I had given this First Doctor story a try once before, and thoroughly bounced off it, but for the sake of completeness I thought I should give it another go. It’s not quite as bad as I thought first time round – in particular, I retract the accusation that the book itself is anti-Catholic – but the number of historical and linguistic solecisms is still far too great for me to appreciate what I will admit is a reasonably well-constructed plot, with quite a nice twist at the end about Guy Fawkes. (Among other irritations: several characters reminisce about the King’s father, who had in reality been assassinated almost forty years earlier in another country; the Lord chamberlain of the day was actually the naval hero and aristocrat the Earl of Suffolk, not the buffoonish and anonymous bureaucrat here; and the portrayal of priests, monks and nuns is utterly anachronistic.) Readers less burdened with knowledge of the period than I am may well enjoy it more than I did.
Links I found interesting for 20-03-2012
- The insider or outsider: who is best placed to bring about change?
#fb Who drives change more effectively in our world: the insider working from within the establishment, or the maverick outsider? With independent diplomat Carne Ross, cosmologist Lord Martin Rees and business supremo Simon Walker – plus a lively audience of opinion formers and business leaders.
- The GOP War On Women Demands A New Women’s Rights Agenda for America | The New Civil Rights Movement
Tanya throws down the gauntlet.
March Books 4) The War of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien
More in-depth analysis of the story of how The Lord of the Rings was written. We start at Helm’s Deep, and follow through the end of Book III and Book IV (ie most of The Two Towers and then all of Book V (first half of The Return of the King). Tolkien’s biggest problem was getting the chronology to work between four separated groups of protagonists so that they would eventually end up in the same place at the same time; placing the Paths of the Dead smoothly in the narrative was a challenge as well – it’s probably the longest single flashback sequence in a book that generally avoids them.
The process of typing up the Helm’s Deep / Isengard chapters of The Two Towers seems to have lost a few sentences from Tolkien’s manuscript – none crucial but it seems to me that a “definitive” edition of LotR should be published which would at least include them in footnotes.
Finally, I was amused to see that the last person mentioned in the preface by Christopher Tolkien, thanking him for explaining an English folk-song reference, is one Mr. Neil Gaiman.
March Books 3) Beggars Banquet, by Ian Rankin
Now that I’ve read all the Rebus novels, that only leaves the short story collections (and Rankin’s other books). The stories in this collection varyin in length from full novella (a variation on the opening of Dead Souls) to a few pages; about half of them have Rebus solving a mystery, and the weaker stories tend to be from the other half. Generally good and entertaining stuff, though.
Links I found interesting for 19-03-2012
- Tachyon TV – The One That Got Away
John Williams reviews Shada (this is the one to read if you read only one)
- Doctor Who: Shada by Gareth Roberts | SFX
Ian Berriman’s review.
- Doctor Who: Adapting Douglas Adams | SFX
Ian Berriman interviews Gareth Roberts.
- Shada, by Gareth Roberts and Douglas Adams | Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
Andrew Hickey’s review.
- KOOL TV REVIEW: ‘DOCTOR WHO – SHADA. THE LOST ADVENTURE BY DOUGLAS ADAMS’ | KOOL TV
Scott Weller’s review, with lots of pics.
- Twitter / @OldRoberts953: Thank you The Sun! #Shada …
John Wyatt’s review in The Sun.
- Blogtor Who
Lalla Ward interviewed by Graham Norton.
- Lost Doctor Who Story Shada Was Stolen at a US Convention in the 1980s | Kasterborous Doctor Who News
JNT’s video-tapes nicked by the unscrupulous.
Links I found interesting for 18-03-2012
- 12-step recovery programme offers hope to Fianna Fáil – The Irish Times – Sat, Mar 17, 2012
How to rebuild your political party from defeat.
- Map of Ikea | Pleated-Jeans.com
#fb So, so true…
- TAR-DISsed: PayPal, PR and Doctor Who – Forbes
Forbes analyses Paypal’s apology. But fails to note that PayPal UK was the arm that got it right for “Behind The Sofa”, while PayPal (US) got it wrong with Regretsy and the violin; I wonder if that is relevant?
- When Ulysses S. Grant expelled the Jews
A military order in 1862, immediately countermanded by Lincoln and repented by Grant in later life.
Networking
I do enjoy it when a slightly peevish Facebook post attracts comments from a 77-year-old German-based English folk singer and a former chef de cabinet to the Albanian Prime Minister.
Edited to add: Kind of the ex-foreign minister of Slovakia to indicate that he liked the post too.
Five Irish history books (plus three)
Given the day that's in it, I though I would list five books about Irish history which I would strongly recommend:
1) William Marshal : court, career, and chivalry in the Angevin Empire, by David Crouch
William Marshall (1147-1219) was not in at the start of British rule in Ireland, but he came fairly close: in 1189 he married Isabella de Clare, the daughter of Richard "Strongbow" Earl of Pembroke and grand-daughter of Dermot MacMurrough, the last Gaelic King of Leinster; the last thirty years of his life were spent balancing the demands of running a huge Irish inheritance which he had never expected along with the high politics of the courts of Richard I and King John, a story which ended with him being appointed regent of both England and Ireland after John's unexpected death. While not a lot of Crouch's book is about Ireland per se, the increasing entanglement of both the Plantagenet dynasty and William Marshal himself with the island is an important element of the story.
2) The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates, by Des Ekin
Today is a day when Ireland is particularly celebrated in the English-speaking world, but there are connections with other places as well, including North Africa. In 1631 almost the entire population of Baltimore in County Cork was kidnapped in a pirate raid and sold into slavery in Algiers. The book is a wee bit journalistic, but entertaining and informative, and explains why, when the possibility of ransom came up fifteen years later, only two of the abductees opted to return. The North Atlantic was a vast network of commerce in goods and people, the pirate chief in question eventually retiring to New Amsterdam, where some of his descendants are very well known indeed.
3) Early Belfast: The Origins and Growth of an Ulster Town to 1750, by Raymond Gillespie
This list reflects my own obsessions, but I think this very short history of the origins of my place of birth has a lot going for it. Belfast was founded not long before New Amsterdam/New York, and the populations of the two were more or less level pegging for the first few decades, though Belfast suffered more from internal and external conflict, which must have hampered growth, and New York's natural hinterland is, er, a little bigger than Belfast's. I learned from this that the story I had been taught at school about the town's origins around High Street was completely wrong; the axis of the medieval settlement was a block to the south along what is now Anne Street, and the seventeenth-century town was concentrated a block to the north around Waring Street. Only 180 pages.
4) Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, by Charles Townshend
A superb analysis of one of the turning points of Irish history, the week in April 1916 when the centre of Dublin (and, as Townshend reminds us, a few other places around the island) were briefly held by rebels before they were shelled into submission and their leaders executed. I learned a lot from it – the British had almost no intelligence capacity in Ireland before the rebellion; even the Pope had been told about it in advance, but Her Majesty's Government was caught completely by surprise. Townshend also dissects the (lack of) military strategy which informed the planning of the rebellion and situated the whole affair in the context of the Irish politics of the first decade and a half of the twentieth century.
I read all ten volumes of this soon after it was published two years ago (see my notes on volumes I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX and X) and came away feeling that the costs and effort involved were very much worth while. If Easter 1916 was a turning point at the start of the twentieth century, 30 January 1972 was a turning point in the Troubles; the use of deadly violence against unarmed civilians on such a scale by state forces, and the state's failure to account for its actions, handed political momentum to exponents of armed struggle in a way which until then might just have been avoidable. It took 28 years but the truth was eventually established, in enormous detail, by the Inquiry, and while there is still room for disagreement with the report's findings, at least we now have a view of the facts which is unlikely ever to be surpassed.
And three extra:
Church and State in Modern Ireland, 1923-1979 by John Henry Whyte – the book that established my father's reputation, still a very readable account of Irish politics in general (not just church-state relations) in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Interpreting Northern Ireland by John Henry Whyte – finished just before he died in 1990, but supplied an important analytical framework to understand what was going on during the Troubles, whose influence reached pretty far.
Science, Colonialism, and Ireland by Nicholas Whyte – all you could possibly ever want to know about the history of science in Ireland between 1890 and 1930.
Links I found interesting for 17-03-2012
- Nicolae Timofti is the new President of the Republic of Moldova
917 days later!
- Amnesty statement: Georgia
#fb Party finance watchdog running roughshod over human rights..
- Hot tips from Evelyn Waugh
Dealing with fans and critics.
Links I found interesting for 16-03-2012
- Alan Garner to conclude Weirdstone of Brisingamen trilogy
Only 49 years since the second volume was published!
- H.P. Lovecraft, Author, Is Dead
75th anniversary. “It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive…”
- Why We Should Fear Amazon
By Scott “Presumed Innocent” Turow.
- Without the Convention on Human Rights – our human rights depend on what our government says they are | Charon QC
Defence of the ECHR.
Interesting Links for 15-03-2012
- Blog chronicles joy of Belgian kids before crash
Heartrending. #fb
- Interviews: James Marsters (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel)
Spike reminisces!
- 7 Things You Don’t Know About A Special Needs Parent
1. I am tired….
Interesting Links for 14-03-2012
- Rebecca West interviewed by Marina Warner in 1981
“Perhaps there’s some quite simple thing we’ll think of someday, which will make us much happier.”
- Open letter to Jason Russell CEO of Invisible Children Inc on KONY2012
A Ugandan speaks.
- Behind The Sofa: PayPal resolution | Behind The Sofa
PayPal UK (@PayPalUK) apologises for their Doctor Who charity book ****-up.
- Pakistani diplomat tells tale of ‘mango diplomacy’ | WBEZ
Click the ‘transcript’ button.
Interesting Links for 13-03-2012
- PayPal is blocking the book | Behind The Sofa
@paypaluk screws up. Please RT.
- PayPal protection racket: update | Behind The Sofa
@paypaluk covering themselves with glory. Or something.
Interesting Links for 12-03-2012
- Reflections on the Church of Ireland homosexuality conference, and praise for Archbishop Harper
#fb
- EU propaganda video | openDemocracy
Dismal chronicle of something which seemed like a good idea at a time, but wasn’t.
- vStrange Effects: The Mystifying History of Neutrino Experiments
Memories of Gilbert Snook…
- Faith in the bush
Eliza Dushku on her NGO helping survivors of Kony’s war in Uganda.
- Android Platform manager steps down after failing to fix app sales
The travails of Android. Heh.
BSFA Award for Best Non-Fiction; my BSFA 2011 ballot
I feel a bit uneasy about the BSFA Award for Best Non-Fiction, which asks us to choose between two blogs as a whole, one blog entry, one dynamic and evolving website, a book of essays and an exhibition catalogue. This really is comparing apples to oranges to mangoes. I particularly regret that it's not explicit that only the 2011 entries for the two blogs and the website are in contention; it makes it feel as if an entire set of entries over the lifetime of the site are being weighed against Abigail's thoughts on Engh. In a sense, that makes it much easier for me; although I very much like and appreciate both the SF MistressWorks blog and the Pornokitsch blog, and they richly deserve the greater exposure they have got by being nominated, I really don't think that they are suitable for this award and so I will not vote for them at all.
The SF Encyclopedia is in a different situation, to my mind; although like the two blog sites it is still evolving, it has in a sense been published in something resembling a complete form, to the point that I do feel comfortable in making a judgement about the importance of the whole enterprise. Maybe this is inconsistent of me, but hey, it's my vote. I think the relative importance is relevant as well; the SF Encyclopedia website will still be consulted when last year's entries on SF MistressWorks and Pornokitsch are showing up on the third or fourth page of Google searches (or whatever is used instead in 2017). So it gets not only a vote, but my top vote.
I didn't get to the British Library while the Out of this World exhibition was on, unfortunately, nor did I get hold of a copy of the catalogue which is nominated in this category. So that leaves my final two preferences between The Unsilent Library and Abigail Nussbaum's review of Arslan. The latter makes many excellent points about a book which she got much more out of than I did. But I'm still putting The Unsilent Library second, because I got a great deal out of it and also it was one of my own nominations in this category. (My other nomination, Elisabeth Sladen's autobiography, presumably put me in a minority of one among nominators.)
So, in case anyone cares, I have now finalised my entire ballot for the BSFA awards for 2011:
Best Novel
1) The Islanders by Christopher Priest
2) Embassytown by China Miéville
3) by Light Alone by Adam Roberts
4) Osama by Lavie Tidhar
5) Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith
Best Short Fiction (vote explained here)
1) "Of Dawn" by Al Robertson
2) "Covehithe" by China Mieville
3) The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell
4) The Silver Wind by Nina Allan
5) Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley
Best Non-Fiction
1) The SF Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition ed. John Clute, Peter Nicholls, David Langford and Graham Sleight
2) The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the New Doctor Who, ed. Graham Sleight, Tony Keen and Simon Bradshaw
3) Review of Arslan by M J Engh, Abigail Nussbaum
(no preference for the other three nominees)
Best Art (vote explained here)
1) Cover of Ian Whates’s The Noise Revealed by Dominic Harman
2) Cover of Liz Williams’s A Glass of Shadow by Anne Sudworth
3) Cover and illustrations of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls by Jim Kay
4) Cover of Lavie Tidhar’s Osama by Pedro Marques
Interesting Links for 11-03-2012
- Joseph Kony and Crowdsourced Intervention | Kings of War
- Invisible Children’s Military Disconnect | Kings of War
- Ugandan Rebel, Kony, Soars to Topic No. 1 in Online Video – NYTimes.com
- …My heart’s in Accra » Unpacking Kony 2012
- …My heart’s in Accra » Teju Cole on American sentimentality towards Africa
- Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of ‘Kony 2012’ – Kate Cronin-Furman & Amanda Taub – International – The Atlantic
- The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012 – Max Fisher – International – The Atlantic
- Kony video: Uganda social media manipulation | analysis | Crikey
- ‘Kony 2012’: How not to change the world – CNN.com
- Why I think the Kony 2012 Campaign Is Wrong | Charlie Beckett
- Visible Children – KONY 2012 Criticism
- African voices respond to hyper-popular Kony 2012 viral campaign – Boing Boing
- The Definitive ‘Kony 2012′ Drinking Game | Wronging Rights
- Don’t Elevate Kony | Reinventing Peace
Important poll news
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Thoughts on Kony 2012
I have been following the online storm about the Joseph Kony video with interest and some despair. I think even if I hadn't read up on it beforehand, the general tone of white saviours of African problems in the video would have put me off, along with the fact that furriners, who actually speak quite clearly, are subtitled and the little American kid, who I actually found difficult to understand, is not. My former colleague JP appears twice in it, looking as messianic as ever (and I chose that adjective very carefully).
Two crucial statements in the video made me sit up because of their barefaced untruthfulness.
"The problem is, 99% of the planet doesn't know who he is. If they knew, Kony would have been stopped years ago."
Actually, I doubt that Kony's lack of celebrity is really that big an issue. Those of us who work in conflict resolution have known all about him for a very long time (which is why some are a bit miffed that the rest of the world has suddenly picked up on what for us is very old news). The reasons that he has not "been stopped" have more to do with the very real political and military problems of tracking down a man who has armed followers and doesn't want to be found in some of the most difficult terrain on the planet. Local and regional actors have been trying to stop Kony for years; one can postulate a long list of reasons for their failure, but the fact that 99% of the planet doesn't know about him must be fairly low on that list. Raising consciousness, and white people building schools, may be part of the answer, but much more important is listening to and empowering local actors.
"The Ugandan military has to find him"
Well, no. Actually that's not strong enough. Hell, no! It's pretty well known that Kony is wandering in the bush between South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) and the central African Republic, not Uganda. Invisible Children are effectively asking their supporters to lobby the US government to support the Ugandan government to invade Uganda's neighbours. Quite apart from the fact that the last Ugandan invasion of the DRC was not a howling success (you didn't hear about that? see my former colleague Gérard's book), I think that the ramifications of this apparently simple policy statement may perhaps not have been thought through.
(It's a bit alarming that the first Ugandan politician interviewed, Santo Okot Lapolo, turns up on Google as someone who is himself accused of multiple human rights abuses, a fact that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.)
I desperately hope that Kony is captured or killed soon, but let's remember that he has already been militarily defeated and has only a handful of remaining followers; and rather bizarrely the US policy objective of the Stop Kony video is not for policy innovation but to continue the status quo of the rather small (100 'advisers'!) US military deployment in Uganda. Once Kony is out of the picture, will the Facebook generation pat itself on the back and allow Africa's problems to slip out of sight again?
This entry is locked because I do work in this field, and I have myself worked with African soldiers and politicians who have attempted both to negotiate with and to defeat Kony (though I should add that this was not why I was working with them myself). These are wily and intelligent individuals who have survived appalling personal circumstances and are now trying to build a new state out of the rubble of decades of external meddling. I don't think that this video will make their jobs any easier at all.
More links:
http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2012/03/joseph-kony-and-crowdsourced-intervention/
http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2012/03/invisible-childrens-military-disconnect/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/world/africa/online-joseph-kony-and-a-ugandan-conflict-soar-to-topic-no-1.html
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/08/unpacking-kony-2012/
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/08/teju-cole-on-american-sentimentality-towards-africa/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/solving-war-crimes-with-wristbands-the-arrogance-of-kony-2012/254193/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-soft-bigotry-of-kony-2012/254194/
http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/03/09/kony-video-social-media-manipulation-analysis/
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/10/opinion/kony-2012-video/
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2012/03/09/why-i-think-the-kony-2012-campaign-is-wrong/
http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/08/african-voices-respond-to-hype.html
http://www.wrongingrights.com/2012/03/the-definitive-kony-2012-drinking-game.html
The Foe From The Future / The Valley Of Death
Well, after thirty-five years, the magic has come back. The first run of Leela stories from The Face of Evil to Horror of Fang Rock is in some ways the peak of the Tom Baker era, possibly of the whole of Who, and I have been a bit disappointed that neither the spinoff novels set in this period nor the Big Finish Companion Chronicles featuring a dying Leela reminiscing about untold adventures have quite captured the Zeitgeist. But Big Finish have now pretty much pulled it off. The Fourth Doctor Lost Stories box set includes a six-parter by Robert Banks Stewart, adapted by John Dorney, and a four-parter by none other than Philip Hinchcliffe, adapted by Jonathan Morris – this is already a super package, with ten episodes and a CD of extra interviews with writers and cast.
Nothing is perfect, of course; The Foe From The Future has quite a complex time-travelling plot, with some of the questions raised in early episodes not really answered by the end, and some really rather gory and visceral moments; and like a lot of six-parters from the original show, it could perhaps have been trimmed a bit. The Valley of Death is much more satisfactory plot-wise – indeed, as a story, it is very well constructed – though it would clearly have been preferable as a Fourth Doctor / Sarah story (alas, no longer possible) and has some dodgy stereotyping of South American tribesmen.
Whatever the flaws, both of them are carried by the soaring performances of Tom Baker and Louise Jameson; several of the guest cast comment on just how infectious their energy was for the rest of the team during the recording process, and it shows. Baker is still occasionally silly, but nowhere near as portentous as he has been in the Paul Magrs BBC audios, and also able to effortlessly switch from clown to genius to alien wizard as required. Jameson has finally been given Who material that treats her as an equal rather than as a mere sidekick, and is utterly convincing. And the chemistry between them is clearly several magnitudes better than it was when they were on TV; both stories feature moments when the Doctor thinks Leela is dead or dying, and Baker rises convincingly to the occasion. (The guest cast are all good too, but really it’s the stars who I was listening for.)
I have got rather far behind with recent Big Finish releases due to changes of routine and reading and listening projects, but I am kicking myself for not getting to these stories (released in January) a bit earlier; though I think not as much as Tom Baker is kicking himself for not getting into the Big Finish studios when he was first invited. Very glad that he took the plunge and that BF found worthy material for him.
March Books 2) The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
Well, this is very entertaining! While The Princess Bride is at its core a rollicking fairy tale that does nothing at all to challenge racial or sexual stereotypes, what saves it is the witty and occasionally self-mocking tone of the text, the framing narrative of an author reclaiming a story he loved in childhood for his grandson, and also the sub-plot about the process of editing down and publishing a story written by another person in another time for another audience. I’m also impressed by the ambiguity of the ending (I understand that the film doesn’t dare to replicate that). So, despite its flaws, some of which are acknowledged in the text, strongly recommended.
Interesting Links for 09-03-2012
- Letters of Note: I have no ancestors of that gifted people
“if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.” (25 July, 1938)
Interesting Links for 08-03-2012
- Web campaigning on a shoestring | Jon Worth | At the intersection of the EU, UK politics and tech
1) Start with WordPress, self-installed version
2) Sort out a domain name and website hosting
3) Get WordPress up and running
4) Keep away prying eyes
5) Get a theme
6) Get the right plugins
7) Put in some content!
- Five Abandoned Places | Crasstalk
Weird emptiness, people all gone:
1. Prada Marfa, Marfa, Texas, USA
2. Abandoned Theatre, Namibe, Angola
3. Leper Colony, North Brother Island, New York, USA
4. Island of the Lost Dolls, Mexico
5. Treasury Building, Perth, Australia
March Books 1) Almost Perfect, by James Goss
I may have mentioned once or twice that I think James Goss is one of the best writers of Who spinoff literature currently in business. Almost Perfect appears to have been his first book, a 2008. Torchwood novel set between Season 2 and Children of Earth, and while I liked it a lot it doesn’t quite reach the level of his later work. There is a sexy alien presence, which is classic Torchwood, and Ianto gets transformed into a beautiful woman for most of the novel, which is very entertaining; and there is a lot of really good writing about the Gwen/Rhys relationship, and about how much Owen and Toshiko are missed. But the book slightly misses the mark with regard to Jack’s characterisation and back-story, and the actual resolution seemed a bit incoherent – lots of fantastic imagery but lacking a decent frame. So, as Torchwood novels go, one of the decent ones; as James Goss novels go, it shows the way to future excellence.
Interesting Links for 07-03-2012
- Why the European Parliament should not be abolished
Simon Hix (contra Jack Straw)
- In Chechnya, 107% Turnout — for Putin
Vlad wins by 1,482 to 1, of 1,389 registered voters.
- There has to be a better way – and maybe there is. « Francesca Elston
- ladybusiness: Coverage of Women on SF/F Blogs
- The self-epublishing bubble | Ewan Morrison | Books | guardian.co.uk
- An Existential Threat Within Israel Endangers Its Democracy : The New Yorker
Interesting Links for 06-03-2012
- Trouble in Paradise
The ex-President of the Maldives describes how he was removed from power last month. Dramatic stuff.
- Opportunity cost problem
The Dylan-Clapton dilemma: “You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative activity. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you would be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan. Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer. Based on this information, what is the opportunity cost of seeing Eric Clapton? A. $0 B. $10 C. $40 D. $50” – I got it wrong.
- Philip Madoc: A career in pictures
Includes War Lord and Solon (but not Eelek, Fenner or Brockley)
The Scarifyers
I did not immediately take to The Scarifyers, a series of audio plays starring Nicholas Courtney as retired police detective Lionheart and Terry Molloy as his sidekick, horror writer Professor Dunning, together solving 1930s X-Files type mysteries in London and elsewhere. Though the two stars are excellent, the first few scripts felt a bit thin and over-reliant on Doctor Who in-jokes. But once we get to the third or fourth story, things start to come together, and when Brian Blessed appears as a guest star in the fourth story, he fits in rather modestly and yet also memorably.
The sixth story was made after Nicholas Courtney died last year, and is rather poignantly about his character’s disappearance; his place is filled in the narrative by David Warner, playing his retired sergeant (Warner doesn’t really sound demotic enough for that part but otherwise is great as ever). By the end, the door is left open for more adventures with the Warner/Molloy combination, and that would not be a bad thing at all.
I don’t think I had come across the work of Simon Barnard or Paul Morris before, but I’ll look out for more by either.
BSFA awards for Best Art
I may not know much about Art, but I know what I like.
I found it actually quite easy to rank the four nominees for this year's BSFA award for Best Art.
4) Cover of Lavie Tidhar’s Osama by Pedro Marques – Not that I dislike it; I understand and like the concept, and it almost works. But the trail of smoke, while no doubt meant to suggest both the cigarette of the noir detective and the collapse of the Twin Towers, doesn’t quite manage the second; and the absence of any element suggesting the real Bin Laden’s trademark beard weakens it.
3) Cover and illustrations of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls by Jim Kay – this may be a little unfair, but I’m not sure to what extent the art we see on the web page corresponds with the art nominated for the award. At one point I thought that it was just the cover, in which case it would have been a clear fourth-place vote. But obviously it includes the internal illustrations as well, which are indeed striking and grotesque. The third image, the monster sitting on a shed, is particularly impressive. In the end I just like the other two more.
2) Cover of Liz Williams’s A Glass of Shadow by Anne Sudworth – this is just beautiful, the cat particularly well caught, its eyes reflecting the bright small flowers around it, the countryside so vivid that you think you could step right into it and feel the midsummer evening glow.
1) Cover of Ian Whates’s The Noise Revealed by Dominic Harman – it may be a bit sad of me, but I like good old-fashioned spaceships sometimes, and here we have a cover that tells us what the story is about (probably); things going whizz and bang and vroom, and a couple of minuscule human figures standing back in awe. The weird and (presumably?) natural rock shapes of the landscape both clash with and complement the modernistic and (presumably?) artificial metal shapes of the base from which the rockets are emanating. It gets my vote.
So, that first century manuscript of Mark’s gospel then
In my links roundup for Friday I included this article describing the alleged finding of a first-century fragment of manuscript with text from the Gospel of St Mark. I don't remember how I came across it; my memory is that I followed a link to it from a summary found somewhere else (I originally thought Huffington Post but don't see it now). In any case, I wish I had been a bit more thorough; the link I chose is the Indian syndication of an American evangelical news service, and in general I prefer to link to primary material (which this is not) rather than journalistic coverage – particularly when as in this case, it is actually old news; my link was more than ten days after the 20 February news story, which itself reported an event held on 1 February.
I would have been better to link to this 20 February radio interview with the scholar at the centre of the controversy, Daniel Wallace, which gives some more details – though not really much more – of the find: this is a manuscript which came from Egypt somehow, and has so far been dated by one unidentified but apparently well-regarded palaeography expert to the first century.(The radio host makes the puzzling remark that "it can't be later than 51", which cannot be correct; Wallace does not either confirm or correct the remark.) Mutterings elsewhere indicate that it may (or may not) be part of the Green Collection, possibly a papyrus fragment from a late Egyptian mummy.
Tracking through internet discussion of this, I have become rather depressed by the poor quality of the debate between liberal and evangelical theologians. The evangelicals seem delighted by the idea that this discovery – if it is true – will push back the known fragments of manuscript to within the lifetime of the apostles, and may (or may not) indicate that the specific fragment of text on it has (or has not) remained unchanged since the earliest days. The liberals, on the other hand, have been mocking the evangelicals for a fake manuscript that isn't even the piece in question.
Myself, I've done a wee bit of New Testament Greek and scriptural analysis, and I've done a wee bit more palaeography and attempts to reconstruct original texts (of a much later date) from various manuscript versions, enough altogether to make me feel that both the evangelicals and the liberals who I've read on this particular topic seem to me to be approaching it with too many preconceptions. If we do have a genuine first century manuscript, that should be a cause for general celebration, full stop. Scholars will certainly continue to debate what it means and how significant it is, but a couple of verses of Mark's gospel in a fragment of a first-century manuscript can't and won't ever prove that the entire New Testament reached its present form by AD 70.
(Though at least none of the people I have read on this question are King James-ers.)
The Ark on DVD
I realised to my delight that I had not yet opened, let alone watched, a DVD of The Ark bought some time ago, and spent some time over the weekend remedying the situation. As the First Doctor space opera stories go, this is one of the few successful ones without Daleks; and I’ve always appreciated it as Dodo’s first proper appearance. The DVD is solid rather than brilliant, though the story behind the insanely complex camera work is told very well, and I had not appreciated just how short the time between filming and broadcast was; though the claim that Dodo’s miniskirt seen at the end was the first ever shown on the BBC seems rather bold. The extras include a lovely reminiscence of the Riverside studio where the story was made, with Peter Purves and the director Michael Imison (who was told he was to be sacked literally as he went into the gallery to supervise filming of the final episode), and a rather silly pieceon why the Monoids never took off (which at least gets Jacueline Rayner a moment as a talking head).
And there’s also a short documentary on the influence of H.G. Wells on Doctor Who, which seems at first an odd inclusion, though the argument is in the end very convincingly made that The Ark is one of the most Wellsian stories in the Whovian canon. This features a lot of Matthew Sweet, who has written some of the more literary Big Finish audios, and also Kim Newman, Graham Sleight and a mysterious figure credited as Dr A Keen, who looks like someone I vaguely remember from the Belfast arts faculty computer facilities in the early 1990s; I wonder what he is doing now?
Charles Burns exhibition in Leuven
Well, I was very satisfied. There are only in fact three rooms featuring Burns’ work, and only one of those is a normal museum exhibition room, 
The main exhibition room is dominated by a mural drawn by Burns specially for Leuven. I was a bit surprised that a lot of the other visitors appeared to be going clockwise round the cases, which is of course useless if you are trying to follow a story from start to finish. I was also surprised by the young age of some of the visitors – not all of Burns’ work is really suitable for children, and some is pretty graphic (in an ugh! way rather than a sexy way). I guess if you are in the habit of taking the kids to a modern art exhibition at the weekend you take it in your stride.
I took the time to wander through the other three temporary exhibitions in the museum. None of them grabbed me in the same way as Burns; Patrick Van Caeckenbergh has made some odd sculptures from everyday objects (the nearly headless penguin is the one that sticks in my mind); Wannes Goetschalcks has filmed himself doing things in a box, which is great if you like films about people doing things on their own in boxes; and Christoph Fink has put on display his own personal and frankly incomprehensible notation of journeys he has made, apparently to honour the great geographer Mercator (he of the projection) who was born in 1512 and did some of his early work in Leuven.
I will follow up a bit on Mercator; the library at the Arenberg campus of Leuven university is staging an exhibition about him starting later this month, and Prince Philippe and Pricess Mathilda are making an appearance at a ceremony at his birthplace today (the actual anniversary appears to be tomorrow). I might even struggle up to Sint-Niklaas, though the Mercator museum there seems with exquisite timing to have closed the main exhibit for renovations, while attempting to tempt the visitor with temporary exhibitions. Well, it’s not that far away.