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Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story, by John Bossy

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Nevertheless, to judge from the abstract in the Calendar, six months later he was still on the job, coaxing along one of Mary’s correspondents in London. It emerged from the letter itself that Williams was not doing quite what one had supposed. It had no address, but had evidently not been written to Mary: nobody, in August 1583, was likely to write to her about the peace and quiet of her present state and kingdom. The ‘sovereign lady’ addressed was Elizabeth, and the person to whom the queen had written the letter it mentioned was or hoped to be serving her, not Mary. The letter to the unnamed ‘party’ must have been delivered by Williams himself, and he was reporting a conversation he had had with him after delivering it. The party, when he had read the letter, was not enthusiastic; he said it was not in the queen’s handwriting, with which he was familiar. He was in a panic: the queen was asking him to do ‘a thing wheron his life dependeth’. He was also very nervous that others than those originally acquainted with the matter had been let into the secret; he would not continue if anybody else was brought in.

The late great John Bossy was a family friend, and my sister’s godfather; his best book is still Christianity in the West, 1400-1700, but towards the end of his career he achieved a remarkable coup of winning both the Wolfson History Prize and the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction for Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, which examined the connections between the Renaissance philosopher and the murky world of espionage in Elizabethan London. This short, dense book concerns one particular wrinkle of the wider story of which Giordano Bruno was also part – identifying the individual who at a crucial moment stole the French ambassador’s correspondence and passed it to the agents of Queen Elizabeth.

I came to this soon after reading the story of Alexander Wilson, and it is salutary to reflect on how much intelligence-gathering had changed across the centuries. What we can see of the Elizabethan world is based very much on the transmission of written records; the nascent bureaucracy of the state required hard copies, as it were. Obviously the whispered conversations do not survive, but Bossy feels pretty confident that by putting all the pieces together – and allowing for various mis-dating of key documents over time – he is able to give us a picture of what was happening in and around the French embassy in London in the 1580s, and who it was that exposed the ambassador’s secrets.

Having said that, this is a book where the trees are more important than the forest, and I’d have liked a few more signposts along the way to remind us of why the story is important. It’s all there, but one has to dig for it a bit, and I think the book needs to be taken as a close sequel to Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, which I read a very long time ago. You can get it here.

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Ben-Hur: movie (1959) and book (1880)

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Ben-Hur won the Oscar for Best Motion Picture of 1959, one of 11 Oscars in total, the others being Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Charlton Heston), Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Special Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Music – Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Miklós Rózsa) and Best Sound Recording. That remains a record, equalled only twice since (by Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). It lost in only one category, Best Adapted Screenplay (to Room at the Top). It was the third film to win both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, after Going My Way and The Best Years of Our Lives.

The other contenders for Best Motion Picture were Anatomy of a Murder, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Nun’s Story and Room at the Top, none of which I have seen. On the IMDB rankings, Ben-Hur places 7th and 3rd, with North by Northwest and Some Like It Hot ahead on both tables. Unusually, I have seen both of them, and I have to say that on reflection I liked both more. I have also seen the first part of Plan 9 from Outer Space, though I could not bear to finish watching it. That year’s Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation wen to the first series of The Twilight Zone. Here’s a trailer for Ben-Hur.

It’s an epic film set in Rome and Judæa at the time of Christ, who makes a couple of appearances in the film. The core plot is about a young Jewish nobleman who is unjustly condemned to the galleys, but makes a comeback as a champion chariot racer and defeats the Roman who betrayed his friendship. It’s based on a novel published in 1880, which was a best-seller in its day. The film was also a huge hit. My mother-in-law, a teenager when it came out, recalls a local cinema showing it on continuous loop, with the time that the chariot race would start on prominent display. She went with her friends to celebrate the end of their exams and claims that she can remember nothing about it except the chariot race.

She is the same age as the younger members of Monty Python, who were surely inspired by memories of their own teenage viewings of Ben-Hur when writing Life of Brian, though I guess Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth was fresher in their memories and also there are probably only so many ways you can do a film set in first-century Palestine. Here’s Pontius Pilate as portrayed by Frank Thring and Michael Palin in 1959 and 1979 (Thring’s version also has a slight speech impediment):

Before I get onto the things I liked and didn’t like about the film, I’m struck by the number of key players who have already appeared in Oscar-winning films. I have not been keeping count of others, but I think that the tally of six is the highest so far for actors playing a significant part. (I have completely missed Franklyn Furman, who was an extra in seven Oscar-winning films from 1937 to 1952.) Let’s start with the star himself, Charlton Heston, who was also the male lead seven years ago in The Greatest Show on Earth:

Heston preparing for the other circus

We have two repeats from two years ago, Jack Hawkins and Andre Morell, who both played British officers in The Bridge on the River Kwai and Roman noblemen here:

Jack Hawkins in The Bridge on the River Kwai
and as Quintus Arrius
Andre Morell in The Bridge on the River Kwai
and as Sextus

Going back a year, one of the gentlemen of the Reform Club in Around the World in Eighty Days becomes one of the Three Wise Men (with a rather striking resemblance to Ken Stott’s Balin in the Hobbit films):

Finlay Currie in Around the World in Eighty Days
and as Balthasar

Going back some more years, Sam Jaffe, who played the Einstein-lookalike character in Gentleman’s Agreement, is one of the few Jews actually playing a Jewish character in Ben-Hur (see below for the other one):

Sam Jaffe in Gentleman’s Agreement
and as Simonides

And Cathy O’Donnell, the youngest of the leading ladies in The Best Years of Our Lives thirteen years ago, comes back as Ben-Hur’s sister, in what was her last ever film role (though she did a few more TV appearances). Her brother-in-law, William Wyler, was the director. Now that she’s in colour, we can appreciate her lovely auburn hair.

Cathy O’Donnell in The Best Years of Our Lives
and as Tirzah

We are also getting to the point where some of these actors also had Doctor Who roles. Andre Morell, mentioned above, is best remembered in sf as Professor Quatermass in Quatermass and the Pit (made between Bridge on the River Kwai and Ben-Hur), but he also played Marshall Tavannes in the 1966 Doctor Who story The Massacre, of which sadly no footage survives, not even screenshots or the equivalent.

More usefully, Laurence Payne has an uncredited, non-speaking part here as Joseph, the father of Jesus Christ:

and went on to have three roles in Doctor Who, Johnny Ringo in The Gunfighters (1966), Morix in The Leisure Hive (1980) and Dastari in The Two Doctors (1986).

OK, so what is bad and what is good about the film?

It’s long. It’s the third-longest Oscar-winning film – we’ve already had the longest, Gone With the Wind, and the second-longest, Lawrence of Arabia, is just around the corner. A lot of the book has been cut, and the spectacle on the screen is just about enough to keep you interested, I admit. I’ll have to get used to this; I’m roughly a third of the way through this project, but I’ve already seen five of the ten shortest films (Marty, The Broadway Melody, The Lost Weekend, Casablanca and It Happened One NightAnnie Hall, Driving Miss Daisy, The Artist, The French Connection and Kramer vs Kramer).

As usual (Bridge on the River Kwai aside), non-white people are marginalised, but in this case not completely absent. There’s one African galley-slave:

Hugh Griffiths blacks up as Sheikh Ilderim, because that’s what Arabs look like (it won him an Oscar):

And much more impressively, Les Ballets Africains, the national dance group of Guinea-Conakry, perform at the banquet in Rome.

So we are a smidgeon of a step above the total invisibility of a lot of Oscar winners, but with points deducted for blackface.

The women characters are particularly poorly served; the most interesting woman in the book, Balthasar’s daughter Iras, is simply omitted. Haya Harareet (not only a rare Jewish actor playing a Jewish part, but actually Israeli) puts in a great debut performance as Esther, Simonides’ daughter and Ben-Hur’s love interest, but I cannot quite believe the chemistry between her and Charlton Heston:

Let alone between Ben-Hur and his unnamed, silent date at the Roman banquet, played by the uncredited Marina Berti:

The other two credited women characters are Ben-Hur’s mother (Martha Scott, only 11 years older than Heston) and sister (Cathy O’Donnell, as noted), who get afflicted with leprosy, cured and rescued.

On the flip side, this is the queerest film I have seen among Oscar-winners so far. The only one that comes close is the very first, Wings. Charlton Heston supposedly was never told that any homo-eroticism was intended in the relationship between Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd’s Messala; I find that very difficult to believe. (NB Boyd, a Glengormley man, wearing brown contact lenses.)

And of course there isn’t the slightest hint of it elsewhere:

Heston’s own Oscar-winning performance carries the film, of course. He smoulders, suffers and learns.

It’s very much supported by the music of Miklós Rózsa, who we have encountered before in The Lost Weekend; it’s an extraordinary, expressive, convincing symphonic sweep which actually isn’t all that intrusive except when it’s diegetic.

And the whole thing looks very good. Supposedly the most expensive film ever made at that time, you can really feel the resources put into it with 10,000 extras, and the Italian studios at Cinecittà put to exceptionally good use. I have to say I was not overwhelmed by the sea battle scene (filmed in California), but the chariot race was every bit as good as advertised, and I can see why my mother-in-law’s local cinema featured it as the main attraction. This is only half of it – it’s well worth watching the whole ten-minute sequence if you see no other part of the film.

I’m ranking it 8th on my overall list, below All About Eve but above Around The World In Eighty Days. You can get it here.

Next in my sequence is The Apartment, of which I know nothing.

I had read the book back when I was a student, over thirty years ago; I re-read it after watching the film. Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter:

“To a wayfarer in a strange land nothing is so sweet as to hear his name on the tongue of a friend,” said the Egyptian, who assumed to be president of the repast. “Before us lie many days of companionship. It is time we knew each other. So, if it be agreeable, he who came last shall be first to speak.”

The film improved massively on the book, which is rare but not unique. My biggest regret about the adaptation is that the most interesting character, Balthasar’s daughter Iras, who is Ben-Hur’s alternate love interest (the Naughty Girl to Esther’s Good Girl), is dropped from the film (as she is apparently from all the screen adaptations). But apart from that, the book is much more of a Shaggy God story, with Jesus healing Miriam and Tirzah (after a dramatic rescue from prison) much earlier, and Ben-Hur and Balthasar becoming active disciples of Christ in the years before the crucifixion (and it is Ben-Hur who gives the dying Christ his last drink via a sponge). The chariot race and downfall of Messala are also also much earlier in the book, and even if you haven’t seen the film you get a sense that it’s running out of steam in the last third or so, where Ben-Hur recruits an army of rebels who we don’t hear any more of after he throws in his lot with Jesus, and then the biblical stuff is reiterated in some detail. Gone With The Wind would have been a much better film if it had been as ruthless with its source material.

It’s interesting to note that Lew Wallace had not himself been to Palestine at that point in his life (he did go later, when he was American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire), so the very convincing descriptions of Palestinian landscapes and peoples are a combination of wide reading in the Library of Congress and observing the horse-crazy ethnically mixed environment of Santa Fe and New Mexico generally, where he was Governor while finishing the book. Indeed, I wonder if the relatively sympathetic treatment of Pilate comes directly of empathy from one colonial governor to another. New Mexico had been under US rule only a little longer in 1880 than Judæa had been under Roman rule at the time of Pilate.

Incidentally, Mary is explicitly fifteen years old at the time of the birth of Jesus in Wallace’s novel.

It’s not a bad book, it just takes itself a bit too seriously and goes on a bit too long. You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) | Oppenheimer (2023)

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The Ghosts of Heaven, by Marcus Sedgwick

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Second paragraph of first chapter of third part:

Verity’s, to the south and the east. Between our two rooms is a third smaller bedroom with an easterly view which I will use as my study, and where I am writing now. I will put my desk in here when it arrives from New York. Otherwise all we have is a pair of suitcases each that made the journey with us. The Long Island Rail Road sped us as far as Greenport so that after these weeks of planning and letters to and fro, it is strange to arrive here so suddenly. Of course, from Greenport we still had some few miles out here, but Doctor Phillips had sent a man to meet us with a horse and buggy. Verity loved that, and I couldn’t help smiling seeing her so happy. In New York we might just have climbed into a taxi, and though we are only a few hours away, it was a good reminder that things here are somewhat different.

This was one of the Clarke Award nominees which I put aside for later enjoyment. It’s a set of four loosely connected stories, a girl in prehistoric times, a medieval young woman accused of witchcraft, a doctor in a nineteenth-century asylum, and a generation starship where the cold-sleep passengers start dying. They are all well written, especially the first which is more or less in verse form, with the recurring theme of a spiral echoing across the centuries. The author’s foreword suggests that the four stories can be read in any order, but I don’t think that’s really true. I see that it was shortlisted for the Carnegie medal – and am interested that I didn’t pick up on it being intended for a younger audience, if indeed it was. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2015. Next on that pile is A Close Run Thing, by Allan Mallinson.

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  • Thu, 20:48: Makes very effective parallel with John Major’s handling of the IRA ceasefire in 1994-96. https://t.co/8THbpSoG3h
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  • Fri, 10:49: RT @britainelects: Newnham (Cambridge) result: LDEM: 59.5% (+16.3) LAB: 18.1% (-18.1) GRN: 11.5% (+1.5) CON: 11.0% (+0.2) Liberal Democra…
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Het Amusement (The City of Belgium), by Brecht Evens

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Third page:

"I'll call you and wake you in the morning.
And I can't wait to see you, darling."
"Me neither, sweetie!"*
"Till tomorrow. Sleep well!"
"See you tomorrow, sweetie!"
(ring tone)
Impossible to translate the "Ik zie je graag"/"Ik zie je graager" exchange accurately. And the pet names are much more bokeworthy than my translation.

I was blown away by Evens’ previous book, Ergens waar je niet wil zijn (The Wrong Place), and grabbed this as well; it won the Fauve d’Angoulême: Prix Spécial du Jury at the Angoulême International Comic Book Festival. Here’s a (wordless) trailer for it:

Before I get into substance, I’m really intrigued by the three different titles in three languages of publication. The Dutch original can be translated as “The Entertainment” though the connotation is of a particular event rather than an ongoing activity. In French, the book’s title is “Les Rigoles”, which literally means “The Gutters” but more slangily could be “The Laughs” or perhaps “The Larfs”, close to the sense of the Dutch (if plural rather than singular); but “Les Rigoles” is also the name of the author’s favourite cafe in Paris. The English title, “The City of Belgium”, weirdly contradicts the spirit of the story which is that the events (and the gutters) could be set in any western European large city that isn’t Berlin, and the setting nods to Paris, Antwerp and Brussels (as well as being closer to the beach than any of those three cities actually is). So there’s a strange ambiguity about what story is really being told here.

Anyway. As with Ergens waar je niet wil zijn, we have a story with three main characters, Jona, Victoria and Rodolphe, who meander across their unnamed city finding (or avoiding) deeper truths about their lives, with again the vortex of carnality and enjoyment that is Disco Harem providing a geographical anchor for the narrative strands. Robbie from Ergens waar je niet wil zijn puts in a guest appearance at one point. Evens’ watercolour style is arresting and intriguing, and his gimmick of giving each of his protagonists a primary colour (Jona blue, Victoria yellow and Rodolphe red) works well to convey their very different perspectives. He gives his minor characters more of a voice here too, each of the three protagonists acquiring a strange sidekick, and also each getting rides with the same mysterious taxi driver, who tells each of them different stories. I enjoyed most of it; I felt that the three stories did not all end equally satisfactorily – in particular the last 40 pages (of 300) follow just one of the three protagonists on his personal path to enlightenment, which felt unbalanced. But in general it’s pretty good. You can get the Dutch original here and the English translation here.

This was my top unread non-English comic. Next on that list is Oyasumi, by Renee Rienties.

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The Secret Lives of a Secret Agent, by Tim Crook

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

There was also a Professor of English Literature on board with the address, The Bungalow, Colbury, Southampton. His name was Alexander Wilson. He had just turned 32. The single-funnelled City of Nagpur with its red and black livery had a passenger list of 34 men and 55 women who in the quaint language of the time were ‘not accompanied by husband or wife.’

Last year we were hugely entertained by the TV series Mrs Wilson, based on the same history as this book. Here’s the trailer for it.

The story is one of fundamental deceit; Alexander Wilson had four wives at the same time, and children with each of them, but managed to keep this more or less secret from all concerned. He was a British spy, and published author of a score of spy novels, but got sacked from the secret service in murky circumstances. He died suddenly in his third wife’s home in 1963; it was not until 2007 that his various families found out about each other, largely thanks to the writer of this book, who is a professor of media studies at Goldsmiths in London.

The story is a fascinating one. Wilson managed to lead parallel lives for decades. His first two wives did at least realise that their relationships were over (divorce, however, was not an option); but the third and fourth wives were living not far apart, and Wilson managed to flit between households without being found out. He was in love with all of the women he married, and loved his children by their account, though he ran out of money pretty fast due to not having a job and indeed served prison time for small-scale financial fiddling. His habitual fantasising in real life clearly also fed into his writing, which was reasonably successful in the 1930s – he published 24 books between 1928 and 1940. I was rather reminded of Patrick Troughton, also a man of simultaneous relationships, who was a professional pretender by trade (also felled by a heart attack in his 60s). Troughton at least seems to have been more honest with his wives and girlfriends about his emotional commitments.

This extraordinary sequence of events is not served well by Crook. Rather than take us through Wilson’s life chronologically, he has instead taken each of the women’s stories and recounted them in separate chapters, in reminiscence style, followed by two chapters each on his secret service career and his literary career. This means that we are jerked about the timeline mercilessly. It would have been very interesting to match the chronology of Wilson’s books directly with the documentary evidence about his second marriage, and essential to match the records of his petty crime convictions against the memories of his third wife. But the sources are treated as separate boxes telling separate stories, rather as Wilson in life kept his families from knowing about each other. The style is breathless and unreflective.

There are some annoying formatting issues as well – the entire book is in plain text with, for instance, extended extracts from Wilson’s novels formatted exactly the same as the rest of the book; there are a decent number of photographs, all shoved at the end in apparently random order. It is a rare case where the fictionalised screen version, which stars Wilson’s granddaughter as her own grandmother, does the facts more justice than this non-fiction version. I found the book surprisingly poor for an author who holds a professorship in journalism. It reads more like a sequence of newspaper feature articles stitched together. Maybe that’s what it originally was. Anyway, you can get it here.

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Tuesday reading

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Current
De Bourgondiërs, by Bart Van Loo
The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter
Doctor Who: Scratchman, by Tom Baker with James Goss

Last books finished
Ben-Hur, by Lee Wallace
Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman
Kate Bush: Under the Ivy, by Graeme Thompson

Next books
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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For the Love of a Mother: The Black Children of Ulster, by Annie Yellowe Palma

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Second paragraph of third chapter (apologies for the scatological content):

“Get me the soap,” mum would squeal if we dared mention constipation. We would then be made to squat over the toilet whilst she softened the soap in warm water and rubbed it on your arse. To much relief, the old bowels would immediately open up and let loose the last ten days of gunge. My mother would look on triumphantly as if she had waved a magic wand or plunger. There wasn’t much time to contemplate dignity, the remedial soap was just accepted as was the fact that your brothers watched on huddled together and in stitches at the sight of your arse up in the air with bubbles floating out of it.

A few years back I read the autobiography of Jayne Olorunda, child of a Nigerian father and a Strabane woman, which was a tough read. Annie Yellowe also grew up in difficult circumstances, but in Portadown; her mother went to Liverpool as a young woman, and came back with no husband and no money, but three mixed-race children. Her Protestant relatives provided a certain amount of support, but her mother was an alcoholic who abused her children and also allowed her rotating succession of boyfriends to exploit her. Reading through, it is frankly astonishing that social services, even at the limited extent that they were operating in the 1970s, did not step in and move the children into foster care (also something that one notices by its absence from Jayne Olorunda’s story); there seems to have been a certain amount of collusion between extended family and authorities to prevent state meddling. In the end, Annie did OK at school, and finally went to London to start her new life (where she is now a social worker and published poet). Her elder brother, who gets a good write-up here, is a well-known Northern Irish footballer.

I have to say that this is not a particularly well-written book – the author’s style is rather breathless and stream-of-consciousness. But it comes from the heart. You can get it here.

This was my top book by a non-white writer. Next on that list is Cat Country, by Lao She.

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A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

During my weeks there I had only two bad nights. Once when I dreamed that the tower was crumpling and, once, sliding forward into machine-gun fire and no pit to creep into, slithering on through mud to mutilating death. And then my screams too joined with the night creatures. Well, there was a third sleepless night but that came much later and for a different reason.

I saw the film with Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth when it came out in 1987, and greatly enjoyed it; the original book is very short, but very intense. It’s the story of two shell-shocked veterans in an isolated English village in the early 1920s, one restoring a medieval wall painting of the Last Judgement, the other on a single-handed archæological dig, both confronting and to an extent exorcising their demons. The place and time are very convincingly invoked; there’s a lovely contrast between the unwelcoming established church (apart from the vicar’s wife who is a bit more welcoming) and the warm communality of the local Methodists; the climactic moment (spoilers, sorry) is when the narrator finds himself giving an impromptu sermon. The final twist, which I didn’t think the film handled very well, is much better in the original. You can get it here.

This was one of the 34 winners of the Guardian Book Prize, which ran from 1965 to 1998. Looking at the list, I think the only other three that I have read are The Condition of Muzak, by Michael Moorcock, Kepler, by John Banville, and Empire of the Sun, by J.G. Ballard.

This was the top unread non-genre fiction book on my shelves. Next on that list is Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver.

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The Showstoppers, by Jonathan Cooper

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Perhaps he’d have time this afternoon to devote some thought to it, though it was already approaching 11am and the stacks of paperwork Corporal Wright had sent over, accompanied by a sweet yet scathing note detailing the dangers of not returning them promptly, had not even been depleted by a fraction. Lethbridge-Stewart sighed. He didn’t expect the duties of a colonel to be wholly blood and thunder, but he hadn’t expected the rot of bureaucracy to set in quite so quickly either.

Sixth book in the Candy Jar Lethbridge-Stewart sequence, second of the second series, this sees the future Brigadier, Ann Travers and journalist Harold Chorley investigating a mysterious TV spy show in which almost all the characters are played by the same actor, who is also the show-runner – the concept of Dr Strangelove, but taken to a new extreme. I had not come across the author before, though he’s written a couple of Space: 1889 books. It’s very nicely done – a novel that is a spinoff from a TV series whose hero changes faces from time to time, about a TV series which features an actor of many faces; Cooper balances the absurdity of the set-up nicely with the tension of how-the-heck-will-they-get-out-of-this. There are a couple of lovely moments of fan-service, but nothing too intrusive. A new (and black) regular character is introduced to the Lethbridge-Stewart universe. Basically, I am enjoying this series. You can get this one here.

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1913, by Charles Emmerson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Visitors to Berlin, over a million of them in 1913, found a city full of nervous, unchannelled energy; a city that wrapped itself in the mantle of the German Reich but which was, inside, still the provincial capital of Prussia; a city which was reckoned the most modern in Europe, an industrial powerhouse and a capital of science; a city on parade. Their reactions were mixed. Some saw a metropolis more suggestive of the future than any other, more urban and more modern, the very expression of the global economic force which the German Empire had become. But other visitors found a parvenu, blaring its new-found prosperity but with no finer sensibilities, an ugly and uncouth city. Many found both.

The author worked alongside me in the International Crisis Group back in the early years of this century, and went on to greater thinktanky things; in this book, he looks at 1913, the last year before the first world war, from the perspective of twenty-three great cities, starting and ending with London, but visiting the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia and the rest of Europe en route. It’s a masterly synthesis of what was going on in global politics, pulling together loads of primary sources – newspapers, diaries, etc – to build a clear picture of human politics as it was experienced by the people of the day. It was particularly interesting to get the perspective of cities from outside the European cultural space, such as Bombay, Peking, Shanghai, Tokyo, Tehran. It’s quite a long book but a refreshingly quick read.

The concentration on individual cities does mean that two aspects of the world in 1913 are underplayed. First, most obviously, the countryside is seen only in relation to the city. Sure, the cities were where change was taking pace most quickly, but the politics of land ownership and agricultural technology are also fairly crucial drivers and are largely not included. Second, of course you can only pick so many cities; Brussels is not listed in the index, though there are a couple of paragraphs on the World’s Fair in Ghent; Ireland’s impact on England is described, but not from Ireland’s point of view; we hear from Algiers and Durban, but little from the continent between. And third, there is little space for transnational phenomena – for instance, there is a throwaway remark about the meeting of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Budapest, which the Persian delegation was unable to attend; Lenin and Stalin pop up very briefly in the chapter on Vienna, as does Adolf Hitler. 

But I guess you have to take your framing devices where you can find them, and I must admit I liked this a lot more than the last such book I read (1688, not counting 1434). It’s fluent and engaging. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2014. Next on that pile is Two Brothers, by Ben Elton.

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Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

On some days you wonder what it all means. And on some days you find out. It’s like suddenly seeing a huge black pig in your headlights when you’re running 80 miles an hour on ice. Boom. Total clarity. No more gray area.

One of the classic accounts of American politics, not quite as remarkable as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 because the election of 1992 was much less remarkable, and also frankly because Thompson’s own style was becoming much more self-indulgent. Thompson’s drug-fuelled raging stream of consciousness writing comes over now as rather white and male. He picks up on the importance of Hillary Clinton, but fails to really interview her. The one African-American who is mentioned in passing is Roosevelt Grier, who he utterly unfairly blames for the death of Robert F. Kennedy. He fumes about the fundamental evil of George H.W. Bush without really proving the case.

And yet there are moments of sheer genius. It starts with a flashback to the failed McGovern campaign which is basically the set-up for a punchline:

Another thing I still remember from that horrible day in November of ’72 was that some dingbat named Clinton was said to be almost single-handedly responsible for losing 222 counties in Texas—including Waco, where he was McGovern’s regional coordinator—and was “terminated without pay, with prejudice,” and sent back home to Arkansas “with his tail between his legs,” as an aide put it.

“We’ll never see that stupid bastard again,” one McGovern aide muttered. “Clinton—Bill Clinton. Yeah. Let’s remember that name. He’ll never work again, not in Washington.”

A passing reference brought me to H.L. Mencken’s obituary of William Jennings Bryan, which makes it clear how much Thompson’s style owed to Mencken’s writing:

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

There is a hilarious passage describing Bill Clinton’s supposedly odd behaviour at his first interview with Thompson, later explained by a mutual friend as the effect of Thompson’s eerie resemblance to Clinton’s childhood nemesis (way too good to be true, alas). I had also completely forgotten that Ross Perot’s excuse for dropping out of the 1992 presidential election was that the Republicans were planning to spoil his daughter’s wedding by distributing fake compromising photographs of her. Yes, really.

The book ends with a postscript written after the death of Richard Nixon, Thompson’s old nemesis, in 1994. For all that Thompson says he hated him, there is evidence of some respect between the two:

Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you.”

Anyway, I should get hold of the better, earlier books of the Gonzo Papers. It’s a little sad to get the sense from reading that Thompson’s powers were waning, and that he knew it. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2016 (cheating slightly because I had in fact read it years ago). Next in that list is The Computer Connection, by Alfred Bester.

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July Books

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Non-fiction: 10 (YTD 29)
Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, by Dennis O'Driscoll
Becoming, by Michelle Obama
First Generation, by Mary Tamm
The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew
Better Than Sex, by Hunter S. Thompson
1913: The World Before the Great War, by Charles Emmerson
For the Love of a Mother: The Black Children of Ulster, by Annie Yellowe Palma
The Secret Lives of a Secret Agent, by Tim Crook
Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story, by John Bossy
Small Wonder, by Barbara Kingsolver

Fiction (non-sf): 3 (YTD 19)
Gigi, by Colette
The Cat, by Colette
A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr

sf (non-Who): 5 (YTD 56)
The Poppy War, by R.F. Kuang
Gateways, ed. Elizabeth Anne Hull
The City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty
The Ghosts of Heaven, by Marcus Sedgwick
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells

Doctor Who, etc: 4 (YTD 17)
Night of the Kraken, by Jonathan Green
Adorable Illusion, by Gary Russell
Terror Moon, by Trevor Baxendale
The Showstoppers, by Jonathan Cooper

Comics 3 (YTD 15)
Plastic Man #1, by Jack Cole
Het Amusement, by Brecht Evens
The Story of Garth the Strong, by Stephen Dowling

6,900 pages (YTD 38,400)
9/25 (YTD 60/137) by non-male writers (Obama, Tamm, Yellowe Palma, Kingsolver, Colette x2, Kuang, Hull, Chakraborty)
4/25 (YTD 22/137) by PoC (Obama, Yellowe Palma, Kuang, Chakraborty)
2/25 (YTD 14/137) rereads (Better Than Sex, The Time Machine)

Reading now
Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman
Kate Bush: Under the Ivy, by Graeme Thompson
De Bourgondiërs, by Bart Van Loo
Ben-Hur, by Lew Wallace
The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter

Coming soon (perhaps):
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, by Deborah M. Withers
Berlin Book Three: City of Light, by Jason Lutes
Smallworld, by Dominic Green
Pigs in Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver
Alina, by Jason Johnson
Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text, by Brian Morris
Cat Country, by Lao She
Oyasumi, by Renee Rienties
The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
Be My Enemy, by Ian McDonald
The Bastard of Istanbul, by Eilif Shafak
The Computer Connection, by Alfred Bester
Two Brothers, by Ben Elton
A Close Run Thing, by Allan Mallinson
How To Be Both, by Ali Smith
A Local Habitation, by Seanan McGuire
The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
True Stories, ed. Xanna Eve Chown

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Current
Grimm Tales, by Philip Pullman
Kate Bush: Under the Ivy, by Graeme Thompson
De Bourgondiërs, by Bart Van Loo
Ben-Hur, by Lee Wallace
The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter

Last books finished
The Secret Lives of a Secret Agent, by Tim Crook
Het Amusement, by Brecht Evens
The Ghosts of Heaven, by Marcus Sedgwick
Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story, by John Bossy
Small Wonder, by Barbara Kingsolver
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells

Next books
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin
Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Adorable Illusion, by Gary Russell

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

‘What’s what?’

The last (so far) Bernice Summerfield novel, published in 2014, this is apparently tied into an audio box set that I haven’t yet heard. I didn’t mind. It’s set on a spaceship called the Adorable Illusion, with Benny disguised as a disgraced fellow-archaeologist for Reasons and a motley assortment of crew and other passengers regarding her with more or less justified suspicion. Then about two thirds of the way through the book, there is a massive plot twist, and it turns out that we do actually care about everyone on board – very nicely done, as you would hope for from Russell who is one of the best Who writers when on form. I think you’d need basic familiarity with the Bernice universe to really appreciate it, though. You can get it here.

Next (and penultimate) in the set of Bernice Summerfield books is True Stories, edited by Xanna Eve Chown.

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The making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement, by Paul Bew

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Second paragraph of third essay (“Modest Realities Lurk behind All-Embracing Rhetoric of Document”, published in The Times on 23 February 1995):

The Framework Document meets none of Sinn Fein’s demands for a timetable for withdrawal. Yet, most unionists were angry yesterday, and the impression persists that the government may have miscalculated. How has this happened? The core belief of Ulster unionism is clear: “It is better to be separated from the rest of Ireland than from Great Britain”. There is a definite implication: unionist politicians are unlikely to make major sacrifices to bring about a local assembly if the price is to give Dublin an unacceptably large role in the north. Hence yesterday’s proposal for a northern assembly will not, in itself, calm unionist fears about the content of the document.

I’ve known Paul Bew since I was 13; he was a colleague of my father’s at the Queen’s University of Belfast and succeeded him as Professor of Irish Politics. This is a collection of his newspaper and magazine articles (as opposed to academic publications) from 1994 to 2007, the year in which he became a member of the House of Lords. (He is now the Chairman of the House of Lords Appointments Commission, having previously chaired the Committee on Standards in Public Life.)

These pieces very much reflect the times in which they were written, and also noticeably shift to reflect the perspective of Ulster Unionist leader and First Minister David Trimble at the point where the author was closest to him in the early 2000’s (and then back away again after Trimble’s defeat). But what really interested me was to be reminded of how far Northern Ireland has come, an important perspective given the gloomy current situation; 25 years ago, when the first of these pieces was written, the terrorist campaigns of both sides remained in full swing, and there was no perspective of a DUP/Sinn Fein-led power-sharing government (and even though that arrangement collapsed in early 2017, both parties stipulate that they want it restored).

It’s also a salutary reflection that in those days, it was the Dublin government which was still getting to grips with the reality of Northern Ireland, and Westminster which had an in-depth knowledge, as opposed to today when the British establishment has retreated to absurd superficiality and it is Dublin that is keeping its finger on the pulse. (Officials from both Northern Ireland and Scotland tell me that they are getting more and better information about Brexit from the Irish government than from London.)

All of these essays have dated, in that they were very specific descriptions of the latest political developments, written for a literate but not well-informed audience. But they are well-written and clear, and useful for anyone wanting to track how we got from the chaos of 1994 to the settlement of 2007. You can get it here.

This was the shortest book left on my shelves of those acquired in 2011. Next on that list is Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory, by Deborah M. Withers.

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