• Reading Gibbon’s "Decline and Fall" – Chapter XXI: Heresy and paganism
  We start briefly with the Donatist schism, which was basically political; and then we have a prolonged and detailed discourse on Platonism and the doctrine of the Trinity, which I must say explained both in more lucid and provocative terms than I recall reading anywhere else. Constantine’s inconstancy opens up further room for debate between Arius and the Catholics, led by Athanasius who gets about a third of the chapter to himself. Finally a brief survey of how well (or badly) the old beliefs were surviving.
  (tags: gibbon)

…who wants to come over to our place to watch Doctor Who next Saturday? 

I got this book out of curiosity: LibraryThing listed it as the top UnSuggestion for both Rasselas and The Stainless Steel Rat, so I wanted to test the system. (This was before I had read Blue Like Jazz, which I got for the same reason, and duly hated.)

The basic plot of the book is revealed in the first chapter: Anna, aged 13, gets a lawyer to help her stop her parents make her donate one of her kidneys to save her sister Kate, 16, to the bewilderment and confusion of their parents. That much is a poignant and engaging story, and I ploughed on to find out how it would end.

SPOILER WARNING

Unfortunately there was too much cuteness in the story to keep my enthusiasm. Picoult really does lay it on thick, by the trowelful. I list the irritating factors here:

1) The girls’ mother is herself a lawyer and represents herself in the court hearing. She is probably the best conveyed and most credible character in the book, but I found this vanishingly improbable behaviour. The poor woman is caring for a dying child and hasn’t practiced law in over a decade (and no indication that she ever practiced family law). Yet she and her husband never seem to have discussed hiring a professional advocate.

2) Anna’s lawyer and her court-appointed guardian ad litem are still getting over their teenage break-up fifteen years earlier. I accept that some people who have their hearts broken as teenagers take a while getting over it, but in my humbe opinion most have got over it by their mid-thirties. What’s more, this is the first time they have spoken since then because in the busy world of family lawyers in Providence, RI, they somehow have never encountered each other before professionally. Rhode Island must be bigger than I had imagined.

3) Kate goes to a dance with a cute fellow patient who then romantically dies a couple of days later, the stress of the evening having proved too much for him.

4) Anna’s lawyer has a grand mal seizure at a crucial point in the proceedings, even though his dog which has been trained to warn him when he is about to have a seizure has been vigorously warning him that he is about to have a seizure.

5) Despite the fact that Anna has been a first-person viewpoint character off and on throughout the book, it is only in the climactic scene that we discover that Kate asked her to go to the lawyer in the first place because she is fed up of being ill and wants to die. This revelation fatally eroded the credibility of Anna’s characterisation for me.

6) It is therefore almost a relief when Anna is killed in a car accident shortly after winning her court case and her kidney is used to save Kate’s life anyway.

So basically I started off wanting to like this book, but found it more and more difficult to do so; and the twists at the end killed any mild whim I might have had to recommend it to other people.

A wholesome tale of an enthusiastic orphan girl accidentally adopted by a brother and sister in rural Prince Edward Island, bringing a mild amount of subversive chaos to their orderly lives and to the life of their small town. It’s not terribly challenging or profound, and the claim made on the cover that Anne is “the most beloved, beguiling and timeless heroine in all of fiction” seems just a tad exaggerated. I don’t think I shall bother with the sequels.

I took B out for an excursion today; first of all crossing the linguistic frontier to the park at Hélécine, ten minutes’ drive from where she lives, a place she always loves visiting; she enjoyed running giggling across the lawns, holding my hand, and seemed to take some interest in the fountains and ducks. She was more hesitant about the climbing frames in the playground, which is a shame because she used to be very agile.

Then I thought I would try some ancient history, and brought her a little further east (and back into Flanders) to the Tumulus of Pepin the Elder, a Frankish magnate of the early 7th century who was, if I calculate correctly, Charlemagne’s great-great-great-grandfather (and therefore probably your ancestor too).

B was a bit dubious about climbing along the brambly paths to the top of the mound, but quite enjoyed running back down the side to the field below. There is a small museum, which is actually a large shed protecting the foundations of the old church on the site; but it was closed, so I didn’t have to tax B’s patience and brought her home (passing through Neerwinden). This page unsportingly suggests that the mound is a 13th-century motte which had nothing to do with Pepin, but I’ll take my romance where I can find it, thanks.

I’d love to read some more detail about early Frankish history. My appetite has been whetted for more information about Brunhilda, who appears to have been one of Pepin’s political rivals. But the only sources seem to be Gregory of Tours and Fredegar

Gosh, it’s almost five years since I listened to episode 1 of Fury from the Deep, and commented on the accent used by John Abineri playing a Dutch character.

I can now bring you the full exchange of what must be the only use of Dutch in the whole Who canon (as far as I remember there isn’t any in Arc of Infinity even though it is set in Amsterdam).

Van Lutyens: Verdomme!

Fraser Hines, narrating: From a walkway overlooking the Control Hall, the Doctor and his companions observe van Lutyens storm off.

Van Lutyens: Koppige [?] idioot! Engelsman!

Jamie: What does kopples iddy oo [?] mean?

The Doctor: I think he’s Dutch, Jamie, and I don’t think he likes the English very much.

Abineri’s accent in Dutch is, er, not quite as far from the real thing as his attempt to reproduce a Dutch accent in English (which sounds simultaneously German and African), but I suppose a decent effort from someone who didn’t speak the language. Would be interested to know what others make of the adjective he uses – I think he is mispronouncing “koppige” as if it were a German word (given that he spoke German), though even then it’s an odd pronunciation of the “g”.

Note also that the Tardis translation circuits don’t seem to work in Dutch.

Facebook folks will have the headlines of this already, but in brief the dental merry-go-round has started again.

Four weeks ago I went back to my dentist for some final cleaning-up on the upper left molar which had been giving me so much trouble, and which the endodontist had at last thoroughly rooted for me. I asked her once again to look at the lower molar which I was sure was hurting, not just reflecting the pain from the upper one. She tapped it a couple of times and realised it was broken; a little more tapping and a large chunk of it came off. At least four dentists had looked at it over the last year or so and not spotten any problem, so I guess it either broke more recently or else just wasn’t very obvious – the crack was lengthways so wouldn’t show up on X-rays. She told me to go back to the endodontist to see if the tooth could be saved.

It took several weeks to get another appointment with the endodontist (she has a ten day waiting list and I missed my frst date when I had man-flu), but when I finally met up with her on Thursday, it took her about ten minutes to shake her head sadly and say that the tooth was too badly fractured to save; it had to come out. My own dentist is less busy and I was able to book her for an extraction first thing Friday.

I was a bit apprehensive but not too much – I had two wisdom teeth out fifteen years ago so reckoned I knew what I was in for. I was wrong; this was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life, as the dentist tried to wrestle fragments of my tooth out of my jaw; I found myself retching and weeping with pain on the chair. I still begged her to give me more anaesthetic and get on with the job, but after 45 minutes she decided that my twisted roots were beyond her skill, and referred me to another specialist, who she referred to as a stomatologist but whose business listing is as a maxillary surgeon. I have a date with her on Monday afternoon, down in Uccle.

Yesterday was almost a complete write-off as a result. I went home to rest and made it back to the office for some essential business in late afternoon, also to pick up the latest run of bacterial spray, painkillers and antibiotics. Young F commented that this had all started with my biting on an olive stone the summer before last, and I think he’s right – the problem with the lower molar may well date back to then, and simply wasn’t spotted because the problems with its upper counterpart were so obvious. But this is getting really old now and I cannot wait for it to be over.

This is a fascinating autobiography. The book, first published in 1995, begins with the death of Barack Obama senior, announced down a bad phone line to his son over a decade earlier; and then divides more or less into two halves: first, of the young Obama’s life without his father, brought up by his mother and her parents and finding a career for himself in the deprived communities of Chicago; and then of his getting to grips with his African family heritage, in particular his father’s troubled personal life and career, culminating in a long narrative of a visit to Kenya. It is an eloquent and emotional account of self-discovery, the first half being particularly acute on the problems of race in the USA, where Obama almost reluctantly becomes an insider. Obviously my main interest in the book was the author’s remarkable subsequent career, but it is very much worth reading in its own right.

I wrote a few months back about the possible configurations of the coming election in the Northern Ireland constituency of North Down, which until this week was represented by the only remaining MP from the Ulster Unionist Party, the former party of government under the old Stormont regime.

Well, Lady Sylvia Hermon announced her resignation from the UUP yesterday, which means that for the first time since the party was founded it does not have a single member in the House of Commons (there are handful of cross-benchers in the House of Lords who remain affiliated with the party).

I predicted in my previous post that if Lady Hermon, even running as an independent against the UUP/Conservative candidate, must be considered front-runner to retain the seat, especially if she gets the support, whether formal or informal, of parties like Alliance and the Greens. The Alliance candidate, my good friend Stephen Farry, says he is fighting on.

What I had not anticipated is the sudden swirl of rumours that the DUP, who I saw as the strongest competition to Lady Hermon, may actually decline to contest the seat against her. The DUP, now dominant in Unionism, have been running strong on ‘Unionist unity’ in the most recent period, challenging the UUP to agree joint candidates in the nationalist-held seats of Fermanagh-South Tyrone and South Belfast, and even hinting that they might stand aside unilaterally in the absence of a formal deal. The DUP also have recent form on not contesting elections when it doesn’t suit them.

I suspect Lady Hermon must feel somewhat ambivalent at the prospect of DUP support. Her branding, after all, is as the sensible end of the Unionist spectrum, with the ability to gain votes from the entire population. I’m sure she would prefer to win by defeating the DUP candidate than with DUP support. But the choice is not hers to make.

We had all been invited to a working lunch with the Prime Minister. I was rather pleased with the way the seating worked out: I ended up sitting opposite an American bloke, who was seated between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister on the other side of the table. To my left was the nice lady who was paying for the lunch (and therefore opposite the PM); to my right, a Brussels thinktanker opposite the foreign minister and marooned beyond her a bloke who was advising the PM; and further to my left, another half dozen assorted people beyond the PM and our hostess.

The background noise was terrible. I knew the restaurant well – near my former place of work, and rather good for a confidential tête-à-tête. But for a “working lunch” with a dozen people, it was disastrous. The prime minister was sitting between the American bloke opposite me and his own ambassador, who was translating for him; my former boss, sitting directly on the other side of the ambassador, could not hear her translation at all (she is very soft-spoken and my ex-boss is very hard of hearing).

Once I found a polite way of talking down-table to the foreign minister while courteously ignoring the prime minister’s inaudible remarks up-table, it was OK. But still, frankly, awkward. I could see how this had happened – the ambassador (or more likely one of her staff) had recommended the restaurant because of the quality of the food, rather than considering the acoustics; the sponsors of the lunch, perhaps not knowing the venue as well as I do, had concurred without reflecting on the logistics. I enjoyed the meal anyway, though I noticed that the prime minister and foreign minister both left their main courses largely untouched.

In general this was a bit of a wasted opportunity of a lunch, but I suspect also important lessons learned all round. And the foreign minister and I were able to bond a little by whining to each other about the set-up.

A good historical and literary survey of whaling: Hoare chases down all sorts of information about whales and their exploitation by humans; I had forgotten just how bad things had got in the 1970s before the whaling ban came into force (as far as it did); but it’s also amazing just how little is known about whales, because of the difficulty of carrying out direct research on them. Hoare also reflects on Herman Melville and the composition of his great work, and even tracks down a specific whale skeleton in Yorkshire which is explicitly mentioned in Moby-dick. I’ve only had one encounter with whales, and I have to admit that I found it rather difficult to process exactly what I was seeing; the scale of the creature is just so large that I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret the evidence of my senses. Anyway, Hoare helped me make sense of it all, though Melville’s book is better.

This is a brilliant, erotic, somewhat mystical novel, about a teenage boy in County Antrim in the 1950s who finds himself crossing into the Different Kingdom of the title and finding his faerie lover while looking for his lost relative (and then reminiscing about it in exile in London, years later). Kearney’s images of the Northern Irish countryside are perfect (“clouds of midges floating like gauze in the air”). His construction of the fantasy otherwhere has the energy of total conviction. I’m surprised that this novel isn’t better known – it addresses (sometimes a little cryptically) all the problems of identity with which we from Northern Ireland are all too familiar; and if it is a little naïve in places, it is none the less heartfelt.

I wasn’t expecting these till the end of the month, so was very glad to be able to listen to both The Emperor of Eternity and The Architects of History which on various errands over the weekend. 

The Emperor of Eternity, unfortunately, didn’t really satisfy me. It’s a straight historical tale of Two, Jamie and Victoria ending up in the China of Emperor Qin in 210 BC, penned by Nigel Robinson who is rather far down my list of favoured Who writers. His prose is not as flat here as it sometimes has been, but he clearly doesn’t understand how to write for audio – dramatic incidents happen off-screen, peculiarly paced switching between direct and indirect speech, and also totally fails to convey the on-screen characterisation of the Tardis crew – I’m in the middle of the Victoria stories at present in my rewatch, and basically Robinson makes Victoria too stupid and Jamie too smart. In the extra track, Deborah Watling tries almost successfully to convey that she understood what was going on, while the production team compliment Robinson on how well he conveyed the sort-of samurai setting (further comment unnecessary I think).

The Architects of History is a decent close to the story of Elisabeth Klein, who we last saw trying to rewrite the ending of the second world war to suit herself; Stephen Lyons is a generally solid-to-good writer who invented her in Colditz in the first place, and now gets to bring in both some aliens called Selachians which he apparently had previously used in two Second Doctor novels (must try and get hold of them). The second best thing about the story is the intricate way in which Lyons sets up various alternative histories across which the Doctor and Klein are variously plotting (he reflects on the extra track that Star Trek: Voyager over-used this plot, which I must admit I was unaware of); the best thing about it is the way he personalises it with Lenora Crichlow of Being Human as a Seventh-Doctor-Companion-Who-Never-Was – very difficult to make us care about a character who is introduced to us as having loads of back story which we have never heard of before (and may never hear of again), but between Lyons’ script and Crichlow’s performance they pull it off.

Though I have an odd complaint – some of the guest cast are really very flat in the first episode or so, as if they hadn’t really read the script properly or just that the recording booth was not comfortable. They warm up as it goes on, but it’s unusual enough for this to happen in a BF production that I noted it.

In summary, The Emperor of Eternity is not strongly recommended, while The Architects of HIstory is a satisfying conclusion to the Klein arc but may not make much sense if you haven’t hear both Colditz and Survival of the Fittest.

Conservative candidate for the Western Isles wants to develop the harbour in Achmore, which sadly is the only village in the Western Isles which is not located on the coast. (Which certainly makes it an imaginative and forward-looking policy.)

Hat-tip to Mark Pack.

I reread this for Ian‘s classic book club, so am putting this below the cut in case anyone who will be at Monday’s discussion (I won’t be!) hasn’t finished it yet and is concerned about spoilers.

I really love this book. I first read it in 1985, and reread it again for a meeting at the TCD Theological Society in about 1992. The story of Ahab and his monomaniacal mission infecting the crew and accelerating to the disastrous climax is a compelling one anyway; but Melville packs it with parentheses on whales and whaling, veering off occasionally into other topics such as the evil side of whiteness. As far as there is a popular consciousness about whaling at all, we owe it to Melville. Some of his statements have not stood the test of time, but all add to the picture, and the wordsmithing of the descriptive writing is just fantastic.

But I also love the way Melville plays with the narrative voice. My own feeling is that the first dozen or so chapters are written in a consciously moock-heroic voice, and that the book only gets serious once we reach the church in New Bedford. From then on, this is a grave tale. Melville switches from the first-person of the first part of the book, to various arrangements of omniscient narrator, tight-third with Ahab or the crew, or even dramatic dialogue and soliloquy, keeping us readers on our toes, challenging us to assess who is telling us the story and how and why.

Moby-dick is a very religious book, but not a very Christian one. The Bible is quoted freely, and as I said earlier the church in New Bedford is an early pivotal point. But Queequeg’s worship of Yojo is in some ways better than, and certainly no more foolish than, the Christianity of most of Melville’s characters and contemporary readership. Several of the other crew members are identified by religion – Fedallah, the Parsee; the sailor from Belfast whose one line makes it clear that he is a Catholic. This is, fundamentally, the story of a man who elevates an animal to become his god, and determines to slay it; and is of course in the end slain himself by the object of his obsession.

I tried Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter a while back, and totally bounced off it, though the two authors were close friends and the two books published within a year of each other. Somehow Hawthorne’s novel was both too verbose and too comfortable in its acceptance of the framework of Puritan social norms for me; Melville is also verbose, but not over the top, and the novel deeply subversive of religion and class (though not so much of race). And in the end, the prose is just fantastic, and you can’t ask for more than that.

See also Ray Bradbury’s Green Shadows, White Whale, about making the film with John Huston in Ireland.

• Whose Who? | WalesHome.org
  Derrick Sherwin reminisces about his time on Doctor Who, handling the Troughton / Pertwee transition
  (tags: doctorwho)

My colleague Carne Ross is on ABC National’s radio show ‘Future Tense’ this morning (Thursday 18th, by the time you read this) at 0830, repeated Friday 19th at 1230. Details and downloadable extract here.

(Also downloadable for non-Australian residents who may be interested.)

When Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature a couple of years ago, I had never heard of him. This is much his most easily obtainable book, and it was also strongly endorsed by , so I had been looking forward to reaching it.

I was very impressed. Le Clézio tells the story of Esther, a Jewish girl displaced from France over the Alps to Italy and eventually to Israel in the mid-1940s; her story briefly touches on that of Nejda, a Palestinian girl who becomes a refugee as a result of the 1948 conflict. The book is beautifully expressive of both the geographical landscapes of the Alps and Palestine, and of the psychological landscape of displacement, homelessness, and building new ties. I did wish we had learned more about what happens to Nejda in the end, and was a bit disappointed that the last few chapters were about Esther’s life decades later. But the pluses outweigh the minuses. I am still hoping for an English translation of Le Clézio’s Désert, which is about the Western Sahara.

It being St Patrick’s Day, I am going to post about the city of Tuzla, where I spent my first night in Bosnia back in early 1997. Looking around the office of my newly acquired colleagues, I spotted a map of the city – I think it may even have been this one. I had not studied much Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian at the time, but one word I did know was "Irac", meaning "Irishman". And I immediately spotted that one of the suburbs of Tuzla, off to the west of the city, rejoices in the name of "Irac".

I asked my Bosnian colleagues how this had come about, but they professed ignorance, other than confirming that "Irac" does indeed mean "Irishman", and so I left the issue as one of many intriguing mysteries about the country.

Well, I have come a little closer to resolving it. The street name next to the place name on the map is "Ivana Markovića Irca", and a little digging leads me to a Serbian Wikipedia page about Ivan Marković "Irac", a Partisan fighter during the second world war – Tuzla was always proud of its Partisan tradition, and Marković was a local boy from Gračanica, northwest of Tuzla – and was eventually hunted down by the Chetniks in 1942 a few km to the east of the city, so obviously the glorious people’s planners of a later decade decided to commemorate him. There appears to be a school (maybe two schools, I’m not sure) named after him in Špionica farther to the north.

The Wikipedia page does not, however, explain how he got his nickname, and I remain puzzled. Just for context, I note that he was a Bosnian Croat. It is not easy to dig into this when my command of the language is rather basic and when there are lots of other people with the same or similar names – such as for instance the Slovak intellectual Ivan Markovič who died in Buchenwald two years after his near namesake was killed on the Bosnian mountainside. So the mystery, though now slightly enriched, remains.

• "Lost" Shakespeare play published
  Another one to read…
  (tags: shakespeare)

I thought I’d done really well by pre-ordering Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of “Doctor Who” by the Women Who Love It from The Book Depository well in advance. But they sent me an email just now to say that they have run out of stock already! – and publication date I think was yesterday! Bah. Have emailed one of the Brussels bookshops to see if they can order it in somehow.

The third in the Artemis Fowl series, which I picked up cheap at a book fair the other week. Artemis Fowl is a thirteen-year-old criminal genius, based in Ireland, dealing with the law enforcement authorities of the fairy world and the mafia bosses of this one (the book is mainly set in London and Chicago). Colfer is a witty enough writer but it didn’t especially grab me.

A peculiar whim moved me to watch this early Cliff Richard vehicle last night. It was made in 1961 when he was only 21, and the plot (according to Wikipedia) was ripped off for The Blues Brothers – our hero and his friends put on a benefit show to save their beloved orphanage night club, despite the efforts of law enforcement to prevent them. (Actually, wasn’t this also true of every episode of Fame?)

The standout acting performance is Robert Morley, playing Cliff’s father who is also incidentally the property developer who wants to build an office block on the night club. Slightly more uneasy is Carole Gray as Cliff’s romantic interest, partly because Cliff himself doesn’t exude sufficient lust to match her. She went on to a brief but notable career in horror films. My whimsical reason for watching the film was the other main female character, Barbara, who is played by Annette Robinson who appeared four years later in Doctor Who as Anne Chaplette in The Massacre. Here she has long red hair, and isn’t quite as confident as Carole Gray (there is one scene where she repeatedly declares that she is Cleopatra for some reason). Also noted: to a dyed blond Melvyn Hayes, playing one of Cliff’s male sidekicks, and future sitcom star Richard O’Sullivan, playing the other one.

Anyway, one doesn’t really watch this for the acting. The point of the film for Cliff to sing some slow romantic songs, including the title piece (which he sings to Gray walking through a park, surrounded by children who mob the couple as they are about to kiss), and he does it very well; and we don’t quite get enough of The Shadows, but what we get is great. Even better, however, are the absolutely stunning dance scenes of Cliff’s friends preparing and performing their show. I found this reminiscent of the great Gene Kelly sequences in Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris, except that they are less focussed on the star (Cliff not being as notable a dancer as a singer) and also make a lot more sense in the context of the film. This is some of the best choreography I can remember seeing on screen, and it’s reason enough on its own to hunt down the film.

I spent most of last week in bed, and finally got round to watching this great example of the Star Trek genre, which I had not seen before (I still haven’t seen the third or fourth films in the series either). Ricardo Montalban as Khan, and Kirstie Alley, years before Cheers, as Vulcan fledgling captain Saavik are both rather more memorable than the returning crew, but that’s OK. The plot and execution are sufficiently close to the better episodes from the 60s, updated for 80s sensibilities, to succeed in what it aims to do.

I was struck especially by the resonances of Spock’s death scene in New Who. RTD has done a couple of scenes which feel to me now as if they are conscious references to it – the Ten/Jack conversation in Utopia (though of course Jack isn’t actually dying, which is partly the point) and Ten’s own self-sacrifice in The End of Time II. Am I imagining this? Are there other famous examples of protagonists being killed by radiation poisoning on the other side of a transparent screen which I have missed?

• reading_gibbon: Chapter XX: The conversion of Constantine and the establishment of Christianity
  The first half of the chapter is an investigation into Constantine’s conversion, one of Gibbon’s few attempts to get under the skin of a complex psychological individual who made a crucial political decision, and on whom the historical sources are in sometimes vigorous conflict. The second half of the chapter is a description of the political set-up of the Christian church during and after Constantine’s reign.
  (tags: gibbon)

The title of this short book is not explained until the last chapter, but the subtitle is clear: The mysterious world of mushrooms, molds and mycologists. I was fascinated. I had no idea of just how dangerous fungi can be – inhalation of spores, poison, corrosion of building materials to make our houses collapse. I had no idea of the massive Armillaria, probably the world’s largest single organism, lurking under 2200 acres of Oregon woodland. I had no idea of the tiny Ingold fungi digesting flotsam in streams. And I had only the vaguest idea of why mushrooms are the shape they are.

It’s fascinating stuff and unfortunately Money’s writing style isn’t always up to it; at times he is too technical for a general audience, and elsewhere is not as deft at weaving peronal reminiscence into his narrative as, say, Gould (though few could match him). But his enthusiasm shines through, particularly his almost inarticulate joy in the process of research and discovery; and his material is vastly more interesting than I had thought it could be. I enjoyed this book much more than I had expected to.

I’m not sure why I bought this particular guidebook to Doctor Who between 1963 and 2009, and I don’t think I would recommend it to other readers. It tries to do several things – outlining the history of the show and plot synopses of the best remembered episodes, tying in to social and political events of the time, looking at literary and genre sources – but doesn’t do any of them very thoroughly. Fans who have already dipped into reference books about the series will find little new here; I hope that those readers for whom this is their first book about the history of Who are stirred by it to go and buy better ones.

One area where it is peculiarly lacking is actual references. There is no chronological index, an omission explained by lack of space and the availability of the information online, but this leaves a sort of vague impression about the details of the show’s history. Few calendar dates are given other than the year. Citations given in an appendix are incomplete – where, for instance, can we find the 2008 online debate with Ian Levine cited on pages 192-193? The back cover blurb promises “unique” interviews with Barry Letts and Philip Hinchcliffe, but this actually means extracts from pieces previously published in Dreamwatch, so not all that unique then.

I’m interested at least to see someone else pick up on the possible importance of the 1943 Tommy Handley vehicle Time Flies as inspiration for Who – I wrote about this two years ago, and Robb cites an article making the same point by Phil Norman and Chris Diamond in TV Cream’s Anatomy of Cinema (which turns out on further research to be a book on forgotten films published in 2007).

However, I think even completists can skip this one fairly safely. (And I wish I could remember why I decided to buy it.)

For your edification, a list of regular characters in Doctor Who, ranked by how many of the episodes of their era (defined by first appearance to last regular appearance) have been destroyed.

1) Katarina – 80% (4/5)
Of the five episodes Adrienne Hill was in, only one survives, making her the Most Burninated Companion.

=2) Sara Kingdom – 77.8% (7/9)
Again, the sad loss of three quarters of The Daleks’ Master Plan means we have only two episodes of Sara.

=2) Ben and Polly – 77.8% (28/36)
This number goes down a bit if you drop episodes in which they did not appear; neither was in episodes 4 and 5 of The Faceless Ones and Polly gets a week off in Power of the Daleks, all of them missing episodes. Their only intact story is their first, The War Machines.

5) Victoria – 70% (28/40)
I’m counting from her debut in the second episode of Evil of the Daleks to the end of Fury from the Deep. Like Ben and Polly, she has only one intact story, Tomb of the Cybermen.

6) Steven – 63.0% (29/46)
Like Katarina and Sara, a victim of the Season Three purges, but more fortunate in that three complete stories survive – The Time Meddler, The Ark and The Gunfighters. (Also his first appearance in the last episode of The Chase.)

7) The Second Doctor – 52.9% (63/119)
Yep, fewer than half of the Second Doctor’s episodes remain, and only six complete stories out of 21. The losses are particularly bad in Seasons Four and Five (as evidenced by the higher rankings of Ben, Polly and Victoria above). Troughton gets a couple of episodes off but it doesn’t affect his ranking.

8) Jamie – 50.4% (57/113)
Since there were only six Second Doctor episodes without Jamie, and they are all missing, his percentage is slightly lower.

[Parenthesis: of the twelve black-and-white episodes with Colonel / Brigadier Alastair Gordon-Stewart, precisely half survive and half are lost – he is not in the first episode of either The Web of Fear or The Invasion. However at this stage he is a recurring character rather than a regular on the show.]

9) Dodo – 42.1% (8/19)
Not a particular favourite of most fans, Dodo none the less got off lightly in the Season Three purges, with only one of her full stories (The Savages) being completely wiped.

10) The First Doctor – 34.3% (46/134)
The spread is very uneven with only 11 episodes deleted from the 81 of the first two seasons, but almost two thirds of the remainder lost, including his last one. Hartnell took more time off than Troughton, but again this won’t affect his ranking.

11) Vicki – 28.2% (11/39)
Vicki does better at the start than the end of her era: only two episodes out of 30 are missing from her first seven stories, but then the final nine (counting Mission to the Unknown, which of course she isn’t actually in) are all lost.

12) Zoe – 20.8% (10/49)
Season Six has survived better than the other Second Doctor stories, and five of Zoe’s eight stories are intact. (And we don’t weep too much for The Space Pirates.)

13) Susan – 17.6% (9/51)
Almost all of the first run of stories has survived, the only casualties from Season One being Marco Polo and two episodes of The Reign of Terror.

=14) Ian and Barbara – 14.3% (11/77)
The Coal Hill school teachers benefit from the relative survival of Season One, and even more so from Season Two, where only two episodes of The Crusade are missing. Proportionally Ian and Barbara are the best represented of the early regular characters, making them jointly the Least Burninated Companions (of those who were burninated at all, of course).

Odd that the beginning and end of the black and white era have survived relatively well; it’s the middle that has been hollowed out. One can always hope for a few stray finds in someone’s garage or attic to rebalance the odds.

I thought this was a particularly good book in the Rebus series (which I am already almost halfway through). There are several plot lines, involving the oil industry, Glasgow gangs, serial killers old and new, and Rebus’s own career problems. It is rather longer than the previous books, but I found it very hard to put down. I also appreciated the visits to Aberdeen, Shetland and the oil rigs (as well as Glasgow), taking us out of the usual Edinburgh beat. The ending is satisfactory for the reader, though not really for Rebus. I think I’d recommend Black and Blue as a good novel to start reading Rankin with; there is no real need to read them in chronological order as I am doing.