Clarification / correction – when I ask “can you read” in the poll (which of course I cannot edit now) I meant “can you see the letters clearly”, not “can you read and comprehend”!!!
For those languages marked with asterisks, I couldn’t find or didn’t like the word for ‘December’ so used ‘Christmas’ instead.
Musing a bit more on yesterday’s kerfuffle, I think Livejournal come out of it rather well and Dreamwidth rather badly.
Livejournal’s senior manager responded to me with the words “this was a mistake” and assured me that the proposed change was not being implemented. Their Customer Care folks then followed up with an explicit statement that “We understand that gender is not binary, and intend to respect that understanding for our users.” That seems to me entirely satisfactory. Someone wrote something which did not suit the organisation for which they work, and it is therefore not being used. In the public policy environment where I work, that happens all the time, particularly if (as I suspect here) there are people of varying linguistic and cultural backgrounds involved. Indeed, what is unusual here is the level of transparency at the drafting stage – a rather courageous approach for which one sometimes (as in this case) pays a price.
The whole kerfuffle began with a post by one of Dreamwidth’s co-owners, a former Livejournal staffer, which inaccurately presented the coding change as a done deal, an irreversible decision. You will note also that in the comments on yesterday’s post, a Dreamwidth staffer accuses Livejournal of lying to me, without evidence; and also makes the shocking assertion that Livejournal has been listening to its users, as if this were in some way outrageous.
Dreamwidth have gained a number of extra customers from Livejournal out of all this, based on a report from their own leadership which turns out not to be true, with the flames of this controversy being further deliberately fanned by their own staff even after Livejournal had resolved it. It is very easy to whip up fears of oppression among people who experience it regularly. It is more difficult in such circumstances to admit that you were wrong. I don’t think this affair looks very good for a company which was supposed to represent a more ethical approach to the business of blogging.
I am also perturbed by comments I have seen here and there about this somehow being the fault of the Russians, including the fact that the senior Livejournal manager who responded to me and to many others does not write perfect English and has a foreign name (which looks Ukrainian rather than Russian to me, but what do I know). Really, folks, get a grip. You have no idea how privileged you are to be native speakers of the world’s main language of communication. In any case I seem to remember that the frequency of Livejournal screwups was much greater, and that they were handled far more ineptly, when it was owned by Americans. SUP are running a tighter ship; the President of Russia is one of their customers.
An occasional correspondent emails me to ask about this passage from the memoirs of H.H. Asquith, the British prime minister, of 24 July 1914 (which I have transcribed on my website:
Later we had a meeting at Downing Street – Redmond [the Irish Nationalist leader], Dillon [Redmond’s deputy], Ll[oyd] G[eorge], Birrell and I. I told them that I must go on with the Amending Bill, without the time limit: to which, after a good deal of demur, the Irishmen reluctantly agreed.’
I should explain that for some enthusiasts of Irish history, rerunning the partition of the island is a favourite pastime, and the most significant point of departure is the conference held at Buckingham Palace in July 1914, to try to get agreement on what parts of Ulster should be excluded from the jurisdiction of an autonomous Home Rule government in Ireland. Unionists wanted the permanent exclusion of all nine counties of Ulster; Nationalists were prepared to accept the temporary exclusion of the four counties with Protestant majorities. Asquith, as prime minister, rapidly settled on the six-county unit we have today as the obvious compromise, largely because the Unionists indicated that they too would settle for it. But the passage above indicates that on the day the negotiations broke down, Asquith was instead heading for “county option” the holding of referendums in each county. My correspondent asks:
As I read this, Redmond and Dillon were prepared to agree to ‘County Option’ permanently, rather than for only 6 years. I think that, if implemented, this would have led to a 4-county Northern Ireland. It does seem strange that this concession was not revisited when Lloyd George carried out his negotiations in 1916 [when he was asked to find a way of implementing Irish Home Rule immediately after the Easter Rising, but failed]. I would be interested in any comments you might have.
My reply:
I think it’s pretty clear that Carson et al – the Unionists in Ulster – were prepared to go to civil war – which they would have won – rather than give up Tyrone and Fermanagh. So Asquith would have been unable to sell such a deal to them and the British Conservatives in 1914. In any case I wonder how solid Redmond and Dillon’s agreement was – I don’t read it as more than assent that Asquith should try this course, but they had probably made the same calculation as I do above, ie that it would not fly with the Unionists. Having said that, of course your interpretation may be correct; there was a Nationalist delusion that any Northern Ireland state of any size would be economically unviable and would wither away. (Similar arguments were successfully used in Cyprus in the 2004 referendum campaign, but in both cases they proved incorrect.)
To be honest I think it was a lucky escape for all of us. The experience of such referendums elsewhere has not been happy. The very prospect of the vote would have been a spark for horrible violence, probably not restricted to Fermanagh and Tyrone. Since the UVF were better prepared than the Nationalists or the British Army in 1914, a referendum proposal would certainly have triggered mass displacements of Catholics by Loyalists from all over what would probably have become the Six (or Five and a Half) counties. The Upper Silesia plebiscite of 1921 shows what can happen. The Unionists had no interest in allowing due process to separate Tyrone and Fermanagh from the other four counties. The border as it was established reflected the balance of potential coercive force at the time it was drawn – as do most borders.
You also ask about 1916. Lloyd George was after a quick fix, and holding six county option referenda in the middle of a war is not a quick fix. He needed something that the leaders could agree to, and implement, right away. I imagine that if he had succeeded, there would have been no elections until after the war was over but Redmond would have been put immediately in charge of a 26-county administration of some kind.
That was my reply to my correspondent. The one point I should have added, of course, is that Asquith was rather prone to changing his mind, and what he thought he would do on 24 July might well have been a different matter the following week, even without the distraction of war breaking out in Europe.
Like a number of you, I imagine, I woke this morning to find news of the latest livejournal screwup in several places on my friends list. Users, we were told, were henceforth to be forced to specify their gender as either "male" or "female", with no allowance for those who do not want to be identified by gender, for shared accounts, for robots or for Elder Gods. Shocked by this news, I did a post of my own, and emailed one of the higher-ups at LJ to register my dissatisfaction. I got this reply:
thank you for your feedback.
However, the code update that you refer to is not live and did not have any chance to go live. That was a beta release, we always push code to beta to see if everything works correctly. In many cases it does not and we either fix bugs or pull the code from the final release plan.
We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.
I would appreciate if you share this information with your friends that are also concerned. I am sorry that you were misinformed.
The source of the original story was here, which is an entry on the Dreamwidth account of a former Livejournal employee who is one of the founders of Dreamwidth, which is in direct competition with Livejournal for customers. Just sayin’.
Edited to add: I also received this response from LJ’s feedback team:
Thank you for taking the time to contact us with your concerns. We understand that gender is not binary, and intend to respect that understanding for our users.
At this time, the code you reference is not live on the site, and will not become so in the future. We know that you, and many other users, have serious concerns about any requirement to specify gender, so we’d like to take a moment to explain events and our position further.
The intention of this code was to change the sign-up process to include a field for the selection of gender; that the code would completely disable the “Unspecified” option at the same time was deemed unacceptable. While the code in question had gone to our beta (testing) server, it had not gone to our production server, and will not do so due to this problem. Furthermore, we’d like to clarify that code posted to the changelog community is not always final, as such code must then go through the beta testing process and can often be changed before actual implementation.
Additionally, some erroneous information has been spread regarding the potential public display of the gender field. We would like to clarify that gender is not currently publicly displayed on the profile, nor anywhere else on the site, and there are no plans to change this behavior.
Regards,
LiveJournal Community Care Team
See also sensible contributions from
I’ve been encountering a lot of fictional people called Sowerby lately. The Sowerby family – Martha, Dickon, and their unnamed mother and ten siblings – play a large role in The Secret Garden. Farther south, Mrs Sowerby is one of a number of characters living in Stockbridge played by Susan Brown in Plague of the Daleks the latest Big Finish audio in their main Doctor Who series. And farther south again, I’m also reading Trollope’s Framley Parsonage, where there is a villainous Sowerby who I hope will come to a sticky end.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone of that name in real life.
This is not a terribly impressive book. It is a more or less chronological account of details of history featuring the Jesuits, with no deep analysis and rather few hard facts – nothing at all to explain their internal structure, miserably brief accounts of how they were founded in 1534 and re-established in 1814. Wright is slightly better on the various political controversies that Jesuits have been involved in, though even here his analysis basically amounts to there being two sides of the story. He is good on the Jesuits’ contribution to science. He is wholly inadequate on their contribution to colonialism. I can’t really recommend this book.
I found this interesting discussion between Paul McGann and one of the Big finish team (not good at recognising voices and he doesn’t introduce himself) in the bonus track to "An Earthly Child", the new Big Finish play with him as the Eighth Doctor and Carole Ann Ford reprising Susan. (download extract here):
McGann: And I didn’t know either that it’s an old character, or at least that the idea that the Doctor had a family goes right back to the beginning, doesn’t it, right back to the early 60s, during Bill Hartnell’s reign.
Interviewer: It does. I mean, the very first episode of Doctor Who was William Hartnell as the Doctor with his granddaughter Susan, played by Carole Ann Ford, and that –
McGann: Of course – Carole Ann who’s in this now!
Interviewer: Yes!
McGann gasps.
Interviewer: She’s the same character.
McGann: Now that, I didn’t realise.
Interviewer: Yeah!
McGann: So there’s all this, sort of, symmetry…
Interviewer: Yeah!
McGann: God, how fantastic! It’s the next generation of where she left off.
Interviewer: Yeah! It picks up from exactly the same place where she left the series in 1965.
McGann: That’s… just too spooky. But kind of great as well, isn’t it!?
Interviewer: Marc [Platt]’s done a pretty seamless job in carrying on the story from where it finished.
McGann: But tell me why, em – let me interview you for a minute – why did we… I mean, I’ve played Doctor Who, why didn’t I know that Doctor Who had ever had kids, that there was a family involved? Is it something that people are coy about, is it something that’s not spoken of, is it a bit of a taboo subject?
Interviewer: I don’t know, actually. I suppose it’s a bit of an area of the show that some producers have chosen not to go in.
McGann laughs.
Interviewer: I have to say Russell T Davies and the team at Cardiff were very supportive of us doing this story, I mean they were very helpful. So it is –
McGann: Initially I felt, well, is it because somehow the Doctor over the years has become a kind of ascetic figure, you know, there’s something… we can’t imagine the Doctor having, we can’t imagine the Doctor having sex, or something. There’s something el- you know what I’m saying, so, is that the reason? I’m just trying to figure out why, why don’t people talk about this kind of thing?
Interviewer: I suppose what it could be is, if the Doctor has a family, it domesticizes him…
McGann: Perhaps.
Interviewer: …in a way, so it gives him roots and ties him down, whereas he’s always portrayed as this wanderer, and quite an isolated figure at times.
McGann: Right.
Interviewer: So…
McGann: It’s me that’s sex-obsessed, then.
Interviewer laughs.
McGann: But that’s a good point, then isn’t it – that it perhaps somehow goes against the grain, and also it kind of rings true, you can see, you know, even, presumably as Bill Hartnell’s character developed and then later on into the other actors that played him, it was more impotant that the Doctor, as you say, remains a kind of wanderer, you know, someone who –
Interviewer: A drifter.
McGann: A drifter, yeah. Somebody essentially quite rootless.
Funny that McGann, though obviously very aware of Hartnell’s Doctor, had never before heard the Susan parts of the back story. But I think he and the other guy successfully identify why the Doctor has never since been portrayed as having a family.
What is the difference, if any, between overalls and dungarees?
This is the simplest of the end-of-year memes: post the first sentence of your first post for each month of the year. I add a short explanation though this is not traditional.
January: We had a rather quiet New Year’s Eve last night. A post about the turn of the year.
February: A story of a young boy who becomes involved in a secret romance – some similarity with McEwan’s Atonement, though the outcome is quite different. My review of The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley.
March: Big Finish have returned to an old theme in Who: the search for the Key to Time, as originally carried out by the Fourth Doctor and his Time Lady companion Romana in 1978. Review of three Doctor Who audio plays.
April: Not mine, but
May: Dreamwidth: nwhyte. My little-used Dreamwidth account.
June: When you see the word “pasties”, do you think of: food? nipples? both? neither? One of my occasional linguistic polls.
July: Locked entry about an encounter with a weird person.
August: AP piece about my work – would be interested to know if it is in the print as well as the on-line version of the New York Times: (link). Big media story about my job.
September: Okay Then: Health Care : Whatever. My link to Scalzi.
October: Pathetic Motorways. My link to another cool site.
November: Sit down for breakfast. Local vegetation by the Nile.
December: More often than not, I complete the last leg of my morning commute by train, arriving at the railway station at Brussel/Bruxelles-Schuman, which is within a hop, skip and jump of my office. forensic railway archæology.
Well, there’s a bit of etymology I had never considered: that the usage of “smashin’!” in English to mean “that’s very good!” originates from the Irish phrase “is maith é sin!” which has the same pronunciation and meaning. Glorious.
Surprising to read that this was the very first anthology of Doctor Who short stories, published back in 1994 (other than the various annuals and fan publications). There is a supposed framing narrative of the Seventh Doctor visiting a California psychic to get readings of objects from his pockets, thus providing the stories, but it is not quite necessary enough to be convincing. Some contributors have since gone on to great things; some have disappeared completely. My favourite was Jim Mortimore’s “The Book of Shadows”, about Barbara Wright marrying one of Alexander the Great’s generals and ruling Egypt – particularly interesting to come to this so soon after Farewell Great Macedon which has a very similar theme. Also I gave a cheer for David Auger’s “The Golden Door” which features Dodo, though it is not very special otherwise. Hoping to read a few more Who anthologies rather than novels this month – you have been warned.
I was greatly entertained the other week by SFX’s list of the ten worst SF/fantasy shows of the decade (10: Hex, 9: Hyperdrive, 8: Jericho, 7: The Listener, 6: Blade, 5: Masters of Science Fiction, 4: Painkiller Jane, 3: Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, 2: Demons, and 1: Flash Gordon). But I was rather perturbed to realise that I had not heard of a single one of them; my diet of Who and its spinoffs, and earlier devotion to Buffy, somehow didn’t lead me to experiment with other sf shows. (I did try the new Prisoner, but just like
So in a spirit of sientific enquiry I obtained and watched all six episodes of Kröd Mändoon, to assess whether SFX’s ratings were reliable. My mature judgement: SFX are probably right. Kröd Mändoon is rubbish, desperately trying to be funny but basically running through adolescent jokes about sex while waving swords about. At least the episodes are only twenty minutes long, and it filled a few commutes nicely.
But never mind what I thought; what do you think?
The Tenth Doctor wakes up in a mysterious museum which appears to contain relics of his past lives; tended by Martha Jones, he finds himself reliving certain experiences of each of his previous nine incarnations, until he works out what is really going on. (Set shortly after Journey’s End.)
With any multi-Doctor story, you have to assess the writer’s success in characterising each Doctor (and companions), and with comics you have to grade the artists’ ability to depict the actors’ faces as well. The Forgotten scrapes a pass mark on both counts. There are some seriously jarring notes in both the One/Ian and Three/Brigadier scenes, which suggests that Tony Lee doesn’t quite get the male companions (Jack Harkness is in the vicinity but unseen at a later point in the narrative). And unfortunately Stefano Martino, the artist for issue 3, is rather awful at portraying Ten, Four and Five. (Pia Guerra and Kelly Yates are at least adequate for the other five issues.)
At the same time there is definitely cause for fannish glee. There are an awful lot of companions featured here (in order: Susan, Ian, Barbara, Steven, Jamie, Zoe, the Brigadier, Jo, Sarah, Harry, Leela, Romana II, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, Kamelion [!], Peri, Mel, Ace, Rose and Martha) and most of them are at least half-decently done. Putting aside my whining about the recognisability of the faces, the art is excellent. The story has a certain internal integrity and ties in rather well (as it turns out) to New Who’s Season Four, though with a decent number of continuity references to the whole of the series. Thoroughly good fun.
I had never read this children’s classic (nor have I read Burnett’s other well-known works, Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess), but like a lot of people who watched mid-70s kids shows on the BBC I have tremendously fond memories of the 1975 TV version, in which Mr Craven was played by John Woodnutt, aka the Draconian emperor / Broton the Zygon leader, and the three main child characters were played by actors who have since disappeared (though one of them is active in local drama in New Mexico).
I do remember starting to read it as a child, and being deterred by the grim first couple of chapters, where Mary’s parents die and she is sent to her uncle’s isolated Yorkshire home where she is insufferably unpleasant. I wish I had kept going. It is a lovely story of psychological and physical healing through close encounters with the regenerative forces of the natural world and also, y’know, just being nice to people.
The wind must have been worse than I realised today, because I found I had something in my eye a couple of times as I read the last chapters. Perhaps the plotline of a disabled child whose condition markedly improves resonates more with me these days than it would have thirty-four years ago.
Horrible toothache this morning. Persuaded dentist to see me at short notice. I go back to them on Monday. Root canals have been mentioned.
This is not to minimise Ian, who is the first of a long run of action-oriented male sidekicks (Steven, Ben, Jamie, UNIT, Harry) but is also much brainier than any of his successors. This does create dramatic conflict with the Doctor, of course, as Ian chafes at being junior male to someone so infuriating. (NB that the successive male companions are all from hierarchies so are more used to taking a lead from their elders.)
There is not much spinoff fiction featuring Ian and Barbara, but I do recommend Paul Leonard’s Venusian Lullaby, set in between The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Rescue. William Russell has made a couple of Big Finish plays, one of which reprises Ian; Jacqueline Hill appears as a misguided priestess in a late Fourth Doctor story but is unfortunately no longer available.
< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >
More often than not, I complete the last leg of my morning commute by train, arriving at the railway station at Brussel/Bruxelles-Schuman, which is within a hop, skip and jump of my office. Schuman station was opened almost forty years ago (in December 1969) as part of the first axis of what has evolved into the Brussels metro system, between there and the De Brouckère station in the city centre. But I was surprised when I came across a Baedeker map of 1910, almost a century ago, which appeared to show the Schuman station in situ six decades early:
(For those who don’t know Brussels, the station is question is signified by the word "Halte" about half way down the right hand side.)
I delved a bit deeper and came up with this slightly more detailed map:
This time the mysterious proto-Schuman is dignified with the title of "Station" rather than "Halte", again a block west of the Rond Point.
A little more digging reveals that the old station of Wetstraat / Rue de la Loi was opened in May 1865, nine years after the track had been laid between Bruxelles-Nord / Brussel-Noord and the station we now know as Bruxelles-Luxembourg / Brussel-Luxemburg, and closed in 1922. I guess that the commuters of the early 20th century preferred to take the tram between the east and centre of the city, rather than the train which loops quite a long way to the north. Me, I rather enjoy sitting in a comfortable carriage for an extra six minutes.
All trace of the old station has now gone.
(NB that the metro station marked near the Schuman railway station here is actually Maalbeek / Maelbeek; the Schuman metro station is marked at the roundabout.)
But we can get an idea of what it might have looked like
It is now a jazz venue.
I am left with one rather minor nagging mystery.
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
The Swoop: How Clarence Saved England by P. G. Wodehouse
My Name Is Legion by Roger Zelazny
Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller
Ake: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka
The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
Kushiel’s Justice by Jacqueline Carey
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild
Kushiel’s Mercy by Jacqueline Carey
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen
With the Light: v. 2 by Keiko Tobe
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine
Farewell Great Macedon by Moris Farhi
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
This Mortal Mountain – Volume 3: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny
Last Exit to Babylon – Volume 4: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny
Medea by Euripides
Beyond the Sun by Matthew Jones
Fanny Kemble and the lovely land by Constance Wright
Fiction (non-sf): 6 (YTD 58)
SF (not Who): 5 (YTD 84)
Doctor Who / Torchwood / Benny: 6 (YTD 66)
Comics: 1 (YTD 26)
4 (YTD 64/325) by women (Morrison, Goonan, Wilhelm, Armstrong)
1 (YTD 15/325) by PoC (Tomine)
~7,300 pages (YTD 96,200)
Owned for more than a year: 5 (Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang [reread], Islam: A Short History, Time Of Your Life, As I Lay Dying, Notre Dame de Paris)
Also reread: none (YTD 36 rereads)
I may well be at the Tun this Thursday. <small voice>would anyone have a spare bed?</small voice>
Chief Executive Officer and President
Belgacom
Boulevard du Roi Albert II, 27
B-1030 Brussels
(Faxed from a neighbouring office)
30 November 2009
Dear Mr Bellens,
I am writing once again (ref my previous letter to you of 26 March) because I am very dissatisfied with Belgacom’s customer service. Your staff have made three serious mistakes in dealing with my problems in the last week, and I still have no office telephone or fax connection.
I called your customer service to report that my line was not working on Wednesday 25 November. In fact, I thought I might have been disconnected due to the late payment of a bill which I paid on 23 November. Your colleague, however, assured me that my payments were in order and that there was a technical fault, which she said would be fixed within the day.
I called again on Friday 27 November to find out what was happening, as the line had still not been fixed two days later. It turned out that in fact your colleague had not even reported the fault on 25 November so Belgacom had taken no action to resolve my problem.
The person I spoke to on 27 November told me that he had arranged for 1) calls to my fixed line to be forwarded to my mobile phone, and 2) that a technician would come to fix the problem on Monday 30 November between 0800 and 1200. In fact, neither of these promises was kept. No action was taken by your staff to fulfil their commitment to forward calls to my mobile number; I cannot do it via your website (or at least I cannot see how I can do it myself).
This morning, expecting your technician at any time between 0800 and 1200, at very considerable inconvenience, my colleague and I waited for him in my office. I had to leave to attend an important meeting at 1130; apparently your technician arrived at 1207, in other words outside the time that had been arranged. The security guard in my office building authorised your technician to go to my office on the first floor, where apparently he was unable to find my colleague, who was sitting in the office waiting for him with the door open, as she had been for some hours.
I have been given another appointment with one of your technicians for Wednesday morning, 2 December. I am very worried, though, because the confirmation message I got for the appointment references a completely different telephone number. I hope that the technician will come to the right address, at the time that has been agreed.
To recapitulate, I was given three important promises by your staff in the last five days, all three of which were broken. I would also add that I have experienced the following additional problems in dealing with Belgacom over this issue:
I expect, Mr Bellens, that you will refund a substantial part of my monthly bill from Belgacom this month, since I have received no service from you for over a week. And I do not know who is going to pay for my lost time and energy in sorting out the mess.
Sincerely,
Once again, they are bloody lucky that their only competitor in the Brussels region, Tele2, is even worse (difficult thought that may be to imagine).
Occasionally my reading programme drags two related books separately to the top of the “to read” pile, and this was one of those occasions. Both of these are excellent and short guides to their respective subjects.
This really covers only the last two centuries – the period to 1800 is covered in a breathless 35-page first chapter – but I learnt a lot from it. Although I knew the general outline of the fall of the Ottoman Empire (including the Arab revolt) and was also fairly familiar with the highlights of post-1948 history, there was a lot from the three decades between that was new to me, specifically the various imperialist engagements with Arab governments and governance. Really the notion that the US and/or the Europeans could be credible advocates of democracy in the Middle East was always nonsense.
(And on reflection, a further cause for disappointment with Kissinger’s Diplomacy is that it has almost nothing to say on this subject.)
This obviously overlaps a bit with Mansfield, and also with the books about Muhammad and his successors which I had read a couple of years back. I was expecting a largely political history of the Islamic world, but in fact Armstrong gives a fascinating account of the development of Islamic religious thought in its political context. My own political contacts have tended to the more secularised and secularist end of the spectrum (my professional interests in the Balkans, Turkey/Cyprus, Polisario, Somaliland, my relatives from Bangladesh – only one of those areas being Arabic-speaking) and my contacts on the religious side have been rather eclectic (the Bektashi tekke in Tetovo and the followers of Said Nursî in Nicosia) so it was useful to be reminded that these are only a part of the story.
Armstrong makes the point that Islam was always engaged with government and with politics in a way that few other major faiths have been. This has made the encounter between Islam and the modern particularly painful; not helped by the fact that the advocates of secularism and modernity in the Muslim world have tended to be repressive and dictatorial in their actions, and the international community’s havit of excoriating, ignoring or conniving in the corruption or cancellation of the results of democratic elections does not really help.
I don’t remember the other guy at all; apparently his name is Brian Gorman.
