F had to do a report on this book for school, and invited me to read it too. It's quite a fascinating package, and very short at only 100 pages; Kuijer gives a very strong sense of a repressed Dutch society of the early 1950s, still coming to terms with the recent war and occupation (Thomas, the central character, is 9 so would have been born in 1942), combined with some startling magical realism as Thomas and the slightly sorcerous neighbour call down the plagues of Egypt on his wife-beating father. The line that sticks with me is from quite near the beginning (repeated again at the end) when Thomas first talks with the witch next door:

“Wat wil je later worden eigenlijk?” vroeg ze.
“Gelukkig”, zei Thomas. “Ik word later gelukkig.”

“What do you want to be when you are older?” she asked.
“Happy”, said Thomas. “I want to be happy.”

Anyway, definitely impressive enough for me to look out for more of Kuijer's work.

A decent enough audiobook read very effectively by David Troughton; aliens intrude into an 1827 British expedition on the Amazon, with some fairly horrific experiments being carried out on their captives – not really one for the younger listener!

Last year I went to the trouble of searching through my Facebook posts of the past twelve months to see which had attracted most comments. But Facebook's interface has now become so user-unfriendly that I will not waste time on that exercise.

Twitter is a different matter; there are a bunch of different metrics out there (of which my favourite, despite its imperfections, is Crowdbooster) which enable you to see which of your tweets has been picked up by the Twitterverse at large.

My most retweeted tweet ever was on 7 November 2010, a link to a Livejournal entry:

What happened to the Doctor Who companions? http://j.mp/ajlxru

It was retweeted by 20 people, and Crowdbooster (which caught only 16 of those) reckons it reached over 36,000 people (though there will of course have been some overlap).

My most frequently retweeted tweet of the last twelve months was on 5 December, as I livetweeted the International Court of Justice's ruling against Greece on the Macedonia name issue:

ICJ says that #Macedonia entitled to refer to itself as "Republic of MAcedonia" in dealings with Greece!!!! http://t.co/Aj65uyPU

This was picked up by 18 people, with (again according to Crowdbooster, which missed a couple of them) an outreach of over 6,000. The typo is a bit embarrassing, but there you go.

However, a single retweet by Paul Cornell, who has 16,000 followers, gave much more depth of penetration to this message on 16 August:

@Paul_Cornell I am very impressed that you put the Goodies into a #DoctorWho novel!

The most replies have I ever received to a single tweet (according to Crowdbooster anyway) came a few days later on 21 August:

D'oh! If I had realised Randall Munroe writes xkcd, I'd have voted for him and he would have been joint winner in the #hugos. #renosf

Crowdbooster claims that I got four replies to this (but I only seem to have records of three, from @niallharrison, @omegar24 and @elmyra).

I don't have any way of tracking the longest conversation I have been involved with on Twitter, and I think it would be quite difficult to compare, say, a prolonged back-and-forth with a friend which is mainly seen by the two of us, versus a broader exchange between lots of people to which I may have only contributed once or twice. No doubt there are mechanisms out there which will claim to quantify that sort of thing.

If I were more concerned about building my online profile I would now be planning all kinds of optimization strategies; but I am not!

Further evidence, if any were needed, of the slow fading of Livejournal: two years ago I was able to list 42 posts of the previous twelve months which had attracted 20 or more comments; last year I could only find 32 with at least 15, and this year it's a mere 26 posts with a lower limit of 12 comments. They were:

30 December 2010: What to read next year? – 41 comments
31 December 2010: 2010 Books poll – 20 comments
4 January 2011: Literary anniversaries – 22 comments
9 January 2011: Getting rid of Amazon; problems with The Book Depository – 12 comments
19 January 2011: Android brick again: Do Not Buy a HTC Desire – 52 comments
19 February 2011: Child development – 28 comments
3 March 2011: Tor top 50 novels – which have you read? – 19 comments
29 March 2011: March Books 27) Contested Will, by James Shapiro – 80 comments
24 April 2011: April Books 28) A Song for Arbonne, by Guy Gavriel Kay – 13 comments
26 April 2011: Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – 15 comments
4 May 2011: Serbian ћ, Maltese ħ and Planck's constant – 26 comments
5 May 2011: Another conversation with a taxi driver – 28 comments
12 May 2011: 2011 Hugos: Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form – 21 comments
17 May 2011: A question for my legal friends – 15 comments
22 July 2011: Oslo bombing – 13 comments
23 July 2011: Hackgate – 20 comments
31 July 2011: July Books 23) A Dance with Dragons, by George R.R. Martin – 14 comments
21 August 2011: 2011 Hugos – some (not much) analysis – 18 comments
26 August 2011: Pronouncing "chair" and "charity" – 35 comments
1 September 2011: Air travel: safety vs comfort – 21 comments
13 September 2011: Northern Ireland: the new constituency boundaries – 36 comments
8 October 2011: British Fantasy Awards – 24 comments
2 November 2011: The SDLP leadership candidates, ranked on internet use and internal organisation – 12 comments
2 November 2011: The Tintin Movie (and the books it is based on) – 16 comments
27 November 2011: Third Doctor celebration – 12 comments
11 December 2011: The wine/whine and ant/aunt differences – 16 comments

As ever, best results are polls and topics that appeal to wingnuts.

An unexpected Christmas bonus for us subscribers from Big Finish (unexpected to me at any rate, though I admit I tend to just download my own subscriptions and the occasional podcast and therefore miss a lot of the interactivity on offer). This is the original 4 CD set of the memoirs of Doctor Who’s longest serving producer, read by JNT himself and originally released by Big Finish in November 2000, eighteen months before his death.

I must say that my opinion of JNT as a human being has improved considerably as a result of listening through the whole set. He is, with a few exceptions (notably Eric Saward, though even there he records some good moments along with the bad), loyal to those who worked for him and reserves most of his criticism for the higher-ups at the BBC who made his job difficult and eventually impossible while also insisting that he keep on doing it. One gets the sense of a man of limited vision but a keen sense of pragmatism, not perhaps as burdened with ego as I had expected, though with very few regrets. Fan criticism obviously did get to him; his riposte to those (including me) who did not like Dimensions in Time is to ask if we would rather have had no commemoration of Who’s 30th anniversary at all (because that was the only other option on offer)? I wished that it had been twice as long, and I wished also that he had gone into a bit more detail about the major casting and crew decisions which he made. But his insider account of the Great Cancellation Crisis of 1985 is particularly compelling, and his voice is laden with emotion at the very end as he discusses why he would not want to be involved with any revival of Who, while wishing any such project well. I wondered if he was already aware that he might not live to see it happen.

Anyway, essential listening for anyone interested in the history of Who, and quite an enlightening insight into the internal politics of TV production in its own right.

This was the last of the 2010 releases in the main Doctor Who series to hit my reading list, and to be honest it’s not a strong contender. Some interesting concepts, particularly the moving of the Doctor both backwards and forwards in the same timeline, and the intersection of the Whoniverse with the US politics of the Cold War era, but Smith’s style is irritatingly unpolished in places.

I guess it’s possible that you have missed some interesting developments over the other side of Europe, where the voters of the unrecognised state of Transdniestria have kicked out not only the strongman who had run the place since the end of the 1992 conflict with Moldova, but also the Kremlin’s chosen candidate to replace him. In the first round of the election, on 11 December, incumbent Igor Smirnov came third with less than 25% of the votes; he was pipped for second place by the Kremlin-supported Anatoliy Kaminsky, who got 26.5%, with Kaminsky’s predecessor as Speaker of the Transnistrian Supreme Soviet, Yevgeny Shevchuk, on 38.5%.

Christmas is celebrated in January in Transnistria (as far as it’s celebrated at all) so the runiff between Shevchuk and Kaminsky was held yesterday. I must say that looking at the first round results I wondered if traditionalists who had supported Smirnov in the first round would shift behind Kaminsky to take him ahead. The number of votes involved is very small – Shevchuk had got 95,000, Kaminsky 65,000 and Smirnov 61,000 in the first round. But in fact the opposite occurred; Kaminsky actually lost votes, getting only 44,000 in the second round, and Shevchuk crushing him with 165,000. (Almost 10,000 voted against both, which is an option in Transdniestria – see official results.)

It’s small beer, of course, compared to what has been happening in Russia, but it makes an interesting pattern with the elections in both South Ossetia and Abkhazia this year also having gone the wrong way from the Kremlin’s perspective. It is all grist to the mill of Nina Caspersen’s thesis that the internal politics of unrecogised states, even the most marionettish of puppet regimes, can be worthy of study and analysis.

As guides to Who go, this is one of the better ones I have come across, with a main core narrative recounting the televised Dalek stories of Doctor Who (shamefully little space given to The Power of the Daleks, but otherwise decent enough) and lots of brilliant little sidebars about how and why the Daleks have been brought to the screen, and also going through the non-televised Dalek material in great detail – particularly the comic strips and computer games, of which I must say I knew very little.

I would be very interested to hear of James Goss writing a televised story. His credits are not vast in number but very impressive in quality; I find almost all of his stories excellent and all of them at least above average. Here he shows (as he had previously done when he ran the Cult TV section of the BBC website) that he is a committed keeper of the flame. More power to him.

Well, I thought that was above average for a Who Christmas special. The jokes were funny, the whole thing seemed disciplined in its self-indulgence, Bill Bailey got to do his thing, Claire Skinner is excellent, and it fitted well with the Zeitgeist. Good stuff.

Luke 2:14, as it might have been presented by the EU:

[bg] Слава на Бога във висините, И на земята мир между човеците, в които е Неговото благоволение!
[es] Gloria en las alturas a Dios, Y en la tierra paz, y en el hombre buena voluntad!
[cs] Sláva na výsostech Bohu, a na zemi pokoj, lidem dobrá vůle!
[da] Ære være Gud i det højeste! og Fred paa Jorden! i Mennesker Velbehag!
[de] Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe und Frieden auf Erden und den Menschen ein Wohlgefallen!
[et] Au olgu Jumalale kõrges ja rahu maa peal hea tahtega inimestele!
[el] Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκία!
[en] Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men!
[fr] Gloire soit à Dieu dans les lieux très-hauts, que la paix soit sur la terre et la bonne volonté dans les hommes!
[ga] Glóir do Dhía ann sna hárduibh, agus síodhcháin ar an dtalamh, deaghthoil do na dáoinibh!
[it] Gloria a Dio ne’ luoghi altissimi, pace in terra fra gli uomini ch’Egli gradisce!
[lv] Gods Dievam augstībā, un miers virs zemes laba prāta cilvēkiem!
[lt] Šlovė Dievui aukštybėse, o žemėje ramybė ir palankumas žmonėms!
[hu] Dicsõség a magasságos mennyekben az Istennek, és e földön békesség, és az emberekhez jó akarat!
[mt] Glorja lil Alla fl-ogħla tas-smewwiet, u sliem fl-art lill-bnedmin li jogħġbu lilu!
[nl] Ere zij God in de hoogste hemelen, en vrede op aarde, in de mensen een welbehagen!
[pl] Chwała na wysokościach Bogu, a na ziemi pokój, w ludziach dobre upodobanie!
[pt] Glória a Deus nas maiores alturas, e paz na terra entre os homens de boa vontade!
[ro] Slavă lui Dumnezeu în locurile prea înalte, şi pace pe pămînt între oamenii plăcuţi Lui!
[sk] Sláva na výsostiach Bohu a na zemi pokoj ľuďom dobrej vôle!
[sl] Zhaſt bodi Bogu u’viſsokoti, inu myr na Semli, inu v’Zhlovekih dobra vola!
[fi] Kunnia Jumalalle korkeuksissa, ja maassa rauha ihmisten kesken, joita kohtaan hänellä on hyvä tahto!
[sv] Ära vare Gud i höjden, och frid på jorden, bland människor till vilka han har behag!

For Slovenian I took the 1584 translation by Jurij Dalmatin, so the style is a bit archaic (this is even more true of the Greek of course). A more modern Slovenian text would be “Slava Bogu na višavah in na zemlji mir ljudem, ki so mu po volji!” And a modern Greek version, though of course heartily disapproved of by traditionalists, is “Δόξα στον Θεό εν υψίστοις, και επάνω στη γη ειρήνη, σε ανθρώπους ευδοκίας.”

Often by looking at translations one gets a better insight into the nuance (or ambiguity) of the original text, and doing this post has been a case in point. I grew up ‘knowing’ that the angels wish peace to men of goodwill on Earth. But by far the majority of the translations above separate out the three parts of the sentence – i) Glory to God in the highest; and 2) peace on earth; 3) εὐδοκία in humanity – and I must say I find that much more convincing. (Note how the King James Version tries to have it both ways by inserting a sneaky comma.)

That word εὐδοκία is particularly tricky. Most translations go for the local equivalent of ‘good will’, a straight etymological reading, εὖ meaning ‘good’ and δοκέω ‘to think’, no doubt strongly influenced by the Vulgate’s ‘gloria in altissimis Deo et in terra pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis.’ But I find εὐδοκία cropping up more in terms of satisfaction of a desire, rather than benevolence, in its other New Testament uses. Perhaps a better synonym for the purpose would be ‘contentment’.

The Aramaic text, which I suppose is how the shepherds (if they existed) would have perceived the experience, is ܬܫܒܘܚܬܐ ܠܐܠܗܐ ܒܡܪܘܡܐ ܘܥܠ ܐܪܥܐ ܫܠܡܐ ܘܤܒܪܐ ܛܒܐ ܠܒܢܝ ܐܢܫܐ – and this has significant differences; ܠܒܢܝ ܐܢܫܐ  are ‘sons of men’, rather than humanity in general, and ܘܤܒܪܐ ܛܒܐ seems to be ‘good hope’ – though ܘܤܒܪܐ is close to ܣܒܥܘ, which is much closer in meaning to satisfaction and fulfillment, were it not for that tricky ܘ at the start rather than the end of the word. Of course Luke’s Greek is the authentic original text here, and the Aramaic that we have is a much later translation. Or at least that’s what most people think…

That final word in the English version, ‘men’, should be understood as directed at all humanity rather than half of us – ἐν ἀνθρώποις, not ἐν ἀνδράσι (if I have that right). Again I used the King James Version above to illustrate the difficulty, rather than because I particularly like it.

Anyway, I wish ευδοκίας to all, particularly if we interpret it as satisfaction or fulfillment; and peace on Earth if we can manage it too.

Normally I have several books on the go at any given time, reading fifty pages of one before switching to another. Last night I realised that I couldn’t put down The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, as Lisbeth Salander’s impending trial for the attempted murder of her father unlocks a chain of conspiracy within Sweden’s intelligence services which takes us readers right to the top of the government. Larsson’s story-telling technique is fascinating: he lays out his characters’ knowledge and intentions in great (though not always complete) detail, which makes the intrusion of brutal violence into the narrative all the more vivid. He also paints a compelling and meticulous picture of the political and physical geography of Sweden, reminiscent of Rankin (except that Rankin is less accurate on the politics). But most of all he makes the reader care about the fate of his central character, and in the most effective scene (a courtroom confrontation with a crooked psychiatrist) appeals for the essential humanity of those who have been written out of society for failure to conform. A brilliant conclusion to this superb trilogy.

We had an exciting general strike yesterday in protest at the government’s planned austerity measures, or as a friend of mine put it on Facebook, “it’s like an ant kicking the other ants in the backside on the assumption that the ant-eater will feel the pain”. Certainly it’s difficult to see how the transport strike will seriously inconvenience those with any power, while at the same time it reminds those of us dependent on the lousy service provided by SNCB / NMBS of the grotesque sense of entitlement which the staff of Belgium’s largest employer seem to enjoy.

One enterprising group of passengers proposes a counter protest. From this site you can download a fake ticket to hand over to your conductor next time you travel by train to indicate your disapproval of yesterday’s action. It’s of course rather unfair to take out one’s feelings on the train staff, when the real problem is clearly one of corporate culture overall; I don’t even particularly blame the unions who are just playing the game according to the usual script. But this seems to me a harmless and sane response.

(For a satirical take on the recent public sector strike in another EU state see here.)

…when you get a message with the subject line "hey" and the message consists simply of the hyperlinked phrase "Click here to see the attached photos".

That in itself is enough to set off the warning bells. But when the email comes from the account of the former president of a European republic, who I suspect has never said 'hey' to anyone in his life (and who I also suspect might not know how to set up a hyperlink to connect photographs to the message) then I can be pretty certain that it is bogus!

A prequel to this year's Torchwood: Miracle Day series, which fairly leapt off the online shelves at me when I realised it was by James Goss, whose contributions to the off-screen Whoniverse have been pretty impressive, and that two of the readers – the main two, it turns out, the other four getting only a chapter or so each – are Kai "Rhys Williams" Owen, who did such a good job of Goss's Ghost Train, and Clare Corbett, who likewise did well sharing The Hounds of Artemis and carrying Dead of Winter on her own.

I was not disappointed. Although the plot itself is a pretty straightforward cut-and-paste from The Midwich Cuckoos and Children of the Corn, Goss puts together a very compelling story of creepy children in a village where nothing is quite right, with the added factor of Gwen Cooper and Rhys Williams and their very small baby trying to work out what is going on and also incidentally not get killed. I have been generally enjoying the Torchwood novels, which as a series are some of the hidden gems of Who fiction, but this is one of the best. The audio brings us Kai Owen's voice to do a warm, confused but courageous Rhys, with Clare Corbett doing a convincing interpretation of Eve Myles and carrying her chapters extremely impressively (she is really good at accents). Apart from the basic horror of the story, there's some bleak office humour about the bureaucracy of atrocity, and some tough teenagers who are central to the story. Very strongly recommended.

Last year I read The Aïda Protocol, the second in a series of earnest graphic novels about the work of Liberal MEPs in the European Parliament; Operation Red Dragon is the first of them, published in 2006, in which our hero Elisa Correr busts open illegal arms dealing with the government of a very large Asian country and incidentally liberates her lover from captivity as a result of getting a resolution passed in the plenary session. So there is a certain amount of wishful thinking (and also an awful lot of info-dumping). But I did like the artists’ faithfulness to the European Parliament’s architecture, both in Brussels and Strasbourg, and the idea of MEPs blocking an economic deal on the grounds of human rights concerns seems a little less improbable to me after last week.

Little to add to what I wrote when I first read these, except to add that in the context of the Eight Doctor Adventures as a series the story seemed slightly more rambling than taken on its own.

Clare College – 2012 Alumnus of the Year announced
Alice Welbourn, who has spent her career working to raise the profile of HIV positive women.

Paul Cornell: Social Networking.
I love the internet. I live here. You know at parties how people, if the conversation tends towards the online, will say 'oh, I prefer real human interaction to all this Twitter nonsense'? I stare at them in horror and go 'are you *insane*?! Twitter *is* real human interaction, turned up to the maximum!

The hunt for Britain's ghost trains – This Britain – UK – The Independent
The 11.36 from Paddington to Gerrards Cross is designed to be as inconvenient for passengers as possible. Why?

Regarding Christopher | The Nation
So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives.

Life in the UK Test website
How much do you know about the British way of life????

Zombie Borders – NYTimes.com
June 13th, 1990, was a historic day for weather forecasting in Germany. For the very first time, the weather map on the Tagesschau showed the newly reunited country’s international borders.

Transdniestrian Leader Out Of Presidential Runoff
…and another one bites the dust, as Smirnov comes third in his bid for election; Moscow having dumped him rather publicly.

Last Dictator Standing
Mugabe, Gaddafi and Kim Jong-Il together at last!

NYT: In Kim Jong-il Death, an Extensive Intelligence Failure
Kim Jong-il, the enigmatic North Korean leader, died on a train at 8:30 a.m. Saturday in his country. Forty-eight hours later, officials in South Korea still did not know anything about it – to say nothing of Washington…

Final exam — Crooked Timber
I stopped giving in-class final exams a few years ago. It was a light-bulb moment, brought on by a student who needed a disability accommodation… I asked myself why I was offering in-class final exams in the first place.

Seasonal flame bait – Charlie's Diary
1. The USA is already a functional oligarchy.
2. It's impossible to be elected to high office without so much money that anyone in high office is, by definition, part of the 0.1%
3. Public austerity is a great cover for the expropriation of wealth by the rich
4. Starving poor people with guns and nothing to lose scare the rich
5. Worse, the poor have smartphones.
6. The oligarchs are therefore pre-empting the pre-revolutionary situation by militarizing the police
7. Modern communications technologies (including the internet) provide people with a limitless channel for self-expression
8. So I infer that the purpose of SOPA is to close the loop, and allow the oligarchy to shut down hostile coordinating sites as and when the anticipated revolution kicks off.

No Country for Innocent Men | Mother Jones
There is no formal legal means in Texas to confess to a crime for which someone else has been convicted. "I guess you can contact whatever law enforcement agency handled the case," says Lubbock District Attorney Matt Powell. That, of course, is precisely what Johnson did when he copied his petition to the district attorney in 1995.
"Here you've got a guilty guy saying, 'I did this crime,'" says Jeff Blackburn, chief counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas. "All the ears went deaf and all the eyes went blind."

In the Wake of Protest: One Woman's Attempt to Unionize Amazon – Vanessa Veselka
"to make the case that Amazon is anti-union barely approaches relevance. Most companies are anti-union, that's not important right now. What made Amazon unique was the way in which it was."

Ciaran Barnes, the Boston College Blackguard Outed as Internet Troll | The Broken Elbow
More detail on dubious journalistic practice in Belfast.

Ciaran Barnes: ‘journalistic ethics on a par…’
Journalist trolls popular Northern Ireland political website.

Belgian beer: Brewed force | The Economist
On Belgian beers: "1,131 at the last count. Apart from six Trappist ales and other abbey beers, it churns out lagers such as Stella Artois and its stablemate Jupiler, the more popular brew in Belgium. Tipplers can also choose from an array of wheat beers, brown ales, red beers from West Flanders, golden ales, saison beers based on old farmhouse recipes, and any number of regional brews. Oddest are the austere, naturally fermented lambic beers of Brussels and the nearby Senne valley, a throwback to the days before yeast was tamed. These anachronisms have survived only in Belgium."

The UK and Europe: how much damage did Cameron's veto do? | openDemocracy
Kirsty Hughes, again: "Rather than playing a major influential role to stop a euro-meltdown, or being in a position to lead through the crisis if the euro did implode, Cameron has relegated the UK to the sidelines whichever way the euro crisis plays out. It is a deeply unimpressive result for a country and a government that likes to assert it is still a global player. And it is no way to defend the UK's interests."

More Action, Better Service: How to Strengthen the European External Action Service
"Roughly one year after its establishment, the EEAS still suffers from a number of design flaws. It has an insufficient resource base and there is a lack of genuine buy-in on the parts of both the member states and the European Commission." And one other big problem not named but shown in the picture. Informed but slightly wishful analysis by an insider who I very much respect.

The European Council on Foreign Relations | How to stop the demilitarisation of Europe
European publics feel safe from armed attack; have become disillusioned with the doctrine of liberal interventionism; and are unconvinced by attempts to conjure ‘new threats’ to justify defence spending. Nick Witney suggests that such reactions are understandable, but dangerously short-sighted. <- Excellent piece including some reflections on what armies are actually for.

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg as promoter of Internet freedom
It was barely a year ago that a web-based collaboration of scientists and citizens demonstrated that Mr zu Guttenberg's doctoral thesis was shamelessly plagiarised from over 130 different sources… Commissioner Kroes justified her choice of consultant saying she wanted "talent, not saints". Yet surely the fact that Mr zu Guttenberg's doctoral thesis is barren of original thought shows that the one thing he lacks is talent… Ultimately, when the commodity you are trading in is trust, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is the last person you want fighting your corner.

Doctor Who News: Big Finish: Jago and Litefoot reunited with the Doctor!
Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter will once again reprise the Victorian investigative duo alongside Tom Baker as The Doctor and Mary Tamm as Romana in The Justice of Jalxar. The adventure is written by John Dorney and will form part of the second season of The Fourth Doctor Adventures, to be released in 2013.

Doctor Who Timeline
Lovely graphic of DW history! (though with some inaccuracies)

Living History (Part One) « Ardent Reader
How to make me feel old: "I wasn’t even a year old when Bill Clinton became the 42nd President of the United States, and I was nine when he left office."

What makes us better people? I’m starting to think it’s mostly not our character…
"I am spending a lot of time thinking about what characterises systems that set people up to do well, and systems that set people up to do less well. My current showcase system is single queuing. People behave better when there is a single queuing system in place, and they are much more relaxed. In parallel queues, they twitch in case the other queue is moving more quickly or someone jumps in or they are in the wrong place and will miss their turn. Their behaviour is more defensive and less kind."

BBC News – Morocco's fish fight: High stakes over Western Sahara
MEPs rejected the deal in its current form by 326 votes to 296 on Wednesday, which will lead to its immediate suspension. They voted instead for a new protocol that is economically, ecologically and socially sustainable, and that fully respects international law.
Back in Laayoune, Ismaili Mohamed Barek, 34, had been hoping for such an outcome. He did a six months of work experience on a fishing boat, but said that he and his fellow Sahrawis were offered nothing at the end of it. "Fishing is dominated almost 100% by Moroccans," he said. "Because of this we want to see the pillaging of Sahrawi wealth stop, and we want an end to the agreement with the EU."
euwesternsahara

Interview: Russell T Davies on shelving US projects, his partner’s cancer diagnosis and coming home
RTD tells all to the Pink Paper.

An intimate look at ancient Rome
When you visit sites of ancient Roman civilization, it's hard to know where to look first: Temples, markets, brothels and baths all draw the eye and the imagination. But if you really want to know what it was like to live in ancient Rome, you may want to consider the humble toilet.

Last time I watched The Romans, just over two years ago, it left me rather cold. On F’s suggestion we watched the first two episodes last night and the other two this evening, and I found I loved it (and so did he). Last time round I was watching while waking up early and jetlagged on a particularly arduous field trip; shows how the mood you are in can make a difference to your appreciation of, well, anything.

A survey of the history of Rome from 1300 to 1590, which covers the history of Rienzi (which I knew nothing about), the Great Schism (which I did know something about) and the government of Rome once the Popes had returned. See also notes on how silly it is to have a poet laureate, the Pope as temporal prince, the Great Schism, how power transforms people, the influence of holy women, and who was right in the end.

One more chapter to go!

Somehow I have fallen behind with logging my progress with the latest Big Finish audios, so here are three, in continuity order (which is coincidentally also release order).

In The First Wave, the story of Steven and audio-only companion Oliver, and their travels with the First Doctor, comes to an end. It’s a story which features the Vardans, which is a stroke of genius – they really belong much more to Season 3 than to the colour era, and somehow the sense of the story fits rather well to the era in which it was set, with Peter Purves and Tom Allen bleakly sparking off each other as death and destruction rage around them. I felt though looking back on it that there wasn’t quite enough plot to sustain a full hour of audio.

The Five Companions is consciously a Christmas romp for us diehard fans, with Peter Purves again opening the story being chased by a Dalek. He finds other people here as well – his old acquaintance Ian Chesterton, Sara Kingdom back from the dead, a woman called Polly, another called Nyssa, and a young fair-haired man with a pleasant open face who claims to be the Doctor… also Sontarans, Daleks, and other nasties. It didn’t make a lot of sense to be honest but I loved it anyway. I particularly noted the audible chemistry between William Russell and Sarah Sutton, who had played against each other previously in an earlier Big Finish story in the main sequence.

Finally, Army of Death brings the Eighth Doctor and Mary Shelley to a future planet equipped with complex politics, scientists playing with artificial life, and (until recently) two major cities. Mary Shelley is now far from her own background but comes over more as Leela than Victoria, with of course the obligatory subplot of her falling in love with the Doctor. It’s well enough done, I felt stronger than the previous run in this series, and I was glad that the ending seemed to leave the path clear for more Eight/Shelley adventures.

In summary, I think all of these would require some knowledge of their particular branches of Who mythology to appreciate properly, with possibly Army of Death the least impenetrable to non-fans, and The Five Companions likely to end up as the most memorable.

I was not surprised that a week passed after my correspondence with Belgian rail without my hearing anything from them. So I sent the deputy spokesman another message on Thursday, regretting that their colleagues in customer service did not seem to share my understanding of "urgency" and "rapid treatment".

Ten minutes later I got a phone call from a bright young woman who said that they would ask their colleagues in Leuven to hold the Oud-Heverlee train for the Brussels connection, but adding rather pessimistically that they had no guarantee that their colleagues in Leuven would actually do this. Of course, she did not give me any contact details in case I might need to get in touch again.

And later on Thursday I got an email from Mr Marc Maes, head of the customer service department, though originating from one of his underlings. It was addressed to “Nicholas Crols”, but with my email address; Crols is the surname of the company spokesman. Mr Maes tells me:

Monsieur,

Nous avons bien reçu votre mail du 8 décembre 2011 qui a retenu toute notre attention.

Nous vous prions tout d’abord de bien vouloir nous excuser pour la réponse tardive.

Nous regrettons le déroulement des événements comme décrit dans votre courrier et vous présentons les excuses de la SNCB pour les désagréments rencontrés.

Nous comprenons qu’il est désagréable de voir partir un train juste devant soi.

La régularité des trains étant tributaire de nombreux paramètres dont le côté technique n’est pas le moins important, il peut malheureusement arriver que certains incidents perturbent les horaires établis. Ces incidents ponctuels sont évidemment très regrettables, mais comme tous les autres moyens de transport (route, air, métro), des impondérables peuvent toujours surgir et perturber le trafic. Nous pouvons vous assurer que tous les moyens sont mis en oeuvre par les services de régulation du trafic afin de limiter les conséquences de tels incidents.

Lors de l’établissement des horaires, un certain nombre de correspondances ont été établies, en tenant compte des courants de circulation les plus importants. Cependant, il est impossible d’assurer des correspondances dans chaque gare et entre chaque train. En outre, il faut prendre également en considération, aussi bien les souhaits de la clientèle que les impératifs liés à la régularité des circulations. Ces 2 priorités ne sont cependant pas faciles à concilier. Dans certains cas, des délais d’attente au-delà de l’heure de départ prévue peuvent être octroyés.

Ces délais d’attente sont attribués en fonction de l’offre et du nombre potentiel de voyageurs en correspondance.

Ce principe est également appliqué dans les gares intermédiaires et/ou terminus en fonction du temps de réutilisation du matériel dans cette dernière gare. Ils sont limités afin d’éviter que les retards accumulés sur une ligne se répercutent sur l’ensemble du réseau. Le non-respect de la régularité peut en effet porter à son tour préjudice à d’autres clients (ceux qui attendent dans le train ainsi que dans les gares intermédiaires) et donner lieu à des plaintes.

Durant les heures creuses, un plus grand délai d’attente peut être accordé étant donné que moins de trains circulent.

Nous vous prions d’agréer, Monsieur, l’expression de nos sentiments les meilleurs.

Mark Maes
Chef de bureau

This basically tells me nothing I did not already know. Notably, there is no commitment to revise the timetable to actually make it more usable by passengers, and also rather notably, the only incoming correspondence from me that is mentioned is my email to the deputy press spokesman on 8 December – not my email to his boss on 7 December, let alone my complaints submitted by the website which were obviously just diverted to the bit-bucket.

I must admit, however, that when on Thursday evening the train from Brussels was again running late, I spoke to the conductor who called ahead and got the connecting train to wait for me in Leuven. As I said in my previous post, I feel bad about doing this because, as Mr Maes puts it, it “peut en effet porter à son tour préjudice à d’autres clients (ceux qui attendent dans le train ainsi que dans les gares intermédiaires) et donner lieu à des plaintes”. But I was actually advised to do it by the first railway employee I spoke to last week, and I suppose the more I do it the more the inadequacy of the existing timetable will be made apparent within the rail company.

Long long ago I came across a listing for The Orchard, by Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, in the Norwegian Book Clubs' list of the top 100 books of all time. Less long ago, someone in Iran spotted it on my Bookmooch list and kindly sent me a very nice edition with a nineteenth-century English translation facing the original Persian, not only of Būstān [بستان, The Orchard] but also of Gulistān [گلستان , The Rose Garden], the two great works by the thirteenth century Persian poet normally known in English as Saʿdī or Saadi, but referred to in my edition as spelt in my subject line above. He was an exact contemporary of Rūmī, whose work I had greatly enjoyed earlier this year, and my expectations were consequently high.

I'm sorry to say that they were not met. Unlike Rūmī, comfortable in his literate and fairly sessile urban merchant lifestyle, Saadi is obsessed by the micropolitics of the court and the caravan. The two books are somewhat different in style – Gulistān mainly very short incidents and reflections, while Būstān is generally longer pieces, in both cases gathered together in chapters on various themes of life as an upper-class medieval man. Often there is an intriguing bit of autobiographical reflection at the start of each piece, followed by some vaguely relevant philosophical rambling and a final poetic quote which may have been a real zinger in the original Persian but is lost in the English. I found Saadi's political philosophy rather unattractive, with no real ethical compass as far as I could tell other than the need to stay alive under a despotic ruler and if possible preserve one's self-respect; like Machiavelli without the humour, or indeed like Confucianism without the sense of tradition.

Oddly the one area where I did feel moved by Saadi's prose was in his occasional reflections on love, quite explicitly his own love for cute young men; there is a passionate chapter in Būstān where he imagines himself as a beggar captivated by a young prince which I found really evocative of the passion of erotic attraction, and that was simply the best of several passages. In general, lust for young men is not my own usual preference, but Saadi took me into his own world very effectively. The flip side is, sadly, that women are annoying distractions and irrelevant to the business of being manly in Saadi's world.

One other thing I did enjoy was trying to spot the rhyming schemes in the poetry. Usually it is rhyming couplets:

But sometimes there are more complex rhyming schemes. It's quite fun to try and spot these things in a language where I barely know any of the letters.

Anyway, the fault may lie with the translation – I think that Rūmī has been very well served by Coleman Banks, and perhaps Saadi simply hasn't been discovered by an English writer with the right sympathy for him yet. But I fear I would need some persuasion to try again.

I spent most of this week in Strasbourg, trying to persuade the European Parliament to reject the latest extension of the fisheries agreement between the EU and Morocco. Under the agreement, EU ships have been exploiting the rich fish stocks off the coast of Western Sahara, which was annexed by Morocco in 1975; officially no other country recognises the Western Sahara as part of Morocco, and the Polisario Front, who are the government-in-exile of the region (and recognised as such by most African countries), have never had any benefit from Morocco's use of their territory's resources.

We knew this was a tough fight. We had tried in September to get the European Parliament to refer the Agreement to the European Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on whether it was legal or not. We lost that vote by 221 to 301, with the fisheries lobby insisting that fishing must continue no matter what the legality or environmental cost, and with the French government lobbying very hard for the Moroccans, who are basically a French client state. Also the September vote was the first use of a new and peculiar procedure, which only came about because I happened to know the MEP who had drafted the relevant paragraph of the Lisbon Treaty (an old friend from Cambridge days).

Now we had another chance, using the normal parliamentary procedures. Three committees get to give their views on the Agreement before it comes to plenary for the final vote. To our delight, the first two (but less important) committees, on Development and Budgets, voted by big margins to reject the Agreement. The key vote was the Fisheries Committee, where the rapporteur, a young Swedish-speaking Finn, Carl Haglund, had also recommended rejecting it. But the rest of the Fisheries Committee, in the pockets of the fishing lobby as they are, voted to reverse his recommendation and approve the agreement by 12 to 8.

It's not unknown for the plenary session of Parliament to reverse the recommendation of the relevant committee. (One other case this week was the plenary's approval of the new Irish nominee to the European Court of Auditors, Kevin Cardiff, although the Budget Committee had rejected him.) But the odds are not great. So I bedded in for three days in Strasbourg, with colleagues S from the Western Sahara Resource Watch organisation, and with J (or I should really say  ج) from the Western Sahara itself. Unfortunately the Polisario were in the middle of their biennial congress, so none of the senior leadership could be spared, and while ج is a good speaker, his English is very poor, and his French not terribly confident (he and I communicated in German, and his Spanish is pretty good too).

Strasbourg is a nice city – excellent public transport system – but the European Parliament is a horrible environment, endless corridors, no decent food, and lifts that do not really connect with reality. There's also the problem of shortage of hotel rooms once you find you have to go there at short notice – my first two nights I was far out in Lingolsheim, and then for Tuesday I managed to find an extortionately expensive place with S in the city centre. At one point it looked as if we might have to stay Wednesday night as well, with all the logistical hassle that would have entailed, but luckily the vote was restored to the Wednesday morning agenda.

I got very few meetings with MEPs in Strasbourg – partly that they claim to be very busy in that mad week (and they are); partly that as a mere lobbyist, without a senior Polisario person present, I don't rate high on the list of people they want to meet with. (In fairness, ج, who actually did have standing as a Polisario official, was working the German and Austrian members pretty efficiently on his own.) Instead, S and I concentrated on distributing information – I had managed to get a leaflet translated into most European languages before we left Brussels, and we put that in members' pigeon-holes. On Tuesday morning I produced another multilingual leaflet, and S, ج and I took the radical step of putting that around the doors of MEPs' offices, mostly in the grand tower which encircles the entrance atrium of the Strasbourg building, but with the Liberals and a few other dissidents in a winding corridor the other side of the river. On Wednesday morning I produced a final leaflet, this time in all 21 languages (you can find how to do this if you know where to look) and again we put it in members' pigeonholes, while the friendly assistant of a friendly Catalan MEP emailed it also to each linguistic group in turn.

Procedurally, the formal plenary debate had been on the Monday night, and it was mildly encouraging. By my count 13 MEPs spoke on our side, including a right-wing Romanian and a left-wing Austrian who I had not heard of (a good sign as it meant we were pulling in new names), with 8 on the other side, all known quantities. However, it was not all that well attended. As we continued leafletting over the next two days, MEPs were debating furiously by email among themselves – and mostly in English, much to the annoyance of the two French members (Alain Cadec and Gilles Pargneaux) who were effectively spokesmen for the Moroccans. The Moroccans themselves were much in evidence; they had brought two senior diplomats to Strasbourg and were trying the old trick of meeting with senior MEPs in the hope that their influence would sort out the foot-soldiers, in contrast to our bottom-up approach. One Liberal from Slovenia complained that it was inappropriate to have foreign agents pursuing him in the corridors like that. I was glad we were not too aggressive.

The vote was called on Wednesday morning. I was now fairly sure we would do better than the 80-vote margin that we had lost by in September. The far left and the Greens were all with us, since they actually sympathise with Polisario; we had also got a majority of the far right and Eurosceptics who oppose all EU treaties and were happy to do the same with this one. We were fortunate that both my friend who had pushed the September vote and Carl Haglund, the rapporteur this time, are Liberals, so knew we would get most of that group. But that still left the two biggest groups, the Socialists and the European People's Party, where it seemed probable that the majority opposed us in both cases (a combination of French and Spanish interests, and the fisheries lobby).

Haglund was called to speak by the chair of the session, and (in English, so as to minimise any risk of confusion via translation) explained the slightly odd procedure – due to the vote in the Fisheries Committee, MEPs who wanted to support his original conclusion and reject the Agreement must now vote against his report; MEPs who disagreed with his original conclusion and want to keep the Agreement must vote for the report. He sat down, and from the gallery we could see members fiddling with the electronic voting apparatus. I wondered how close we would get. Losing by 80 again would be just about acceptable, but I hoped we would at least get the margin down to less than 20 or so, as a decent springboard for the next time we had to campaign on this. At least this time the vote was on Wednesday not Thursday, so the Eurosceptics etc would still be around.

And the figures flashed up: Yes, 296: No: 326. We had won, by thirty votes.

I didn't take in much else for a while.

It turned out later on that there were 58 abstentions, quite a high number; we had a clean sweep of the GUE [far left] and Green groups; we got 88% of those voting one way or the other in the European Conservative and Reformist group, 82% of the Liberals, 75% of the non-inscrits (members not in any group), and 65% of the [Eurosceptic] EFD. We lost the vote in the two biggest groups, getting only 42% of the Socialists and 24% of the [Christian Democrat] EPP. This is itself a pretty extraordinary outcome; we managed to pull together the radicals of left and right, plugged in the Liberals (it helps that Haglund is one of their own) and sufficiently split the big two groups to the point where they were not able to exercise their usual dominance. It is very unusual for the majority of both EPP and S&D to be on the losing side.

Among member states, we again got a clean sweep of Sweden and Estonia (as in September) and also Denmark (the one Dane who voted against us in September changed her mind). We got majorities in the UK, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Ireland and Austria. On the other hand, once again we got no support at all from the Maltese, and lost the votes in Spain, Poland, Greece, Romania, Luxembourg, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, France, Lithuania, Hungary, Belgium, Slovakia, Slovenia and Bulgaria. (Cyprus, again, was evenly split. Appropriately enough.) We won two countries which we lost in September (the Czech Republic and Germany) and another two which were evenly split then (Austria and Ireland), but we lost Slovenia to the other side (purely because of differential turnout; nobody actually switched sides).

47 MEPs who voted our way in September voted the other way or did not vote this time (20 switched sides, 12 abstained, 15 were absent). But we gained 152 new votes (57 who had voted against the ECJ referral, 12 who abstained, 75 who were not present and 8 of the new MEPs). The other side lost 110 of those who opposed the ECJ referral (57 switched to us, 32 abstained and 21 were absent) but almost made up the difference by gaining 105 (20 had voted for the ECJ referral, 12 had abstained, 65 were absent and they too got 8 of the new MEPs.) Among the groups our biggest gains were in the ECR and EPP, with more modest gains among the S&D and ALDE groups. We lost ground with the EFD.

Our biggest net gains by country were in Germany, the UK and the Czech Republic; but we slipped back quite significantly in Italy. Taking the size of the country into account, we also gained more than elsewhere in Slovakia, Ireland, Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Greece. But we lost ground in Latvia, the Netherlands and Slovenia. Drilling down to national party level, ج's work with the German Christian Democrats clearly paid off as 20 of them came over to our side; also, from the ECR group, big numbers from the Czech ODS and the UK Conservatives (the Tories had split 7-7 in September with many absentees, but this time went for us 20-3). We gained also 4 German SPD who voted against the ECJ referral and another 4 who had abstained. But we lost 6 of the Italian Lega Nord MEPs (in the EFD group) to the other side. We got all the Irish MEPs on our side except Fine Gael (with whom I had had a most unsatisfactory meeting two weeks earlier). Apart from a couple of Scots and their best friends we got most of the British as well.

In parallel, the Parliament passed a resolution urging for any new agreement with Morocco to be economically, ecologically and socially sustainable and fully respecting international law and benefiting the local populations. (Our lefty friends voted against this because it did not go far enough, and the Euroscpetics opposed it out of general opposition, but the usual comfortable consensus was restored.) My bet is that these conditions are too restrictive for the Moroccans to accept, and that there will therefore be no new EU agreement to fish either in Moroccan or in Western Saharan waters. It is also the first time that a plenary session of the European Parliament has voted against a fisheries agreement. Interesting times.

List everywhere you have spent a night away from home this year. Mark anywhere you went for non-consecutive nights with an asterisk.

Chişinău, Moldova*
Geneva, Switzerland
Belfast, Northern Ireland*
London, England*
New York, NY*
Washington, DC
Manchester, England
Loughbrickland, Northern Ireland*
Strasbourg, France*
Brussels, Belgium (!)
Pristina, Kosovo

Less hectic this year than most. Also two overnight transatlantic flights, and numerous other countries visited to change planes or drive through. (My one night in Brussels? Having dinner with friends and realised I had missed the last train home.)

See previously: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006.

For some strange reason Nina Caspersen’s publishers decided to send me a copy of this newly published book, and I duly took the hint, read it and am now reviewing it. It comes with blurb by Charles King, Stefan Wolff and Sumantra Bose, three scholars for whom I have the greatest respect, and the cover also features a rather good design of imaginary frontiers resolving as question marks, so it made a good impression even before I opened it. The acknowledgement pages feature numerous familiar names including two who used to work for me. I was pretty certain this was going to be my kind of book. (Good call sending it to me, Polity Press!)

To get the negative point out of the way first: I wish that the book had been longer and had covered more cases of unrecognised states in greater depth. She concentrates on the classic Eurasian frozen conflicts (the Caucasus Three, Transnistria and Northern Cyprus), the classic partial recognition cases of Kosovo and Taiwan, and also looks at Somaliland and the failed cases of the Republika Srpska Krajina and Tamil Eelam, which went down to defeat by Croatia and Sri Lanka respectively in 1995 and 2009. I wished she had found more space for the Bosnian Republika Srpska, which is the only one of these territories I myself have lived in, and I thought also that she missed the interesting interval in the early 1990s when Macedonia, despite fulfilling all the criteria required of it by international law, was none the less not recognised by the majority of international players, a situation that lasted shamefully longer than some like to remember. She also mentions the similar cases of Montenegro, Bangladesh and Eritrea in passing, and I would have liked more detail. Essentially my biggest criticism is that I liked it so much I wanted there to be more. But I appreciate that for the author, enough is sometimes enough.

Caspersen makes the important point that the problem of unrecognised states has arisen only in the last sixty years or so. Before the second world war, it was sufficient to win your war of independence, hold your territory, and then send out your ambassadors in the reasonable expectation that they would be received. Since then, however, the international system has become wedded to the doctrine of inviolability of frontiers, which I think demonstrably has reduced the number of casus belli in the last half century, but which doesn’t offer an easy get-out for when recognised states break down and fail to discharge their obligations to their citizens. Unrecognised states nestle in the grey zone between self-determination and change of borders. International organisations, which are really where you get to go to prove you are playing with the big kids, formally are groupings of states which all recognise each other and are therefore unlikely to make speculative recognition of someone whose territory is claimed by someone else within the system. Postmodern idealists like to mumble about how shared sovereignty or partial sovereignty could be an answer, but really this is too subtle a concept to be usefully deployed in most cases; you’re either recognised as sovereign or you’re not, in most policy-makers’ minds and therefore in most people’s reality. (Where these concepts work, and this is a point Caspersen misses, it is because the autonomous region is given large autonomy not only in areas of coercion, ie control of their own security forces, but also in areas of culture, meaning use of languages, flags, symbols and names of government institutions.)

The real strength of this book is that, rather than treating unrecognised states as untidy and problematic bits of international relations which the grownups need to clear up, Caspersen takes them on their own merits as subjects in their own right – sure, they are often beholden to powerful external patrons, but that doesn’t mean that the patron calls all the shots (and in fact I can’t think of a single example of a totally subject puppet state, since South Ossetia has twitched into life and the Russians are trying to ditch the Transnistrian leadership); sure, they are sometimes institutionally weak and badly governed, but that is often equally true of recognised states (indeed, in the case of Somaliland, the parent state is functionally non-existent and it is the unrecognised seceders who have actually built a viable polity). Caspersen has some very interesting analysis of why the more successful unrecognised states have adopted internal democratisation as a means of adding legitimacy to a government which is denied legitimacy by external actors.

Caspersen’s key point relates to engagement with the government and citizens of the unrecognised state, particularly by the “parent state” from which the unrecognised state has seceded. Isolation is easy, and of course if the strategic circumstances turn out right can be a good precursor to the military defeat which is the most frequently encountered fate of unrecognised states, with all its awful human costs. Economic and person-to-person engagement carries risks for the parent state, in that it may appear to recognise the status quo of the separation and to legitimate the social structures (and by implication the political structures of the seceding state. But it carries even more risks for the seceding government, an essential part of whose narrative must be that life with the former parent state is impossible; as far as I can see, it is very much worth the parent state’s while to engage in that way (and I would observe that the cases where I see conflict as least likely – Taiwan, Transnistria and Northern Cyprus – are precisely the cases where despite the conflict strong economic links have been fostered by both sides). If a peaceful settlement one way or the other is the preferred goal in a particular situation, serious engagement across the boundary without prejudice to future status is a key stepping stone in that direction. It’s an argument that almost shouldn’t have to be made, but Caspersen provides a great deal of evidence for it.

Apparently two long-lost episodes of Doctor Who have come to light – “Airlock”, the third episode of Galaxy 4 from 1965, and the second episode of the 1967 story The Underwater Menace. The latter becomes the earliest known surviving episode of Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor. I don’t have further details – am rather bizarrely following this on Twitter in a Portuguese bistro in Luxembourg, on my way to attend next week’s plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg – but I imagine it will be all over the news pretty soon for those of us who care. Looking forward to discovering if the earlier ep is as good as I hope, and the latter as bad as I fear…

Just in case you are actually interested in seeing how the EU summit appears to commentators who have not swallowed the Downing Street version of events as readily as most media, here are a fee links that caught my eye. (Apologies if you have already seen me post them on Facebook or Twitter.)

The Economist‘s David Rennie brutally skewers any claims of British diplomatic success:

In my version of the English language, when one member of a club uses his veto, he blocks something from happening. Mr Cameron did not stop France, Germany and the other 15 members of the euro zone from going ahead with what they are proposing. He asked for safeguards for financial services and—as had been well trailed in advance—France and Germany said no. That’s not wielding a veto, that’s called losing.

Jon Worth summarises the discussion between Merkel, Sarkozy and Cameron.

The Economist‘s David Rennie, again, with a scoop explaining how exactly Cameron screwed up at the summit.

Jason O’Mahoney reflects on British Eurosceptics.

Kosmopolit dissects Cameron’s diplomatic failure.

Faisal Islam concludes that “it appears the PM claimed to have vetoed something that wasn’t there”.

And finally, my colleague Carne Ross makes the point that there will be little popular consultation in the next few months.