Doctor Who monthly’s latest issue publishes the results of a reader poll of all 200 Doctor Who stories to date, ranked in order of popularity. (The article also includes scores for the two Dalek films and other ephemera, but never mind that). The top stories are difficult to argue with, though I am sorry that the best of the black and white era doesn’t feature higher. The bottom of the list is impossible to dispute, with The Twin Dilemma coming last by a very significant margin.

There is plenty of discussion going on elsewhere, but my idea for turning this into a meme is to do the list with the stories which you think should be ranked much higher in blue and the stories that you think should be ranked much lower in red, for whatever definition of "much" you feel happy with. (LJ’s rich text posting will let you do this; also there’s always the option of typing <font color="red">…</font> and <font color="blue">…</font> around the text you want to alter). I’ve cut-n-pasted the list from here, but also added which Doctor is in each story. If you haven’t seen all of them, I encourage you to do this anyway but just put the ones you haven’t seen in italics.

001. The Caves of Androzani. (5)
002. Blink. (10)
003. Genesis of the Daleks. (4)
004. The Talons of Weng-Chiang. (4)
005. The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances. (9)
006. Human Nature / The Family of Blood. (10)
007. Pyramids of Mars. (4)
008. City of Death. (4)
009. The Robots of Death. (4)
010. Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways. (9)
011. The Girl in The Fireplace. (10)
012. Turn Left. (10)
013. The Stolen Earth / Journeys End. (10)
014. Remembrance of the Daleks. (7)
015. Dalek. (9)
016. The Seeds of Doom. (4)
017. Terror of the Zygons. (4)
018. The Evil of the Daleks. (2)
019. Earthshock. (5)
020. The Deadly Assassin. (4)
021. Power of the Daleks. (2)
022. Army of Ghosts. (9)
023. Web of Fear. (2)
024. Silence in the Library. (10)
025. Tomb of the Cybermen. (2)
026. Horror of Fang Rock (4)
027. Last of the Time Lords (10)
028. The Ark in Space (4)
029. The War Games (2)
030. The Curse of Fenric. (7)
031. The Invasion (2)
032. Inferno. (3)
033. School Reunion (10)
034. The Daemons (3)
035. The Impossible Planet (10)
036. Spearhead From Space. (3)
037. The Daleks. (1)
038. The Five Doctors. (1,2,3,5)
039. The Green Death (3)
040. The Brain of Morbius (4)
041. Fury from the Deep (2)
042. The Daleks’ Master Plan (1)
043. Midnight. (10)
044. The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1)
045. Doctor Who and the Silurians (3)
046. Revelation of the Daleks. (6)
047. The Time Warrior (3)
048. The Christmas Invasion (10)
049. Fathers Day (9)
050. The Sea Devils (3)
051. Terror of the Autons. (3)
052. Tooth and Claw. (10)
053. Logopolis. (4)
054. The Unquiet Dead. (9)
055. The Tenth Planet. (1)
056. The Fires of Pompeii. (10)
057. The Aztecs. (1)
058. The Three Doctors. (1,2,3)
059. The Abominable Snowmen. (2)
060. The Mind Robber. (2)
061. An Unearthly Child. (1)
062. Carnival Of Monsters. (3)
063. Rose. (9)
064. The Shakespeare Code. (10)
065. Marco Polo. (1) – I’m actually watching the recon of this at the moment, and it is really good.
066. Smith and Jones. (10)
067. The Stones of Blood. (4)
068. Rise of the Cybermen. (10)
069. Kinda. (5)
070. The Keeper of Traken. (4)
071. Day of the Daleks. (3)
072. Enlightenment. (5)
o73. Image of the Fendahl. (4)
074. Gridlock. (10)
075. The Time Meddler. (1)
076. Ghost Light. (7)
077. The Visitation. (5)
078. The Ice Warriors. (2)
079. Planet of the Ood. (10)
080. Survival. (7)
081. Warriors Gate. (4)
082. The Curse of Peladon. (3)
083. The Unicorn and the Wasp. (10)
084. Planet of Evil. (4)
085. The Masque of Mandragora. (4)
086. The Massacre. (1)
087. State of Decay. (4)
088. Castrovalva. (4)
089. Planet of the Spiders. (3)
090. The Ambassadors of Death. (3)
091. The Sontaran Stratagem. (10)
092. The Mind of Evil. (3)
093. Resurrection of the Daleks. (5)
094. The End of the World. (9)
095. The Androids of Tara. (4)
096. The Hand of Fear. (4)
097. The Romans. (1)
098. Partners in Crime. (10)
099. Planet of the Dead. (10)
100. The Crusade. (1)
101. Full Circle. (4)
102. Mawdryn Undead. (5)
103. The Sontaran Experiment. (4)
104. Frontios. (5)
105. The Ribos Operation. (4)
106. Robot. (4)
107. The Next Doctor. (10)
108. The War Machines. (1)
109. The Pirate Planet. (4)
110. The Awakening. (5)
111. The Seeds of Death. (2)
112. The Moonbase. (2)
113. Frontier in Space. (3)
114. Voyage of the Damned. (3)
115. The Runaway Bride. (3)
116. The Face of Evil. (4)
117. Black Orchid. (5)
118. Planet of the Daleks. (3)
119. The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. (7)
120. Snakedance. (5)
121. Destiny of the Daleks. (4)
122. The Faceless Ones. (2)
123. The Android Invasion. (4)
124. Vengeance on Varos. (6)
125. The Two Doctors. (2,6)
126. The Myth Makers. (1)
127. The Rescue. (1)
128. Death to the Daleks. (3)
129. The Claws of Axos. (3)
130. Revenge of the Cybermen. (4)
131. Invasion of the Dinosaurs. (3)
132. Aliens of London. (9)
133. Mission to the Unknown. (no Doctor but during first Doctor’s era)
[The Ultimate Foe (6)]
134. Planet of Fire. (5)
135. Doctor Who The TV Movie. (8)
136. 42. (10)
137. The Macra Terror. (2)
138. The Idiots Lantern. (10)
139. The Enemy of the World. (2)
140. The Doctors Daughter. (10)
141. Boom Town. (9)
142. The Trial of a Time Lord. (6)
143. New Earth. (10)
144. The Reign of Terror. (1)
145. The Highlanders. (2)
146. Battlefield. (7)
147. The Sun Makers. (4)
148. The Mark of the Rani. (7)
149. The Leisure Hive. (4)
150. The Lazarus Experiment. (10)
151. The Celestial Toymaker. (1)
152. Evolution of the Daleks. (10)
[Terror of the Vervoids (6)]
153. Love and Monsters. (10)
154. The Ark. (1)
155. The Invasion of Time. (4)
156. The Wheel in Space. (2)
157. The Chase. (2)
158. Edge of Destruction. (1)
159. The Smugglers. (1)
160. The Keys of Marinus. (1)
[Mindwarp (6)]
161. Attack of the Cybermen. (6)
162. The Savages. (1)
163. Planet of Giants. (1)
164. The Invisible Enemy. (4)
165. The Long Game. (9)
[The Mysterious Planet (6)]
166. The Krotons. (2)
167. Nightmare of Eden. (4)
168. The Armageddon Factor. (4)
169. Terminus. (5)
170. The Happiness Patrol. (7)
171. Colony in Space. (3)
172. Galaxy 4. (1)
173. Four to Doomsday. (5)
174. The Power of Kroll. (4)
175. The Gunfighters. (1)
176. Silver Nemesis. (7)
177. Arc of Infinity. (5)
178. The Web Planet. (1)
179. The Monster of Peladon. (3)
180. Delta and the Bannermen. (7)
181. The King’s Demons. (5)
182. The Mutants. (3)
183. The Sensorites. (1)
184. The Creature from the Pit. (1)
185. Warriors Of The Deep. (5)
186. Dragonfire. (7)
187. The Time Monster. (3)
188. Meglos. (4)
189. The Horns Of Nimon. (4)
190. The Space Museum. (1)
191. The Dominators. (2)
192. Fear Her. (10)
193. Paradise Towers. (7)
194. The Underwater Menace. (2)
195. The Space Pirates. (2)
196. Time-Flight. (5)
197. Underworld. (4)
198. Time and the Rani. (7)
199. Timelash. (6)
200. The Twin Dilemma. (6)

The worst injustice is The Daleks’ Master Plan coming as low as 42nd; I think this is probably because few have settled down to the whole 12-episode saga in a frame of mind to appreciate it. I will never understand the popularity of Remembrance of the Daleks, but the most over-rated story in the poll for my money is The Faceless Ones, which if it weren’t for Pauline Collins should have been in the last ten, and in no way deserves even the rather low rank of 122nd.

This is a somewhat frustrating book. The opening chapters, based apparently on the author’s PhD thesis about diplomacy in the nineteenth century, are pretty dull, even soporific. But once Kissinger gets to the twentieth century, it all gets rather exciting – particularly as regards the foreign policy of Germany in the period between the two world wars and between 1945 and 1961; I don’t think I have read a better analysis. But then, rather surprisingly, as Kissinger himself becomes an actor the book becomes less interesting; his fascination with the characters of Nixon and Reagan robs him of any ability to judge their efforts objectively, and even his account of ending the Vietnam War is repetitious and oddly unenlightening.

The book fails to establish its main intellectual theses which are that a) America is unique in bringing its own moral values to international diplomacy and b) that this is only successful when these are consciously married to a realist perception of what is possible. The first proposition is easily falsified by the large number of other countries which have attempted to export their own ideologies to the rest of the world. America has been more successful, admittedly (though the jury must surely still be out on the Chinese), but that’s not the same as being unique.

The second proposition is trickier. Kissinger’s bête noire is John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, who he blames for Suez, Hungary and the initial and irreversible commitment to Vietnam. But on Kissinger’s evidence, the problem with Dulles was not faulty ideology but poor personal management skills; Dulles made speeches without reference to his own officials’ painstakingly compiled research, containing commitments on which he was utterly unable to deliver (or, worse, from which it was impossible for him to disengage). It was, on Kissinger’s account, fortunate for Dulles that for most of his term of office the Soviet Union was led by Khrushchev, whose own personal management skills were even worse.

Kissinger’s praise for Ronald Reagan, despite his total lack of intellectual depth (which Kissinger describes in a couple of devastating phrases), is further evidence for my view that knowing a lot about international relations in theory is not a good qualification for actually being involved in practice. I’m dubious anyway about the genuine value of Reagan’s legacy – again, on Kissinger’s own evidence, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze first discussed how to change the Soviet Union years before Reagan came to power, thanks to the CSCE process started by Nixon and ended by Ford; SDI had little to do with it. But if you think Reagan was in any way successful, that in itself is a serious strike against the idea that studying IR is any use at all (other than for potentially generating literature to be read by other IR scholars, rather than practitioners). Kissinger damns Carter by barely mentioning him.

I also found fault with Kissinger’s analysis of American discourse. He singles out the Vietnam war as having been a uniquely divisive and horrible event in the American psyche. But the more I read about American history, the more it seems to me that the nasty, viscerally horrible debate that was happening 40 years ago about Vietnam, the brutal debate happening now about health care, the question of slavery which sparked armed conflict in the 1860s, the division between John Adams and Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s, that this style is all fairly characteristic of the standard mode of American discourse. It’s not for the faint-hearted, and it’s not for me, but it’s a recurrent phenomenon through history. I’m sure that for Kissinger and for many of his colleagues, Vietnam was a uniquely searing experience. But in the context of American history, it seems less so (at least to me).

Cyprus conspiracy theorists will be (and already have been) disappointed that the island is not mentioned even once in the book.

It is over 25 years since I last read this book; it was one of our set texts for Eng Lit O-level, so I remembered it as a source of material for essay-writing rather than as an actual reading pleasure. I had forgotten quite a lot of it:

1. that little Adèle is probably Rochester’s illegitimate daughter
2. the whole death scene of Jane’s aunt
3. Jane’s inheritance from the uncle in Madeira
4. that Jane is actually a rather sassy, assertive teenager, who knows what is best for her and, very gracefully, refuses to take crap from anyone (though like her author she is a bit of a snob and racist)
5. the repeated instances of the supernatural – prophetic dreams, culminating in her hearing Rochester call to her from a hundred miles away – which make it a magical rather than realistic novel
6. that it is actually a very enjoyable book.

My Penguin edition has an excellent introduction and a few well-considered endnotes by Queenie Leavis, which shed extra light on the text without showing off the editor’s command of trivia. Brilliant stuff.

• What’s wrong with the Irish Greens | David Cronin | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
  (tags: ireland eu climatechange)
• The Associated Press: EU nations fail to agree on bluefin tuna ban
  Disgraceful.
  (tags: fish)
• Rid Europe of "tac nukes" | open Democracy News Analysis
  …without public announcements, the administration of President George W. Bush removed all nuclear weapons from Greece in 2001 and from Britain in 2008, plus withdrawing most of the deployed weapons from Germany in 2007 and a large number from Italy… Today, five countries [Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey] host "tactical" nuclear weapons… The basing countries thereby have many of the responsibilities of nuclear weapon states but little of the ultimate authority… Does NATO unity really depend on outmoded weapons and increasingly obsolescent delivery aircraft? … Washington and five European capitals have it easily within their power to create a de facto European nuclear weapon free zone between the French and Russian borders. No real security would be lost; much money would be saved.
  (tags: war)

The Fifth Doctor novels have rather a good strike rate for me (the audios even more so). This confirmed the trend: a sequel to the Fourth Doctor’s TV story Planet of Evil, with the Morestran empire, centuries later, destroying itself by experimenting both with anti-matter and harnessing the kinetic energy of the planets, at the same time riven by internal conflict between church and state. Messingham’s concepts of anti-matter and planetary kinetics are pretty disconnected from actual science, but faithful enough to the spirit of the story which he is sequelling (and improving on). We have, as so often in Fifth Doctor novels, a rather good Nyssa storyline as she goes off investigating with dire consequences; Tegan is less well served. The Doctor here is somewhat damaged from his previous encounters with anti-matter (including Omega) which also takes the story in interesting directions. The Morestran politics are somewhat improbable but well told. I recommend this one.

Apparently Nixon hung portraits of Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson in the Oval Office. Is there any information available as to which portraits were chosen by other presidents?

(My bet on the current one and his predecessor would be Kennedy/Lincoln, and Bush Sr/Reagan.)

We got a bulletin from CD&V, the prime minister’s political party, through the door yesterday. This was supposedly targeted at the needs of our small village (where the party’s national chairman happens to be a resident). Now, I am rather charmed by the current PM, but his predecessor, who was from the same party, struck me as a total disaster (and now, God help us, he is our foreign minister; maybe he will be more mellow when not dealing with his fellow Belgians). On the other hand again, I have met several other CD&V ex-prime ministers (Dehaene, Tindemans, Eyskens) and been impressed by them (though all three predate the party’s most recent name change). So I was prepared to be open-minded about the CD&V.

Not any more, I’m afraid. The second page of the leaflet boldly proclaims their new legislative initiatives – not as part of the government, but as proposals from individual CD&V senators. The first of these was to make it compulsory for cyclists to wear fluorescent clothes. Not a word about punishing bad driving more severely, or even doing something positive to increase road safety like build more bike lanes; no, legislate against the victims, that is the CD&V answer.

But the offensiveness of that proposal is far exceeded by the other one that caught my eye, to make it illegal for women to wear face-covering clothes in public, one reason given being that it makes “many people” (ie CD&V voters) feel insecure. It’s difficult to know where to start; I am aware that this is a deeply contentious issue, but as far as I am concerned, if it was wrong for Ireland’s English rulers to ban the wearing of Irish traditional clothing in 1367, it is wrong for the Belgian state to oppress its own citizens (and residents) in that way in the 21st century. Perhaps the CD&V will equalise their proposal by also banning the wearing of face-covering masks at Carnival time, but I am not holding my breath.

With any luck the other parties in the senate will kill these proposals off before they even get near the lower house.

• http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/main.php?id=47884&amp;cat_id=1
  "At this point the challenge is how to go about flushing out the Cyprus moon rock"
  (tags: cyprus space)
• doctorwho: Trivia fact: If you decided to sit down
  and watch the complete canonical Whoniverse in one sitting without toilet breaks, sleep or anything else, it’d take you 15 days, 19 hours and 36 minutes to get through One-Ten, Torchwood, Sarah Jane, even K-9 &amp; Company.
  (tags: doctorwho)
• A prediction: Vaclav Klaus will sign Lisbon this year | Charlemagne’s notebook | Economist.com
  Scroll down for his interview with a Czech journalist
  (tags: eu)

The numbers 2 and 3 are both prime, so both have two factors, themselves and 1.

While there are no other examples of consecutive primes, it’s not difficult to find more pairs of consecutive integers with the same number of factors:

Eventually you get to sets of three consecutive integers with the same number of factors:

It isn’t possible to have a sequence of more than three integers with only four factors, but so far I have found this set of four consecutive integers with six factors:

I’m sure that somewhere out there I can find out whether or not a) there are longer sequences of consecutive integers which the same number of factors and b) whether there is a natural limit to the process. That’s as far as I can take it in the sleepless hours of the night though.

Well, it seems that I am a former member of an infamous Soros witch conclave. Who knew?

Clifton Park Avenue is now an uncomfortable interface route between the Crumlin Road and the Cliftonville areas of North Belfast. A hundred years ago, it was one of the more Jewish parts of the city (which is not saying much, though a quick scan of the 1911 census reveals four Jewish families on the street, which is probably four more than are there now). These included David and Rifka Levinson, who moved into number 15 Clifton Park Avenue in 1908. They originally came from Białystok, now in Belarus; Rifka had smuggled her husband out of Russia twenty years earlier to avoid conscription, and they had built up a decent family business in Enniskillen and Clones. My suspicion is that they moved to Belfast because of the new Jewish school recently opened around the corner on the Cliftonville road by Sir Otto Jaffé, who served twice as Lord Mayor of the city.

Shortly after the Levinsons moved to Belfast in 1908, Rifka’s brother Max Wallach turned up. He was on the run. He had a suitcase full of roubles which had been stolen a year before in a raid on a bank in Tbilisi in which three people were killed and fifty injured. He had escaped to Paris, where the French government had caught him red-handed when he tried to bank the loot (the serial numbers of the stolen banknotes were known), but to the fury of the Russians they simply expelled him from France rather than extradite him back to Russia. Wallach, not surprisingly, went to his sister in Belfast, where the long arm of the Okhrana might have more difficulty in reaching him.

Family lore (as interviewed in the Belfast Telegraph in 1940, subsequently unearthed by Slavicist Neil Cornwell, and recently republished by Manus O’Riordan here) has Wallach wandering around Belfast in a white Parisian linen suit and a Panama hat, puffing furiously on large cigars, and climbing Cave Hill for recreation. He got work teaching Russian in the Berlitz language school (branching out to German, French, Spanish, Italian and even Japanese as required). He stayed with the Levinsons for two years, until his friends from Moscow ordered him to London to work for them there.

In London, Max Wallach became Maxim Litvinov, and hung around with the Fabians of the Bloomsbury set; and when his friends from the Tbilisi bank raid, Joseph Stalin and V.I. Lenin, came to power in Russia, he became the new regime’s informal ambassador in London – though he was eventually arrested and exchanged for a British spy who had been captured in Russia. He served as Soviet Foreign Minister from 1931 to 1939, and as Ambassador to the USA from 1941 to 1943. He never spoke about his Belfast experience, not even to the Irish diplomats who he persuaded to allow the Soviet Union into the League of Nations in 1934. (Any such considerations were probably obscured by the glamour of his wife Ivy, an Englishwoman who was a fascinating character in her own right.)

The writing style was entertaining, but I regret to say that I could not follow the plot at all.

• Gibbon Chapter III: Of the Constitution of the Roman Empire in the Age of the Antonines
  This is the most enjoyable chapter so far, and also the most political and the most overtly tied to current (ie 18th-century) affairs.
  (tags: gibbon)

I am cranking up my reading on sixteenth-century Ireland, and decided to go back to basics. This is essentially a narrative survey, based on exhaustive sampling of the surviving primary sources, of what happened politically in Ireland from the death of the seventh Earl of Kildare in 1513 to the Flight of the Earls in 1607. I am still getting my head around the various shifts in religious policy, particularly during the reign of Elizabeth I, but this gives a good skeleton on which to hang the meat of any future work I do.

I was less convinced by Dudley Edwards’ subtitle, “The Destruction of Hiberno-Norman Civilisation”. It is beyond dispute that in so far as there was such a thing, this period saw its destruction, but he doesn’t really illustrate why or what Hiberno-Norman civilisation actually was. It would be more accurate to describe the book as tracking the growth of colonialism as the active British policy in Ireland, which it does very well.

I have always boggled at the fact that anyone could see any merits in the proposed US ballistic missile defence system. The more I looked into it, the more convinced I became that it was a technology that would never work against a threat that did not exist. So I was glad to see that President Obama has cancelled the proposed deployment of the missile defence system to Eastern Europe. This isn’t about giving in to Russia or Iran; it’s about not throwing good money after bad. Excellent analysis here.

Back in February last year, I wrote a post on the Lisbon Treaty, outlining my view that it is basically a shuffling of the institutional architecture which has little impact on the average EU citizen. Since then, the Irish people voted against the Treaty by 53% to 47% on 18 June 2008; and the Irish government has got certain points of clarification on the Treaty from the rest of the EU, and is holding another referendum on 2 October, less than a fortnight away. Also, the German constitutional court has said some interesting things about the Treaty and the European Union.

Isn’t it undemocratic to have a second referendum? I find it a peculiar argument to say that there can only ever be one referendum on a particular topic. I’m not especially in favour of them anyway, but if you like referendums in the first place then it seems odd to object when you get more than one. (Unless, of course, you only like them when you agree with the results.)

So has the Lisbon Treaty been amended to take the concerns of Irish voters into consideration? No. One concrete change to the EU has been made as a result of last year’s referendum (or rather, one proposed change has been dropped), but I’ll get to that in a moment. At their June 2009 summit, the EU’s leaders made a decision that the Lisbon Treaty doesn’t affect a) the peculiar provisions of the Irish constitution on abortion, the family and education, b) taxation and c) Irish neutrality. Since this is just re-stating what was already in the Treaty, it isn’t an amendment (and while the decision will be incorporated into EU law eventually, that won’t be until the next new member state joins).

So how does that change things? Well, if you are an Irish voter who voted against Lisbon last year in the misinformed belief that it would lead to the EU interfering in Irish policy on abortion, taxation and/or defence, you can feel reassured. (If you are an Irish voter who hopes that the EU might in future interfere in these issues, not so much; but the Lisbon Treaty was never going to be much use to you in that regard anyway, and see below on the German Constitutional Court.) I note that the Eurobarometer post-referendum opinion poll (here, page 19) found that a total of 14% of “No” voters voted against Lisbon because of their (misinformed) concerns about one or other of these issues. That’s not a lot but it would be enough to produce a different result.

And that’s all? No. There’s also a declaration on workers’ rights, which has even less legal force than the decision on abortion, taxation and neutrality, but may give comfort to those who fear the EU is a neo-liberal capitalist conspiracy. Though I am uncertain how many of those individuals will be reassured by statements made by the 27 EU heads of state and government, who presumably are key co-conspirators. Also the Irish government made a further declaration on neutrality and defence, which of course isn’t binding on the other 26 governments.

So there is no concrete change? Actually there is one very important concrete change, but the decision on that was made in December 2008 rather than June 2009. The current rules (the Nice Treaty) compel the EU to reduce the number of European Commissioners when they are next appointed (which will be in the next few months). As a result of the Irish referendum vote, however, the EU has decided to keep one Commissioner per member state (a concern cited by 6% of No voters in the Eurobarometer survey). But it cannot do this unless the Lisbon Treaty is passed (because Lisbon gives the member states discretion to decide how many Commissioners there are; Nice simply says there should be fewer). So there is a very immediate and practical consequence of a “No” vote on 2 October – fewer European Commissioners.

Does that matter? I think so. I have never bought the argument that the European Commission with 27+ members is too large to function – sitting as I do in my office beside its headquarters, it seems to function just fine. There is plenty of work to go around. I admit that I scoffed when the new Romanian Commissioner was given the portfolio of multilingualism, which sounds terribly waffly, but I was wrong to do so; he supervises 15% of the Commission’s total workforce, DG Translation being the largest single directorate-general – it’s not glamorous but someone has to keep things moving. Given that the work is there, and that Commissioners, for all that they are supposed to be above such things, are in fact important representatives of national interests in Brussels, it makes sense to have one per member state.

The German Constitutional Court? Ah yes. This actually makes much more difference than the European Council declarations. Germany’s Constitutional Court has made a ruling on the Lisbon Treaty which basically kills off any idea of a European federal super-state. A lot of my German Euro-federalist friends have been looking down in the mouth since the ruling came out on 30 June, and now that I’ve read it I can see why. Key quote: “authorisation to transfer sovereign powers to the European Union [is] granted under the condition that the sovereign statehood of a constitutional state is maintained”. The court essentially allows the German government to sign up to Lisbon but only if the level of democratic scrutiny of Lisbon and of future EU developments is enhanced, and also makes it clear that there are limits to how far European integration can go. The ruling should also dismay Lisbon’s opponents, however, as the court concludes that Lisbon itself is not a threat to German sovereignty, as long as it has been properly approved by the German democratic system. (Which has since happened.)

So, the bottom line is… As I said last time, the changes proposed in the Lisbon Treaty are indeed mostly improvements, and certainly will make life easier for those (a small, self-selected and privileged minority, admittedly) who have to operate within European politics. Voting against it doesn’t kill the EU, or globalisation, or anything like that; it just perpetuates the existing machinery. The Irish government is somewhat over-selling the guarantees they have received from the other member states, but then the “No” campaign shamelessly exaggerated the effects of the Treaty last year and continues to do so.

• The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences – Telegraph
  Spoilt for choice, really!
  (tags: sf)

• The Art of Penguin Science Fiction
  (tags: sf)
• America’s Groucho Marxists
  Chris Patten: We know that despite its great wealth – and its groundbreaking medical research – America’s health-care system is awful. It is hugely expensive. Its costs overwhelm workplace health-insurance schemes. The poor go unprotected. Too many of the sick are untreated. Overall health statistics are worse than those in comparable countries.
  (tags: ushealth)

• BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Five consumer laws you really ought to know
  (tags: law)

I resolved to buy and read this several years ago after my argument with Ken MacLeod about the so-called Glorious Revolution; it appeared to be the most recent heavyweight academic analysis of the period.

Scott’s subtitle is “Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context”, but actually that’s not really what the book is about. His argument is that all four Stuart kings (James I, Charles I, Charles II, James II) were faced with similar problems of statecraft and in fact made very similar mistakes, with the result that two were deposed (and one of those was executed). He is most interested in the intellectual reasons given by the protagonists in the struggle between the kings and their opponents (who usually controlled the House of Commons and London). In particular, he boils down the cause of the “troubles” to a) the fear of the Stuarts that their opponents were motivated by the intention of reducing the monarchy to the status of the Doge of Venice, or to abolish it altogether; and b) the fears of their opponents that the successive kings intended to introduce “Popery and arbitrary government”.

The kings were certainly correct in their suspicions, as is demonstrated by the historical facts that the monarchy was in fact abolished for a decade, and restored in 1660 only by promising to restrict its freedom of action with respect to parliament (a promise broken by both Charles II and James II, which was therefore tightened up still further for William III). Scott goes into considerable detail on the political theorising of the radical republicans throughout the mid-century, both before their victory in 1648 and the reversal of that victory in 1660. I am sceptical about the usefulness of political theory in current international relations, but it seems OK to look at it as a cultural phenomenon to explain behaviour as here.

He has to plead a lot harder, and in my mind unsuccessfully, for comprehension of the radicals’ fears of popery and arbitrary government, though he certainly makes it very clear that “fundamental conservatism, intolerance and anti-catholicism [were] the bases of English parliamentary policy”. I’m not equipped to deal with this very neutrally, as I grew up with people marching past our house asserting that the Glorious Revolution was good for them and not for me. It has always seemed significant to me that the final straw for James II’s rule came when he attempted his Declaration of Indulgence as a liberalising gesture not just for Catholics but also for Dissenters (something his brother had attempted as early as 1662). I don’t claim him as a great liberal hero, but it seems ludicrous to claim his opponents as such (though some of my lefty friends do).

Scott’s basic message seemed to me that these two conflicting ideas, combined with the financial and military weakness of England after Elizabeth I bankrupted the kingdom, made conflict inevitable; the Stuarts were driven to making stupid policy decisions by their own preconceptions and by the intransigence of their domestic opposition. I instinctively and deeply disagree. I suspect that the Stuarts made stupid policy decisions because they were stupid, and that better men (or women) would have made better decisions – in particular that they could have found a way of coming to terms with the domestic situation without having to depend on the good will of the King of France. William III, after all, was able to do so (and one of the best chapters shows just how contingent the 1688 invasion was on domestic Dutch politics).

So, an interesting book, but I disagreed with the main conclusion, there is very little on Ireland (where the backwash of the English troubles was particularly calamitous and horrible), and I could have survived with less on the radical political thinkers.

I admit that I only bought this because the author has the same name as a friend of mine who has a key back-room role in British politics; next time I see him I will give him this book as I don’t especially feel the need to treasure it in my collection.

It’s a somewhat confused tale of two wrongly accused prisoners breaking out and discovering that the USA (indeed, the world) of 2030 is on the brink of biological catastrophe. The point of the book seems mainly to be the escape sequences of the first half, followed by the resistance against the bad guys of the second half, which are decently enough written. The elements of a good book are all there but somehow don’t quite gel.

• reading_gibbon: Chapter II: Of the Union and Internal Prosperity of the Roman Empire in the Age of the Antonines
  (tags: gibbon)

I was trying to read this book while feeling ill, and we did not really get on. I wish in retrospect that I had followed the author’s advice to read just the first four chapters (when authors tell you not to bother reading what they have written, it is often advice worth taking) and that I had waited until I was feeling better, because reading about the horrible digestive problems of Eggers’ dying mother was not really what I needed at the time. (I am feeling much improved today, thank you.)

It is not a bad book. Dave, as twenty-something narrator, finds himself looking after his much younger brother after their parents die, so he combines the lifestyle of a young Californian magazine editor with his paternal responsibilities. We are meant to take it as a non-fiction memoir with fictionalised elements, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a novel which leans more heavily than usual on personal experience. As noted above, it goes on rather too long, and my edition came with a rambling foreword which I found self-indulgent (by which I mean boring).

• Thatcher told Gorbachev Britain did not want German reunification – Times Online
  No big surprise.
  (tags: history)
• Treatment of Alan Turing was "appalling" – PM | Number10.gov.uk
  (tags: ukpolitics sexandsexualityandgender)

Stuck with two heavy serious books on my uncomfortable travels on Wednesday, I realised to my relief that I had downloaded this ebook from Project Gutenberg some time ago (onto my Blackberry, using Mobipocket – none of that silly DRM’ed stuff, thank you) and it kept me going.

I had gone off the Barchester Chronicles a bit after not really enjoying the second’s retreading of the first’s territory, so it was good to find new ground being broken here. In fact it reminded me a lot of both Middlemarch and P.G. Wodehouse, though less serious than the former, less funny than the latter and frankly not quite as good as either.

It is pretty obvious from the word go that Frank and Mary are destined for each other, not least because Trollope interrupts and delays the narrative to tell us so (which I find a bit precious). It also becomes obvious at a very early stage how Frank’s mother’s snobbish objections to Mary’s (relative) poverty will be overcome, to the point that I found myself wondering how on earth Trollope was going to keep to book going for another x hundred pages (answer: by introducing more characters, or by blatant digression).

Although the characters are not especially three-dimensional, they kept my attention (more than Dave Eggers or seventeenth-century England). The happy ending is a bit of a cop-out, in that the social pretensions of Frank’s mother triumph rather than being seriously challenged (Mary is still illegitimate at the end of the book, but now she is rich so everything is all right). It’s a pleasant little tale as it is; I would have cheered a little harder if Frank and Mary had got on with their marriage on a modest income and without Lady Arabella’s blessing.

(In real life, when I have encountered people behaving badly about their children’s prospective weddings, they are usually repeating patterns of bad behaviour learnt from their own parents, often indeed about their own weddings; Trollope doesn’t really indicate that as being a factor here.)

Anyway, I enjoyed it, especially the election chapters (always a winner for me).

• Ireland’s Eurocrats sound the Lisbon alarm | Charlemagne’s notebook | Economist.com
  (tags: eu ireland)

I am not convinced that the British House of Lords should be replaced by an elected upper chamber.

First off, I am not wildly convinced about upper chambers in general. It seems to me that a lot of countries with unicameral systems – the Scandinavians, most of the Balkans, the longer-lasting democracies of Africa and Central America – do perfectly well without. Croatia abolished its upper house a few years back, as part of a general liberalisation of its political system. The Senate Chamber of the Hungarian parliament is beautiful but empty, and there is no cry to fill it up again.

Conversely I am not persuaded that any of the countries with two fully elected chambers really benefits much from the experience. Certainly there is no good argument to be had about democratic legitimacy; if you have one house whose members are entirely elected on a fair voting system, why do you need two? Both Romania and Italy have experienced constitutional crises in the last couple of years precisely because the will of the voters was reflected slightly differently in the two houses. It seems to me an avoidable error.

If you have a fully federal system, as in Germany or Switzerland, it is of course a different matter; when your country is at least in theory composed of different units, they deserve formal representation of some kind in the legislature. I have to say that the German solution, of each of the Länder governments appointing its own Bundesrat delegates, strikes me as preferable, but there are many other ways of doing it. And there are also unicameral countries of considerable internal diversity.

The arguments in favour of having an upper house all revolve around checking on the executive rushing through bad legislation. But I think this needs some unpacking. The issue of “rushing” can be dealt with by having a properly elected legislative chamber which actually scrutinises the executive. (I have written before of the foolishness of restricting the membership of the executive to parliamentarians.) The issue of quality control is trickier. Testing for legality and constitutionality is essential but also fairly straightforward, and should be done by a properly constituted and empowered supreme court (and the UK has just taken a step in that direction). But I am uncomfortable with the idea that an upper chamber should be able to vote down a government proposal which has been passed in a democratically elected lower house because they disagree with it politically.

It does seem to me reasonable that there could be a revising process where the proposals of the lower house go before a panel of experts, preferably selected by an independent panel for a reasonably long term of office and barred from running for election to the lower house themselves while so serving. You could build regional (and gender and ethnic) representation into such a system rather easily. In fact that is not far off what the House of Lords is at the moment, once you get rid of felons, the remaining hereditaries, the bishops, the completely senile and those who are just there because they are rich.

But an elected upper chamber will simply have exactly the same kinds of people in it as the elected lower chamber, with the important difference (on current British propsals) that it will at least in part be elected fairly. It would be better to get rid of it entirely. I don’t see what value that adds to the legislative process, and I do see it as a distraction from the key issue of a democratically elected House of Commons.

I had a long uncomfortable journey yesterday feeling ill and trying to get through two rather heavy books which did little to cheer me up. As soon as I got home I went to bed, picking this off the shelf, and very much enjoyed it. Charles Pooter is a grotesquely comic creation, sometimes engaging our sympathy, sometimes the horror of recognition. He is a snob, a beast to his maid, certainly less clever than his wife or friends; he is boring and self-centred. But he is fascinating, and a brilliant window into the life of late Victorian London.

Incidentallly, George Grossmith was knocking this out for Punch while starring as the tragic jester Jack Point in the opening season of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Yeomen of the Guard”, having just finished a very successful run as the original Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner in “The Mikado”.

• dorianegray: Hmph. Today I read a book from Del Rey
  Author sets book in Dublin; fails
  (tags: ireland)
• The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions | Information Is Beautiful
  Glorious!
  (tags: internet)
• jemck: Something more for the ebook debate.
  What if your Kindle is lost or stolen?
  (tags: copyright)

I first read this a couple of years ago and was unimpressed. But I must have been out of sorts generally because I enjoyed it much more this time. It is set in what is now the very near future – May and the summer of 2010 – and concerns two different projects to change the future of the human race, a massive investment in the African country of Beninia and the genetic experiments of the Asian archipelago of Yatakang. The narrative is broken up with vignettes of daily life in Brunner’s future dystopia, where human reproduction is increasingly harshly limited by law, and nobody’s motives are above suspicion (and there is an almost sentient computer). It is rather long but surprisingly tightly written given the diversity of material and perspective; rather a dazzling example of the New Wave.

Stand on Zanzibar won the 1968 Hugo for Best Novel, beating Alexei Panshin’s Nebula-winning Rite of Passage (a decent book with a stupid ending), and also three books I haven’t read, Nova by Samuel R. Delany, Past Master by R.A. Lafferty, and The Goblin Reservation by Clifford D. Simak. One of those years when the Nebula shortlist was better; it also included Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick and Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ.