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Whoniversaries 3 July

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i) births and deaths

3 July 2001: death of Delia Derbyshire who arranged Ron Grainer's theme tune to make it as we knew it from 1963 to 1979.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

3 July 1965: broadcast of 'The Watcher', the first episode of the series we now know as The Time Meddler, with newly acquired companion Steven fainting on the Tardis floor and then refusing to believe that they are in 1066. Features the First Doctor picking up a Viking headpiece and asking, "What do you think this is? A space helmet for a cow?" One of the great episode endings as the Doctor discovers that the chanting monks are actually on a gramophone record and is then imprisoned by a set of bars descending from the ceiling. The Monk is the first fellow member of the Doctor's race we have met since Susan.

3 July 2009: broadcast of Torchwood: The Dead Line, the audio play where Jack spends most of the story unconscious (which is just as well since Barrowman is not a natural at audios) and Ianto gets to tell us how much he loves him; while Gwen and Rhys get cuddly too.

iii) dates specified in-universe

3 July 1999: Much of Keith Topping's 2000 Fifth Doctor novel, The King of Terror, is set on this date.

3 July 2379: The date on which the Sixth Doctor story Mindwarp is set, ending with Peri's brain being destroyed – or so we are led to believe. (1986)

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Thursday reading

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Current
The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner
Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
The Overstory, by Richard Powers
Tooth & Claw, by Jo Walton
City of Lies, by Sam Hawke

Last books finished
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
De dag waarop ze haar vlucht nam, by Beka, Marko, and Maëla Cosson
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, by John Bolton
The Extremes, by Christopher Priest
The Wicked + The Divine vol 6: Imperial Phase Part 2, by Kieron Gillen etc
The Wicked + The Divine vol 7: Mothering Invention, by Kieron Gillen etc
Doctor Who Annual 2020

Next books
EU Lobbying Handbook, by Andreas Geiger
Gaze of the Medusa, by Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby and Brian Williamson

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Whoniversaries 2 July

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i) births and deaths

2 July 1973: birth of Peter Kay, guest star on Love and Monsters (2006).

2 July 1991: death of Don Houghton, who wrote Inferno (1970) and The Mind of Evil (1971).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

2 July 1966: broadcast of the second episode of The War Machines, in which poor Dodo Chaplet is unceremoniously written out of the programme. Starts with WOTAN demanding the presence of "Doctor Who". Ends with Ben being trapped by a newly activated War Machine.

2 July 2009: broadcast of Torchwood: The Golden Age, a somewhat bonkers radio play which brings Jack, Gwen and Ianto to India to meet an old flame of Jack's.

iii) date specified in-universe

2 July 1462: end of the 2007 Big Finish Fifth Doctor story, Son of the Dragon.

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Top tweets 2020 H1

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My four top tweets from the first half of this year:

4) Bitter commentary on the UK media.

3) Commentary on Northern Irish election stuff.

2) News of how the pandemic was hitting our own family:

And 1) commentary on the levelling effect of the pandemic:

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Picard

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As the lockdown eased, we sat down and watched the ten episodes of Picard, the latest in the Star Trek franchise, with 79-year-old Sir Patrick Stewart returning to his most iconic role. In case you don’t know much about it, here’s the official trailer:

I have actually seen only a very few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it was enough to help me locate all of the returning characters in Picard. Our hero is moved to come out of retirement to right a historic wrong; Starfleet won’t give him a ship, so he acquires one of his own with a motley crew, led by Michelle Hurd’s Raffi Musiker, another one of Picard’s former first officers who comes with baggage from their past. But old friends return as well. The ghost of Data haunts the entire story, Seven of Nine makes an appearance or three, and the emotional peak is in the seventh episode, “Nepenthe”, where we are reunited with William Riker and Deanna Troi (I would be very surprised not to see that episode on the Hugo ballot next year).

The core plotline is about the rights of synthetic life-forms in the Federation, and Isa Briones plays the cutest of a number of cute anthropomorphic robots. My wife reasonably chided me for enjoying the show despite my well-chronicled dislike of stories about cute anthropomorphic robots. I realise that actually I hate them much more in prose than on the screen, for whatever deep psychological reason. The Robots of Death is a great Doctor Who story, after all. But in any case, the synths in Picard are not funny metal machines trying to be human; they are a vulnerable minority who are being othered and whose rights are under attack, so it’s a whole different trope being explored.

The pace is slow, but my concentration is not so good these days and I appreciated it. The one annoying glitch is that the showmakers forgot to give closure for the good-looking Romulan agent Narek in the final episode, which otherwise is also pretty good on the emotional intensity front. Well worth watching.

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Whoniversaries 1 July

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In 2010-11, I did a series of daily posts on anniversaries in Doctor Who history, covering i) real-world anniversaries of the births and deaths of people important to the history of the programme; ii) anniversaries of the first broadcast of Who stories on TV and radio (which get a bit thin over the summer, so we are starting gently); and iii) dates which are specified in broadcast stories or spinoff literature (of which there are surprisingly few). Ten years on, there is more material to work with, so let’s do it again.

i) Births and Deaths

NB: I include producers, writers, directors, regular cast and actors who have appeared in more than one story here.

1 July 1934: birth of Jean Marsh, who played the great Sara Kingdom in The Daleks' Master Plan (1965-6). She also appeared as Princess Joanna in The Crusade (1965) and as Morgaine in Battlefield (1989). She has done ten audios for Big Finish, nine as Sara Kingdom. (She was also married to Jon Pertwee, before either was on Doctor Who.)

Also born on 1 July: Daphne Dare (1929), costumer for much of the black and white era; Sonny Caldinez (1932), four-time Ice Warrior who appeared as Kemal the Turk in earlier episodes of Evil of the DaleksThe Movie (1996).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

NB I concentrate on TV releases here, with occasional exceptions.

1 July 1967: broadcast of the seventh and final episode of Evil of the Daleks, Skaro collapsing in flames as the malignant pepperpots battle each other in civil war, and the Second Doctor, Jamie and new companion Victoria flee the ruins as Season Four comes to an end. Sadly, one of the lost episodes.

1 July 2006: broadcast of Army of Ghosts, which starts with that creepy voiceover by Billie Piper about how she died, and then goes on to feature celebrity cameos and Jackie's great line "If we end up on Mars, I'm gonna kill you." Then we get into serious business with Torchwood and the Cybermen, and finally, in the best reveal in the whole of New Who, the Daleks emerge. from the Genesis Ark.

Also 1 July 2006: release of Tardisode 13, a prequel for next week's TV episode, Doomsday.

1 July 2009: broadcast of Torchwood: Asylum, the first of the three radio plays leading up to Children of EarthThe Doctor Falls, last of the tenth season of New Who and the last with Bill and Nardole (and probably with the Gomez and Simm Masters). Poor Bill gets transformed into a Cyberman; the Masters fight each other to the death; and the Doctor starts to regenerate, only to be confronted by a very familiar face at the end.

iii) dates specified in-universe

(Mostly in broadcast stories, with some exceptions as in the first case below)

1 Juy 1997: last day of setting of the 2003 Big Finish audio Sympathy for the Devil, starring David Warner as an alternate-history Doctor, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, and someone called David Tennant as Colonel Brimmicombe-Wood; I wonder what happened to him?

1 July 2058: Date of establishment of Bowie Base One on Mars, as seen in The Waters of Mars (2009).

Plenty more to come.

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June 2020 Books

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Non-fiction: 6 (YTD 32)
The Beiderbecke Affair, by William Gallagher
The Queen's Agent: Sir Francis Walsingham and the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England, by John Cooper
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by Stephen Fry
Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter
From A Clear Blue Sky, by Timothy Knatchbull
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, by John Bolton

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 15)
Local Hero, by David Benedictus
The Ghost of Lily Painter by Caitlin Davies
Laatste schooldag, by Jan Siebelink (did not finish)

sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 70)
The Sleeper Awakes, by H.G. Wells
Heaven's War by David S Goyer and Michael Cassutt (did not finish)
Dreaming In Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Extremes, by Christopher Priest

Comics: 6 (YTD 21)
The Wicked + The Divine vol 2: Fandemonium, by Kieron Gillen etc
The Wicked + The Divine vol 3: Commercial Suicide, by Kieron Gillen etc
The Wicked + The Divine vol 4: Rising Action, by Kieron Gillen etc
De dag waarop de bus zonder haar vertrok, by BeKa, Marko and Maëla Cosson
The Wicked + The Divine vol 5: Imperial Phase Part 1, by Kieron Gillen etc
De dag waarop ze haar vlucht nam, by BeKa, Marko, and Maëla Cosson

5,000 pages (YTD 38,500)
4/20 (YTD 47/144) by women (Davie, Sullivan, 2x Ka of BeKa and Cosson)
1/20 (YTD 17/144) by PoC (Mitter)
1/20 reread (YTD 17/144) – The Sleeper Awakes

Current
The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner
Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
The Wicked + The Divine vol 6: Imperial Phase Part 2, by Kieron Gillen etc
The Overstory, by Richard Powers
Tooth & Claw, by Jo Walton
City of Lies, by Sam Hawke

Coming soon (perhaps)
EU Lobbying Handbook, by Andreas Geiger
Gaze of the Medusa, by Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby and Brian Williamson

TOR: Assassin Hunter, by Billy Bob Buttons
Guban, by Abdi Latif Ega
“Houston, Houston, do you read?” by James Tiptree Jr

George Eliot, by Tim Dolin
Yugoslavia's Implosion: The Fatal Attraction of Serbian Nationalism, by Sonja Biserko
Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo

Jerusalem, by Alan Moore
The Mirror and the Light, by Hilary Mantel
East West Street, by Philippe Sands
Beren and Luthien, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England, by Steve Jones

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Survivants, Tome 3, by Leo
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, by Robert M. Pirsig
The Conqueror's Child, by Suzy McKee Charnas
The Inside of the Cup, by Winston S. Churchill
SS-GB, by Len Deighton
Tono-Bungay, by H. G. Wells
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January 2007 books

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Momentous times as I started my new job and new office. My first visitor was former Labour MP Dick Leonard, who will turn 90 this December, all being well. 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 (which I still use for Doctor Who related posts here).

Now that I had started commuting largely by train, my reading rate shot up and I read the following books in January 2007:

Non-fiction 7
The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
Actors of the Century: a Play-Lover's Gleanings From Theatrical Annals, by Frederic Whyte
About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1963-1966, by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles
Machiavelli in Brussels: The Art of Lobbying the EU, by Rinus van Schendelen
Who on Earth is Tom Baker?
To Engineer is Human, by Henry Petroski
From Behind a Closed Door: Secret Court Martial Records of the 1916 Easter Rising, by Brian Barton

Non-genre 4
The Sexual Life of Catherine M., by Catherine Millet
The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot
The Book of Proper Names, by Amélie Nothomb
Starter for Ten, by David Nicholls

SF 7
A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin
Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett
The Secret Visitors, by James White
The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Variable Star, by Robert A Heinlein and Spider Robinson
The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass
Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson

Doctor Who 1
The Eight Doctors, by Terrance Dicks

Comics 2
Preacher [#3]: Proud Americans, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
Caricature, by Daniel Clowes

6,500 pages
4/21 by women
1/21 by a PoC

The best new reads here were the first of the Wood and Miles Doctor Who volumes, which you can get here, and the first of Bujold's Sharing Knife series, which you can get here. The worst was Rinus van Schendelen's incomprehensible guide to EU lobbying; you can get the revised (and possibly improved) edition here.


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From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

During my grandmother Edwina’s childhood, the family used it primarily as a shooting lodge. It was lit by candles and oil lamps and had just one bath. Water from a well was carried a quarter of a mile uphill by donkey. The sandy beaches on which the children played rolled into dunes and fields. Seal colonies lived nearby and birdlife abounded. The Gaelic language and culture were still strong, relative informality was the norm, and the tempo of life was gentle.

This is quite a gruelling read. In August 1979, 14-year-old Timothy Knatchbull was seriously injured when the IRA blew up his grandfather’s boat; his parents were also seriously injured, but survived; his maternal grandfather, his paternal grandmother, a teenage boy who was helping out on the boat, and also Timothy’s twin brother Nicholas were all killed. This would be a shocking enough event no matter who the victims were, but the boys’ grandfather was Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, whose nephew Philip was and is the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. It was a direct attack by the IRA on the British royal family, and it succeeded.

That same day, eighteen British soldiers were killed in two bomb attacks at Narrow Water Castle, County Down, and their colleagues mistakenly shot and killed a civilian in the belief that they were returning fire. It was one of the worst days of the Troubles, with the biggest single loss of life for the British army. Of the two events on 27 August 1979, the Narrow Water attack hit much closer for me. Roger Hall, whose family still owns the castle, was a close friend of my father’s, and their sisters, Moira Hall and my aunt Ursula, shared a house in London for many years where we were always welcome.

But everyone has their own story, and Timothy Knatchbull tells his very eloquently. Many people have suffered violent bereavement, but very few lose an identical twin, and Timothy carefully unpacks the nature of his relationship with Nicholas, and his adaptation to life without him. Getting closure was a long process; Timothy was too badly injured to attend the funerals, and only years later did he uncover the post-mortem reports and photographs of his brother’s body being recovered from the sea, which were crucial for his coming to terms with the past.

As one might expect, Knatchbull’s relationship with Ireland is very complex. It was a magical place of childhood holiday memories, which turned to horror in an instant. He is fulsome in his tributes to the people who rescued him and his parents, and the Sligo medical team who saved their lives. Most of the Irish people who he quotes deplored the attack on his family. But not all. He looks in detail at the Garda investigation and subsequent trial – Thomas MacMahon, who was convicted of planting the bomb, had actually been arrested two hours before it exploded, which rather clearly indicates that he was not the only person involved. There is a tangible suspicion that not every stone was left unturned. Knatchbull twice quotes a senior Irish politician to the effect that this was the biggest crime in the history of the State. (Actually I would dispute that on behalf of Kevin O’Higgins, whose killers were never arrested, even though it is now well known who they were.)

Mountbatten was clearly capable of inspiring devotion as a father and grandfather. I still can’t warm to him; he flirted with the overthrow of British democracy in 1968, and his botching of the partition of India killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Oddly enough the latter experience made him more personally sympathetic to Irish nationalism. In any case, the IRA did not kill him because of his colonial and military record, still less his political views; they killed him, and two children and an old woman, purely because of who his nephew had married. The effect in the short term was to harden the positions of both the British and Irish governments against the IRA, and in the medium and long term to deepen suspicion and make peace and reconciliation more difficult. This was not a win in any way. (And today’s Sinn Féin supporters need to own that this act of murder was celebrated by SF at the time.)

Knatchbull has found his equilibrium, and welcomes the peace process which has (largely) brought an end to traumas like his. (I don’t think I have ever met him, but his last year in Cambridge as an undergraduate at Christ’s was my first year at Clare, so we may well have been in the same room on occasion.) He has found a way of making sense of the terrible thing that was done to his family. Many other victims of the Troubles have not been able to do that. A book like this is important as a demonstration that a personal reconciliation with the past is in the end possible, although the necessary resources (time, space and often money) are not equally available to everyone. You can get the book here.

I bought the book because it won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize for 2009-10, but it took me years to get around to it and eventually it was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that pile is Yugoslavia’s Implosion, by Sonja Biserko.

Ewart-Biggs Prize winners: Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness | From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull | Setting the Truth Free: The Inside Story of the Bloody Sunday Campaign, by Julieann Campbell | The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923, by Charles Townshend | The Whole and Rain-Domed Universe, by Colette Bryce | The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell

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The Ghost of Lily Painter by Caitlin Davies

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

The keeping of a journal will also, I trust, provide an opportunity to note down observations relating to my work, although I have no intention of producing anything resembling the sort of police memoir so popular these days. I find such publications devoid of personal interest, containing as they do a series of anecdotes written for no other purpose than that of self-aggrandisement. What is missing, one feels, is the reflections of an ordinary police inspector doing an extraordinary job. For the role of the police officer today is no longer confined to the prevention of crime, rather we are expected to fulfil the role of social inspector. Be there bonfire or smoke, traffic accidents or tardy dust contractors, abandoned children or missing dogs, then a person's first port of call is a police officer. Divisions differ of course: an inspector at Kensington is likely to be inundated with elderly ladies reporting the loss of a cat or a purse, while an inspector at Tottenham Court Road will find himself in a veritable hot bed of crime. When it comes to Upper Holloway, barely a day passes without one sergeant or another bringing in a drunk or a thief. And then there are the children, particularly around the Seven Sisters Road, who quite deliberately get themselves 'lost' and report as much to the beat constable in the hope of being taken to the station for a slice of bread and jam. Divisional Superintendent Dyball has let it be known that this practice is to cease forthwith. Instead, any stray children with homes to go to are to be given a good clip round the ear and told to make their way whence they came.

One of those novels I had picked up years ago on a whim; Annie Sweet, recently separated from her husband in 2008, becomes obsessed with tracking down the story of Lily Painter, a teenage music hall performer who lived in the same house in 1901. I'm afraid that I worked out what the twist ending was going to be about half way through, and I was also annoyed by the policeman character who seems to have very little grasp of police procedure and writes implausible diary entries. But it's told with a certain amount of emotional force, and if I were in a less cynical mood at the moment it might well have worked better for me. You can get it here.

This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is The Inside of the Cup, by the other Winston Churchill. But it will have to wait until I have finished all the books I acquired in 2013 (I'm getting through them fairly rapidly).

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Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Decades after the deaths of Mao and Chiang, it is possible not only to look at those two major figures with some perspective, but also to pay more attention to the context around them. There is an alternative to regarding the early 20th century as a clash of the two Chinese giants: instead we can treat the period from the establishment of Chiang’s Nationalist government in 1928 to the present day as one long modernizing project by two parties that agreed as well as disagreed. Both the Nationalists and the Communists wished to establish a strong centralized state, remove imperialist power from China, reduce rural poverty, maintain a one-party state, and create a powerful industrialized infrastructure in China. Both parties launched powerful campaigns against ‘superstition’, believing that ‘backward’ spiritual beliefs were preventing China from reaching modernity. The major ideological difference was that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) believed that none of these goals, especially rural reform, was possible without major class warfare. The Nationalists opposed this, in part because it was captive to forces that opposed economic redistribution. This division led to a deadly falling-out by the mid-1920s, which was resolved only by the Communist victory in 1949. Ironically, though, by the end of the century, the CCP had also abandoned class war, although only after decades of factional, often highly destructive, conflict between classes.

Rana Mitter was a friend in Cambridge days, now Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University, and after renewing contact with him a couple of years ago (and also conscious of the growing dominance of China in the world) I decided to get this book as a starter. (I've previously bounced off a couple of histories of China.)

It's a good readable, brief and almost breezy introduction to China as it has developed in the last century or so. By taking modern China as his subject, he more of less starts with the 1911 revolution (with occasional contextualising from the past) and argues for a relatively linear development from Sun Yat-Sen to Chiang Kai-Shek to Mao to Deng, Jiang, Hu and Xi; many things changed, but there is a lot of continuity too. The history section is only half of the book; he also looks at society as a whole, the Chinese economy and Chinese culture, this last of course extending well beyond the People's Republic. The second edition was published in 2016, when it was already clear that Xi was heading in a less liberal direction; now of course we are seeing the vicious crackdown on Hong Kong (which is very sad but surely not surprising), and the appalling treatment of the Uighurs, both clearly directed from the top. But Mitter seems to think that this can't last forever, and that there will be an inevitable pressure for liberalisation which Xi, or possibly his successor, will have to deal with; millions of Chinese live in democratic and open countries, most locally in Taiwan, and we should not underestimate the flexibility that already exists. It's a good book and you can get it here.

Another friend, Peter Martin, is about to leave Beijing after a couple of years there with Bloomberg; I will miss his regular reporting. I have signed up for the POLITICO weekly briefing but it's a bit US-focused. Open to advice for a regular update that I can skim on a weekly basis.

This was top of my pile of unread books by non-white writers. Next in that list is Guban, by Abdi Latif Ega.

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A hundred days after lockdown

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Not sure how much longer I will keep up this series of posts every ten days. The numbers of hospitalisations, deaths, etc in Belgium are now back to where they were before lockdown, which basically means that it's barely distinguishable from background noise in the statistics. The government has announced further relaxation of the restrictions from 1 July (ie next Wednesday) including reopening cinemas and theatres, and allowing events of up to 200 people indoors and 400 outdoors, to double in August all being well.

And I'm inclined to think that all probably will be well. I have a slightly heretically optimistic take: I suspect that very few people were infected after the lockdown, except probably in care homes (which have been a disaster), and the numbers we have seen since then have largely been the outworkings of the pool of active and latent infection that existed in late March, and the very few people who came into contact with that pool. In that case, the first wave will have left a population that is still vulnerable to future infection, but hopefully very few infectious people; and a future outbreak will be much easier to contain, because we are prepared. So I am cautiously positive about the way things are heading.

I think this does justify the severity of the lockdown in the first place, but it's quite possible that it could have been relaxed sooner, provided that we kept to social distancing and hygiene rules (as we will continue to do). And it's certain that if the lockdown had been imposed a week earlier, about two thousand lives would have been saved.

For us, the major development of the last ten days was that we were finally able to see B, on her 23rd birthday. We had to wear masks and gloves, and were accompanied at all times by two of the carers from the Stichting, but she was clearly pleased to see us as we were to see her.

Little U will come home tomorrow, for the first time since March, and will stay with us for ten days or so. She has apparently understood that something big is happening tomorrow and has been a bit nervous. We were not able to see her last week because she would certainly have wanted to come home with us immediately.

Also as previously noted I went to church last Sunday, the doors open for business at last.

I went to work by train yesterday, again for the first time since 13 March. I treated myself to a first-class ticket, which was silly because there were so few fellow passengers that there was no real difference in comfort level. I took the train rather than driving because we had an internal social event in the office yesterday evening, after which I went to the Place de Londres with some colleagues for a drink, just like one might in normal times. We're doing drinks again tomorrow evening for a departing colleague, al fresco in the park. The forecast is that it will be very sunny and warm. I think the good weather has played its part in lifting everyone's spirits, but the main thing is the gradual resumption of normal social life, and a feeling that the trajectory is firmly upward.

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Thursday reading

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Current
The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner
Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, by John Bolton
The Wicked + The Divine vol 6: Imperial Phase Part 2, by Kieron Gillen etc
De dag waarop ze haar vlucht nam, by Beka, Marko, and Maëla Cosson

Last books finished
The Wicked + The Divine vol 4: Rising Action, by Kieron Gillen etc
De dag waarop de bus zonder haar vertrok, by Beka, Marko, and Maëla Cosson
Dreaming In Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan
The Wicked + The Divine vol 5: Imperial Phase Part 1, by Kieron Gillen etc

Next books
The Overstory, by Richard Powers
Tooth & Claw, by Jo Walton

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The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by Stephen Fry

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Second paragraph of first chapter:

Why not indeed. Here's a list of the most likely possibilities:

1 Beat — Monometer
He bangs
The drum.

2 Beats — Dimeter
His drumming noise
Awakes the boys.

3 Beats — Trimeter
His drumming makes a noise.
And wakes the sleeping boys.

4 Beats — Tetrameter
He bangs the drum and makes a noise,
It shakes the roof and wakes the boys.

5 Beats — Pentameter
He bangs the drum and makes a dreadful noise,
It shakes the roof and wakes the sleeping boys.

6 Beats – Hexameter
He bangs the drum and makes the most appalling noise,
It shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.

7 Beats — Heptameter
He bangs the wretched drum and makes the most appalling noise,
Its racket shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.

8 Beats — Octameter
He starts to bang the wretched drum and make the most appalling noise,
Its dreadful racket shakes the very roof and wakes the sleeping boys.

An enjoyable book by Stephen Fry about how poetry works and how to write it. There are a lot of exercises inviting the reader to try their own; I did about half of them and then ran out of energy. I'm not as much into poetry as some people, but this was a nice re-introduction to enjoying it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop.

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December 2006 books and 2006 books roundup

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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:

I don't appear to have travelled this month. My overnights tally for the year was 25 places in 18 countries.

Thanks to my sudden conversion to commuting by train, I read 20 books in December 2006:

Non-fiction 8 (2006 total 70)
This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, by Swanee Hunt
The Great English Pilgrimage, by Christopher Donaldson
Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, by Dee Brown (did not finish)
The Elusive Quest: Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, by Norman Porter
Ockham's Razor: A Search for Wonder In An Age of Doubt, by Wade Rowland
Notes from a Small Island, by Bill Bryson
An Intimate History of Humanity, by Theodore Zeldin (did not finish)
Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, by Marina Warner

Non-genre 7 (2006 total 35)
The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink
White Eagles over Serbia, by Lawrence Durrell
The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon
Perfume, by Patrick Süskind
Crooked Little Heart, by Anne Lamott
Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad
Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming

SF (non-Who) 3 (2006 total 68)
Thunderbird Falls, by C.E. Murphy
Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett
Unfinished Tales, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

Doctor Who 2 (2006 total 28)
Timewyrm: Apocalypse, by Nigel Robinson
Timewyrm: Revelation, by Paul Cornell

Comics 0 (2006 total 6)

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 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, about 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% – same as last year; this number got bigger in between)
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)

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

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The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham & the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England, John Cooper

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

It had all looked so different earlier that same summer. The signing of the treaty of Blois was commemorated in a group portrait of the English royal family now known as the Allegory of the Tudor Succession. According to its inscription, the painting was presented by Queen Elizabeth to Francis Walsingham as a 'mark of her people's and her own content'. The artist didn't sign his name but was probably Lucas de Heere, a Flemish Protestant who fled to England with his family in the 1560s. He later acted as an envoy between Walsingham and William of Orange. Like so many images of the time, the Allegory was intended to be decoded as well as admired. The setting is a throne room in one of the royal palaces. Henry VIII presides under the Tudor coat of arms, surrounded by his three children. Edward VI kneels beside his father, accepting the sword of justice, but it is Elizabeth who dominates the foreground of the painting. She is pictured entering the chamber hand in hand with Peace, a goddess with an olive branch. Weapons are trampled and burst into flames, while Plenty follows behind with her cornucopia. To the rear of the royal dais stand Queen Mary and Philip of Spain attended by Mars, god of war.

My Tudor research is somewhat on hold at the moment, but I'm keeping my interest ticking over, and this rose to the top of one of my piles (books acquired in 2015; next is Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England, by Steve Jones). It's an interesting survey of Walsingham's career, starting with how his views of Catholicism vs Protestantism were hardened by the experience of being the English ambassador in France at the time of the St Bartholomew's Eve Massacre (see also Christopher Marlowe, and Doctor Who). And in particular, Cooper conveys very effectively the fragility of the Elizabethan regime as directly experienced by those who were running it. One of the biggest mental adjustments I've had to make as I get into the period is to realise that the people living through it had no idea that Elizabeth would live to 1603 – crowned heads were tumbling at the drop of a hat across Europe, and the heir to Elizabeth's throne was literally imprisoned in England and actively plotting against her. It's also clearly and sympathetically put that Walsingham and Cecil were more hardline in their religion than the queen was; and they saw their job as preserving the realm even against her whims if the latter should be potentially destructive. Ireland doesn't loom as large here as I had expected it might; perhaps the informal demarcation of responsibilities between Walsingham and Cecil left it more in the latter's domain. But there is lots of useful stuff, helping me to form a better picture of the complex environment of the time. You can get it here. (The American edition has a different title, The Queen's Spymaster.)

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Local Hero, by David Benedictus

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

'What are you thinking about?' he asked Danny. What the hell did the guy think about?

Back in the olden days, there were no DVD players or streaming services, and if you saw a film or some TV that you liked, the only way to experience again at a time and place of your own convenience was to read the novelisation. And if you loved the film Local Hero, as I do, you had to buy this slim book by David Benedictus from Bill Forsyth's original screenplay.

I can't pretend that it's great literature. The book inevitably misses the superb visuals and the soundscape provided by Dire Straits, and the performances of the good members of the cast, including a young Peter Capaldi. (On the other hand, Peter Riegert's boredom in the supposedly central role is less painfully obvious on the page than on the screen.) And as I said, it's short and easily digestible. You can get it here.

This was the shortest book acquired in 2013 on my unread shelf. Next (if I can find it) is Exiled to Nowhere: Burma's Rohingya, by Greg Constantine.

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