Another pretty decent Torchwood novel, with an intersection between exploitative aliens and exploitative crime lords in the property market in Cardiff Bay, set just after Gwen and Rhys return from honeymoon, with Owen still dead and walking. Some nice exploration of the dysfunction in the Owen/Toshiko relationship (Toshiko gets to be on the front cover this time) and lots of reference to their back-stories which will please the diehard fan. My one gripe is that the supposedly Latvian crimelord has a rather Adriatic name (“Besnik Lucca” – first name Albanian, second name Italian).

Sadly the very last of the SJA audiobooks, read by Anjli “Rani” Molhindra, about the kidnapping and trial of Sarah Jane by an alien race with an unhealthy devotion to the truth. It’s a decent tale, well read by Malhotra, which actually probes at Sarah’s own motives and actions and the slightly ambiguous moral basis for them, a bit more deeply and more effectively than one might have expected from an audio book for younger listeners. It’s very vivid in places, perhaps reflecting author Scott Gray’s experience in comics.

I was going to do a full roundup of all the Sarah Jane audiobooks here, but I realise that I still have two to listen to – The White Wolf and The Shadow People – so will report back when I have done them.

I was on the road a lot last week, so only now blogging recent reading/listening; stand by for a few more posts this morning.

I remember catching occasional episodes of the 1981-82 BBC sf radio series Earthsearch, in which the crew of a generation starship have been wiped out by the ship’s megalomaniac computers, apart from four children who are brought up under the computers’ control and then must gradually emancipate themselves. In the second series, two children of the next generation are added to the mix and they too must shake off the computers’ influence as they all seek the lost planet Earth.

At the time, as a cynical teenager, I didn’t actually rate the show that highly. But listening to it thirty years on, I could see its strong points. James Follett, the show’s writer, did not have the genius of Douglas Adams but did have more discipline, and the two ten-episode series actually work fairly well as a continuous arc in which each episode must feature this week’s new planet, or abandoned starship, or killer robot, or all three. It doesn’t really challenge cliches or conventions, but it does take the British tradition of sf and bring it to a new medium. Nicholas Courtney pops up as the last president of Earth before it was removed from our solar system, recorded for posterity.

Much more recently, in 2006 Big Finish produced an audio version of Follett’s novel Mindwarp, which is a sort-of prequel to the radio series and features a lot of the same tropes, though in this case the central characters must escape from the underground city which is the only world they have ever known. I thought this was in general better than the original (and also considerably shorter), sadly let down by the lacklustre performance of Leon Parris as the male lead. His rather phoned-in performance is a jarring contrast to the ever-luscious tones of India Fisher as the female lead and Colin Baker and (again) Nicholas Courtney in supporting roles, and it’s a shame that an actor who can actually do audio wasn’t selected for the part.

Bulgarian media desperately seek expert on Scotland.

This is a great book about the human side of space travel. There are fascinating chapters on how astronauts are chosen (people who are able to keep making decisions and responding to instructions while under extreme stress, and also do not snore) and on the problems of personal hygiene when underwear and room for manoeuvre are limited. The chapter on sex in zero gravity was a bit disappointing because there is in fact no empirical source material. But there is a lot about poo, a recurrent theme throughout the book culminating in a long chapter which answers every question you ever thought you might ask, and many more, about toilets in space.

The book is not quite as entertaining as the same author’s Bonk, I guess because sex is a more familiar activity than space flight (for me, anyway); it is also not quite as well edited, with some repetition of anecdotes perhaps indicating that some of the chapters began life as newspaper or magazine columns. But it is great fun anyway.

I didn’t really get much out of this Eighth Doctor novel, set immediately after the two-volume Interference, with the Doctor, Fitz and new companion Compassion getting involved with various aliens and Iris Wildthyme. I did like the fact that we encounter a young svelte Iris as well as the standard more elderly version – indeed this is one of the better stories about Iris out there. But I was hoping to get a better handle on what Compassion is all about, and didn’t; and the various alien plot threads were all entangled without being terribly interesting. One of those books that I recommend only for completists (and fans of Iris).

One of the last two Sarah Jane audio books, featuring the voice of Daniel “Clyde” Anthony and a story by Martin Day about a timetravelling steampunk android (the “difference golem”) which needs to be sorted out by SJS and pals. I have not seen the last series of SJA so the character of Sky was new to me, but the story is well done and Anthony a decent reader who sensibly gets on with trying to convey emotion and character rather than imitating voices.

Cheerful news on the electoral front today. Croatia has voted by almost 2 to 1 – rather more strongly than opinion polls suggested – to join the European Union. (Official results are not out yet but my old friends at GONG have done their own calculations.) And the Finnish presidential election will be a runoff between the establishment Conservative candidate and the gay Green; the extremist nationalists placed a poor fourth with less than 10%, less than half what they got last April when they nearly ended up the largest party.

A few days ago I was on a radio show (for Australia listeners, for what that is worth) as one of a panel and found myself the only commentator daring to suggest that the EU-pocalypse may not, in fact, be at hand; that perhaps we will muddle through. The moderator was inclined to point to the likely success of the True Finns as evidence that I was wrong. I’m glad that that has been falsified and that the Croats have surprised us with their enthusiasm for the EU. The English-speaking media may have generally adopted the narrative of imminent European collapse, but that doesn’t make it true.

(Electoral geek point re Finland – Väyrynen was a whisker ahead of Haavisto on absentee ballots, and initial media coverage had him qualifying to face Niinistö in the runoff. But Haavisto was well ahead of Väyrynen on votes cast today rather than in advance, which shows that the ground campaign is still worth something.)

Another great collection of New Scientist columns with readers asking questions and other readers answering them. Lots of interesting trivia; two different answers given for why we westerners tend to eat a sweet course at the end of the meal (not totally sure I believe either of them); the title question is answered somewhere in the middle; at the very end, a question about how Big Ben is kept on time is answered by someone who had actually had the job of keeping it on time. Entertaining stuff.

Not a lot to add to my enthusiastic write-up of this book from first reading, except to say that the Doctor Who / Sherlock Holmes mash-up is even better reading in the Moffat Era.

A brief book going in detail into the demise of the Elizabethan courtier John Perrot, of interest to me because of the supporting role played by my ancestor Sir Nicholas White. I had gone over some of this ground before with Hiram Morgan and Perrot's son, but this is a great little example of how to pull it all together, including even one of the surviving transcripts of Perrot's trial, the high point perhaps being the fatal moment when he was confronted with evidence that he had called the Queen a "bastard piskitchen woman".

I felt that Turvey's thesis that Lord Burghley Was Behind It All was not really borne out by the evidence. What seemed to me clear was that Perrot, having returned to London after his term of office in Ireland, was becoming an alternate power centre on Irish affairs much to the dismay of everyone else working on Ireland, and the leading faction in the Dublin administration decided to discredit him as best they could. But I doubt that Burghley jumped on the band-wagon until it was already rolling, though I agree that his decision would have been necessary for Perrot's trial and conviction for treason, a process in which the odds were stacked against the defendant procedurally. Even then, probably nobody anticipated Perrot's death from natural causes before a date for his sentence could be set. Turvey tracks Nicholas White and Richard Meredith to London as prisoners due to their support of Perrot, but unfortunately doesn't cover their trial in Star Chamber (though does cover the detail that White's son was prevented from access to the Queen).

The book helped me a bit – and certainly gave me a reading list – for understanding how the royal court functioned in Tudor times. It helped me rather more in understanding exactly how the Irish administration functioned. Apart from the official designation of roles and office-holders, there was a whole shadow politics going on behind the scenes, as the viceroy's decisions and policies in Dublin could always be overturned in London, and because many of the leading figures in Ireland had their own routes to the Queen's ear. White had always been close to Burghley, but obviously became collateral damage in the fall of Perrot. A good piece of work.

Mark Pack asks who should replace Diana Wallis as MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber? Her husband Stewart Arnold came second in the selection for the party’s candidates back in 2007, as shown in these figures taken from the offical results site.

		Stage 2		Stage 3		Stage 4		Stage 5		Stage 6		Stage 7		Stage 8
	First Prefs	Surplus of Diana Wallis		Exclusion of Veena Hudson		Exclusion of Phil Kitchen		Exclusion of Neil Poole		Exclusion of Nader Fekri		Exclusion of Jeanette Sunderland		Exclusion of James Monaghan
Stewart Arnold	60	+215.60	275.60	+9.16	284.76	+14.88	299.64	+15.20	314.84	+26.40	341.24	+30.96	372.20	+69.96	442.16
Nader Fekri	32	+52.08	84.08	+11.60	95.68	+8.60	104.28	+8.48	112.76	-112.76	–		–		–
Veena Hudson	19	+30.24	49.24	-49.24	–		–		–		–		–		–
Phil Kitchen	11	+43.68	54.68	+3.12	57.80	-57.80	–		–		–		–		–
James Monaghan	97	+77.28	174.28	+8.04	182.32	+7.60	189.92	+7.04	196.96	+11.84	208.80	+47.64	256.44	-256.44	–
Neil Poole	28	+36.40	64.40	+2.12	66.52	+5.48	72.00	-72.00	–		–		–		–
Jeanette Sunderland	90	+38.08	128.08	+2.12	130.20	+7.16	137.36	+10.04	147.40	+25.40	172.80	-172.80	–		–
Rebecca Taylor	85	+85.68	170.68	+11.40	182.08	+10.84	192.92	+21.20	214.12	+34.60	248.72	+61.68	310.40	+123.08	433.48
Diana Wallis	1082	-580.66	501.34		501.34		501.34		501.34		501.34		501.34		501.34
Non-transferable	0	+1.62	1.62	+1.68	3.30	+3.24	6.54	+10.04	16.58	+14.52	31.10	+32.52	63.62	+63.40	127.02
Totals	1504		1504.00		1504.00		1504.00		1504.00		1504.00		1504.00		1504.00

	Stage
	8
Stewart Arnold	442.16	Elected
Rebecca Taylor	433.48
Diana Wallis	501.34	Elected
Non-transferable	127.02
Totals	1504.00

Mark Pack admits in his piece that the winner of the contest to be second on the list is not necessarily the same as the person who would win if the contest for first on the list was re-run with the original winner excluded, and goes on to say that those figures are not available. But in fact they are; it is not too difficult to take the transfers of Diana Wallis’s votes from the second stage of the real election, work out how many physical ballot papers went to each of the other candidates, and see what the result would have been with all of her votes transferred. (It’s fairly clear from inspection that her transferred votes were now at a value of 0.56.)

Candidate	original first prefs	transfers from Diana Wallis on second count	transferred ballot papers from Diana Wallis on second count	first prefs including Diana Wallis first prefs at full value
Stewart Arnold	60	215.6	385	445
Nader Fekri	32	52.08	93	125
Veena Hudson	19	30.24	54	73
Phil Kitchen	11	43.68	78	89
James Monaghan	97	77.28	138	235
Neil Poole	28	36.4	65	93
Jeanette Sunderland	90	38.08	68	158
Rebecca Taylor	85	85.68	153	238

It is straightforward if tedious to repeat this exercise for each of the counts and therefore to reconstruct the election result for the top spot on the ballot paper, as it would have been if Diana Wallis had withdrawn after the votes were cast but before they were counted. Incidentally, this is how vacancies are handled for the STV parliamentary elections in Malta, which also tend to feature lots of candidates, but a very topheavy pattern of first preference votes. (Also Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory, and Cambridge Massachusetts.)Fortunately the order in which the losing candidates would have been excluded is the same as in the real election.

		Stage 2		Stage 3		Stage 4		Stage 5		Stage 6		Stage 7
	First Prefs	Exclusion of Veena Hudson		Exclusion of Phil Kitchen		Exclusion of Neil Poole		Exclusion of Nader Fekri		Exclusion of Jeanette Sunderland		Exclusion of James Monaghan
Stewart Arnold	445	+14	459	+25	484	+24	508	+33	541	+38	579	+99	678
Nader Fekri	125	+16	141	+13	154	+12	166	-166	–		–		–
Veena Hudson	73	-73	–		–		–		–		–		–
Phil Kitchen	89	+4	93	-93	–		–		–		–		–
James Monaghan	235	+12	247	+12	259	+11	270	+18	288	+56	344	-344	–
Neil Poole	93	+3	96	+9	105	-105	–		–		–		–
Jeanette Sunderland	158	+3	161	+12	173	+14	187	+32	219	-219	–		–
Rebecca Taylor	238	+18	256	+17	273	+30	303	+61	364	+85	449	+175	624
Non-transferable	0	+3	3	+6	9	+14	23	+22	45	+40	85	+60	155
Totals	1456		1456		1456		1456		1456		1456		1456

	Stage
	7
Stewart Arnold	678	Elected
Rebecca Taylor	624
Non-transferable	155
Totals	1456

The figures for the very last stage have a couple of other possible mathematical permutations, but would not change the fact that Stewart Arnold was the winner; I have gone for the one I thought most likely given the transfer patterns of earlier counts (where Rebecca Taylor had gained almost twice as many transfers).

It’s fairly clear then that the next spot on the list is Stewart Arnold’s, fair and square; and while I’m not going to grind through the calculations again (it’s more complex to work out the lower places from the information given), I would be astonished if the next spot down does not fall to Rebecca Taylor by a fairly clear margin over James Monaghan or any of the others.

The legal position is pretty clear. As outlined by Richard Gadsden, once the Returning Officer for Yorkshire and thr Humber is notified that that there is a vacancy, the RO contacts the next person on the list and gives them a deadline. If they have responded saying they want the job by the deadline, and they have the approval of the nominating officer of their party, then they become an MEP forthwith. Otherwise, once the deadline expires (or if they write back refusing the seat), the Returning Officer writes to the next person on the list and so on until the list is complete. (If the seat doesn’t get filled at all, then there is a by-election by region-wide FPTP. The seat cannot stay vacant for more than six months.

So legally the place is Stewart Arnold’s, if he wants it and if the party approves. (And the party ought to approve if he wants it; procedurally, he is completely entitled to take up the seat.) But things have moved on since the candidate selection of 2007, and the optics of an MEP handing their seat over to their spouse are, frankly, pretty disastrous. I feel very sorry for the three people most concerned, Diana Wallis, Stewart Arnold and Rebecca Taylor, all of whom I know and like, and I am certain that Diana Wallis will not have resigned her seat other than with a heavy heart and after deep reflection. But I hope that there will be mature consideration in Hull this weekend about what happens next.

In about five minutes, discussing the Euro crisis.

My first Nebula winner of the year (only five more to go). In a lot of ways this is a very good book – excellent that Griffith has nested three different strands of plot, her heroine's childhood and then two different phases of her recovery from a kidnap ordeal, with some very sensuous descriptions of setting (Hull, of all places) and passionate yet thoughtful reflections on class and gender. My one reservation was that I wasn't sure how central the sfnal elements were to the plot; perhaps this is partly because quite a lot of the stuff that seemed futuristic in 1995 has become quotidian in 2012.

Slow River won the Nebula for Best Novel in 1997. It beat three books I haven't heard of – Nina Kiriki Hoffman's The Silent Strength of Stones, Patricia A. McKillip's Winter Rose and Robert J. Sawyer's Starplex – and two that I have read, Expiration Date by Tim Powers and Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which won the Hugo that year. Considering the three that I have read on the list, it is actually quite a tough choice. Expiration Date is fun but not really profound, and The Diamond Age has more flaws than I realised on first reading. I think this is one of those years when the Nebulas picked out a novel that deserved a bit more recognition; in other words, for once, the system actually worked.

This really is a must-have book for fans of New Who. It has shaken off some of the extra material of last year's equivalent, and settled down to being a damn good guide to the 2011 series (and 2010 Christmas episode), including interviews with the key crew and cast, very short pieces of fanfic for each episode by established authors (James Goss, as usual, scores with the adventures of madame Vastra) and some nice reflections on how some of the episodes fit into longer Who history. I found it very helpful in reviving my memories of watching it first time round and tying them into the wider continuity. (Apart from Night Terrors which I struggled to remember.) I recommended it sight unseen to a friend to share with his nine-year-old and I strongly repeat that now that I have actually read it, for fans of any age.

My first Irish history book of the year, this one looking not so much at the big picture of Irish history as specifically at the colonisation policies pursued by English (and Scottish) officials in Ireland from 1580 until the Cromwellian settlement resolved the land issue for three centuries.

Canny argues persuasively that the intellectual agenda for colonisation (or 'plantation' in local dialect) was set out by Spenser in both The Faerie Queene and the View of the Present State of Ireland, and while it wasn't the whole-hearted policy of either the royal court in London or of the Dublin Castle administration, it became inevitable after the Flight of the Earls and the fact that the viceroys under James I were themselves deeply involved with plantation. He also finds that Wentworth/Strafford, who was executed largely on suspicion of being too nice to Irish Catholics, was actually secretly pursuing a pro-plantation agenda which was as extreme as Cromwell's ten years later. In fact Irish Catholics found it difficult to resist the creeping dispossession of their lands precisely because it was never enshrined as government policy, so the traditional idea that appealing to the King or Queen might sort out the more hostile local officials never quite got lost until 1649. Lots of interesting detail about what life was like in Ireland at the period, including how widespread the use of Irish was in the Pale and the curious incident of the Pathan who settled near Roscrea. Not quite enough for my purposes on my own ancestors – both the sixteenth-century Sir Nicholas White and his seventeenth-century grandson of the same name are mentioned, but the story is not really about them or their people. Still, a very interesting read.

Thanks to Ian Sales I have just caught up with the controversy regarding Liz Bourke's review of Michael J. Sullivan's novel Theft of Swords. For those who want to read the full debate, which has spilled far beyond the review's original publication on Strange Horizons, Bourke herself has helpfully listed all the links she could find here. I am impressed by Bourke and baffled (and slightly worried) by some of her critics.

I want to pick up one of her arguments in particular, because I think it's important. Bourke takes issue with one particularly purple paragraph of the book which begins with the immortal sentence "Measures thou see art but trifles." She says,

If you're going to write in a dialect with which you're not familiar, whether archaic or foreign, it behoves you to become familiar with it. If you're writing in Early Modern English (a language still read and performed, and not just by Shakespeare buffs), it behoves you—and your editor, and your copyeditor—to get the basic grammatical structures right. Early Modern English does have a grammar. And if you don't know the grammar offhand, the internet does.

As she points out, the sentence should have been "The measures thou see'st be [or are] but trifles." A couple of Sullivan's defenders jumped on this point:

This is a FANTASY BOOK. He can make up whatever f*ing language he pleases quite frankly.

The language isn't real. The world isn't real. Guess what, magic isn't real. Sullivan can make up whatever phrasing he wants in this world.

As another commenter and I have pointed out, they are objectively wrong on this point, and Bourke is objectively right.

Perhaps I can help with an analogy. If we were talking about an sf novel where astronauts landed on the surface of Jupiter and walked around, that would simply be wrong. The argument can be made that the author is free to make up what he or she likes about the surface of a planet that nobody has visited ("It's a made-up Jupiter!"). But in fact we know enough about the conditions of Jupiter to be sure that it will never be possible for human beings to land on it and walk around. The visible parts of Jupiter are cloud and would not support an astronaut's weight; the solid surface is so far down that it is subject to colossal pressure which would squash any traveller. It doesn't matter how well such a book is written in other ways; anyone who knows anything about Jupiter will find that their appreciation of the book is very negatively affected by the author including such a scene.

So it is for the use of Early Modern English. It's not a made-up language; it's a real language, just as Jupiter is a real planet. There are rules about how you can use the word "thou" – for instance, it changes the verb "see" to "see'st". There is a rule about how you use the word "art" as a part of the verb "to be" – it goes with second person singular "thou", not with third person plural "measures". If the author breaks those rules, it is impossible for anyone who knows Early Modern English to ignore, as bad as describing your characters walking around on the surface of Jupiter.

And if the author has broken those rules, the copy-editors and the rest of the editorial team have a duty to spot and correct it, a duty which was clearly not discharged in this case.

I was fascinated to come across this snippet from seventeenth-century Ireland. It is one of the many depositions made by Protestant settlers who were attacked by Catholics during the insurrection of 1641 (I have modernised the spelling and punctuation). But the deponent is not an English or Scottish Protestant – he came from much farther away:

John Fortune, for 20 years a servant to Captain Richard Steele, and by birth an Indian Pethagorian, but now a Christian and Late an Inhabitant of Ballinakill in the Queens County, sworn and examined deposeth:

That since the begining of the present Rebellion, viz. about 2 months since, he, when the town and Castle [of Ballinakill surrendered, he] was deprived, robbed, dispoiled of, or otherwise lost his cattle, sheep, cloth, household goods & other goodes & chattels of the value of thirtie Pounds, by the means of besiegers & assailants of the said town & Castle which are all Rebels, viz. General Preston, the Earl of Castlehaven, the Lord Mountgarret, & their followers and divers other Rebellious soldiers whose names he cannot express.

Signed [mark] by the aforesaid John Fortune
21 June 1643

Ballinakill is about halfway from Roscrea to Nenagh, north of the main road just inside the Offaly (ie Queen’s County) border. The castle had been confiscated from the Butlers in 1616, and then surrendered to the Confederate insurgents (led by Mountgarret, who was a Butler) in 1643 as Fortune reported, but was then shelled by Cromwellian troops a few years later and never rebuilt; the ruins are still visible from the main road apparently. 

So far, so normal for the horrors of war. But it is fascinating to see that an ‘Indian Pethagorian’, who would have left his homeland before 1621 at the latest (as he had been a servant to Steele for twenty years even before the rebellion started), had settled in Ireland. 

At first I thought that ‘Indian’ must here mean Native American, with ‘Pethagorian’ meaning either ‘Patagonian’ (as English pirates had settled there by 1586) or possibly ‘Powhatan‘ (as in Pocahontas). The author of the book I am reading hints as much in another article published elsewhere on colonial links across the Atlantic, and on the face of it, given where English soldiers were active in general at the time, America seems more likely than actual India.

But in fact I now think that this is one of the rare cases in the early seventeenth century where ‘Indian’ actually does mean ‘from India’, because Captain Richard Steele was one of the early representatives of the British East India Company, and indeed left a description of his journey from the Moghul Emperor’s court to Baghdad in 1615-16. Although he does not name any of his servants, it is notable that he still uses “we” after he parts company with the other Englishman in his party, so he was not travelling alone. I reckon that John Fortune was recruited by Steele at some point in the journey. Most likely he was a Pathan (not so far phonetically from ‘Pethagorian’), probably recruited in Lahore where the two Englishmen appear to have hired extra staff (though the text is not clear), and sticking with him through war in Germany and rebellion in Ireland. That fits the dates rather well; if he had worked for Steele from 1616 to 1636 or so, and had followed him to Ireland, he then had seven years to build up £30 in capital before it was wiped out by the rebellion.

There cannot be many earlier identifiable examples of migration to Ireland from South Asia. No further record of John Fortune’s adventures seems to survive, unfortunately.

(Steele’s grandson of the same name became a famous writer.)

A popular history of the building blocks of US political geography (NB the author is not the wingnut Mark Steyn). I learned a number of things from it, including the importance of the 1790 Nootka convention and why Hawaii has more interesting borders than one might have thought. I had not really taken in that the block shapes of Colorado and Wyoming reflected a general aspiration to create states covering seven degrees of longitude and four of latitude (three for the four states immediately to the east). Some boundaries are set by landmarks which may be ephemeral – the circle in the Delaware/Pennsylvania border, centred on a spire in the town of New Castle; the Texas/Arkansas border running due south from a point 100 paces west of the southwest corner of the Fort Smith garrison building; the section of the Maryland/Virginia border which was supposed to align with Watkins Point, which had however been eroded into oblivion by the time the surveyors got there. And a lot of the colonial-era boundaries were badly surveyed, with mutterings that local settlers bribed or confused the surveyors with moonshine.

It struck me that there were several cases of states voluntarily giving up territory, on the grounds that it was impossible to control from the state capital due to geography and therefore would be better handled by a neighbouring jurisdiction – this is the explanation given for Washington shedding the gold fields which became part of Idaho, and for the trimming of the town of Boston Corner from Massachusetts to New York. That’s rather different from the approach to territoriality I am used to elsewhere – it speaks to a trust that neighbouring jurisdictions could handle one’s own troublesome citizens better. Armed conflict over territorial aggrandisement was very rare, the 1836 Toledo War between Ohio and Michigan being the most recent example.

Though I do wonder if it’s true if, as reported here, those of the original colonies with claims west of the Appalachians surrendered them to the new federal government fairly smoothly, apart from the westernmost bits of Virginia and Connecticut’s Western Reserve (now in Ohio). I also wished Stein had gone into more detail on the secession of Vermont from New York and of West Virginia from Virginia – I know that he left out some interesting details from the latter and I had hoped to learn more than I did about the former.

Since Stein covers all fifty states, and the Dictrict of Columbia, in alphabetical rather than historical sequence, there is a fair bit of repetition (the Watkins Point story is told in the chapters on Virginia, Maryland and also Delaware). But it’s all lucidly done and nicely illustrated with clear maps.

Maybe someone should do a book like this on the borders of European countries. I have sometimes asserted that most of them were formed as tide marks in the ebb and flow of empires; maybe that proposition can be proved one way or the other.

One of Pratchett's earlier YA novels, about a 12-year-old boy who is an enthusiastic player of computer games, which was very much enjoyed by my 12-year-old son who is an enthusiastic player of computer games. Although Pratchett apologises in the introduction of the 2004 edition for how the story has dated since the original 1993 publication, I didn't spot any gross problems in that regard (and my expert advisor tells me that only the mention of Atari is particularly dated, plus perhaps old-fashioned descriptions of Nintendo).

Anyway, it's the story of what happens when the creatures in the game start to interact with the players as if they were real being living real lives and dying real deaths; and Pratchett injects it with his characteristica humanism, humanity, passion and humour. Very entertaining, and I now realise that perhaps the only gaps in our Pratchett library are the other two books in the Johnny Maxwell series.

I’m agnostic tending to positive on Scottish independence, and have been observing with great interest the current successful manoeuvring by Alex Salmond (see excellent interview by David Rennie)to put himself in pole position to win a vote which in fact is currently opposed by a majority of the Scottish population. As points out, the referendum, whatever the question, really could have any result at this stage; and I suspect that Salmond would be content with “devo max”, but also reckons that if Westminster forbids him to put it on the ballot paper he will benefit from a backlash of resentment. Certainly some Scots Unionists have already given up.

From where I am sitting in Brussels, the interesting thing is the consequence for the relationship between Scotland, the remnant UK of England Wales and Norn Iron, and the EU. The only serious study of this that I am aware of (discounting any statement from any politician anywhere, of course) is a House of Commons research paper which comes to the sensible conclusion that nobody really knows what the consequences of Scottish secession would be vis-a-vis Brussels. If I had to bet, I would expect that the least difficult option, of treating both Scotland and the remnant UK (rUK) as inheriting the current UK membership, keeping all the British opt-outs as long as they want to, is the most likely. There will be objections from the likes of Spain, worried about the demonstration effect, but in the end if a sovereign state becomes two sovereign states by legal means, it’s not really anyone else’s business.

An independent Scotland would have the same number of seats in the European Parliament as Ireland, Finland, and (soon) Croatia, currently 12. The rUK might well get away with keeping 72 seats, ie more for England and perhaps Wales (not Norn Iron which is already over-represented), as its population shifts from just ahead of Italy to just behind. All the EU acquis is already Scottish law. I can’t see any formal problem.

Where I can see a problem, as hinted at in this AFP article quoting anonymous EU sources, is that the necessary renegotiation of the rUK’s relationship with the EU following Scottish independence will necessarily be so huge that it must trigger the 2011 European Union Act requiring a referendum on any significant Treaty change – and if it doesn’t formally do so, the political pressure to have a referendum on the new terms of rUK’s EU membership will surely be overwhelming. And unlike the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum, the outcome of any UK or rUK referendum with the word “Europe” in is far too obvious. In my view, one of the unexpected by-products of Scottish independence may well be that the rest of the UK leaves the EU entirely.

Prove that n⁴+4 is never a prime number for n>1.

It was at the end of August 2009, twenty-eight months ago, that I started to read Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and two weeks ago that I finished it. I thought then that I could read two chapters a week, and get through the lot in nine months. In fact, I found I needed the space of a weekend without visitors or travel to read and write up each chapter, so the 71 chapters took me 133 weeks (rather than the 36 I had optimistically first imagined). But such a rich diet is best digested slowly, morsel by delicious morsel, rather than trying to rush it. I strongly recommend a structured read-through of the entire work to anyone interested in history.

There are some things I would advise readers to do differently from me. I wish I had used the Bury edition, with its expanded footnotes, which is available online and in various hard copy formats, rather than sticking to the Penguin version, edited by David Womersley, with just the original text. I would also interleave a bit more with other reading – I have the Gibbon and Empire volume of essays sitting on the shelf waiting to be read, and I profited also from Gibbon's own Autobiography. I might even suggest splitting the longest chapters rather than religiously taking one a week: Chapter L, on Mahomet (sic) is 81 pages, and Chapter LI, on his successors, in 90 pages, full of intense detail.

I set this up as a separate LJ community, , more to give the project a framework outside my usual bookblogging than out of any hope that I would build up a cohort of regular readers. Indeed there were a few people who commented regularly at the beginnning and more sporadically as it went on; I don't blame them in the slightest for flagging. I do now wonder what I will do with the entries in the long term, as LJ does not feel like a reliable archive right now. Probably I will simply shift them to my website.

I structured each entry to start with striking quotes from each chapter, followed by a short summary, followed by any points arising from the text. I should of course have put the summary first, then the quotes, then the points arising. I don't make any apology for rambling into favourite topics of mine such as Balkan geography and astrology, rather than more generally interesting points; I'm not an academic specialist in this area and have no ambition to be, and it seemed important to record when my pleasure in reading was enhanced by the intersection of the text with subjects that I already knew something about.

So, what did I learn?

The two things that will linger with me from Decline and Fall are the superb quality of the writing and the fact that Gibbon doesn't really prove his own case. The writing speaks for itself; some of the best passages are long – the fall of Constantinople being the one which most recently springs to mind – and some of the greatest lines are very brief – for example, that Artaxerxes “was driven into exile and rebellion by royal ingratitude, the customary reward for superior merit.” It does sometimes drag a bit – I found the chapters around the fall of Rome rather tough going – but on form Gibbon is one of the best combiners of irony with substance that you will ever encounter.

However, his overall thesis is not especially clear and not especially well proven by his own account. Gibbon blames the decline and fall of the empire on decisions taken in the second century, after which Rome endured another 250 years and Constantinople more than a millennium; he blames Christianity, though his proof of this tends to degenerate into prejudice about monks and Papists; he extols liberty, but exactly what he means by liberty is never very clear; he argues that there is a straight decline from 410 to 1453, which means minimising Justinian’s achievements (while yet giving him five chapters) and blatantly ignoring the later Byzantine empire. The building blocks are solid, and some of them extremely well made, but the overall structure is impressive more because of its size and style rather than its function.

One should not take this too far. This book, published precisely in the interval of years between the American Declaration of Independence and the French revolution, represent the effort of one of the smartest brains of the time trying to get to grips with the greatest historical catastrophe that he knew of, while yet fearing that his world was getting worse rather than better. And he also hopes to communicate his understanding of the past, and its application to the chaos of the present, to those who like him who have visited Rome as secular pilgrims:

Of these pilgrims, and of every reader, the attention will be excited by a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind. The various causes and progressive effects are connected with many of the events most interesting in human annals: the artful policy of the Caesars, who long maintained the name and image of a free republic; the disorders of military despotism; the rise, establishment, and sects of Christianity; the foundation of Constantinople; the division of the monarchy; the invasion and settlements of the Barbarians of Germany and Scythia; the institutions of the civil law; the character and religion of Mahomet; the temporal sovereignty of the popes; the restoration and decay of the Western empire of Charlemagne; the crusades of the Latins in the East: the conquests of the Saracens and Turks; the ruin of the Greek empire; the state and revolutions of Rome in the middle age. The historian may applaud the importance and variety of his subject; but while he is conscious of his own imperfections, he must often accuse the deficiency of his materials. It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public.

Well done, Mr Gibbon; well done.

Book I
Preface
Chapter I
Chapter II: Of the Union and Internal Prosperity of the Roman Empire in the Age of the Antonines
Chapter III: Of the Constitution of the Roman Empire in the Age of the Antonines
Chapter IV: The cruelty, follies and murder of Commodus [with added Pertinax]
Chapter V: mostly about Septimius Severus
Chapter VI: Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus; and taxation
Chapter VII: The Year of Six Emperors, and Philip the Arab
Chapter VIII: Of the state of Persia after the restoration of the monarchy by Artaxerxes
Chapter IX: The state of Germany till the invasion of the Barbarians
Chapter X: mostly about the Goths
Chapter XI: mostly about Aurelian
Chapter XII: Tacitus, Probus, Carus, and the rise of Diocletian
Chapter XIII: Diocletian
Chapter XIV: The Rise of Constantine
Chapter XV: Early Christianity
Chapter XVI: Early Christianity and the Emperors

Book II
Chapter XVII: Constantinople and Constantine’s system of government
Chapter XVIII: Constantine and his successors
Chapter XIX: Constantius, Gallus and Julian
Chapter XX: The conversion of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity
Chapter XXI: Heresy and paganism
Chapter XXII: The Rise of Julian the Apostate
Chapter XXIII: Julian and his Apostasy
Chapter XXIV: Julian’s Persian campaign, and his death
Chapter XXV: Jovian, Valentinian, Valens, Valentinian’s sons & the final division of the empire
Chapter XXVI: The Goths infiltrate

Book III
Chapter XXVII: Mostly about Theodosius
Chapter XXVIII: The Destruction of Paganism, and Worship of Relics and Saints by Christians
Chapter XXIX: The Sons of Theodosius; also Rufinus and Stilicho
Chapter XXX: The Goths are coming
Chapter XXXI: The Sack of Rome
Chapter XXXII: Arcadius, St John Chrysostom, and Theodosius II
Chapter XXXIII: The Vandals conquer Africa
Chapter XXXIV: Attila the Hun
Chapter XXXV: The End of Attila
Chapter XXXVI: The End of the Western Empire
Chapter XXXVII: Monks and Arians
Chapter XXXVIII: France, Spain and Britain
General Observations On The Fall Of The Roman Empire In The West

Book IV
Chapter XXXIX: Theodoric and Boethius
Chapter XL: Justinian, Part I
Chapter XLI: Justinian, Part II
Chapter XLII: Justinian, Part III
Chapter XLIII: Justinian, Part IV
Chapter XLIV: Justinian, Part V – his legal legacy
Chapter XLV: After Justinian’s death: The Lombards and Italy
Chapter XLVI: The Persians, the Avars and Heraclius
Chapter XLVII: Christianity in the East

Book V
Chapter XLVIII: Plan of last two volumes, and later Byzantine emperors
Chapter XLIX: Iconoclasm, Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire
Chapter L: Mahomet
Chapter LI: the successors of Mahomet
Chapter LII: The limits of the early caliphate
Chapter LIII: The Byzantine Empire in the Tenth Century
Chapter LIV: The Paulicians and the Reformation
Chapter LV: The Bulgarians, the Hungarians and the Russians
Chapter LVI: Italy and the Normans
Chapter LVII: The Turks

Book VI
Chapter LVIII: The First Crusade
Chapter LIX: The Later Crusades
Chapter LX: The Fourth Crusade
Chapter LXI: The Latin Empire, the Crusades and the Courtenays
Chapter LXII: the East in the later thirteenth century
Chapter LXIII: The East in the early 14th century
Chapter LXIV: Genghis Khan, and the return of the Turks
Chapter LXV: Tamerlane / Timour, and the Turks again
Chapter LXVI: The Eastern Empire and the Popes
Chapter LXVII: The Beginning of the End
Chapter LXVIII: The Fall of Constantinople
Chapter LXIX: Rome, 1100-1300
Chapter LXX: Rome, 1300-1590
Chapter LXXI: The End

Vindication of some passages in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters

• Lords Reform 1: The Harder the Conflict, the More Glorious the Triumph? | The House Divided: Politics, Procedure and Parliament
  
  Historical background
  (tags: ukpolitics houseoflords )
• Lords Reform 2: Form and Function… Joined in Spiritual Union | The House Divided: Politics, Procedure and Parliament
  
  What is it for?
  (tags: ukpolitics houseoflords )
• Lords Reform 3: We Are the People | The House Divided: Politics, Procedure and Parliament
  
  Legitimacy v independence v expertise.
  (tags: ukpolitics houseoflords )
• Lords Reform 4: The Choice… | The House Divided: Politics, Procedure and Parliament
  
  Surveying the options.
  (tags: ukpolitics houseoflords )
• Women in Comics: A Reading List | comicbookGRRRL
  
  List of comics created by women – to go through carefully.
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender comics )
• Best of the Aughts: Music Videos | Music | Slant Magazine
  
  Ten brilliant pieces.
  (tags: music videos )
• The independence debate in Scotland: Interviewing Alex Salmond, the man who wants to break up Britain | The Economist
  
  One of the UK’s best journalists interviews one of the UK’s best politicians.
  (tags: scotland ukpolitics )

• Where the heck is Transnistria?
  
  Villy Søvndal doesn’t know.
  (tags: moldova eu )
• secritcrush: Indefinitely British
  
  How one migrant stays in the UK.
  (tags: migration )
• emily_shore: Kenny Everett and the Beatles
  
  The untold story – fascinating.
  (tags: sexandgenderandsexuality music history )
• BBC News – Turkish Cypriot ex-President Rauf Denktash dies
  
  End of an era.
  (tags: cyprus )
• jblum: A Scandal in Fandom: Steven Moffat, Irene Adler, and the Fannish Gaze
  
  Long thoughtful piece on “A Scandal in Belgravia”.
  (tags: tv sf )

• 29 hours on the campaign trail
  
  In many ways, I am not a very good campaign reporter
  (tags: )
• World’s Smallest Frog Found
  
  From the New Guinea rain forest.
  (tags: science )
• Ten 100-year predictions that came true
  
  Forecasts from 1900.
  (tags: sf history science )
• I’m not here to make friends
  
  Google just broke its search engine.
  (tags: internet )
• Android as we know it will die in the next two years
  
  Hee hee.
  (tags: phone )
• Inside Tito’s nuclear bunker
  
  Stunning!
  (tags: war bosnia )
• Paris
  
  Former Doctor Who companion Jackie Lane visits Paris, 2010. Beautiful video.
  (tags: video france doctorwho )
• Latest PHOBOS-GRUNT Reentry Prediction
  
  Failed Mars probe crashing to earth this weekend.
  (tags: space )
• Brussels versus Paris? No contest
  
  Am worried by the Telegraph’s choice. (from June 2010)
  (tags: belgium )
• Should The New York Times call out lying politicians?
  
  The moral and ethical poverty of US media revealed!
  (tags: election2012 politics usa )
• Tip for Getting More Organized: Don’t
  
  Don’t spend too much time sorting your email!
  (tags: work )

Although of course nothing really matches the experience of sitting down and watching the story, there is a certain amount of fascination in following the words and the script as they were originally written. One appreciates just how much is brought to the show by the designer, director, producer and above all the actors, but at the same time the strengths of the script itself become clear. The seven episodes are actually all rather distinct from each other, and more self-contained than I had appreciated; the fake-out of the end of episode four is still rather striking; the Thals somehow come over as a bit more interesting on paper; one gets a sense that the vision in the writer’s mind was not quite the same as what appears on screen. I have only a couple of other script books but look forward to reading them both (this year I am reading my unread Old Who books in internal chronological sequence).

Someone recommended this to me months ago, a surreal reimagining of Prague as a city with a mystical twin space linked to it. I found it dull and incoherent. China Mieville did it much better in The City & the City. At least it is short.