more concrete results than sixty years of whining about Partition had achieved. At the same time there was a learning process for the Irish side, to discover how far the British could go and for how much in return. And I must say it is striking how many rounds of negotiations were concluded over luxuriously catered lunches and dinners, and the beverages consumed afterwards. (Though you still had to report back in the morning.)
It’s also very striking that the only woman with a speaking part in the whole process is Margaret Thatcher. At the time she was the only woman in the British cabinet, and there was also only one woman in the Irish cabinet (Gemma Hussey). Their officials and advisers were all middle-aged white men too, and so were the political party leaders in Northern Ireland (who were barely consulted anyway, including Hume). And this is only forty years ago.
I found a passing reference to an elderly retired British diplomat who I know, who played a minor part in keeping the show on the road at a late stage, and sent him snapshots of the pages where he is mentioned. He was delighted; he had no idea that he was in the book.
I think that the Anglo-Irish Agreement was a success, and that it was critical in bringing about the Good Friday Agreement thirteen years later, now 28 years ago. It was constructed to be almost unwreckable. It showed political Unionism very clearly that a return to majority rule was not on the cards. Unionism was deeply traumatised, but they had it coming to them, having wilfully destroyed the Sunningdale power-sharing arrangement and failed to put forward anything even half as good themselves. It was an important and significant on the way to lasting peace.
One of several essays by other people in the last third of the book also asserts that the Agreement gave a push to the new thinking in the IRA and Sinn Fein that led to the Hume/Adams talks, the secret channel with the British government and the ceasefire. I think the biggest factor there was certainly exhaustion from decades of conflict with no progress, but the fact that there was a political process happening demonstrated that other ways of investing energy could bear fruit.
I still don’t quite understand Thatcher’s own psychology here. I suspect that she thought there would be clear and immediate benefits on security co-operation – I remember a very conservative family friend telling me, the weekend after it was signed, that if there were security benefits, then infuriating the Unionists would have been worth it. Any such benefits were not really obvious; there were 57 deaths in the Troubles in 1985, which was actually the lowest of any year between 1971 and 1994, so the violence actually increased after the Agreement. But it clarified the landing zone for how it could be brought to an end.
