This was a period of astonishing disparities in wealth and living. A typical workman’s daily wage in the 1380s was 4d, giving an annual income of around £5 (100s), assuming he could find work at least 300 days a year; a gallon of good ale cost just over a penny, as did two chickens or two dozen eggs. In London a goose was supposed to cost 6d, but sharp-eyed salesmen often asked seven or eight. A year’s tuition at Oxford University in 1374 cost 26s 8d, though lodgings there were significantly pricier at 104s a year (when annual rent for a cottage might be 5s, or 20s for a craftsman’s house), and the student would need 40s for his clothing. Meanwhile a merchant’s house in London (such as the one in which Geoffrey Chaucer was born) might be rented for two or three pounds a year, which was about what it would cost to send your son to a monastery school. Higher up the social scale, the numbers lose purchase. A knight’s two horses, without which he couldn’t function as a knight, would cost him about £10. His armour could total nearer £20. In 1397 Thomas, Duke of Gloucester owned armour worth £103. If a man were attendant at court he would need a fashionable gown, in silk or fur: it would certainly cost £10, and he could easily spend £50. The life annuity granted to Chaucer in 1367 (paid until 1388), of £13 6s 8d, would make him wealthy in the city of London, yet would barely support him at all at court. But as a courtier he was the recipient of largesse – robes, livery, gifts – and appointments to administrative offices from which, it was understood, he would profit. In 1389 Richard II made Chaucer Clerk of the King’s Works in London; in 1393 he presented him with £10 as a gift for good service, and in 1394 awarded him an annuity of £20.⁴ ⁴ Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social change in England c.1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 215 (daily wage), p. 58 (ale), p. 208 (annual rent), p. 75 (monastery school), p. 76 (armour and horses), p. 77 (duke’s armour); A. V. B. Norman and Don Pottinger, English Weapons & Warfare, 449–1660 (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1979), p. 78 (chickens and eggs); A. R. Myers, London in the Age of Chaucer (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 198 (geese), p. 186 (Oxford), p. 53 (fashionable gowns); Douglas Gray, ‘Chaucer, Geoffrey (c.1340–1400)’, ODNB.
I was inspired to get this by my detour into the history of the Duke of Ireland a few weeks back, and also by my good friend Conrad’s reviews of the Penguin Monarchs series, of which this is one. It’s a very short and digestible book, which doesn’t waste time on chronology but just jumps straight into the question of what went wrong with Richard’s reign, assuming that the reader is familiar with the basics.
There are four chapters, each dealing with an area of kingship as practiced by Richard. In her prologue, Ashe makes the point that the court is not one of those four, because it was carried by the king wherever he went. The four areas are Parliament, the battlefield, the City of London (where Richard hand-picked his namesake Richard Whittington as Mayor), and the shrines connecting the King with God.
The overall thesis is that Richard was driven by a concept of kingship where he was divinely appointed to lead, and did not need to keep people like the other magnates and the citizens of London on board with anything that he did. He felt this very deeply and it informs the Wilton Diptych, which is a personal statement of his religious beliefs which we can only dimly understand. Of course, it was not sustainable; he made too many enemies and was overthrown and (probably) killed.
It is worth reflecting that British constitutional history was a close run thing. If Richard had been even slightly more politically adept, or luckier, he could have assembled a coalition of favourite lords combined with urban stakeholders to support his personal rule without institutional safeguards, provided that there was something in it for them; and that could have proved a lasting political settlement. He was in fact lucky in how the Peasants’ Revolt played out, and that the Lords Appellant in the late 1380s also pushed their cause too far and allowed him to regain control for another decade.
As it was, the fact that Parliament successfully overthrew him one and a half times (counting 1388 as well as 1399) consolidated the English constitutional theory of Parliament as a sovereign institution which constrained the monarch, to the point of deciding who the monarch could be. Richard was clearly not interested in constitutional theory. If he had been, he might have lasted longer.
One point that I wished the book had spent more time on: Richard’s reign was a really good time for the arts in England. This is the age of Piers Plowman, Chaucer, Wycliff, Gower and the Pearl poet; and as mentioned the Wilton Diptych and the funeral monument in Westminster Abbey that Richard built for his first wife and where he was eventually laid to rest. I don’t think you would find a similar flowering of the arts in England for a century or two either before or after. Richard himself doesn’t deserve a lot of credit for this, but it’s worth noting.
There is a page on Richard’s temporarily successful campaign in Ireland in 1394, and half a page on his unsuccessful return in 1399. These were the only visits to Ireland by a reigning English monarch between King John in 1210 and William III in 1690.
See here for methodology; to the best of my ability, I am excluding books not actually set in the current Republic of Korea, as noted below.
Title
Author
Goodreads raters
LibraryThing owners
The Vegetarian
Han Kang
184,841
3,735
The Island of Sea Women
Lisa See
133,653
1,768
A Single Shard
Linda Sue Park
41,101
5,149
82년생 김지영 / Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Cho Nam-Joo
159,227
1,193
Almond
Sohn Won-Pyung
132,757
547
Please Look After Mom
Shin Kyung-Sook
43,760
1,577
If I Had Your Face
Frances Cha
54,291
738
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
David Halberstam
8,945
1873
Shamefully, I have not read any of these, though it is nice to see this year’s Nobel Prize winner for Literature topping the list.
I had to disqualify the top two books tagged as Korea on LibraryThing and Goodreads; they were Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, which is mainly set in Japan, and Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner, mainly set in the USA. Further down the table, The Name Jar, by Yangsook Choi, is also set in the USA.
I have made an exceptional judgement call with Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter and I’m going to be listing it under both South Korea and North Korea, as I think both sides share evenly in the narrative.
The consensus from sources seems to be that the next four countries are Sudan, Uganda, Spain and Algeria, so I’ll take them in that order.
This is another in my run of rather forgettable films with a 2025 setting – at least, the start and end and several bits in the middle are set in 2025, though you’ll have picked up from the title that there is a lot of time travel in it. Here’s a trailer.
This is very skippable. Jason Scott Lee, best known for playing Bruce Lee in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, is a time agent trying to prevent a rival time agent from changing history by, among other things, killing Hitler in 1940. (What would be so bad about that?) The plot is confused, the acting uninspired and the fight scenes done better elsewhere. Not especially recommended.
That wasn’t the first time that had happened, Gottfried’s grandmother told her. People often misjudged her grandson as slow and stupid. His cruel classmates christened him with a nickname that made her flush with rage: Gottfried the Fool. She knew that they were wrong about him, because he was so clever and earnest when his teachers called on him in class. But she had to admit that she, too, was often confused by his behavior.
A big thick prize-winning book by the late Steve Silberman, looking in detail at the history and practice of autism and neurodiversity, and how American society (and by extension, Western society) is coming to terms with making accommodations for people who, as he puts it, ʎlʇuǝɹǝɟɟᴉp ʞuᴉɥʇ.
There were a couple of chapters that really grabbed my attention. One was a section about Hugo Gernsback, who set up science fiction fandom as a safe space for people to be geeks and nerds, and whose own behaviour is recognisably on the spectrum now – for instance, his invention, the Isolator, allows you to concentrate on the text you are reading without sensory distraction and even has its own air supply.
The other striking chapter is very much less fun, looking at the early twentieth-century eugenics movement and at the Nazi policy of killing neurodiverse children. The psychiatrists responsible for these murders survived into successful post-war careers in Austria. It is pretty stomach-churning.
The story of the struggle for autism is generally pretty tough, though it has a hopeful end. I can see both sides; in the initial grief and confusion after B’s diagnosis back in 2000, I too was desperate to find a way that she could be ‘cured’, and I know of other parents in a similar situation who spent vast amounts of time, money and emotional labour on snake oil solutions for their children.
I fairly quickly came around to acceptance that our family was following our own path, and that society needs to adapt to our children’s needs more than the other way round. It’s a tough path all the same, and I felt many moments of solidarity with the people whose lives are discussed in Neurotribes; though the book doesn’t include much on those who are as cognitively disabled as our daughters.
The book also concentrates very much on the US policy landscape with only brief looks at what is going on in other counties (and nothing at all about Belgium). But I found it helpful in understanding my own thinking in any case. You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is The Light We Carry, by Michelle Obama.
For convenience, here is a reading list of other books I have read about autism:
We rewatched Midnight last night. I wrote previously that I couldn’t understand why this story didn’t get a Hugo nomination this year; I am still baffled.
I think it’s the best episode of the season, and certainly the best ever written by Russell T Davies. The sources are good sources – The Edge of Destruction, also written at the last minute by Old Who’s first script editor, putting the Tardis crew in a single set for 50 minutes; also I think Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust, where a group of tourists is trapped on the Moon, though without the sinister alien presence. (The eye of faith may detect inspiration also from Delta and the Bannermen, or The Leisure Hive, but personally I don’t.) Davies takes this and puts his own particular interpretation onto the situation, and for once his writing remains tight up to the last moment.
He’s helped by a couple of stellar performances – Lesley Sharp as Sky and the unnamed baddie, and Rakie Ayola as the hostess in particular; also from the past we have David Troughton as the Professor, and from the future Colin Morgan as Jethro. The scenes with Lesley Sharp first echoing, then synching with, then anticipating the other cast members’ lines are just incredible. (The only irritating moment is Rose’s brief appearance, which is difficult to reconcile with what we later find out she’s been doing – the similar moment in The Poison Sky is at least set in the present day.)
Quite apart from the creepiness of the basic concept, it’s a story where the Doctor’s normal cockiness and air of mystery, which normally seem to get authority figures magically co-operating with him, work against him; and his fellow passengers end up baying for his blood. It’s notable that they are not, particularly, authority figures; and the one who is nominally in charge, the Hostess, ends up being the one who saves them all. And the specific point where the Doctor’s credibility breaks down completely is when he tries to urge compassion, which rather more often works to shame other characters into cooperating. It’s a great subversion and stretching of the show’s usual assumptions.
After two stories where we’ve had the Doctor’s own intimate relations (his daughter and River Song) on screen, here we have the Doctor observing and interacting with several other family dynamics – Biff, Val and Jethro; the Professor and Dee Dee; Sky and her absent ex; perhaps also the Hostess and the crew. (Indeed, it might have been better if this had been shown between The Doctor’s Daughter and Silence in the Library, as was originally planned.)
Midnight was Russell T Davies’ nineteenth story for Who, which puts him ahead of the 18 stories written entirely or partly by Robert Holmes. [We are far past that now.] Andy Murray suggests (in his piece in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space) that we can see the frustrated attempts of the tall, fair-haired Chancellor Goth to hunt down and destroy the Doctor as the tall, fair-haired Holmes working through his own frustration with the central character of the show. Note that in this story the Doctor loses his authority over the other passengers and even his voice, and that he is actually killed off at the beginning of the next story; am I going too far in detecting a subconscious desire to get rid of him on the part of the executive producer and chief writer? (Not that there is the same physical resemblance between RTD and the villain of either story.)
Two further pieces of trivia from the BBC via Wikipedia: it is the first story since Genesis of the Daleks where the Tardis does not appear, and the only Who story where the villain is never named.
(Robert Holmes’ 18 stories: The Krotons, The Space Pirates, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons, Carnival of Monsters, The Time Warrior, The Deadly Assassin, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Sun Makers, The Ribos Operation, The Power of Kroll, The Caves of Androzani, The Two Doctors, and The Mysterious Planet plus also The Ark In Space, The Brain of Morbius, Pyramids of Mars and the first episode of The Ultimate Foe. Of course, in screen time he is still well ahead of RTD, since all but one of the above were at least the equivalent of four 25-minute episodes.)
I also just rewatched 73 Yards, another of RTD’s best scripts, but I still think that Midnight has yet to be surpassed among his stories. (Though my favourite New Who story remains Blink.) Since then we’ve seen a couple of the actors elsewhere – Rakie Ayola, the hostess here, was Persephone in Kaos, and Ayesha Antoine, who is David Troughton’s sidekick Dee Dee here, has been Bernice Summerfield’s companion Ruth in the Big Finish audio series, and was also a lead in the DALEKS! webcast by James Goss.
Philip Purser-Hallard’s Black Archive is businesslike and looks at the reasons for the story’s success (including off the screen, live on stage). The first chapter, ‘A Failure of the Entertainment System’, recounts the very brief history of how the story was written, drawing comparisons with The Edge of Destruction, and touches on how it subverts the generally heroic and successful portrayal of the Doctor.
The second chapter, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, and Variations’, looks at each of the guest characters in the story, exploring what they are telling us about their society and about the Doctor. Purser-Hallard draws a comparison with RTD’s more recent drama Years and Years, which also has a very tight ensemble of central characters 9and which I also enjoyed very much).
The third chapter’s title is ‘He Started It, With His Stories’. Its second paragraph, with footnotes, is:
Moffat and his interviewer, Christel Dee, were considering the themes, concerns and narrative techniques that Doctor Who shares with its folkloric precursors, rather than its more superficial aesthetic trappings. The latter, being primarily futuristic and scientific, contrast with the magical otherworlds of traditional fairy stories, and the imagined pasts, whether agrarian or courtly, from which their protagonists hail². Marina Warner’s history of fairytale, Once Upon a Time (2014), speaks of these stories being constructed from ‘building blocks includ[ing] certain kinds of characters (stepmothers and princesses, elves and giants) and certain recurrent motifs (keys, apples, mirrors, rings and toads),’ and while most of these items may be found in specific Doctor Who stories, they are hardly emblematic of the series as a whole³. However, her identification of fairy tales as consisting of ‘combinations and recombinations of familiar plots and characters, devices and images’ describes Doctor Who’s overall approach just as well⁴. ² Given Doctor Who’s eclectic nature, individual stories may be identified as exceptions, but the overall point holds. ³ They can, however, be indicative of more fantasy-inflected stories: for instance, The Keeper of Traken (1981) includes a stepmother and a ring; Kinda (1982) features both apples and mirrors; and a mirror and a frog, if not a toad, appear in It Takes You Away (2018). ⁴ Warner, Marina, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, ppxx-xxi.
This chapter considers the (multiple) fairy tale and mythic roots of Midnight, with a look also at Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
The fourth chapter, ‘Not a Goblin or a Monster’, looks at invisible evil in the context of Davies’ other work (Years and Years again, and The Second Coming) and also Steven Moffat’s story Listen.
The fifth chapter, ‘The Cleverest Voice in the Room’, looks at the less heroic aspects of the Doctor as a character and notes that some of the most popular Who stories actually show the central character in a less than positive light. Again, other RTD work is mentioned; I noted particularly A Very English Scandal., but Purser-Hallard also looks at how the Fourteenth Doctor stories form a coda to the Tenth Doctor era.
An appendix, ‘What’s the Next Stage?’, looks at three theatrical productions of Midnight, which out of the whole 61 years of the show’s history is surely the story best suited for a stage production.
So, a thought-provoking monograph on a great Who story; and when you unpick the reasons for why it is so great, the greatness is still there. You can (probably) get it here.
The conversion of England was thus effected by the landing of St Augustine in Thanet and other places, which resulted in the country being overrun by a Wave of Saints. Among these were St Ive, St Pancra, the great St Bernard (originator of the clerical collar), St Bee, St Ebb, St Neot (who invented whisky), St Kit and St Kin, and the Venomous Bead (author of The Rosary).
A cheerful return to an old favourite: the spoof version of English history, cantering through two thousand years with a series of unlikely and yet very probable misreadings. There’s not much more to be said; some of the humour has dated, but a lot of it remains very funny.
He also invented a game called “Bluff King Hal” which he invited his ministers to play with him. The players were blindfolded and knelt down with their heads on a block of wood; they then guessed who the King would marry next
I am particularly alert for Irish references, such as:
The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).
[King John] had begun badly as a Bad Prince, having attempted to answer the Irish Question by pulling the beards of the aged Irish chiefs, which was a Bad Thing and the wrong answer. N.B. The Irish Question at this time consisted of: (1) Some Norman Barons, who lived in a Pail (near Dublin), (2) The natives and Irish Chieftains, who were beyond the Pail, living in bogs, beards, etc.
Henry VII was very good at answering the Irish Question, and made a Law called Poyning’s Law by which the Irish could have a Parliament of their own, but the English were to pass all the Acts in it. This was obviously a very Good Thing.
[James I] also tried to straighten out the memorable confusion about the Picts, who, as will be remembered, were originally Irish living in Scotland, and the Scots, originally Picts living in Ireland. James tried to make things tidier by putting the Scots in Ulsters and planting them in Ireland, but the plan failed because the Picts had been lost sight of during the Dark Ages and were now nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile the Orange increased its popularity and showed themselves to be a very strong King by its ingenious answer to the Irish Question; this consisted in the Battle of the Boyne and a very strong treaty which followed it, stating (a) that all the Irish Roman Catholics who liked could be transported to France, (b) that all the rest who liked could be put to the sword, (c) that Northern Ireland should be planted with Blood-Orangemen. These Blood-Orangemen are still there; they are, of course, all descendants of Nell Glyn and are extremely fierce and industrial and so loyal that they are always ready to start a loyal rebellion to the Glory of God and the Orange. All of which shows that the Orange was a Good Thing, as well as being a good King. After the Treaty the Irish who remained were made to go and live in a bog and think of a New Question.
Gladstone .. spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question…
It’s a firmly liberal approach: satirising the total lack of knowledge and misunderstanding of the neighbouring island by England’s rulers, and admitting that Irish policy failed for centuries. The same approach is not really shown to other places formerly part of the Empire.
Second volume in the story of the loving and kinky relationship between Alison and Lisa, this one mainly punctuated by flashbacks to Alison’s previous experiences with best friend and former lover Alan. Again, very tastefully done. You can get it here.
Current The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling The Geraldines: An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman The Tudor Discover of Ireland, by Christopher Maginn and Steven G. Ellis
Last books finished The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins Tudor Court Culture, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Anna Riehl
Next books The Ripper, by Tony Lee The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck
I wrote of the TV story that this book is based on:
I was in Glasgow planning the Worldcon for the showing of 73 Yards, and a bunch of us clustered together to watch it in someone’s room. This too was tremendous, a Doctor-lite episode that called on Gibson (who turned 20 last week) to portray her character aging through the decades, with one of those timey-wimey plots that can actually go awry rather easily but in this case didn’t.
This time the old school actor who I cheered for was Siân Phillips, who was of course Livia in I, CLAVDIVS, almost half a century ago, but has done some more recent Big Finish work as well. She too is in her nineties but clearly in her element as the sinister old woman in the pub.
Watching it again, one is stunned especially by Millie Gibson as the aging Ruby. Apparently these were the first scenes that she filmed for the show.
Second paragraph of third chapter of the novelisation:
For an hour, it seemed her expedition would never end. Step after countless step, her feet were cold and damp, icy snowflakes soaked into her collar, and her ragged breath formed misty clouds in front of her face.
I am slightly surprised that this is Scott Handcock’s first Doctor Who novel, possibly his first book-length work at all; he has been writing, directing and producing for Big Finish since 2006. 73 Yards was one of my favourites of this year’s stories anyway, and Handcock has done it justice, focussing necessarily on Ruby’s story (since the Doctor is hardly in it) but also giving some neat extra bits – back-stories for the people in the Welsh pub, a scene with Ace, the ultimate fate of UNIT revealed. Very enjoyable. You can get it here.
Just to add, as I commented on social media soon after the story was shown, that the fictional Robin ap Gwilliam looks eerily like the real prime minister of Georgia.
Irakli Kobakhidze, prime minister of the Repulic of Georgia; and Aneurin Barnard, who played the fictional prime minister Roger ap Gwilliam, in last weekend’s Doctor Who episode, “73 Yards”.
Er, well, that’s a bit one-sided, isn’t it!!!!! It is the first time that I have seen such complete dominance of the literary portrayal of a country by a single author. At least he’s actually Colombian.
As already mentioned, no books disqualified (one could raise an eyebrow at for instance The Autumn of the Patriarch where it’s not 100% clear that the setting is Colombia, but really we know that it is).
The next five books in my ranking are also by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The next after that is Infinite Country, by Patricia Engel. The top book on the list by a Colombian woman is Fruit of the Drunken Tree, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras.
But they are all a long way behind. Well done, GGM.
I had a lovely time yesterday at Port Lympne in Kent, the hotel and nature reserve which was founded by John Aspinall. I don’t have a well-informed view on the ethics of keeping wild animals on a different continent, but I did get a real thrill from being up close and personal with real giraffe, different species of rhinoceros, Bactrian camels and a more distant zebra.
Who are *you* looking at?
I also saw a lion and a capybara, but did not get good shots of them; and lots and lots and lots of different types of deer.
Inside the hotel, there is some spectacular art, with the jewel being the room whose entire walls are dominated by a massive mural by Arthur Spencer Roberts. It’s difficult for photographs to do it justice, but I tried.
The whole day, of course, was a celebration for a friend and former colleague, who has found the man for the rest of her life. It was a great day and I wish them many happy years together.
As usual, a disturbing comic book from Clowes, this time looking at the life of a woman called Monica, trying to discover the truth about her origins after her mother abandoned her as a child. The images are vivid and the stories deliberately a bit obscure, so that you have to concentrate on getting the links. I thought it was great, if anything a bit more accessible than some of Clowes’ other work. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was my top unread comic in English. Next on that pile is volume 5 of Once and Future.
SF 4 (YTD 76) The Hanging Tree, by Ben Aaronovitch Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett A Friend of the Earth, by T.C. Boyle Austria in the Year 2020, by Josef von Neupauer
Comics 6 (YTD 28) The Sapling: Branches, by Alex Paknadel et al Monica, by Daniel Clowes Sunstone, vol 2, by Stjepan Sejić Return to Kosovo, by Gani Jakupi and Jorge González Barcelona, âme noire, by Ruben Pellejero, Eduard Torrents, Martín Pardo, Denis Lapière, Gani Jakupi Superman & Batman Generations 3: The 21st Century!, by John Byrne
5,700 pages (YTD 57,900) 4/22 (YTD 102/236) by non-male writers (Uglow, Jagger, Ashe, Fitzpatrick) None (YTD 26/236) by a non-white writer 3/22 rereads (1066 and All That, Night Watch I think, Burning Heart)
267 books currently tagged unread, down 15 from last month, down 77 from October 2023.
Reading now The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling Tudor Court Culture, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Anna Riehl The Geraldines: An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald
Coming soon (perhaps) The Ripper, by Tony Lee Synthespians™, by Craig Hinton Doctor Who: Rogue, by Kate Herron and Briony Redman Ascension of the Cybermen & The Timeless Children, by Ryan Bradley The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee Lost Objects, by Marian Womack What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War, by Ernest Bramah Marriage, by H.G. Wells Authors of their Lives, by David Gerber Collected Plays and Teleplays, by Flann O’Brien Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman The Good Earth, by Pearl S Buck Drowned Ammet, by Diana Wynne Jones The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, eds Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin The Light We Carry: Overcoming In Uncertain Times, by Michelle Obama Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi Bellatrix, Tome 1, by Leo The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy How I Learned to Understand the World, by Hans Rosling Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
‘There’s some evidence that Christina Chorley might have been a practitioner,’ I said and explained Dr Walid and Vaughan’s fibrings, which led to Stephanopoulos asking the same questions I had. So I shared the same lack of answers that Dr Walid and Vaughan had given me – this is known in the police as intelligence focusing. First you identify what you don’t know. The next step is to go and find some likely sod and question them until they give you some answers. In the old days we weren’t that bothered whether the answers had anything to do with the facts, but these days we’re much more picky.
Sixth in the Rivers of London sequence, which I have generally enjoyed a lot. The drug-related death of a teenager turns out to involve the daughter of the goddess of the river Tyburn (the river which waters the roots of the original Hanging Tree) and Peter Grant and colleagues are brought in to sort things out. Also the Americans; also the Faceless Man, antagonist in a couple of earlier books. It ends with a grand magical shoot-out in a luxury apartment block. I quite enjoyed it, but got a bit of a middle-book vibe, as if the pieces are being put in place for something more to come. You can get it here.
I am a bit surprised to see that readers on both LibraryThing and Goodreads rate this higher than the previous book, Foxglove Summer; I’d have put them the other way round. Users of both systems agree in ranking the next in sequence, Lies Sleeping, top; so I have that to look forward to.
Current The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling Tudor Court Culture, eds. Thomas Betteridge & Anna Riehl The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald
Last books finished A Friend of the Earth, by T.C. Boyle Barcelona, âme noire, by Ruben Pellejero, Eduard Torrents, Martín Pardo, Denis Lapière, Gani Jakupi Superman & Batman Generations 3: The 21st Century!, by John Byrne Irish Demons, by Joan Fitzpatrick Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell Austria in the Year 2020, by Josef von Neupauer
Next books The Ripper, by Tony Lee The Roommate of Anne Frank, by Nanda van der Zee Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman
These horrors lurked for Kosovo, too. Arkan, rewarded for his slaughtering crusade in Bosnia, was put up as a candidate for Kosovo in the Serbian parliamentary elections. Surrounded by his thugs, he took up residence in Pristina’s Grand Hotel. Milošević, brushing off Arkan’s crimes to a Croatian envoy in November 1993, declared: ‘I too must have people to do certain kinds of dirty work for me.’ Then he laughed out loud. They weren’t laughing in Pristina. The candidacy of Arkan, says the Harvard-educated Minister of Dialogue Edita Tahiri, a formidable negotiator, ‘held up a mirror to the future of Serbian democracy.’
One of those books where I know the subject, and the subject matter, reasonably well. Hashim Thaçi emerged from the shadowy world of Kosovo exile politics to become one of the political leaders of the new polity after the war of 1998-99 (the West likes to think of the NATO conflict of 1999, but it started a year earlier). the biography is by two journalists from The Times of London; I got my copy from Thaçi himself at a book launch in London in 2018; the Albanian translation came out earlier this year.
The book is unashamedly partisan, but I did not spot any factual inaccuracies, and it covers all of the main events fairly. It digs into Thaçi’s own perceptions and intentions in depth. There aren’t a lot of first-person narratives from actors in the Balkan wars (though I did also read an extended interview with Ramush Haradinaj, twenty years ago). The book therefore shows the biases you would expect – including consistent hostility to Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo’s pre-war leader, who I must agree was way out of his depth. (On the shelf in my office, I keep a rock that Rugova gave me the first time I met him.)
One of the areas where the book needs to tread gently is its coverage of the horrifying organ-smuggling allegations against Thaçi made by a former war crimes prosecutor and by members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I have always been astonished that anyone took these allegations seriously. It is an improbable scheme in the first place, and any attempt to implement it would have left an undeniably clear logistics trail. The EU was unable to find any evidence for it, likewise the Kosovo Specialist Chambers tribunal. It seems to me to be another Martinović case writ large. (If you don’t know about the Martinović case, lucky you, and I advise you not to Google it.)
Unfortunately the book doesn’t quite deliver on the promise in the blurb to explore how come the Kosovo intervention was largely successful when Iraq and Afghanistan failed. But there is a repeated emphasis that Thaçi was planning for the day after victory – how to get to independence, and also how to avoid the trap of becoming a mono-ethnic society. It’s fair to say that the Kosovo Liberation Army went in much less for civilian reprisals than its counterparts on all sides in Bosnia, and its leadership should get some credit for this. It’s also fair to say that Thaçi became the most important political figure in post-conflict Kosovo for a time, though his dominance was never complete or unchallenged, and that his rhetoric on ethnic relations was always responsible.
Anyway, I think that there are more comprehensive books about Kosovo and the Balkans out there, but I don’t think there is a more comprehensive book about Hashim Thaçi. You can get it here.
This was published in 2019, at the point when Thaçi was President of Kosovo but was also under pressure from the Kosovo Specialist Chambers tribunal in the Hague, which duly indicted him in 2020 for war crimes. The book obviously doesn’t cover that but I just want to say up front that the prosecution evidence is remarkably poor, and the key points have been refuted by the ranking US diplomat in Kosovo at the time. Like his rival Haradinaj, Thaçi surrendered immediately on his indictment, and Kosovo has complied fully with its obligations under international law. Not every state in the region has as good a record.
This was the shortest book on my shelves acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is The Geraldines; An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald
To be honest, not one of the more memorable Sixth Doctor novels. The Doctor and Peri land in a crumbling authoritarian society, closely aligned with the setting of the Judge Dredd comics. Peri ends up with the rebels and the Doctor (after flirting with death) with the Adjudicators. Lots of running around and biffing. You can get it here.
I have been fortunate enough to be closely involved with the Hugo Awards and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and many years ago I was briefly the paid administrator of the very non-sfnal Christopher Ewart-Biggs Award. I helped tally BSFA votes a few times before the electronic age. I generally love the concept of awards, provided that the process is rules-bound and at least minimally transparent.
I was sorry to see that the folks behind the Kitschies have decided that this year’s awards will be the last. This was a British juried award for science fiction, which tended towards the eclectic and slightly overlooked, and always brightened my days when the nominations and winners were announced. I also note with concern that the Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award), has had its own travails, though it looks like they do plan to make awards for 2024 after a couple of years without.
I have been asked a couple of times if the Hugos are under threat from, for instance, the Ignyte Awards, which were specifically set up to celebrate diversity and inclusivity in 2020, in the wake of Black Lives Matter and (less important but still painful) that year’s Hugo ceremony debacle. I say, let a hundred flowers bloom. It’s great that people want to celebrate the sf that they love, and slapping a label on it saying “This wins our prize” is a very effective way of celebrating it. The more, the merrier as far as I am concerned.
The worst threat to the Hugos is not competition from other awards, but self-inflicted damage, of which the grievous abuse of process that we saw at Chengdu is the most obvious recent case. These things take time, energy and money. We should not take any of them for granted.
I don’t think that any award is diminished by any other. I am interested to know what other people enjoy, and I find collective wisdom – whether from a jury or a vote – all the more interesting from both a political and literary perspective. Sometimes I will agree, and more often I won’t. And that’s fine.
Disqualified: Dreams from my Father, by Barack Obama, was way ahead of the field, but it is mainly set in America. Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was second on Goodreads, but is set all over the place and especially in Somalia rather than Kenya. A bit further down the table, the short story collection Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Akpan, has settings in several different countries including Kenya.
Women are very well represented, John Le Carré being the only male author on the list. Circling the Sun, which tops the Goodreads raking, is a novel about Beryl Markham, whose real autobiography comes third on Goodreads and fourth on LibraryThing (but fourth on my ranking . Denys Finch-Hatton scores very well here, as the overlapping lover of both Beryl Markham and Karen Blixen; basically half of my Kenya list is about shagging him (because Out of Africa comes up twice).
The top Kenyan author on Goodreads and LibraryThing is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and his top book is A Grain of Wheat.
Another film set in 2025, and another 2025 story set around a ridiculously violent reality game, in this case called Futuresport. It has been invented to resolve gang violence by getting them to play Futuresport against each other instead. The top American team is led by a guy who looks like Superman, because he is played by Dean Cain. The top Asian team challenges the American to a match to decide who owns Hawaii, because Hawaiian terrorists have been blowing things up. It is exactly as stupid as I make it sound. You’ll never guess who wins in the end.
In its favour, there is one half-decent sex scene, right at the beginning to make you keep watching in hope that there is another, and the violence is not as gruesome as, say, Endgame / Bronx Lotta Finale. But the game itself is rather dull, which doesn’t help.
From 1969 onwards every nuance of every utterance by anybody of note, in all parties in the South, but especially in Fianna Fáil, was analysed for the minutest divergence from stated policy on the North. Any inconsistency led to an avalanche of publicity, followed by another avalanche of restatements of official policy by virtually everybody concerned; there was then relative calm until the next occurrence. Along with the Taoiseach, the Department of Foreign Affairs had overall responsibility for Northern issues, but the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Garret FitzGerald, spent much of his time abroad (much to the satisfaction of some of his own cabinet colleagues, according to one of my sources in the Department of the Taoiseach), so Conor Cruise O’Brien was given a free run at Fianna Fáil. He seemed to have Liam Cosgrave’s permission to badger the party about its Northern policy and could not resist stirring the pot from time to time.
A really interesting insider account of Irish politics particularly in the period from 1974 to 1982, when the author started out as press secretary for Fianna Fáil, then in opposition, and was then appointed spokesman of the government when they unexpectedly won a huge majority in 1977; under the Fine Gael / Labour coalition, he was not as central but still had plenty of scope to observe.
I found the first two thirds of the book totally gripping. Dunlop had a front seat as Jack Lynch built Fianna Fáil up from its bitter defeat in 1973, and takes us through the 1977 election campaign and the stunning result. He then sees Lynch slowly losing his grip over the next couple of years, until he is forced to resign in 1979 and replaced by Charles Haughey (“Charlie” to everyone). His description of the Lynch government, having won an unexpectedly huge majority which was in fact built on a very fragile electoral margin, is grimly reminiscent of the problems faced by Keir Starmer and the Labour Party in the UK today.
Dunlop defends Haughey strongly against all allegations of corruption and wrong-doing, and tells stories of his humanity – and also of monstrous behaviour and gross political misjudgements. It’s clear that Haughey was his favourite Taoiseach. Alas, Dunlop’s defence of Haughey’s probity rings a little hollow in the light of his own subsequent criminal conviction for bribing Dublin councillors, not to mention what has since come to light about Haughey. But for me, coming from a perspective where my family were distinctly not Haughey fans, it is healthy to read another view. (Even if it is wrong.)
Dunlop was less close to the centre under Garret Fitzgerald, and spent most of his time in the coalition governments of 1981-2 and 1982-7 assisting the Fine Gael minister John Boland (I must admit I had completely forgotten about him). He then retreated into private sector public affairs and lobbying, though was recruited again by Fianna Fáil for the 1992 election. The book was published in 2004, ten years after the events it describes, and contemporaneous with Dunlop singing like a bird to the Mahon Tribunal.
There is very little about ideology here and a lot about political character, psychology and motivation. In particular there’s very little about Northern Ireland, other than complaining about the difficulties it raised, praising Haughey’s attempts to build a relationship with Thatcher and explaining his own perfunctory contacts with British diplomats, and regretting the (peripheral) impact of the hunger strikes in the first 1982 election. It shows how little the reality on the ground in the North mattered for Dublin (and other southern) politicians.
I am personally sympathetic to the anthropological approach to politics, and I love gossip anyway (who doesn’t?) so I generally enjoyed Dunlop’s account. It is occasionally a little too hand-wavey – he never quite says what he thinks the facts were behind the Arms Trial, except that in his view Lynch was more guilty and Charlie less so than most people think. But some of his observations about the relations between politicians and the media, politicians and the voters, and indeed politicians and reality itself, are spot-on. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that rapidly dwindling pile is Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, eds. Edmund Curtis and R.B. McDowell.
Concluding the series of albums featuring the Twelfth Doctor, library assistant companion Alice Obiefune, and sentient tree The Sapling, here we have the showdown between the TARDIS crew and The Scream, a Silent so silent that even the other Silents can’t remember him. I felt the previous volume a bit lacking in energy, but it really picked up here to race us towards the conclusion of the story. You can get it here.
I guess this is saying good bye to Alice as well – a nicely developed comics only companion, with perhaps a bit more consistency than some of them (indeed, than some of the TV companions). She’s also in The Lost Dimension which I haven’t got to yet.
It seems like only yesterday that I posted about being 20,000 days old. But actually it was a thousand days ago. When I was born on 26 April 1967, Lyndon Johnson was President of the USA; Harold Wilson was Prime Minister of the UK; Jack Lynch was Taoiseach; and Walter Hallstein was President of the European Commission. It was the day that Italy launched an earth satellite from an ocean platform, and Harry West was forced to resign as Northern Ireland’s Minister of Agriculture due to a corruption scandal. My birthday twins include the wrestler Glenn Jacobs aka Kane; the actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste; the former Estonian Minister of Finance and his twin brother; and the British Ambassador to Indonesia who incidentally was my college flatmate in our final year.
1,000 days: Tuesday 20 January 1970 I was two and three quarters, living in Belfast. The Troubles were going through a deceptive lull – the first violent deaths of the year in Northern Ireland would not be until June. The Biafrans had just lost the Nigerian civil war. The first commercial Boeing 747 took off the next day. Born that day: Mitch Benn. (Between episodes 3 and 4 of Spearhead from Space.)
US President: Nixon UK Prime Minister: Wilson Taoiseach: Lynch Northern Ireland Prime Minister: T O’Neill President of the European Commission: Rey
2,000 days: Monday 16 October 1972 I was five and a half, attending primary school. The Troubles were in full flow with four people killed by the British Army that day, two IRA, two Loyalists, and Maze prison inmates starting a fire which caused serious damage. Congressman Hale Boggs died in a plane crash in Alaska (at least that’s what most people think; the wreckage was never found). The first episode of Emmerdale was broadcast.
US President: Nixon UK Prime Minister: Heath Taoiseach: Lynch Northern Ireland Prime Minister: vacant President of the European Commission: Mansholt
3,000 days: Sunday 13 July 1975 I was eight and a quarter. I remember being at my grandparents’ in Dublin later that week, watching the Apollo-Soyuz mission; possibly we were already there on the 13th, avoiding the Twelfth. Two people were killed in the Troubles that day, a Catholic teenager shot by the Army and a loyalist killed in in an internal feud. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) process was nearing an end, with the Helsinki Accords signed on 1 August. Born that day: Alan Kelly, former leader of the Irish Labour Party.
US President: Ford UK Prime Minister: Wilson Taoiseach: Cosgrave President of the European Commission: Ortoli
4,000 days: Saturday 8 April 1978 I was nearly eleven, in my last year at St Anne’s primary school. The IRA kidnapped and shot a Catholic man from Twinbrook that day; his body was not found until 2014. Star Wars had just won six Oscars, to four for Annie Hall. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was released the following day. (It seems not.)
US President: Carter UK Prime Minister: Callaghan Taoiseach: Lynch President of the European Commission: Jenkins
5,000 days: Friday 2 January 1981 Weirdly enough, I remember actually working out that I was 5000 days old on that day. I was thirteen, still enjoying the Christmas holidays, in the third form at Rathmore Grammar School. We were in the lull between the two hunger strikes; the IRA killed a Castlewellan man the previous day. Jimmy Carter was preparing to hand over to Ronald Reagan. Greece had just joined the EEC. (Episode 1 of Warrior’s Gate was broadcast the next day)
US President: Carter (just) UK Prime Minister: Thatcher Taoiseach: Haughey President of the European Commission: Jenkins (in his last few days)
6,000 days: Thursday 29 September 1983 I was sixteen, in Lower Sixth at Rathmore Grammar School, with a long-distance girlfriend in England. The previous weekend 38 prisoners escaped from the Maze Prison, the biggest prison break in UK or Irish history. Neil Kinnock was about to be elected leader of the UK Labour Party.
US President: Reagan UK Prime Minister: Thatcher Taoiseach: Fitzgerald President of the European Commission: Thorn
7,000 days: Wednesday 25 June 1986 I was nineteen, working on an archaeology site near Heilbronn in Germany, still with the same long-distance girlfriend. That evening West Germany beat France and Argentina beat Belgium in the World Cup semi-finals (Argentina won the final on Sunday). I actually remember that we had a barbecue at work the next day, lots of roast meat and beer. Born that day: Leonora Knatchbull (1986-1991) after whom the Leonora Children’s Cancer Fund was named.
US President: Reagan UK Prime Minister: Thatcher Taoiseach: Fitzgerald President of the European Commission: Delors
8,000 days: Tuesday 21 March 1989 I was 21, single, preparing nervously for finals at Cambridge, and had just been elected Deputy President of the students union for the following year. The previous day, the IRA killed two policemen in south Armagh. Serbia was about to revoke Kosovo’s autonomy, as Communism crumbled across Eastern Europe. The People’s Action Movement won six of the eleven elected seats in the Assembly of St Kitts and Nevis. Dick Cheney became the U.S. Secretary of Defense.
US President: Reagan UK Prime Minister: Thatcher Taoiseach: Haughey President of the European Commission: Delors
9,000 days: Monday 16 December 1991 I was 24, living in Belfast again and working as a researcher on the project that became my PhD, long-distancing with Anne, my future wife. The following day a Belfast bar manager was killed by a leading INLA man who had been thrown out of his bar. Kazakhstan declare independence from the Soviet Union, which was formally dissolved on Christmas Day (though functionally it had collapsed months before). The People’s National Movement won the election in Trinidad and Tobago.
US President: GHW Bush UK Prime Minister: Major Taoiseach: Haughey President of the European Commission: Delors
10,000 days: Sunday 11 September 1994 I was 27, had been married to Anne for almost a year, in the middle of my PhD; I actually had a 10,000-day party that evening, having done the calculations in advance. We were in ceasefire time, with the IRA having announced theirs two weeks before, and the Loyalists preparing for theirs a month later. I was already active in the Alliance Party as the grandly titled Director of Elections. Frasier won four Emmys.
US President: Clinton UK Prime Minister: Major Taoiseach: Reynolds President of the European Commission: Delors
11,000 days: Saturday 7 June 1997 I was 30, working in Bosnia, nervously ready for the arrival of B a couple of weeks later – I think we already knew by the 7th that Anne (who had stayed in Belfast) would have a Caesarian on the 19th. The Irish general election was the previous day, with Bertie Ahern placed to start his eleven-year term as Taoiseach. The IRA ceasefire was reinstated the following month.
US President: Clinton UK Prime Minister: Blair Taoiseach: Bruton (just) President of the European Commission: Santer
12,000 days: Friday 3 March 2000 I was 32, working at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels; we were still getting to grips with B’s disability, and F was a happy seven months old. I think this was actually the weekend that I went to Szeged in Hungary to meet with the Serbian opposition. My first visit to Kosovo was later that month. The Northern Ireland Assembly had been suspended again. George W. Bush and Al Gore clinched their respective presidential nominations the following Tuesday. The Anguilla United Front won the election in, of all places, Anguilla.
US President: Clinton UK Prime Minister: Blair Taoiseach: Ahern Northern Ireland First Minister: Trimble Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister: Mallon President of the European Commission: Prodi
13,000 days: Thursday 28 November 2002 I was 35, working for the International Crisis Group, expecting U’s arrival a few weeks later. We had just published a report on [North] Macedonia and NATO. Back in Northern Ireland, the Assembly had been suspended after Stormontgate the previous month, and did not come back for years. There were terrorist attacks in Mombasa, Soweto and Beit She’an.
US President: GW Bush UK Prime Minister: Blair Taoiseach: Ahern President of the European Commission: Prodi
14,000 days: Wednesday 24 August 2005 I was 38, still working for the International Crisis Group, briefly at home between our holiday in Northern Ireland (including the 2005 Glasgow Worldcon) and a particularly fun trip to [North] Macedonia which started the following day. The USA was about to be hit by Hurricane Katrina. As part of the ongoing Northern Ireland choreography, the IRA had declared a permanent end to its campaign the previous month (which had also seen the 7/7 bombings in London).
US President: GW Bush UK Prime Minister: Blair Taoiseach: Ahern President of the European Commission: Barroso
15,000 days: Tuesday 20 May 2008 I was 41, working with Independent Diplomat, just back from a trip to Montenegro and Albania, and reading lots of Doctor Who books. B had moved out a few months before, and into the place where she now lives the previous month. Bertie Ahern had just stepped down as Taoiseach, followed by Brian Cowen, and Ian Paisley was about to step down as First Minister of Northern Ireland. Boris Johnson had just been elected Mayor of London. (Between The Unicorn and the Wasp and Silence in the Library)
US President: GW Bush UK Prime Minister: Brown Taoiseach: Cowan Northern Ireland First Minister: Paisley (just) Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister: McGuinness President of the European Commission: Barroso
16,000 days: Monday 14 February 2011 I was 43, still working with Independent Diplomat, probably took the evening to celebrate Valentine’s Day with Anne. In Ireland, voters were preparing to give Fianna Fail a massive kicking, and across the Arab world governments were toppling; in Iran it was a ‘Day of Rage’ for protesters.
US President: Obama UK Prime Minister: Cameron Taoiseach: Cowan (just) Northern Ireland First Minister: Robinson Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister: McGuinness President of the European Commission: Barroso
17,000 days: Sunday 10 November 2013 I was 46, at Novacon in Nottingham with F, having a damn good time. Still working with Independent Diplomat but actively looking. Preparing for the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who two weeks later…
US President: Obama UK Prime Minister: Cameron Taoiseach: Kenny Northern Ireland First Minister: Robinson Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister: McGuinness President of the European Commission: Barroso
18,000 days: Saturday 6 August 2016 I was 49, on holiday in Northern Ireland from my work at APCO, where I had been working for almost two years. The Rio Olympics were about to start. We went to Tyrella Beach and Downpatrick that day, and saw the Red Arrows fly overhead.
US President: Obama UK Prime Minister: May Taoiseach: Kenny Northern Ireland First Minister: Foster Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister: McGuinness President of the European Commission: Juncker
19,000 days: Friday 3 May 2019 It was the week after my 52nd birthday, and I spent all day in the BBC TV studio in Belfast commenting on the results of the previous day’s local council elections. The next day I did more TV in the morning and went south to a Dublin Worldcon planning meeting in the afternoon. The Emperor of Japan had just abdicated. This is me exploring the green screen with the BBC’s Mark Simpson.
US President: Trump UK Prime Minister: May Taoiseach: Varadkar President of the European Commission: Juncker
US President: Biden UK Prime Minister: Johnson Taoiseach: Martin Northern Ireland First Minister: Givan (remember him?) Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister: Michelle O’Neill President of the European Commission: von der Leyen
21,000 days: Wednesday 23 October 2024 Last Sunday (three days ago) was the tenth anniversary of my joining APCO. I’m having a party to celebrate that next week – let me know if you’d like to come and I somehow forgot to invite you. But it’s pleasing that it almost coincides with my 21,000th day on the planet.
US President: Biden UK Prime Minister: Starmer Taoiseach: Harris Northern Ireland First Minister: Michelle O’Neill Northern Ireland Deputy First Minister: Little-Pengelly President of the European Commission: von der Leyen
Current A Friend of the Earth, by T.C. Boyle Barcelona, âme noire, by Ruben Pellejero, Eduard Torrents, Martín Pardo, Denis Lapière, Gani Jakupi Irish Historical Documents, 1172-1922, ed. Edmund Curtis & R.B. McDowell The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins
Last books finished Sunstone, vol 2, by Stjepan Sejić 1066 and All That, by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman Midnight, by Philip Purser-Hallard Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman Richard II: A Brittle Glory, by Laura Ashe Ireland under Elizabeth and James I, ed. Henry Morley Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett Return to Kosovo, by Gani Jakupi and Jorge González
Next books The Peshawar Lancers, by S.M. Stirling The Geraldines. An Experiment In Irish Government 1169-1601, by Brian Fitzgerald Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman
When [James] Watt was born on 19 January 1736, his father was a substantial figure, a general merchant, builder, shipwright, carpenter and cabinet-maker, and part owner of several vessels. He made the first crane in Greenock for unloading the heavy, scented bales of tobacco, and into his workshop the captains brought their instruments for repair. This was the trade Watt set his heart on. Instrument-makers were the unsung heroes of the scientific revolution. The sixteenth-century burst of exploration had fostered the mathematics of navigation and the improvement of astrolabes, quadrants and compasses, while on land surveying instruments were vital to map new territories.¹ Meanwhile the clock- and watchmakers were developing their craft, and the spectacle-makers and glass-grinders were working on new optical instruments, telescopes and microscopes. Yet the theoretical aspects of their work had little status: in Cambridge in the 163os, ‘Mathematicks … were scarce looked upon as Academical Studies, but rather mechanical, as the business of Traders, Seamen, Carpenters, Surveyors of Land, or the like.’² ¹ For a survey see Gerard L’E. Turner, ‘Scientific Instruments’, in Pietro Corsi and Paul Weidling (eds), Information Sources in the History of Science and Medicine (1983) 243-58. ² John Wallis, in Heilbron, 10; see her careful introductory survey.
A lovely in-depth look at the men behind the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment in the mid-19th century West Midlands of England, focussing especially on Erasmus Darwin as the key figure, but also looking at Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Samuel Galton, and a number of others whose names I was less familiar with. They were all members of the Lunar Society, which met monthly in Birmingham from the 1760s to around the end of the century.
There is a lot of loving detail about their lives, with common threads including Methodism and other minority Protestant traditions (especially Quakers); pottery; lots of children (Darwin had fourteen with his two wives, and maybe more besides); investments; the abolition of slavery; and of course engineering. It could have been overwhelming, but it’s broken up with black-and-white illustrations and some lovely plates. I was particularly struck by Joseph Wright’s paintings of the orrery and the air pump.
A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1766)An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768)
I learned a lot from this; in particular I realised how well the author had managed to gain my sympathy when I found myself horrified by the 1791 Priestley Riots, where a right-wing mob targeted the local religious minorities in Birmingham, including especially the vulnerable and visible Joseph Priestley; the local authorities appear to have colluded in the outbreak of violence and then (as usual) blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves. Some things never change.
Anyway, this is a tremendously engaging book about a part of history that I should have known more about; and now I do. You can get it here.
There was lots of time for Matt to do what he intended and then get on to his homework.
A YA novel, the first in a sequence related to the series of Net Force novels (and TV movie) by Tom Clancy, published in 1998 but set in 2025. I think I probably got enough of a flavour from this not to need to try out the rest of the series of 18 books. Our protagonist, Matt Hunter, tracks down a bunch of hackers who are not only disrupting important cultural events like baseball games, but also infiltrating embassies in Washington and stealing information. The virtual world in this version of 2025 is much more hologrammy and immersive than we have actually managed to generate in real life. It’s the least dystopian future of any of the books and films set on Earth in 2025 that I have tried so far – the future of John Varley’s Titan also seems fairly rosy, but it’s set among the moons of Saturn. You can get it here.
An odd bit of historical trivia that I came across: the Duke of Ireland was killed by a wild boar in the woods near our house, on 22 November 1392.
I was not aware that there had ever been a Duke of Ireland. It was a title given in 1386, for his lifetime only, to Robert de Vere, the ninth Earl of Oxford, by King Richard II. Richard II was the only king of England to visit Ireland between 1215 and 1690. One of the ways he demonstrated his regard for Ireland was to give titles to his very good friend the Earl of Oxford. In 1385, Richard made de Vere Marquess of Dublin, the very first title of Marquess granted in England, and in 1386, Duke of Ireland, the first duke in England who was not closely related to the royal family.
There was speculation then and now about exactly how close the relationship between King and Duke was. In 1385, when the unprecedented title of Marquess was granted, Richard II was 18 and Robert de Vere 24. Both married twice; neither is known to have had children. It should be added that de Vere married his second wife, one of the ladies of the household of Richard II’s first queen, Anne of Bohemia, after a very public love affair. This of course does not exclude anything.
It all ended horribly. Richard II was not a consensus-minded guy and tried to rule England and Ireland with the assistance and advice of a very few chosen friends. The regional magnates, banding together as the Lords Appellant, rebelled against him, and defeated the pro-Richard forces, led by de Vere, at the Battle of Radcot Bridge in 1387. De Vere was forced into exile; this medieval illustration shows him after his defeat, sadly crossing the Thames on his way to exile in Flanders.
The “Merciless Parliament” of 1388 consolidated control of England by the Lords Appellant, and condemned de Vere to death in absentia. It lasted less than a year; the Lords Appellant proved even worse at government than Richard II had, and his uncle John of Gaunt returned and brokered a restoration of power to Richard in 1389. One of the Lords Appellant who Richard persuaded to change sides was John of Gaunt’s son Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby. Henry and Richard were the same age and had been childhood playmates.
Richard elevated Henry to the title of Duke of Hereford (incidentally, Richard II created nine dukedoms, a record not broken until Charles II three hundred years later). But ten years later, they quarrelled, Henry was sent into exile, and so the plot of Shakespeare’s Richard II begins. I must admit that until I came across the trivial point of the identity of the Duke of Ireland, I was not aware of the whole 1380’s crisis and knmew nothing about Richard’s reign between the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and the exile of Bolingbroke in 1397, leading inexorably to Richard’s overthrow and death two years later.
Although Richard regained power from 1388, he made no attempt to recall de Vere from his exile in Leuven. As I said up top, de Vere was killed in a hunting accident in the woods close to our house in 1392, aged 30. The titles of Duke of Ireland and Marquess of Dublin died with him, and his uncle inherited the title of Earl of Oxford. Three years later his body was brought back to England and reburied. It is reported (in the St Albans Chronicle) that the king had the coffin opened to kiss his lost friend’s hand and to gaze on his face one last time. Ironically, the emblem of the de Vere family was a boar, the same animal that killed the Duke of Ireland.
Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II
Vicki Constantine Croke
10,885
535
A Well-Tempered Heart / Herzenstimmen
Jan-Philipp Sendker
12,054
284
Finding George Orwell in Burma
Emma Larkin
3,602
734
As is so often the case, it’s a shame that this list is all about Westerners encountering Myanmar. The top authors from the country, a bit further down the table, are Pascal Khoo Thwe, Thant Myint-U and Aung San Suu Kyi. The only one on the list that I have read is Guy Delisle’s graphic novel.
I disqualified three books: The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan, seems to be more than half in Australia; The Glass Palace, by Amitav Ghosh, seems to have enough excursions to India and Malay(si)a to push the Burmese sections below 50%; and A Fortune-Teller Told Me / Un indovino mi disse, by Tiziano Terrari, is set all over Asia.
In Glasgow last weekend, with a hired car, and with the help of the Megalithic Portal website, I thought it might be interesting to find three megalithic monuments to the north of the city. Spoiler: I found only one.
The Machar Stones
The Machar stones (far left of the map) are in a Forestry Commission plantation, just west of the Carron Valley Reservoir. Alas, it proved impossible to get very far into the Forestry Commission territory from the B818 which skirts the northern edge of the reservoir. The western edge, at Todholes, was completely closed off. The eastern entrance, which looked more promising at first, was also closed off before you got much further.
There is an educational medieval village at the eastern end of the reservoir, and it has some mock standing stones.
They wobble when you touch them; made of fibre-glass (at best). So that was that.
The Broadgate Stone
This was the only one of the three that I was actually able to reach: conveniently beside the A891, just east of Strathblane. Some doubt has been expressed about whether it’s a genuine megalith, or possibly commemorating a 16th century murder. I thought it was nicely shaped to mimic the outline of the Dunglass volcanic plug across the road.
And the view in the other directions was good too.
But it’s actually rather small, maybe 1 metre 20 in height? All these pictures were taken crouching in the wet grass.
The Dumgoyach Stones
This looked promising, though it was a bit of a walk; I parked in a layby beside Dumgoyach farmhouse, and walked in a light drizzle along the West Highland Way (marked by the green diamonds on the map), passing many campers and a few non-campers who were out taking the weekend air, around the hill of Dumgoyach, which is really striking.
I hoped to find the row of half a dozen megaliths on the next rise. One of them was at least visible from the path, so I know that they exist.
But there was a small river and a large fence between me and the hilltop, and I realised that to get over to the stones I would really need to have had much better boots, or to be twenty years younger, or both. So I gave up and went back to the car.
An additional deterrent was provided by scary notices about the local wildlife.
At Edinburgh airport on the way home, I bought two venison haggis, which seemed like fine revenge (and was also not expensive).
