My plan was to blog an intense account of everything I did at Gallifrey One this year. But you know what? I ran out of time. So here’s a gallery of the best moments.
Matthew “Adric” Waterhouse. “Now I’ll never know if I was right!”Matthew Waterhouse script reading. He is playing the Doctor, and the cosplayer is playing Adric.Billie Piper explains that she wanted to move on to more edgy and less well-behaved roles after Doctor Who“Hello, sweetie!”Derek Jacobi mortified with embarrassment as they play an old recording of him singing “Home on the Range”Οὐδεὶς δύναται δυσὶ κυρίοις δουλεύειν· Nobody can serve two Masters.Annette Badland, Shaun Dingwall, Jacqueline King, Camille Coduri, Fraser Hines and Matthew WaterhouseJenna: Where are you going? Cally: I’m going to clear the neutron blasters for firing. Jenna: Well, what are you going to fire at? Cally: Anything that moves.
(plus the second Travis)
Cosplay
Hannah, my partner in crime, as the 8th DoctorNine and Ten.The definite article, you might say.Leela cosplayThe Meeping Angel.Cally. (Previously Leela.)Annoyed that this ended up out of focus but maybe it’s more atmospheric that way.Robot Santas. Or something.Meep: “Will you be my friend?” Me: “No.”The littlest cosplayer.
Ribbons
Our contribution to the cult of ribbons.
My ribbon collection.
Writers
Writers panelLots of writersSimon’s book (review coming soon)Sunday dinner with Simon, John and España
A fantastic weekend while other things were on fire. No actual Doctor, but maybe that made it more relaxed. Hope to come back again next year.
Second frame of third part (“What He Wants”, by Rob Williams):
First of the 2014 line of Eleventh Doctor comics by Titan, this introduces a new companion, Alice Obiefune from Hackney, as a regular Tardis traveller along with invisible musician John Jones and an alien entity called ARC. I like the new dynamic between the primaries, but the other two companions seem a bit superfluous, and the historical story set in the segregated Deep South pulls its punches. Pleasing enough, good art, and you can get it here.
I remember watching The Talons of Weng-Chiang when it was first broadcast in 1977, and loving it; the years since then have sensitised me to the racism in the story, but it retains a problematic attraction. I saw it again on videotape twice in the 1990s, and next time I saw it in 2007 I wrote:
The Talons of Weng-Chiang, from 1977, is the climax of the great Holmes/Hinchcliffe era of Doctor Who (also the last directed by the superb David Maloney), and is as good now as I remember it being when I was nine. (I admit I have also seen it a couple of times since, once in the company of a girl from Manila who giggled pleasingly at the line about the Filipino army advancing on Reykjavik.) Thanks to my background reading I was now alert to look out for a particular shot at the start of episode 4 which had escaped my notice previously (on the DVD commentary track, Louise Jameson laughs loudly). There is so much great stuff here: Leela and the Doctor are both alien to Victorian London, so Jago and Litefoot are effectively the viewpoint characters; Deep Roy, later to play hundreds of Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, turns in a great Mr Sin. Yes, the ethnic stereotypes are rather regrettable (and quite apart from the Chinese, I would draw the attention of Irish viewers to Chris Gannon’s Casey), but the setting and drama are just fantastic.
When I came to it in my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:
I always loved The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and rewatching it made me realise once again how brilliant it is. (I know, I said this about The Deadly Assassin too, but it’s true in both cases.) There are two big problems with the story: the fairly useless and unterrifying giant rat, and the racism including having the lead Chinese role played by a non-Chinese actor. However, the settings are beautifully done, the plotting is tight enough, Magnus Greel’s distorted face is truly horrible, and everyone takes it seriously and does it well. The script has some particular delights: “I can play the ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ in a bowl of live goldfish”; “sleep is for tortoises”; etc.
I know it by heart, so this time I watched it with the cast commentary and the production subtitles. Still enjoyable, except that the racism really does make you cringe. It’s also a total Bechdel fail. Apart from Leela, there are hardly any women characters, and they do not talk to each other.
As it happens, I was reading R.F. Kuang’s Babel at exactly the same time as rewatching the show and reading the books, and if you don’t mind connecting the sublime and the ridiculous, that’s a really interesting pairing. You can get the DVD here.
Since I have it, I also went back and reread the Robert Holmes script, edited by John McElroy. The opening of the second scene of the third episode is:
2. PROFESSOR LITEFOOT’S DINING ROOM.
(LEELA peers out of the window. She hears the front door shut, then turns around.) LITEFOOT: Nobody out there now! Fellow must have got wind of .. . (He breaks off mid-sentence with a groan. There is a rustling sound in the hall.) LEELA: Professor? (She goes towards the door.) Are you there, Professor? (She is almost at the door when it swings open. MR. SIN is standing there, a knife glinting evilly in his hand. He moves purposefully towards LEELA. For a moment she is frozen with fear, then she grabs a carving knife from the side-table. As MR. SIN moves stiffly towards her, she hurls the knife at him, with expert precision. It thuds into MR. SIN‘s throat but, to LEELA‘s amazement, it seems to have little effect. The weird little mannequin continues to shuffle towards her.)
The script, published in 1989, is really for completists only, but I would say two things: first, two of the most problematic elements of the TV series – the use of a white actor to play Li H’sen Chang, and the rather poor implementation of the giant rat – are of course invisible in the script (the racism, alas, survives); but second, so is the gorgeous staging which made it such a vivid experience when I was nine. A nice bit of nostalgia which you can get here.
Not much to add to that.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the Terrance Dicks novelisation is:
Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang also loses out in the visual stakes, but gains a bit with occasional tight-third narrative from Leela’s point of view, which accentuates one of the successful aspects of the story, the confrontation between her primitive experience and the Victorian era.
The one difference I picked up on this time is that Teresa, one of Greel’s victims, is clearly coded as a sex worker in the TV story but is a gambling hostess in the adaptation. You can get it here.
With the publication of Dale Smith’s monograph on The Talons of Weng-Chiang, the Black Archive covers six consecutive Tom Baker stories and 26 consecutive episodes, which is their longest run of any era. I think that underlines the consensus that the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era, which ended with Talons, was a true high point of the show.
Smith’s monograph is actually quite short by Black Archive standards, at 137 pages. It has just five chapters.
The first, “Foe from the Future”, looks at the story’s roots in the Jack the Ripper murders, Fu Manchu and The Phantom of the Opera, and also reviews the production process which was deeply exhausting for Holmes.
The second chapter, “The Talons of Victoria”, looks at the affinity that Doctor Who has with the Victorian era, and explores the role of science and the narrative of colonialism (also very much applicable to Leela).
The third chapter, “The Time-Traveller and his Savage Companion”, looks at the many double-acts in the story – not just Jago/Litefoot but also Doctor/Leela and Greel/Chang and even Greel/Mr Sin – and also at the extent to which it really does draw on Fu Manchu, The Phantom of the Opera and indeed The Island of Doctor Moreau. Its second paragraph is:
Holmes was undoubtedly a master of dialogue, creating characters painted with broad enough strokes to be immediately recognisable, but giving each of them the ability to say just the right things to give us a clear picture of who they are. Jago’s couplet of ‘You’ve been drinking’ / ‘Well, it’s time you started’ isn’t just a funny joke3: it gives us a clear picture of what is going through his mind, what he wants and how he intends to get it. But dialogue isn’t the only thing that Holmes uses to give his characters life and depth, and his ability with double acts shouldn’t be reduced to just having a way with words. Holmes had a way with every tool in the writer’s toolkit, and the best way to demonstrate that would be to look at one of the other double acts that Holmes peppered Talonswith. 3 Episode 1.
The fourth chapter, “‘Die, Bent Face!'”, looks at Greel’s disfigurement and at disability in fiction in general and Doctor Who in particular, a theme that suddenly caught fire for about 48 hours last year.
The fifth and longest chapter, “Of Its Time, and Ours” addresses the crucial issue of race and racism. I think this is one of the best such analyses I’ve read by a white guy, addressing a largely white audience. We can love things that are problematic, but it’s really important to understand why and how they are problematic. Smith very briefly reviews the history of British engagement with China in the nineteenth century (it was, again, refreshing that I had just read Kuang’s Babel) and also the history of discrimination against London’s Chinese population, led by the trade unions. (He doesn’t mention the issue of Chinese slave labour in South Africa which became one of the themes of the 1906 general election, but there is plenty else to choose from.) He makes it clear that the question of whether Talons of Weng-Chiang is a racist story isn’t a matter of debate; what is up for debate is our response.
We know this is a bigger issue than just whether one story broadcast in 1977 contains racism. Talons isn’t just a product of the 70s – that young proto-fan can find it just as easily as they would find any of Christopher Eccleston’s stories. It is impossible for anyone to watch anything in the context it was made: everything is watched within an elastic context of ‘now’, and Talons is quite literally a product of now. It is easy for someone to get down their Blu-ray and settle down to watch it, to buy books about how it was made or listen to sequels that ape its atmosphere. The same can’t be said for The Black and White Minstrel Show. That’s why we feel uncomfortable when it is raised, why the urge to minimise and argue is so strong: we have watched this story and enjoyed it, and we are not racists so something else must be wrong.
But it isn’t. We are.
If we were educated through the British school system; if we have engaged with British culture; if we have lived in this country for any length of time. If we are white. It would be impossible for us to eliminate every unconscious racist assumption we have been taught to make. That is why the onus is on those of us who are white Doctor Who fans, to listen when people raise the issue of the racism in Talons. We have to educate ourselves about what that racism is and how it displays itself, and ultimately we have to decide how we as people are going to respond to it. Because it is too easy for us to push back, to force the people that racism targets to carry out the emotional and physical labour involved in educating white people. Because racism is a white problem. We benefit from it every day. It is up to us to solve it.
As this story demonstrates, Doctor Who has not always been good to China, but I’m glad to say that China has a thriving Doctor Who fanbase, as I discovered in October. After a couple of weeks when the Chengdu Worldcon has been excoriated in public and in private (including by me) I’ll take a moment to remember the positive.
This is one of my favourite New Who stories. I wrote of my 2011 Hugo votes:
1) Doctor Who: Vincent and the Doctor. Yes, I do plan to give my first preference to the writer of The Tall Guy, Blackadder, Mr. Bean, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and The Vicar of Dibley. (Not forgetting his first great work with The Heebeegeebees.) I thought this was the outstanding Who episode of last year, the best since Blink, and my biggest difficulty in deciding which others to nominate for the Hugos was a fear that if I nominated any of them, Vincent might be crowded out. But luckily we got through that stage OK; hopefully the Alternative Vote will see the award go where it ought.
Rewatching it again for this exercise, I still loved it a lot. It looks gorgeous, it sounds gorgeous, the acting is spot-on and the script sparkles. I have two reservations: the actual monster bit is slightly surplus to requirements, and at the end, the exhibition of van Gogh’s work would certainly have displayed his dates of birth and death rather prominently. I’ms also still irritated that a teaching moment in Dutch phonology was missed. As I wrote at the time, in the name “van Gogh”:
1) the ‘a’ is very short and low, heading towards a short ‘o’ in English. 2) both the ‘g’ and the ‘gh’ are pronounced as a softer version of ‘ch’ in Scottish ‘loch’. 3) ‘Vahn Goff’ is completely and utterly wrong. (And if you thought it was ‘Van Go’, I don’t ever want to talk to you again.)
I like his art, and we saw some at the Kröller-Müller Museum a year and a half ago. I’ve also read two biographies in graphic novel format. He’s a fascinating character who left us an evocative legacy, and Richard Curtis pushes it just far enough in Vincent and the Doctor.
Bechdel fail, I’m afraid; the two title characters are both men, and apart from Amy there is no named female speaking part. (We are told Giselle’s name after she is dead.)
Paul Driscoll’s Black Archive monograph is one of the longer and more substantial ones. Like the last one I read, on The Haunting of Villa Diodati, it links a historical story about real-life historical creators to the actual biographies and works of those creators. I found it much more successful, I think partly because I like the story much more but mainly because Driscoll has written a better book.
The first chapter, “The Voice of the Writer”, looks at the career of Richard Curtis and how Vincent and the Doctor flows from a lot of his previous themes, and also the very personal one of his sister who he lost to depression a year before the episode was written. I’ve seen less than half of the films and stories referenced, but I am convinced of a linear narrative thread connecting Vincent with About Time and Blackadder: Back and Forth. It’s detailed and well argued.
The second and longest chapter, “The Voice of the Artist”, starts by looking at other screen treatments of van Gogh’s life and death, then looks at how the episode treats him as tortured genius vs visionary artist, and finished by looking at van Gogh’s own letters for indications of how he himself saw his art.
The third chapter, “The Voice of the Monster”, looks at the monster as a metaphor for mental illness and considers how Doctor Who portrays trauma more generally. Its second paragraph is:
In a lengthy scene cut during post-production, the Doctor tells Amy that artists often see real things that nobody else notices. As they prepare to head off in the TARDIS to meet Vincent for the first time, he shows her various examples from Fuseli, Bosch, Munch and De Goya3. The Doctor’s point is that nightmares and monsters cannot always be dismissed as flights of fantasy on the part of the artist. The monster in The Church at Auvers (1890) painting reminds him of a fairy tale he’d read as a child. He cannot be sure, but he sets off on the presumption that the creature is real and not a product of Vincent’s imagination. 3TCH [The Complete History] #65, p94f.
The fourth chapter, “The Voice of the Paintings”, looks first at how little the visual arts feature in Doctor Who outside the Moffat era and then at how much Moffat emphasised them, and then looks at several specific van Gogh paintings and the way in which they are used in the episode.
A brief conclusion considers the story as a fairy tale.
An appendix lists 46 (!) different van Gogh paintings that appear in or are referred to in the episode.
As I said, this was a long but meaty Black Archive, and I recommend it. You can get it here.
It didn’t work out that way. For one thing, I overslept and felt terrible when I got up. I had forgotten what a long, sleepless journey can do to your system. For the past five years I had done less and less traveling, and I was getting soft. For another thing, the rain had changed to sleet during the night and was driving down in freezing gusts. The wind was blowing briskly from the east, in off the sea. Bill and I sat at the battered wooden table in the farm kitchen, while Mrs. Trevelyan pushed bacon, eggs, homemade sausage, bread and hot sweet tea into me until I showed signs of life. She was a spry, red-cheeked lady in her middle sixties, and if she was surprised that Bill had finally brought someone else with him to explore Little House, she hid it well.
When I was doing my first run through stories that won both the Hugo and Nebula in 2004, I wrote:
Back in the summer of 1991 I was finishing up my M Phil in Cambridge, and dropped in one day on my supervisor, who at the time was the curator of the history of science museum. He welcomed me into his office, shuffled through some papers with strange cylindrical diagrams on them, and flourished them at me: “These,” he said, “are Charles Babbage’s original blueprints for the Difference Engine.” He had a tendency to do that. I remember one seminar on Newton where he brought in an authentic 17th-century widget, “just like Newton would have had”, and showed the original owner’s notes of how it had been used, almost casually indicating at the end that the original owner in this case had in fact been Isaac Newton. We would occasionally see the current Lucasian Professor, a post previously held by Babbage and Newton, trundling through the cobbled streets in his battery-driven wheelchair.
Babbage was all the rage in those days, it being the bicentenary of his birth, and with no less than three sf novels published the previous year in which Babbage’s difference engine was actually built (Michael Flynn’s In the Country of the Blind, S.M. Stirling’s The Stone Dogs, and William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine), and thus the computer was brought into being a century and a half before Bill Gates. Apart from those three novels and Sheffield’s novelette, which is dated as having been finished on December 31, 1991, there aren’t many stories with that theme, though steampunk as a genre keeps on going. In all three of those novels, the difference engine is at least partly responsible for revolutionising society.
Sheffield, however, takes it in a different direction: what if it were simply built in 1850 as a project of an eccentric couple in the farther flung reaches of the British Empire, and then forgotten? His unnamed narrator and his old New Zealander friend Bill Rigley team up to find out the truth behind the manuscripts located on a farm at the back end of nowhere. In fact, the largest surviving fragment of Babbage’s analytical engine was indeed discovered, along with various papers now in the Wanganui Museum, on a farm in New Zealand in the late 1970s by Garry Tee, to whom “Georgia On My Mind” is dedicated and who “is no more Bill Rigley than I [Charles Sheffield] am the narrator of this story.” However, in our timeline the Babbage material reached New Zealand via Australia in the hands of Babbage’s son and grandson when they emigrated, rather than being constructed from scratch.
Tee made his real-life discovery about the time that Charles Sheffield’s first wife died, in 1977, and the narrator of “Georgia on My Mind” has had a similar recent loss. The theme of nostalgia and loss runs strongly and powerfully through the story, permeating the excitement of the two friends as they look through the papers of Luke and Louisa Derwent from over a century before. Anyone who has ever been bereaved will sympathise with the narrator’s sharp intake of breath as a picture of Louisa reminds him of his dead wife. The setting of New Zealand is also richly portrayed, in the days before Peter Jackson made it as iconic as it now has become. And so we are not really prepared for what happens next.
It seems that the Derwents – a married couple, exiled from England because they were also, scandalously, half-brother and half-sister – had made contact with aliens – or at least intelligent non-humans – on Macquarie Island. One last letter written in 1855 reveals that Luke and the dying Louisa set off to the permanent base of the “heteromorphs”; there is just about enough information in the manuscripts to enable the identification of the site of that permanent base as being South Georgia, in the Atlantic Ocean. (The story’s title has nothing to do with the U.S. state of Georgia, let alone the former Soviet Republic of the same name, where I will be this time next week as I write these words.)
And so, just as the Derwents’ story finishes with preparation for a long and dangerous journey, “Georgia On My Mind” ends with our narrator and Bill Rigley preparing to follow the Derwents to South Georgia. But they will not be alone; word has leaked out, and a host of people from MIT, Livermore and the hard science fiction community are rumoured to also be converging on the island. For some readers, this somewhat recursive twist at the end spoils the story. Not for me. I read it as a tribute, 14 years on, to the support Sheffield drew from his professional and literary colleagues at the time of his bereavement, and a good end to a story whose plot was never intended to be fully resolved.
I should say that Garry Tee of the University of Auckland, on whom the character of Bill Rigley is based, found this review soon after I had posted it in 2004 and we maintained a friendly correspondence until he retired in 2018. If he is still around, he will turn 92 next month, so I do not feel offended that I have not heard from him in a while.
Edited to add, June 2024: Nigel Rowe emailed me to say that in fact Gary Tee died on 18 February 2024, only a few days after I had published this blog post. He was 91. There are two lovely obituaries here and here. Thank you, Gary, for your friendly correspondence with a random chap on the other side of the world.
Coming back to it two decades later, I still loved this story for bringing me back to my history of science days, the most intellectually interesting work I have ever done in my life. I wondered also if E.J. Swift was slightly inspired by it for The Coral Bones. And I think we can all do with a hidden history occasionally.
Bechdel fail, I’m afraid; the two women characters are Mrs Trevelyan and Louisa Derwent, who live more than a century apart.
The story has not been reprinted in English since 1998, in The New Hugo Winners, Volume IV where I first encountered it. You can also get it in:
Analog January 1993 (which also included Hugo-wining novella “Death on the Nile” by Connie Willis)
“Georgia on my Mind” won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novelette presented in 1994 for work published in 1993. “The Franchise” by John Kessel was also on both final ballots. The Nebula ballot also included two other Hugo winners due to varying year / word count qualifications.
The other Hugos in the written categories went to Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (Novel), “Down in the Bottomlands” by Harry Turtledove (Novella) and “Death on the Nile” by Connie Willis (Short Story). The Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo went to Jurassic Park. The other Nebula winners were Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (Novel), “The Night We Buried Road Dog” by Jack Cady (Novella) and “Graves” by Joe Haldeman (Short Story).
Next up in this sequence: “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” by Mike Resnick.
Second page of third chapter (which is in English in the original – I checked):
Someone commented on social media that this isn’t my usual reading fare, and it’s true. Back in November I was at Brussels Comic Con, and also needed a new phone case; and I spotted a stall selling manga-style artwork including this rather striking young warrior woman. So I bought it.
I thought it must be just something that the stall-holder had invented, but young F was certain that it was a canonical manga, and after a bit of crowdsourcing with his friends, confirmed that it is Rukia Kuchiki from the BLEACH by Tite Kubo. So I invested in the first volume, Strawberry and the Soul Reaper, to become better informed.
It’s a fairly basic story of Ichigo Kurosaki, a kid with red hair (unusual in Japan, to say the least), who finds himself drawn into the grand supernatural battle between the good guy Soul Reapers and the evil spirits called Hollows. Rukia Kuchiki, the character on my phone case, is one of the immortal Soul Reapers (based on the traditional Japanese shinigami, only cuter), but ends up giving her powers to Ichigo and having to become a normal(ish) schoolgirl.
I wasn’t blown away by it, though I can see why the core audience (which I’m not in) would like it. I would have liked to see more sensitive exploration of Ichigo’s abusive family situation, and I was sorry that the promising character of Orihime was introduced and then apparently got dropped. (Though I believe she comes back in later volumes.) Those who like this sort of thing will find it the sort of thing that they like. You can get it here.
Even though it’s about a teenage boy with magical powers, I did find a scene where Rukika and Orihime are talking to each other about Orihime’s injured leg. Ichigo is in the vicinity but not in the conversation. (Read right to left.)
The end of story about the phone case is that less than three months after buying it, I found that I needed to upgrade to a new iPhone in order to be able to run my Apple Watch. So if you’d like the Rukika phone case, it’s surplus to my needs right now.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer, and also my top unread comic in English; next on those piles are Babel, by R.F. Kuang, and Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray.
Current Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, by Simon Guerrier
Last book finished Lizard Radio, by Pat Schmatz
Next books Kill the Moon, by Darren Mooney Sferics 2017, ed. Roz Clarke Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien
Since 2007 I’ve been the Northern Ireland arm of the analysis of UK parliamentary constituency changes by Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings. The latest version, taking into account the new boundaries that will take effect from the next election (be it Westminster or Assembly) was published a few weeks ago; it’s been a busy period for me, but I have now taken the time to write up the changes to each of the 18 Northern Ireland seats.
Media coverage coverage of the changes focussed on the effects in England, Scotland and Wales, and frankly that was the right call; the changes in Northern Ireland are the least dramatic since the 1970s. The 1983 review added five new constituencies, taking the total from 12 to 17; the 1996 review added another, making a total of 18; and the 2007 review expanded the Belfast seats outwards with knock-on effects all around the map.
There were also two failed reviews, one in 2013 which fell victim to the internal politics of the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, and one in 2018-20 which was quashed by the Belfast courts for failing to adequately consider public opinion at the final stage of revision (and the whole thing was then killed off by Boris Johnson).
So this is the first change to the Westminster constituencies for 17 years, the longest gap since the 1950-70 period. In Northern Ireland the Westminster boundaries are also used for Assembly elections, and indeed in 1973 and 1996, regional level elections used the new boundaries first. Personally I think that the Assembly constituencies should be linked to the Local Government Districts rather than the Westminster seats, but that’s for another day.
Every seat is changed this time, but few of the changes are drastic. In the list below, I’m going from the most changed to the least changes constituency, showing my working for each of them. Notional votes are a bit of a mug’s game, but I’m confident that these numbers correspond closely to whatever the reality might have been if the 2019 general election votes had been cast on the 2024 boundaries.
Going from most to least changed, the biggest effect is on the constituency where I grew up, South Belfast, now renamed to South Belfast and Mid Down. It loses 10% of its electorate to East Belfast, but gains a bit more than that from Strangford and Lagan Valley, and a few scrapings from West Belfast. (By the way, I have an idiosyncracy of calling the Belfast constituencies “X Belfast” rather than “Belfast X”. It seems to me that “South Belfast and Mid Down” sounds better than “Belfast South and Mid Down.)
Projecting the 2019 election onto the new boundaries, I see about 850 more Unionist votes, 550 more for Alliance and 1650 fewer for the SDLP, with another 250 Nationalist votes coming in from West Belfast. Claire Hanna won the seat with a majority of over 15,000 in 2019; this would be reduced by 2,000, but the SDLP still win more than half of the votes in the constituency.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Con
APNI
Gr
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
70134
11678
1259
6786
27079
550
From
To
24.7%
2.7%
14.3%
57.2%
1.2%
SB
SBMD
63029
9786
1055
6028
25136
550
SB
EB
-7096
-1890
-204
-758
-1939
SB
WB
-9
-1
-3
-1
Str
SBMD
6078
1634
372
136
981
73
207
LV
SBMD
2161
611
276
31
320
34
22
WB
SBMD
710
56
20
67
32
225
18
Total
71978
12087
1703
167
7348
73
67
25409
247
568
25.4%
3.6%
0.3%
15.4%
0.2%
0.1%
53.3%
0.5%
1.2%
Change
+0.7%
+0.9%
+0.3%
+1.1%
+0.2%
+0.1%
-3.9%
+0.5%
–
DUP
UUP
Con
APNI
Gr
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
Sinn Fein did not contest the 2019 Westminster election, but they could take almost half of the SDLP vote and Claire Hanna would still win the seat. She bantered with me on social media about looking forward to the challenge.
At Assembly level, Unionists combined were just short of 2 quotas in South Belfast in 2022, and these numbers would put them just about in position to regain the second seat lost in 2017.
Strangford
Neighbouring Strangfordloses 6,000 voters, mainly in Saintfield, to the new Belfast South and Mid Down, but gains 9,000 around Downpatrick from South Down.
This results in the biggest shift in party support in any constituency.
Roll
DUP
UUP
UKIP
Cons
APNI
Gr
SDLP
SF
Aontu
66990
17705
4023
308
1476
10634
790
1994
555
From
To
47.2%
10.7%
0.8%
3.9%
28.4%
2.1%
5.3%
1.5%
0.0%
Str
Str
60899
16068
3651
308
1340
9651
717
1787
555
Str
SBMD
-6078
-1634
-372
-136
-981
-73
-207
Str
ND
-10
-3
-1
-2
Str
S
-3
-1
SD
Str
9171
60
26
800
2215
2462
193
Total
16128
3677
308
1340
10451
717
4002
3017
193
40.5%
9.2%
0.8%
3.4%
26.2%
1.8%
10.0%
7.6%
0.5%
-6.7%
-1.5%
0.0%
-0.6%
-2.1%
-0.3%
+4.7%
+6.1%
+0.5%
DUP
UUP
UKIP
Cons
APNI
Gr
SDLP
SF
Aontu
The DUP majority over Alliance here is reduced from 7,000 to 5,700, and if you squint you could just about see a unified non-Unionist candidate defeating a split opposition at a Westminster election; but it’s not very likely. From the Assembly point of view, the Nationalist vote increases by more than 10% and is now over a quota. At every Assembly election since 1998, the SDLP have been runners-up here; whichever of the Nationalist parties can get ahead of the other now has a good chance of gaining a seat here.
South Down
Staying in the neighbourhood, the calculations for South Down were much the most complex. It swaps bits of territory with three of its neighbours, most notably donating the voters around Downpatrick to Strangford, and also makes a gain from Upper Bann (my ancient homeland of Loughbrickland).
Although the shifts are geographically complex, the electoral impact is muted.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
SDLP
SF
Aontu
79295
7619
3307
6916
14517
16137
1266
From
To
15.3%
6.6%
0.0%
13.9%
29.2%
32.4%
2.5%
SD
SD
68646
7417
3219
5987
12032
13374
1049
SD
Str
-9171
-60
-26
-800
-2215
-2462
-193
SD
N&A
-1458
-140
-61
-127
-267
-297
-23
SD
LV
-20
-2
-1
-2
-4
–4
UB
SD
1960
574
174
152
83
221
N&A
SD
1058
143
55
55
123
264
21
LV
SD
105
27
12
1
18
2
2
Str
SD
3
1
Total
71,772
8162
3460
1
6212
12240
13861
1070
18.1%
7.7%
–
13.8%
27.2%
30.8%
2.4%
+2.8%
+1.0%
–
-0.1%
-2.0%
-1.6%
-0.2%
DUP
UUP
Cons
APNI
SDLP
SF
Aontu
SF won this seat with a 1300 majority in 2019, and I don’t see much change to that in my notional result. The overall Nationalist vote share decreases by 3.8% and the overall Unionist share increases by the same amount. This is still not enough to put Unionists in play for a second Assembly seat.
Lagan Valley
Rounding off the middle of County Down, Lagan Valley loses Drumbo to South Belfast and Mid Down, and more significantly Dunmurry to West Belfast, while gaining the eastern fringes of Lurgan from Upper Bann.
Again, it looks bigger on the map than it actually is.
Roll
DUP
UUP
UKIP
Cons
APNI
SDLP
SF
75884
19586
8606
315
955
13087
1758
1098
From
To
43.1%
19.0%
0.7%
2.1%
28.8%
3.9%
2.4%
LV
LV
68948
18020
7910
315
878
11793
1441
900
LV
WB
-4330
-840
-370
0
-41
-898
-272
-170
LV
SBMD
-2161
-611
-276
0
-31
-320
-34
-22
LV
SA
-340
-88
-39
0
-4
-59
-8
-5
LV
SD
-105
-27
-12
0
-1
-18
-2
-2
UB
LV
7364
1818
550
0
0
571
410
1090
SD
LV
20
2
1
0
0
2
4
4
Total
76,332
19840
8460
315
878
12365
1855
1994
43.4%
18.5%
0.7%
1.9%
27.1%
4.1%
4.4%
+0.3%
-0.4%
+0.0%
-0.2%
-1.8%
+0.2%
+1.9%
The DUP’s 6,500 majority over Alliance in 2019 increase to 7,500 (what you might call the Dunmurry effect), and the total non-Unionist vote upticks very slightly. At Assembly level, Nationalists were able to win a seat in Lagan Valley in a good year, and these changes make good years more likely, though Alliance would still have a good chance of holding their second seat.
West Belfast
Looking north of Lagan Valley, West Belfast loses a few nibbles around the edges but gains 9,000 voters from Dunmurry at one end and the Shankill at the other.
Neither of the newly added patches of territory is great for SF, but they are pretty far ahead anyway.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Cons
APNI
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
65761
5220
1882
6194
2985
20866
1635
From
To
13.5%
4.9%
16.0%
7.7%
53.8%
4.2%
WB
WB
62538
4084
1813
6058
2919
20408
1599
WB
NB
-2393
-1071
-45
-57
-28
-195
-16
WB
SBMD
-710
-56
-20
-67
-32
-225
-18
WB
SA
-120
-10
-3
-11
-5
-38
-3
NB
WB
5044
2,863
348
–
–
208
–
LV
WB
4330
840
370
41
898
–
272
170
–
SB
WB
9
1
1
–
3
–
0
Total
71921
7789
370
41
3060
6058
3195
20786
1599
18.2%
0.9%
0.1%
7.1%
14.1%
7.4%
48.5%
3.7%
+4.7%
+0.9%
+0.1%
+2.3%
-1.8%
-0.2%
-5.3%
-0.5%
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
This is the second biggest shift of party support in any constituency, but I don’t think SF will be awfully troubled by the prospect of their 14000 majority over PBP at Westminster being reduced to a 12000 majority over the DUP; the seat is safe as houses anyway. Unionist candidates were runners-up here in every assembly election since 1998, with the exception of 2003 when Diane Dodds actually won. There is now a clear prospect of a safe(ish) Unionist seat at the next Assembly election.
Upper Bann
As noted already, Upper Bann loses Loughbrickland to South Down and its eastern fringes to Lagan Valley, but gains parts of the apple country of North Armagh. It was the most bloated constituency on the old boundaries.
The result looks big on the map but has little net electoral impact.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
SDLP
SF
Aontu
83028
20501
6197
6433
4623
12291
From
To
41.0%
12.4%
12.9%
9.2%
24.6%
UB
UB
73704
18109
5474
5711
4130
10980
UB
LV
-7364
-1818
-550
-571
-410
-1090
UB
SD
-1960
-574
-174
-152
-83
-221
N&A
UB
3265
822
314
169
221
474
38
Total
76969
18931
5788
5880
4351
11454
38
40.8%
12.5%
12.7%
9.4%
24.7%
0.1%
-0.2%
0.1%
-0.2%
0.1%
0.1%
0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
SDLP
SF
Aontu
The DUP majority at Westminster drops from just over 8000 to just under 8000. The last Assembly seat here in 2022 was won by Alliance with a 376 vote margin over SF; that would look vulnerable under these changes.
East Belfast
This is very straightforward, with a loss to North Down in one direction and gains from South Belfast in the other.
This does bring in notional South Belfast SDLP votes (the SDLP did not stand in East belfast in 2019).
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
SDLP
66273
20874
2516
19055
From
To
49.2%
5.9%
44.9%
0.0%
EB
EB
62980
19726
2378
18232
EB
ND
-3293
-1148
-138
-823
SB
EB
7096
1890
204
758
1939
Total
70076
21616
2581
18990
1939
47.9%
5.7%
42.1%
4.3%
-1.3%
-0.2%
-2.8%
4.3%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
SDLP
The DUP’s majority in 2019 was 1800, and the changes expand that to 2600. But those 1939 notional SDLP votes could go a long way to making up the difference in one of the tightest results. I don’t see any direct impact on Assembly representation; there is still nowhere near a Nationalist quota.
North Belfast
Jumping across the river now, we have some tinkering around the margins of North Belfast; the biggest changes are the smallest on the map, to West Belfast on the Shankill and to and from South and East Antrim in Newtownabbey.
These changes basically don’t help the DUP to regain the seat lost in 2019.
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
21135
4824
23078
From
To
72332
43.1%
9.8%
47.1%
NB
NB
66711
18103
4437
22686
NB
WB
-5044
-2863
-348
-208
NB
SA
-577
-169
-38
-184
WB
NB
2393
1071
45
57
28
195
16
SA
NB
1926
157
132
563
192
267
0
EA
NB
342
89
29
5
54
5
11
0
Total
71372
19419
161
5
5099
57
225
23158
16
40.3%
0.3%
0.0%
10.6%
0.1%
0.5%
48.1%
0.0%
-2.8%
0.3%
0.0%
0.8%
0.1%
0.5%
1.0%
0.0%
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
SF’s 1900 majority in 2019 expands to 3700. And it’s difficult to see any change in Assembly representation either.
East Antrim
Continuing up the coast, we reach East Antrim which swaps large but sparsely populated territory with North Antrim.
It doesn’t make a lot of difference to the results though.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
Green
SDLP
SF
64907
16871
5475
1043
10165
685
902
2120
From
To
45.3%
14.7%
2.8%
27.3%
1.8%
2.4%
5.7%
EA
EA
62640
16282
5284
1007
9810
685
870
2046
EA
NA
-1045
-272
-88
-17
-164
0
-15
-34
EA
SA
-880
-229
-74
-14
-138
0
-12
-29
EA
NB
-342
-89
-29
-5
-54
0
-5
-11
NA
EA
7036
482
1342
0
583
0
553
1057
SA
EA
260
55
45
0
30
0
8
18
Total
69936
16818
6671
1007
10423
685
1432
3120
41.9%
16.6%
2.5%
26.0%
1.7%
3.6%
7.8%
-3.4%
+1.9%
-0.3%
-1.3%
-0.1%
+1.1%
+2.1%
The DUP’s actual majority of 6700 over Alliance is reduced to a notional 6400, which won’t cause sleepless nights. There are clearly two non-Unionist quotas for the Assembly, and equally clearly Nationalists will struggle to get one of them.
Newry and Armagh
Back to the south of Northern Ireland again, where Newry and Armagh, the second most bloated seat under the old boundaries, loses most of the apple country to Upper Bann and Fermanagh-South Tyrone, and tidies up its eastern boundary.
The territory lost is at the more Unionist end of the constituency.
DUP
UUP
Alliance
SDLP
SF
Aontu
11000
4204
4211
9449
20287
1628
From
To
81329
21.7%
8.3%
8.3%
18.6%
40.0%
3.2%
N&A
N&A
73,127
9275
3545
3786
8753
18792
1508
N&A
FST
-3879
-760
-290
-201
-353
-757
-61
N&A
UB
-3265
-822
-314
-169
-221
-474
-38
N&A
SD
-1058
-143
-55
-55
-123
-264
-21
SD
N&A
1458
140
61
127
267
297
23
Total
74585
9415
3605
3913
9019
19088
1531
20.2%
7.7%
8.4%
19.4%
41.0%
3.3%
-1.4%
-0.5%
0.1%
0.8%
1.0%
0.1%
SF’s 2019 majority increases from almost 9300 to over 9600. For the Assembly, a second Unionist seat slips a little further away.
North Antrim
Back up to the north again as North Antrim swaps territory with East Antrim and comes out a bit smaller.
Changes that look big on the map don’t always have much effect on the ground.
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
77156
20860
8139
6231
246
2943
5632
47.4%
18.5%
0.0%
14.1%
0.6%
6.7%
12.8%
NA
NA
70120
20378
6797
5648
246
2390
4575
NA
EA
7036
-482
-1342
-583
-553
-1057
EA
NA
1045
272
88
17
164
15
34
Total
71165
20650
6885
17
5811
246
2404
4609
50.8%
16.9%
0.0%
14.3%
0.6%
5.9%
11.3%
3.5%
-1.5%
0.0%
0.2%
0.0%
-0.8%
-1.4%
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
I see the DUP’s notional majority here increasing slightly from 12,000 to 13,000. From three quotas they should notionally get three Assembly seats, but Jim Allister was not a candidate in 2019.
Fermanagh and South Tyrone
Out West now, where the maths is fairly simple but the politics complicated. Fermanagh and South Tyrone was pretty close to the required size, but because of other changes must gain some net territory from Newry and Armagh, and lose a bit to Mid Ulster.
On paper, the differences are not huge.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
Aontu
72945
21929
2650
751
3446
21986
0.0%
43.2%
5.2%
1.5%
6.8%
43.3%
0.0%
FST
FST
69887
22722
2761
751
3608
23017
FST
MU
-3058
-793
-111
-162
-1031
N&A
FST
3879
760
290
201
353
757
61
MU
FST
877
136
32
44
79
255
Total
74643
896
21458
2784
751
3717
21968
61
1.7%
41.6%
5.4%
1.5%
7.2%
42.5%
0.1%
1.7%
-1.6%
0.2%
0.0%
0.4%
-0.8%
0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
Aontu
But this was the tightest result in Northern Ireland in 2019, SF beating the UUP by a mere 57 votes. The notional majority is now 510; but there are 896 notional DUP votes in the mix. So Northern Ireland’s closest race may actually have got a bit closer.
Mid Ulster
This was one boundary change that I called completely incorrectly. I had expected that Mid Ulster would stretch north towards Dungiven, as had been the case in the previous quashed proposals. But in fact it takes a chunk of Coalisland from Femanagh and South Tyrone, which losing a large but sparsely populated chunk to West Tyrone.
It doesn’t make a lot of difference.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
70501
10936
2611
3526
690
6384
20473
24.5%
5.9%
7.9%
1.5%
14.3%
45.9%
MU
MU
67036
10566
2523
3284
690
6031
19342
MU
WT
-2588
-234
-56
-198
-273
877
MU
FST
-877
-136
-32
-44
-79
255
FST
MU
3058
793
111
162
1031
Total
70094
10566
3316
3395
690
6193
20372
23.7%
7.4%
7.6%
1.5%
13.9%
45.7%
-0.8%
1.6%
-0.3%
0.0%
-0.4%
-0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Ind
SDLP
SF
SF’s 9,500 majority extends to a notional 9,800, and the needle is not really moved for the Assembly seats.
Foyle
A little trimming at the edges to East Londonderry and West Tyrone.
The changes are minor, and although more Nationalist than Unionist voters are moved, the Unionist vote share is hit worse.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
74431
4773
1088
1267
1332
26881
9771
2032
From
To
10.1%
2.3%
2.7%
2.8%
57.0%
20.7%
4.3%
Foyle
Foyle
69890
3852
878
1189
1251
25785
9372
1949
Foyle
ELy
-2854
-691
-157
-49
-51
-591
-215
-45
Foyle
WT
-1687
-230
-53
-29
-30
-505
-184
-38
69890
3,852
878
1,189
1251
25785
9372
1,949
8.7%
2.0%
2.7%
2.8%
58.2%
21.2%
4.4%
-1.4%
-0.3%
0.0%
0.0%
1.2%
0.4%
0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
The SDLP’s 17,100 majority in 2019 is reduced to a mere 16,400 which I don’t think will trouble them unduly. The DUP won the last Assembly seat here by a margin of 95 votes over the UUP, the closest result of the 2022 election, and on the above swing it would be vulnerable, but the picture is very much blurred by tactical voting.
West Tyrone
Simply takes in adjacent chunks from Mid Ulster and Foyle.
These are small territories, sparsely populated, and don’t make a lot of difference.
Roll
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Green
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
66339
9066
2774
3979
521
0
7330
16544
972
22.0%
6.7%
9.7%
1.3%
0.0%
17.8%
40.2%
2.4%
WT
WT
66339
9066
2774
3979
521
0
7330
16544
972
MU
WT
2588
234
56
198
0
0
273
877
0
Foy
WT
1687
230
53
29
0
30
505
184
38
Total
70614
9530
2882
4206
521
30
8108
17604
1010
21.7%
6.6%
9.6%
1.2%
0.1%
18.5%
40.1%
2.3%
-0.3%
-0.2%
-0.1%
-0.1%
+0.1%
+0.7%
-0.1%
-0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
Green
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
The SF notional majority increases from almost 7500 to almost 8100. No impact on the Assembly result.
South Antrim
Getting near the end now, with South Antrim by far the most annoying to calculate: lots of little changes that don’t add up to anything much, the biggest being chunks of Glengormley going to North Belfast.
A real pain to work out these very small notionals!
Roll
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
71915
15149
12460
8190
2288
4887
35.3%
29.0%
19.1%
5.3%
11.4%
SA
SA
69729
14937
12283
7597
2088
4603
SA
NB
1926
-157
-132
-563
-192
-267
SA
EA
260
-55
-45
-30
-8
-18
EA
SA
880
229
74
14
138
12
29
NB
SA
577
169
38
184
LV
SA
340
88
39
4
59
8
5
WB
SA
120
10
3
11
5
38
3
Total
71646
15432
12396
18
7836
11
2113
4858
3
36.2%
29.1%
0.0%
18.4%
0.0%
5.0%
11.4%
0.0%
+0.9%
+0.1%
–
-0.7%
–
-0.4%
–
–
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
In a good year, the UUP could overtake the DUP here, and in a much much better year the same is true for Alliance. But the boundary changes have little impact on the Westminster or Assembly outcomes.
North Down
Takes in a small sliver of Strangford and a larger sliver of East Belfast.
The Alliance Party’s strongest seat takes in 3000 voters from the Alliance Party’s second strongest seat.
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
15390
4936
1959
18358
67,109
37.9%
12.1%
4.8%
45.2%
ND
ND
67,109
15390
4936
1959
18358
EB
ND
3,293
1148
138
0
823
Str
ND
10
3
1
0
2
Total
70,412
16541
5075
1959
19182
38.7%
11.9%
4.6%
44.9%
0.8%
-0.3%
-0.2%
-0.3%
DUP
UUP
Cons
Alliance
Alliance’s Westminster majority is reduced from almost 3000 to just over 2600, so the seat remains competitive but they are starting ahead. The shifts are so small that it’s difficult to see much impact on the Assembly.
East Londonderry
Gains a ward from Foyle.
Small numbers make for small differences.
DUP
UUP
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
69359
15765
3599
5921
6158
6128
1731
40.1%
9.2%
15.1%
15.7%
15.6%
4.4%
ELy
ELy
69359
15765
3599
5921
6158
6128
1731
Foy
ELy
2854
691
157
49
51
591
215
45
Total
72213
16456
3756
5970
51
6749
6343
1776
40.0%
9.1%
14.5%
0.1%
16.4%
15.4%
4.3%
-0.1%
-0.5%
+0.1%
+0.8%
-0.2%
-0.1%
DUP
UUP
Alliance
PBP
SDLP
SF
Aontu
The DUP’s Westminster majority is unchanged. It’s difficult to see much impact on the Assembly election, especially if independent MLA Claire Sugden remains active.
So there you have it. A Westminster election is likely before the end of the year. It may well see some changes of seats, but the new boundaries are unlikely to make the difference.
A grim question for the next time you are setting a general knowledge quiz: How many European Commissioners have died in office?
The answer is three, in 1958, 1981 and 1987.
Michel Rasquin was the very first European Commissioner for Transport and the first Commissioner from Luxembourg, appointed to the Walter Hallstein Commission in 1958. He lasted less than four months, dying on 27 April aged 58. Born in 1899, he was a journalist before the Second World War and the first leader of the Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party after the war. He was Luxembourg’s minister for the economy from 1951 until he became a European Commissioner.
Finn Olav Gundelach was the very first Danish Commissioner, appointed in 1973 under François-Xavier Ortoli as Commissioner for the Internal Market and the Customs Union, re-appointed as Vice-President for Agriculture and Fisheries in the Roy Jenkins Commission, and demoted to mere Commissioner for Agriculture under Gaston Thorn. However he lived only a week into his third term, dying aged 55 on 13 January 1981. Born in 1925, he was a career diplomat who had served as Danish ambassador to the UN and the EU, and also vice-president of GATT.
Finally (and let’s hope it stays that way), Alois Pfeiffer was appointed as Commissioner for Economic Affairs and Employment in the first Jacques Delors Commission in 1985, as one of the two German commissioners. He died on 1 August 1987 aged 62. Born in 1924, he was a forester and then a trade unionist, and was nominated by the SPD. He never held elected public office, and was seen by some in Germany as a bit too European and not sufficiently German.
All three of them were simply replaced by nomination by their home government. These days a new Commissioner has to go through hearings in the European Parliament as well. (We’ve had four resignations out of 27 from the current crew, all replaced in that way.)
There is a much more recent case with some similarities: the most recent President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, died a week before the end of his term in January 2022 aged 65. Born in 1956, he was a print and TV journalist in Italy until becoming an MEP for the centre-left Democratic Party in 2009. When he emerged as a front-runner to head the Parliament in 2019, there was a lot of head-scratching. He performed perfectly well in office, however, until falling ill in 2021. His immediate successor in an acting capacity was the First Vice-President, Roberta Metsola, who was then elected to the job at the scheduled election a week later, and is still there until the elections this summer. Presumably if a vacancy occurs a bit earlier in the term, there would need to be a full election process, but it was hardly worth it for seven days.
Mrs. Kelsey was settling into her house at Alwiyah, and I was glad to be able to take a few things off her shoulders.
This came up in conversation a couple of weeks ago, and I realised that I have it in my vast store of unread Agatha Christies, and pulled it out to see for myself. It was not one of the Christies that I had consumed as a teenager. It’s mainly remembered for the story behind the story; the first murder victim is based strongly on the real-life Lady Katherine Woolley, wife of Sir Leonard Woolley who led the 1930s excavation at Ur where Agatha Christie met her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan.
Massive spoilers: The various European and American characters in the book are vividly drawn. But the murder part of the plot is frankly ridiculous. It requires the first victim to have forgotten crucial details of her own previous marriage, and also requires that she remains strangely silent at the crucial moment of being murdered. The second murder is very poorly planned and could easily have failed. The murderer is very lucky that they actually off their victims. They are unlucky that Poirot is there to catch them out.
Despite my frustrations with the narrative, I found the context really fascinating. It’s a thoroughly racist book – Iraq was basically under British military occupation at the time, and the Arabs get barely a mention – and certainly not a positive one – in the narrative.
It was the workmen that made me laugh. You never saw such a lot of scarecrows – all in long petticoats and rags, and their heads tied up as though they had toothache. And every now and then, as they went to and fro carrying away baskets of earth, they began to sing – at least I suppose it was meant to be singing – a queer sort of monotonous chant that went on and on over and over again. I noticed that most of their eyes were terrible – all covered with discharge, and one or two looked half blind. I was just thinking what a miserable lot they were when Dr. Leidner said, “Rather a fine-looking lot of men, aren’t they?”
I was struck by a couple of other points too. The narrator’s name is Amy Leatheran; that surname simply doesn’t exist in real life. (She pops up again in the 1970 Agatha Christie novel Passenger to Frankfurt, nursing the narrator’s great-aunt, but does not appear to have aged 35 years in the meantime.) I’m wondering what significance the name has. If you swap “leather” for “mallow”, you get A. Mallowan, which was Agatha Christie’s married name, but maybe that’s stretching a bit.
I love lists of books, and here Poirot looks at the victim’s bookshelves and draws some drastic conclusions:
“In her bedroom I noticed the following books on a shelf: Who Were the Greeks?Introduction to Relativity, Life of Lady Hester Stanhope, Back to Methuselah, Linda Condon, Crewe Train. “She had, to begin with, an interest in culture and in modern science – that is, a distinct intellectual side. Of the novels Linda Condon, and in a lesser degree Crewe Train, seemed to show that [the victim] had a sympathy and interest in the independent woman – unencumbered or entrapped by man. She was also obviously interested by the personality of Lady Hester Stanhope. Linda Condon is an exquisite study of the worship of her own beauty by a woman. Crewe Train is a study of a passionate individualist. Back to Methuselah is in sympathy with the intellectual rather than the emotional attitude to life. I felt that I was beginning to understand the dead woman.”
I thought it worth seeing which of these books, familiar to a fictional 1930s Belgian detective, has stood the test of time, and apply my usual test of Goodreads and LibraryThing users. It turns out to be about half and half. (I’m assuming that Max Born’s book on relativity is meant, rather than any other.)
Bechdel pass – the narrator is a woman and has been hired to look after a woman, and their first conversation is mainly about the latter’s health (the husband is mentioned a couple of times but he is not the main subject).
This is a grim and also funny book about the lifestyle of a bestselling author. The protagonist, June Hayward, watches her successful writer friend Athena Liu die in an accident in the first chapter, then takes her unpublished manuscript and successfully sells it as her own. June makes some awful decisions and is repeatedly confronted with the consequences of her actions; there’s also some wickedly vicious commentary on the perception of Chinese culture and especially Chinese history in today’s America (and I don’t think that other Western countries would be very different). It’s a short but compulsive read; you can’t quite believe that June has got herself into a position where her career success depends on a gruesome lie, but you can absolutely believe the contortions that follow. You can get it here.
For some bizarre reason this book was on the BSFA Long List for Best Novel. It has no sfnal content. June thinks that she sees Athena a couple of times after her death, but I don’t think we are meant to think that it is “really” her. If it is on the BSFA short list, I will not vote for it, even though I think it is a brillliant book.
Easy Bechdel pass – in the very first chapter, before Athena dies, she and June are talking to each other about their writing and men are barely mentioned.
This was my top unread non-genre book. Next on that pile, on a rather different level, is Moonraker’s Bride by Madeleine Brent.
—My mother, who was sitting by, look’d up,—but she knew no more than her backside what my father meant,—but my uncle, Mr. Toby Shandy, who had been often informed of the affair,—understood him very well.
So, my local interest in Tristram Shandy is this. (Actually, it’s very respectful to the spirit of the book to start my review in the middle, as it were. The whole point is not to get to the point too quickly.) My daughters live close to the small village of Neerwinden, which is the site of the battle usually known as the Battle of Landen which took place in 1693. Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby’s manservant, Corporal Trim (pay attention there in the back) was wounded in the knee at that battle and exclaims in Chapter 19 of Book 8:
Your honour remembers with concern, said the corporal,the total rout and confusion of our camp and army at the affair of Landen; every one was left to shift for himself; and if it had not been for the regiments of Wyndham, Lumley, and Galway, which covered the retreat over the bridge Neerspeeken, the king himself could scarce have gained it – he was press’d hard, as your honour knows, on every side of him.
Neerspeken is obviously a mistake for Neerhespen, which I often drive through when I take my oldest back from a visit to the Beemden nature reserve in Landen. We usually stop off at the Chapel of the Holy Cross. (In the spirit of Tristram Shandy, I should record that I usually go to Landen by the more southern route via Eliksem and Laar.)
I first read Tristram Shandy when I was 23, more than thirty years ago, and still have the slightly mildewed paperback that I picked up off a Cambridge bookstall one day in late 1990. I can’t honestly tell you what happens in it; I can’t find any particular lines that resonate or are very quotable; the most memorable moment is when our hero’s penis gets caught in the windowframe in Book 5 Chapter 17. (Sorry for the spoiler.)
And yet somehow I love it. It’s rambling, self-indulgent, full of references to things I know nothing about; and at the same time the stream-of-consciousness narrative, the refusal to make many concessions to the reader who wants to know what is actually going on, are part of the charm. It’s clearly an inspiration for Joyce, Woolf, and lots of the modernist writers who I really like; but it’s a book of its own time, requiring friendly engagement and repaying that engagement with warmth and humour. You can get it here.
Total Bechdel fail. The most prominent female character, Tristram’s mother, spends most of the book giving birth to him, so her conversation is necessarily about her motherhood. The other women are all defined by their relationships with the male characters.
This was my top book acquired last year; next on that pile is Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey.
“Tanis and Sera are due back on the ship in another day,” she said. “Their negotiations with Scipio are over, we’re preparing to leave the Bosporus system.”
I think I bought this by accident. It is the fifth book in a series of thirteen, and I found it impossible to get into the space opera plot. I put it down after 60 pages. You can get it here.
Easy Bechdel pass, as the very first chapter has two women characters debating the politics of the empire with each other.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is SFerics 2017, edited by Roz Clarke.
As the show itself was transforming on screen so the exhibition began to blossom as a tourist attraction. Peripheral events such as the switching on of the illuminations in 1975 and the Blackpool Centenary celebrations in 1976 helped to cement the exhibition’s place as an exciting and worthwhile visitor destination.
A 600-page sequel to the Blackpool Remembered volume, also going back to memories of the Doctor Who exhibition in Blackpool which ran from 1974 to 1984, but this time also with material on the Doctor Who museum that was open in the same town from 2004 to 2009, and an account of some of the spinoff merchandise that was available to fans in the Good Old Days.
Like the previous volume, it’s a beautifully assembled set of photos with literate commentary. Every corner of both the earlier exhibition (again) and David Boyle’s Doctor Who Museum is described in loving detail. There is a feature on Boyle’s life and career, including some very sad photos from his final years of ill health. He was also the maker of the Dapol models which were the authorised miniatures of characters from the TV series. Short sections also look at Jon Pertwee’s Whomobile, and at Maginty, the Blackpool double of the Doctor’s car Bessie. Again, the perspective is very male and white, which is unfortunate; but it’s a labour of love, and there’s a lot of love here. You can download it for free from here (600 pages, 140ish MB).
Current Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North Lizard Radio, by Pat Schmatz The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman
Last books finished The Dawnhounds, by Sasha Stronach Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir, by Hergé The Odyssey, by Homer, tr Emily Wilson After Life, by Al Ewing et al The Fire Starters, by Jan Carson A Life in Questions, by Jeremy Paxman
Next books David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, by Simon Guerrier Sferics 2017, ed. Roz Clarke Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien
Lost of good stuff to choose from, but my longlist votes go to:
Julia Lloyd, cover of Descendant Machine Leo Nickolls, cover of The Surviving Sky Raphael Lecoste, cover of The Terraformers Elena Betti, cover of Danged Black Thing.
Like many of you, I was very sad to learn this morning that Christopher Priest has died at the age of 80. I first met him on the printed page, as a teenager in Belfast, where his novels were one of my main escape routes from the Northern Ireland of the day. Inverted World and Fugue for a Darkening Island were favourites then, and the former is a favourite still. Later, when I first started bookblogging, The Separation was the best of the books that I read in the closing months of 2003. I very much enjoyed his Guest of Honour speech and other presentations at Interaction, the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow. Nineteen years on, we are preparing another Glasgow Worldcon and we’ll be thinking of him.
In 2007, we became friends. We met in person at the 2007 Beneluxcon which was conveniently for me in Leuven, and started a correspondence which continued for a decade and a half. He filled me in on the story of how he didn’t write for Doctor Who, and we reflected on Brexit and other political disasters together. And I continued to enjoy his writing, both new and old.
In August 2016 I happened to be passing through Devon, and we met up in Burrington, where he and Nina Allan were living at the time, and went for a very pleasant lunch in The Grove Inn, the only pub in the area, in the next door village of Kings Nympton. He and Nina loaded me with books to take away. (They subsequently moved to Scotland.)
The last time we saw each other was at Novacon in Buxton in 2021, where as it turned out I contracted COVID (but he fortunately did not). Fanboyishly (if that is a word) I brought over a small part of my Chris Priest collection, and he signed them all for me after breakfast. (He had already signed the ones he gave me in 2016.)
He was funny, passionate, incisive and (I have to be honest) not always kind. He was hugely entertaining to spend time with and I felt that my teenage enthusiasm for a writer I never expected to meet was ripely repaid a quarter to a third of a century later. Paul Kincaid’s brilliant book, The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, will give you a very good idea of what he was like and what he was trying to achieve as a writer. I feel privileged that I knew him as a person as well. My condolences to Nina, and to the rest of their families.
From the upper windows of the Golden Court, Brunhild saw not just the river Moselle and the bridge spanning it. She could also see straight down into a small amphitheatre inside the city walls. Gladiator games had long been outlawed, but exotic animal hunts and bear baiting were still held there. These, sadly, seemed to be the main entertainment. The new queen quickly discovered that even what luxuries the Merovingian courts offered left something to be desired. There were mimes and actors in residence for instance – predecessors of the minstrels and jesters later found in medieval courts – but mostly, these performers recited long-winded national epics.
This is a book about two queens of the sixth century, both probably born in the early 540s: Fredegund of Neustria (died 597) and Brunhilda of Austrasia (died 613). You may not have heard of Neustria or Austrasia; these were old kingdoms of the pre-Charlemagne era, the tail end of the Merovingian dynasty founded by Clovis, King of the Franks, in the late 5th century. This is a period which we learned nothing at all about at school in Belfast, and if your native language is not French, Dutch or German, you’re probably in the same boat. My previous exposure to it amounted to a 2021 exhibition of Merovingian metalwork in Mariemont, off to the south of Belgium.
Neither of the two queens was in fact a Merovingian by birth, but they married two brothers, grandsons of Clovis, who ruled between them large chunks of what are now northern France, central Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of the Netherlands, with Burgundy also in the mix at various times.
Brunhilda was a Visigothic princess from Spain, who married Sigebert of Austrasia (the eastern bit) in 567. He was murdered, probably on her orders, in 575 and she ruled in Metz off and on, in her own right and as regent for the next generation, for four decades. Fredegund was a slave girl from the western chunk, Neustria, ruled from Soissons; she caught the eye of Chilperic, the local overlord, and replaced his wife (Brunhilda’s sister) as queen.
Brunhilda and Fredegund feuded bitterly until Fredegund’s death in 597, but eventually in 613 Chilperic and Fredegund’s son Clotaire managed to conquer both kingdoms, and Brunhilda (who must have been well into her 60s at this point) was executed by a gruesome method which remains obscure but definitely involved horses.
Both women have been largely written out of history. Clotaire emphasised his own legitimate descent from Clovis, not his usurping aunt or indeed his low-born mother. No men wanted to commemorate women who had survived and ruled for many years. The major contemporary witness, Gregory of Tours, is very partisan and clearly incomplete. Fredegund’s tomb has an image of her whose face has been erased. Brunhilda’s tomb has been lost, apart from two chunks of marble.
Shelley Puhak has done an entertaining job of pulling together the threads of history and legend to tell the story of the two women. She occasionally falters under the weight of detail, and at other times is forced to adopt a very chatty style to compensate for the absence of reliable sources, but one feels that she has done her best with what is available. I got what I wanted from The Dark Queens; you can get it here.
The largest menhir in Belgium is known as the Pierre Brunehaut; I visited it in February 2021. It is near to one of the many old roads known as chaussées Brunehaut in northern France and southern Belgium.
The Pierre Brunehaut near Tournai, which I visited in February 2021 with my friend J, who gives it a sense of scale.
Some speculate that the chaussées Brunehaut are the paths supposedly taken by the horses participating in her execution, but there are too many roads for that; I prefer to think that in her many years as queen, she dedicated state resources to the upkeep of the transport infrastructure, and (rather like Mussolini making the trains run on time) this has been dimly remembered by local lore. There are worse possible memorials.
[Chris] Whitty had reason to be worried. Some months earlier a highly infectious disease called Ebola had started to sweep through Britain’s former colony of Sierra Leone and neighboring Liberia and Guinea. Groups such as the World Health Organization and Medecins Sans Frontieres had rushed to halt the contagion. So had the UK, French, and American governments, Barack Obama’s American administration had even sent four thousand troops to Liberia. The world’s best medical experts at places such as Harvard were hunting for a vaccine, and computer scientists were using Big Data tools to track it.
Gillian Tett and I were contemporaries as undergraduates at Clare College, Cambridge, in the 1980s; she studied archaeology and anthropology, and I studied natural sciences (specialising in astrophysics in the end). We did not know each other well, though we lived on the same staircase in our first year. I’ve seen her precisely twice since then, when she gave a presentation on the causes of the 2008 crisis in Brussels in 2009 and when we caught up at a college reunion in 2022 and found we had both been working on Ukraine. She is now the Provost of King’s College, next door.
Before becoming a Financial Times journalist, Tett was an anthropology student whose doctorate examined Islam and Communism in rural Tajikistan. I came to anthropology a bit later in my life – for bureaucratic reasons, my PhD, which was in the history of science, was administered in the Social Anthropology department at the Queen’s University of Belfast. I developed a deep respect for that discipline, and I’ve written about this here in the context of the House of Lords and, er, England. In my day job as a public affairs consultant in Brussels, it seems to me that I get a much better understanding of what is going on and what is likely to happen by applying anthropological analysis of human behaviour and organisational culture than by the traditional methods of political science, let alone philosophy.
Tett doesn’t make quite such grand claims for her discipline in her book Anthro-Vision. She argues merely that it would be good to take an anthropological perspective into account in making important decisions, as well as the legal, economic, political etc points of view that already are well represented around the table. Among the topics she examines are the response to the 2013-14 Ebola outbreak in West Africa; the failure of bankers to spot the risks in their own behaviour that caused the 2008 financial crisis; the appeal of Donald Trump; the difference between remote and office working; and the intriguing rise of environmental, social, and corporate governance as a serious concern in the top boardrooms of the private sector.
I think that she undersells the case for anthropology. As I said above, I think it is actually superior as an analytical framework, perhaps precisely because it is insufficiently used. On the other hand, she also frames herself as a feminist outsider who has a healthy scepticism about the claims of capitalists; but can a Financial Times journalist truly be a mere observer of the world of high finance? With that slight pinch of salt, I strongly recommend the book as a refreshingly different look at what is really going on in the world, and how important (and often bad) decisions get made. You can get it here.
The first person she met, was the Viscount of——a young Man, no less celebrated for his Accomplishments & Virtues, than for his Elegance & Beauty. She curtseyed & walked on.
There’s not really much here!
Bechdel pass (if being generous) in the very last chapter (it is specifically stated that she does not have a conversation with either of two women characters mentioned earlier):
She entered it & was pressed to her Mother’s bosom by that worthy Woman. Cassandra smiled & whispered to herself ‘This is a day well spent.’
This was the shortest of the unread books that I had acquired in 2018. Next on that list is SFerics 2017, edited by Roz Clarke.
Non-fiction 7 Fatal Path, by Ronan Fanning Rule of Law: A Memoir, by Glynnis Breytenbach Anthro-Vision, by Gillian Tett The Dark Queens, by Shelley Puhak Blackpool Revisited, by John Collier Vincent and the Doctor, by Paul Driscoll The Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Dale Smith
Non-genre 4 The Beautifull Cassandra, by Jane Austen Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang Murder in Mesopotamia, by Agatha Christie
Plays 2 The Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Robert Holmes, edited by John McElroy Three Plays, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
SF 5 The Future, by Naomi Alderman Attack on Thebes, by M.D. Cooper (did not finish) Babel, by R.F. Kuang “The New Mother”, by Eugene Fischer “Georgia on my Mind”, by Charles Sheffield
Doctor Who 1 Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Terrance Dicks
Comics 2 A Fairytale Life, by Lilah Sturges et al Strawberry and the Soul Reapers, by Tite Kubo
5,600 pages 9/21 by non-male writers (Breytenbach, Tett, Puhak, Austen, Christie, Alderman, Cooper, Kuang, Sturges) 3/21 by a non-white writer (Kuang x2, Kubo) 5/21 rereads (Tristram Shandy, The Talons of Weng-Chiang (script), “The New Mother”, “Georgia on my Mind”, Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang) 305 books currently tagged unread, down 7 from last month
Reading now The Dawnhounds, by Sasha Stronach The Odyssey, by Homer, tr Emily Wilson A Life in Questions, by Jeremy Paxman Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir, by Hergé
Coming soon (perhaps) After Life, by Al Ewing et al David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television, by Simon Guerrier Kill the Moon, by Darren Mooney Doctor Who and the Sunmakers, by Terrance Dicks The Sunmakers, by Lewis Baston The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman Sferics 2017, ed. Roz Clarke The Smile on the Face of the Tiger, by Douglas Hurd and Andrew Osmond Bletchley Park Brainteasers, by Sinclair McKay Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien The Wheels of Chance, by H.G. Wells Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard Moonraker’s Bride, by Madeleine Brent Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler When the Moon Was Ours, by Anna-Marie McLemore How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz
My parents had limited opportunities when they were young. Neither of them went to university. They weren’t stupid, but their frame of reference was very limited. They didn’t read particularly widely or well. Their lives were work, home, television. My dad played tennis, too, before he retired. They weren’t very well educated, and they hadn’t travelled either. Their horizons were quite narrow and neither was particularly adventurous. When I travelled, they really didn’t get it. They thought it was marvellous that I could go to Greece, but it never occurred to them that they could have gone too. The first time they ever went overseas was in 1996 or 1997, when I sent them on a holiday.
I was encouraged to get this book, then newly published, when I visited South Africa in 2017 as a guest of the Democratic Alliance. Breytenbach is a former state prosecutor who is now one of the DA’s parliamentary stars. Her autobiography is a frank account of service to the judicial system of South Africa, punctuated by politically motivated interference (a disciplinary procedure and a criminal prosecution, both of which exonerated her). The story is told in 27 beathless chapters, full of picturesque South African slang (I am still not sure if “oke” is pejorative), punctuated also by comments from friends and colleagues.
To be honest, it is not a brilliant book. It is assumed that the reader is already super-familiar with South Africa and also with the high points of its recent criminal and judicial history. Many pages are devoted to the evils of Jacob Zuma, who was then the president of the country; in fact he was forced out of office six months after this book was published, so those sections became instantly out of date. One gets the sense that Breytenbach makes few concessions in her professional life; that’s certainly also true of her approach to her readers here. For South Africanists only, I think, but you can get it here.
This was the very last book acquired in 2017 that I got around to reading, five months after I finished the last book that I acquired in 2016.
Current The Dawnhounds, by Sasha Stronach The Odyssey, by Homer, tr Emily Wilson A Life in Questions, by Jeremy Paxman Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir, by Hergé
Last books finished Three Plays, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart “Georgia on my Mind”, by Charles Sheffield
Next books After Life, by Al Ewing et al The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North
The initial results are in, and it looks very much as if Alexander Stubb will be elected the next President of Finland in the second round of voting in two weeks’ time.
I’ve known him since he was a member of the European Parliament, and for complex reasons ended up hosting an official meeting for him and the Turkish Cypriot leadership in my office in December 2008. Back in 2018 I went to Helsinki to help him campaign for the EPP nomination for the Presidency of the European Comission.
This evening’s results indicate that he will face off against the Green candidate Pekka Haavisto, who lost the two previous elections in 2018 and 2012. I don’t have any problem with Haavisto, and the really good news is that the extremist candidate finished a poor third, but I’ll be cheering for Alex on 11 February.
I am in Glasgow for a preparatory meeting for this summer’s Worldcon, and for complex reasons arrived on Thursday evening and did my day job from the hotel yesterday. I took a long lunch break though for a cultural excursion in two parts.
First stop was the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, a splendid structure abut 15-20 minutes’ walk from the conference centre.
The big draw was an organ recital – the Kelvingrove organ is massive (and therefore open to much double entendre) and the sound fills the main hall well. I particularly liked the video feed of the organist’s hands and feet.
The art gallery is rather special too; the painting that particularly spoke to me was a Belgian refugee from the first world war, painted by Norah Neilson Gray. (I took my own photo but this is the official gallery one.)
Gray, Norah Neilson; A Belgian Refugee; Glasgow Museums; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/a-belgian-refugee-84289
The second leg of the trip was to te end of the Roman Empire. When I watched the Oscar-winning film Gladiator back in 2021, it transpired that the Antonine Wall has a bit of a marketing problem, at least among my Facebook friends (click through for vigorous discussion):
The Antonine Wall ran from what’s now northern Glasgow to northern Edinburgh. It was made of turf rather than stone, unlike the much better known Hadrian’s Wall, so almost nothing survives of the actual structure. It wasn’t actually the northernmost limit of the empire: there were the Gask Ridge Forts north of Edinburgh, and also the mysterious temple-like structure near Falkirk (which gave its name to Stenhousemuir), known as Arthur’s O’on and destroyed in 1743.
In Bearsden, now a northern suburb of Glasgow, the foundations of a Roman fort were found in 1973, and the excavated foundations of the bathhouse are visible in a little park by the road (whose name is “Roman Road”). It’s 15-20 minutes by car from the convention centre in normal traffic.
Often these sites amount to little more than a big pile of stones, but there are several decent interpretative signboards featuring manly men using the facilities.
You can imagine how the Gaulish soldiers, after a hard day’s patrolling in the rain, would have loved to settle down in the heated room and hang out with their mates. The flags and underfloor channels behind which heated air circulated have also been well preserved.
I was educated by nuns in Belfast, and although the school itself was a modern building, the convent (which we spilled into occasionally) had been built in 1874 by an engineering magnate who installed the first central heating system in any house in Ireland. A century later, it was very noisy and probably unsafe – I hope it has been replaced by now! The Roman system looks very attractive.
The Baptist church across the road is on the site of the main section of the camp, and boasts a “Roman sound garden” and a large wooden statue of a legionary.
Edward Gibbon, in one of his eloquent but inaccurate and prejudiced passages, wrote of the Antonine Wall in the context of Agricola:
Before his departure, the prudent general had provided for security as well as for dominion. He had observed that the island is almost divided into two unequal parts by the opposite gulfs, or, as they are now called, the Firths of Scotland. Across the narrow interval of about forty miles, he had drawn a line of military stations, which was afterwards fortified in the reign of Antoninus Pius, by a turf rampart erected on foundations of stone. This wall of Antoninus, at a small distance beyond the modern cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, was fixed as the limit of the Roman province. The native Caledonians preserved in the northern extremity of the island their wild independence, for which they were not less indebted to their poverty than to their valour. Their incursions were frequently repelled and chastised; but their country was never subdued. The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths, over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians.
The Romans did of course press quite far north of the Antonine Wall before they gave up on what is now Scotland, and the source given for the last sentence is Appian, who actually says: “Crossing the Northern ocean to Britain, a continent in itself, they took possession of the better and larger part, not caring for the remainder. Indeed, the part they do hold is not of much use to them.” That last barb about southern Britain is somehow omitted by Gibbon.
Balfour’s Irish experience was rooted in his years as chief secretary for Ireland from 1887 to 1891 when his repressive policies had earned him the nickname of ‘Bloody Balfour’ among Irish nationalists. His deep-seated Unionism was the rock on which the efforts to establish a bipartisan policy on the Irish problem had foundered in 191o. In 1920 Balfour was the cabinet minister arguing most forcefully for Ulster’s right to remain a fully integrated part of the United Kingdom. In November 1921 he remained so sceptical of negotiating with Irish republicans in the aftermath of the truce that ended the Irish war of independence that Lloyd George sent him to head the British delegation at the Washington Naval Conference lest his presence in London disrupt the negotiations that led to the establishment of the Irish Free State. Arthur Balfour was at once the most cultivated, the most cynical and the most cerebral of prime ministers. The trouble with Arthur, a colleague observed, is that he knows there has been one Ice Age and he thinks there’s going to be another. Who better, then, to share Balfour’s enjoyment at Shaw’s lampooning of the conduct of well-meaning English liberals in Ireland than the two Liberal leaders who were to follow him into 10 Downing Street?
I did not know Ronan Fanning well; we met a few times and I certainly admired his work. Although this book came late in his life, published in 2013, four years before he died, big chunks are apparently taken from his PhD thesis of 1968. I guess history doesn’t necessarily change that much.
The subject is Westminster attitudes to Ireland at the time of independence, focussing especially on the two Prime Ministers, Asquith and Lloyd George, and also on the leading Conservative politicians and the other Liberals, Winston Churchill in particular. My own PhD thesis concentrated on almost exactly the same period, and I thought I had done a pretty exhaustive dive into the last two decades of British administration in Ireland. So I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I learned from this book. Fanning concentrates on policy rather than administration, and on the debate in London rather than what was happening on the ground in Ireland – the Easter Rising, for instance, gets barely a page, but the British response gets most of a chapter. This is not a criticism – Fanning was entitled to write the book he wanted to write, and he was entirely correct to see a huge gap in the historiography of the period.
Things that I learned, roughly in order:
The Liberals from 1905 until the House of Lords crisis in 1909-10 were not just apathetic to Irish Home Rule, the leadership were actively hostile to the concept, and would not have ever legislated for it if they had not been backed into a corner by John Redmond and the Irish Nationalists (one of the latter’s few strategic successes).
At the same time, the Liberal government in 1912-14 knew that Home Rule could not be implemented in large parts of Ulster. Lloyd George and Churchill proposed excluding Ulster from home rule as early as February 1912. This was copper-fastened by the disloyal and treacherous actions of senior army officers, in particular Sir Henry Wilson and the brothers Hubert and Johnnie Gough, who undermined the elected government by conspiring with the opposition and with the military garrison in Ireland to provoke the Curragh mutiny in March 1914.
Therefore the counterfactual idea that, if there had been no 1916 Rising or War of Independence, a Home Rule Ireland would have eventually evolved into a Dominion-like status, is wrong. The only decisive factor affecting British policy, apart from the personal prejudices of political leaders, was violence or the threat of violence. The British folded on Ulster in 1914, and on independence for the rest of the island in 1921, purely because of the balance of coercive force. The British government’s own use of coercive force was poorly planned and disastrously implemented.
When it came to the Treaty negotiations on 1921, the British got entirely what they expected (apart from a late concession on tariffs). The Irish delegation were thoroughly unprepared, particularly on the issue of partition. Michael Collins then planned to destabilise and attempt to take control of Northern Ireland, but was distracted by the Civil War, and after that he was dead. London did nothing to protect Catholics in the North in the 1922-25 period (or for that matter Protestants in the South, though they were in less danger). The Boundary Commission, to which Fanning devotes an interesting epilogue, was designed to achieve nothing, and did so.
In general, both Asquith and Lloyd George were motivated (on Ireland at least) not by ideology but by the need to stay in power by satisfying their coalition partners, successively the Irish Nationalists and then the Conservatives. (Also Asquith was fundamentally a procrastinator who did not want to actually do anything.) The Conservatives were more ideologically Unionist than the Liberals; so too was the fledgling Labour party. Andrew Bonar Law, who actually became Prime Minister briefly in 1922-3, was Canadian by birth but an Ulster Presbyterian by background; however, once he came to power his first decision was to get the last stages of the Treaty enacted, just to get it over with.
There’s not a lot about women here, but a key figure is Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s secretary and lover. The smartest officials, notably General Macready who was the person who advised the British in 1921 that the military campaign in Ireland was lost, knew that Lloyd George never read his own paperwork and wrote to Stevenson instead. Not everyone knew this trick. Lloyd George and his key male adviser, Tom Jones, often had crucial conversations in Welsh, which nobody else in Downing Street understood.
The whole thing is eloquently written. It’s not short (361 pages) and it’s not for beginners (knowledge of the broad thrust of events is assumed) but it’s really interesting.
I found the account of the bitterly divided 1912-14 government, publicly committed to a policy goal that had been wished on it from outside, and that few of its leaders really believed in, very reminiscent of the Brexit period. But the wider lesson, that most British prime ministers spend most of their political energy on simple day-to-day survival, has much broader relevance, and not just in the UK.
Having finished the IDW Tenth Doctor comics last month, I’m into the Eleventh Doctor run; and rather than start at the beginning of a long narrative, I picked up this one-shot album from 2011 for a sample. The author, Lilah Sturges, is best known for collaboration with Bill Willingham on the Fables series and spinoffs; I was really into that, ten years ago or so, but drifted off once the main narrative ended.
This is an enjoyable enough fantasy-world-actually-a-theme-park story, with the Doctor and Amy liberating the oppressed. The art by Kelly Yates is seriously below par though, with Amy much more freckled than the real Karen Gillan and the Doctor often looking like someone else entirely. This was early in the Eleventh Doctor era, so perhaps the lead characters’ images were not well communicated to the artist, but it’s a barrier to enjoyment. There are some nice covers by Bill Willingham though. You can get it here.
Bechdel pass: Amy and Aurelia battle an evil robot together on page 48, and then review progress on page 56.
Will, her late husband, sat in the wooden chair facing the lake view, watching her. He said: Tough decision?
I’m a fan of Alderman’s previous novels (The Power, Disobedience and a Doctor Who book, Borrowed Time), so was looking forward to this, a story of tech zillionnaires, apocalypse and survival. To be honest I was a little disappointed; I’m not especially interested in the cults of personality around Musk, Zuckerberg, etc, and a large part of the story evolves around equivalent characters and their entourages. There’s also an AI that is just smart enough to carry the plot forward, and a rather silly dénouement. But there are also some vivid character moments and strong descriptions of setting. So it’s entertaining, if not quite up to Alderman’s previous work. You can get it here.
Definite Bechdel pass, as two of the main characters are women in an on-off relationship with each other.
This was the very first book that I finished this year! So this is my first review to have the ‘bookblog 2024’ tag.
In order to ensure that you adopt the most effective strategy, it is therefore critical to understand and master the EU legislative process. It is part of your 3Ps (People-Power-Procedures) and I have known several brilliant lobbying strategies failing because the intricacies of procedure were poorly addressed.
This is a book about lobbying in Brussels, published in 2010. As such it is somewhat out of date; the institutional rules have not changed much in that time, but the way things really operate has moved on a bit; and about a quarter of the book is dedicated to kindly explaining that social media actually matters and giving guidance on how you might dip your toe into it. Those were innocent days, in retrospect! (My good friend Jon Worth is mentioned, in the context of the doomed Citzalia project.)
I’m not sure why I got it when I did; I once had aspirations to write such a book myself, but I must say that seeing how quickly such a project could be overcome by events is a bit of a disincentive. Still, the description of the legislative and policy-making process is accurate and useful, and made me realise how much of it I have internalised in my 25 years working here. You can still get the book here.
This was the shorter of the two remaining books on my shelves acquired in 2017. Next is the last of those books, Rule of Law: A Memoir, by Glynnis Breytenbach. This was also the last book that I finished in 2023, so I’m two and a half weeks behind at the moment.
Current Three Plays, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart The Dawnhounds, by Sasha Stronach
Last books finished The Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Robert Holmes, edited by John McElroy Murder in Mesopotamia, by Agatha Christie Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Terrance Dicks Strawberry and the Soul Reapers, by Tite Kubo Babel, by R.F. Kuang The Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Dale Smith “The New Mother”, by Eugene Fischer
Next books A Life in Questions, by Jeremy Paxman “Georgia on my Mind”, by Charles Sheffield Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir, by Hergé
Michel Rasquin was the very first European Commissioner for Transport and the first Commissioner from Luxembourg, appointed to the Walter Hallstein Commission in 1958. He lasted less than four months, dying on 27 April aged 58. Born in 1899, he was a journalist before the Second World War and the first leader of the Luxembourg Socialist Workers’ Party after the war. He was Luxembourg’s minister for the economy from 1951 until he became a European Commissioner.
Finn Olav Gundelach was the very first Danish Commissioner, appointed in 1973 under François-Xavier Ortoli as Commissioner for the Internal Market and the Customs Union, re-appointed as Vice-President for Agriculture and Fisheries in the Roy Jenkins Commission, and demoted to mere Commissioner for Agriculture under Gaston Thorn. However he lived only a week into his third term, dying aged 55 on 13 January 1981. Born in 1925, he was a career diplomat who had served as Danish ambassador to the UN and the EU, and also vice-president of GATT.
Finally (and let’s hope it stays that way), Alois Pfeiffer was appointed as Commissioner for Economic Affairs and Employment in the first Jacques Delors Commission in 1985, as one of the two German commissioners. He died on 1 August 1987 aged 62. Born in 1924, he was a forester and then a trade unionist, and was nominated by the SPD. He never held elected public office, and was seen by some in Germany as a bit too European and not sufficiently German.
There is a much more recent case with some similarities: the most recent President of the European Parliament, David Sassoli, died a week before the end of his term in January 2022 aged 65. Born in 1956, he was a print and TV journalist in Italy until becoming an MEP for the centre-left Democratic Party in 2009. When he emerged as a front-runner to head the Parliament in 2019, there was a lot of head-scratching. He performed perfectly well in office, however, until falling ill in 2021. His immediate successor in an acting capacity was the First Vice-President, Roberta Metsola, who was then elected to the job at the scheduled election a week later, and is still there until the elections this summer. Presumably if a vacancy occurs a bit earlier in the term, there would need to be a full election process, but it was hardly worth it for seven days.
