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.

I had a good evening yesterday: met up with an old friend who has just moved to this city and was able to show her some of the sights before going to my favourite restaurant.

But at 3 am, it was a different matter, and I found myself, as they say, talking to God on the great white telephone. ‘Orrible stomach cramps rather impeded my attempts to get back to sleep.

On top of all that, I had a very important meeting at 0930 (with Alexander Downer, who will be known to Australian readers if not to many others). My desperate emails asking if the meeting could be postponed received no reply, so I struggled to the vertical position and arrived at the UN compound half an hour late. Downer took it in his stride, but I was rather mortified.

I came back to the hotel and have been in bed ever since. My dinner companion of last night – who like me had the excellent swordfish at El Sabor Latino – is in perfect health, so I must simply have been unlucky with the water or something.

I called this evening’s dinner companion to cancel our arrangement, and asked whether he thought I should try sweating it out at a hamam (Turkish bath). He said it certainly wouldn’t do any harm! But I then found I didn’t really have the energy to even walk round the corner to the nearest one.

Well, rest and cups of sweet black and/or herbal tea are probably all that I need. Home tomorrow, all being well.

So, I’m in an eastern Mediterranean city, my first meeting isn’t until 1100, I’ve had my breakfast by 0900 and I need a haircut. And I haven’t shaved since Friday. The concierge directs me to the nearest barber, and where my hair is duly shortened. I seem to be the first customer of this week; a small boy stares at the pasty-faced foreigner who doesn’t speak their language.

And then the barber offers to shave me as well, and I accept. I am 42 years old, and have never been shaved by any hand other than my own. The small boy lathers up a huge shaving brush – foam all over it; he rinses off the handle and sets it down for the barber (who is also young, but they don’t look related – brother-in-law? step brother?). Many layers of towels are laid over me, and then the foam; and then the barber comes at me with a sharp sharp cut-throat razor. My throat feels very exposed; but then, like a junior wolf, I submit.

Like most teenage boys, I simply adopted my father’s shaving habits – shaving brush and ordinary soap, Wilkinson safety razor, do it twice over – and have gradually moved to my own variation – shaving gel, Gillette Mach 3, a single run over the relevant area is enough. Occasionally hairdressers have nibbled around the edges of my scalp with a straight razor, but now it’s a comfortable stroking of the blade against my skin, separating off the bristles from the follicles, looking clean, feeling smooth. He pulls at my lips to get at the tricky bits in the corners of my mouth and under my nose.

And then he does it again, to catch anywhere he missed first time. And all the other trimmings as well, including patting my ears with flaming alcohol to get the hairs there; a bit alarming, but effective. The little boy pinches and pulls at my arm muscles, presumably his idea of a massage, for that extra bit of service. And the whole lot, including haircut, costs me €20. Money well spent.

It’s 1045. time to go.

I have been working my way through various US bestsellers of recent years, due to various manipulations of the top unread books lists in various places. This one is about a teenage white girl in about 1964, who flees her abusive father to the far side of South Carolina, where she ends up living with the same black family of bee-keepers who had sheltered her mother many years before. There’s lots of lovely symbolism in the processes of apiculture and (more unexpectedly) the Blessed Virgin Mary. I couldn’t help but notice, though, that the laudatory blurbs all seemed to be by white critics; I wonder how this has been received in the black community?

Back in 1981 it seemed like centuries since the last Doctor Who reference book had come out (it was three years since the second edition of The Making of Doctor Who). We fans grasped eagerly at the two rather slim volumes produced in the break between the Fourth and Fifth Doctors. The first volume is a recapitulation of cast, crew and plot from the first eighteen seasons of Who; the second an A-Z of characters, creatures and concepts in the Whoniverse up to that point in time.

They are pretty thin by even the standards of the day. Characters and events from the less fashionable end of the Hartnell and Troughton eras get pretty short shrift (eg the entry in volume 2 for Ping-Cho, whch reads, in its entirety, “Chinese girl”).

The two volumes are a good model for how to do a comprehensive guide for Who, but not a brilliant example of the execution. (Numerous misprintls – poor John Abineri!)

Somehow this didn’t get posted on Sunday when I actually finished the book. It is rather a good romp with scary children and scary monsters, Ten and Rose and a creepy Welsh island. Very well read by Anthony Stewart Head.

The fourth series of Companion Chronicles from Big Finish is off to an excellent start.

After the rather unexpected posthumous return of Sara Kingdom in Home Truths, Simon Guerrier has a tricky problem for the sequel: how to combine Sara’s unusual position of partial resurrection in the far future with the format-dictated reminiscence of an adventure with One and Steven. He does it very well, with future-Sara essentially on trial for her continued existence, recounting a rather eerie claustrophobic tale of a waterlogged asteroid, which ties in rather well psychologically to her existential dilemma. Very well done by Jean Marsh and Niall McGregor.

The events of 1688-90 period in England, Scotland and Ireland are ever so slightly controversial, among the decreasing minority who care, so I was interested to see how Jamie, Zoe and Two would fit into it – Big Finish has tackled similar bits of history very badly (The Marian Conspiracy) and very well (The Settling). Jonathan Morris is definitely towards the upper end of the scale with The Glorious Revolution, which takes Jamie back to the precise origin of his own personal history, with the crew landing in London in 1688 as James II’s rule is tottering; on the one hand, we get a fair perspective that the Glorious Revolution was not especially glorious if you were not an English Protestant; on the other, James II was a pretty bad king, even though he had been an excellent military strategist in his brother’s reign. Fraser Hines is excellent as a Jacobite who discovers that his hero has feet of clay; likewise Andrew Fettes as both James II and a Time Lord sent to investigate a potential time anomaly. I felt the plot itself didn’t quite cohere in terms of the time-paradox sub-genre, but Morris’s mostly excellent writing distracted me for most of the time. (The arbitrary executions of Judge Jeffreys, as depicted, are however out of place for 1688 in London; even the notorious Hanging Assizes actually had assizes.)

It’s striking that both of these plays are flashbacks from the point of view of Sara and Jamie, respectively, and that the framing narrative is given a decent prominence.

Meanwhile the main narrative of Big Finish plays is staggering along:

The Company of Friends is actually four separate Eighth Doctor plays, each with a different companion: Benny Summerfield (who is mainly a Seventh Doctor companion but did appear in the first Eight Doctor spinoff novel), Fitz Kreiner (who is apparently in more Doctor Who books than any other companion), Izzy (from the DWM comics) and Mary Shelley (from out of nowhere). I must say I felt that a lot of this was not my personal canon, as Andrew Hickey would put it. The one I enjoyed most was with the companion I knew least, Izzy’s story, with its very witty portrayal of late 70s comics fandom; the Fitz and Benny stories were OK, the Mary Shelley one didn’t quite hang together for me.

I keep on enjoying the Six/Charley plays despite my inclination, and Patient Zero was no exception. The Doctor is absolutely aware that Charley Pollard is much more than she has admitted; but Charley now finds herself substituted by a mysterious invisible alien which takes over her very being; meanwhile the Doctor is defending himself from the Viyrans (boo!) and Daleks (yay!). A great set-up for the next two stories.

Big Finish has been moving towards story arcs – the Fifth Doctor / Guardians one earlier this year, for instance – and it is a welcome change of gear: The Company of Friends suffers a bit because it goes the other way (four stories, rather than a third of a story, in the one release). The Companion Chronicles, which ought by rights to be rather more format-bound, feel a bit more vibrant right now.

Read all about it! Here.

Having enjoyed A House for Mr Biswas, I tried this as a follow-up, but did not enjoy it as much. Naipaul’s protagonist is Indian, and gets a scholarship to study in London, where he starts to make a career as a journalist and writer; and then he abruptly goes to Africa with his current lover. The best thing about the book is the vivid sense of place of the three settings – the immediate post-independence period in India, the London literary sub-culture, and the African colony lurching towards independence: I really felt immersed in the settings, both the physical and human aspects of the geography.

That said, the book is rather frustratingly incomplete. There is occasional name-dropping of real people – Krishna Menon, Arthur Christiansen, Che Guevara; but I couldn’t really understand the contrast between on the one hand this specificity about real people, and the very well conveyed sense of place, and on the other a geographical coyness. Why not name the Portuguese colony on the east coast of Africa? (There is only one, after all.) Why not be more specific about Willie’s home town in India? Perhaps the point is to make it a more universal critique of colonialism, but I think it would have been more effective without the vagueness.

It’s not a very cheerful book. Willie makes love to many women, but doesn’t really appear to enjoy it, or to like them very much. I don’t think it is misogynistic – Willie’s sister, and his Portuguese African girlfriend, are both memorable characters with their own motivations – but it’s not especially upllifting. It is, however, mercifully short.

The reading list system I set up four months ago has been pretty satisfactory. I’m changing it just a bit and also adding a couple more for the rest of this year.

1. unread sf (excluding Who), in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue:
   1. Appleseed by John Clute
   2. White Crow by Mary Gentle
   3. The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Second Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois
   4. Irish tales of terror, edited by Jim McGarry
   5. Forbidden Acts, edited by Nancy A. Collins
2. unread sf (excluding Who), in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole:
   1. Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett
   2. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
   3. The Wandering Fire by Guy Gavriel Kay
   4. The Darkest Road by Guy Gavriel Kay
   5. Kushiel’s Scion by Jacqueline Carey
3. unread sf (excluding Who), as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by you here:
   1. Fairyland by Paul McAuley
   2. Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan
   3. Appleseed by John Clute
   4. The Best Science Fiction of the Year #4, edited by Terry Carr
   5. Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak
4. unread fiction other than sf or Ian Rankin, in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue:
   1. Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
   2. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
   3. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
   4. Thirteen Steps Down: A Novel by Ruth Rendell
   5. Notre-Dame of Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) by Victor Hugo
5. unread fiction other than sf or Ian Rankin, in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole:
   0. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
   1. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
   2. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
   3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
   4. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
   5. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
6. unread fiction other than sf or Ian Rankin, as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by you here:
   1. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
   2. Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
   3. Notre-Dame of Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) by Victor Hugo
   4. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
   5. Njal’s Saga by Leifur Eiricksson
7. non-fiction, in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue:
   1. England’s Troubles : Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context by Jonathan Scott
   2. The Meaning of Tingo by Adam Jacot de Boinod
   3. The Jesuits by Jonathan Wright
   4. The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism by Stephen Schwartz
   5. Radical Islams Rules: The Worldwide Spread of Extreme Sharia Law by Paul Marshall
8. non-fiction, in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole:
   1. The Stuff of Thought:: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
   2. Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger
   3. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould
   4. Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
   5. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
9. non-fiction, as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by you here:
   1. The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by Richard Dawkins
   2. A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield
   3. The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis
   4. Constantinople by Philip Mansel
10. books I have already read but haven’t reviewed on-line, ranked by LT popularity:
    1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
    2. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
    3. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    4. Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
    5. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
11. Hugo-award winning novels which I haven’t previously reviewed on-line, in order of winning the award:
    0. Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner
    1. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer
    2. Where late the sweet birds sang by Kate Wilhelm
    3. The uplift war by David Brin
    4. Hyperion by Dan Simmons
    5. The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold
12. unread Doctor Who books, in order of internal continuity:
    1. Zeta Major by Simon Messingham
    2. Imperial Moon by Christopher Bulis
    3. Doctor Who – Slipback by Eric Saward
    4. Time of Your Life by Steve Lyons
    5. The Algebra of Ice by Lloyd Rose
13. unread Doctor Who books, in order of LT popularity (changed from previous restriction to just New Series Adventures):
    0. Doctor Who Programme Guide: v. 1 by Jean-Marc Lofficier
       The Nightmare of Black Island by Mike Tucker
    1. Doctor Who: A Celebration : Two Decades Through Time and Space by Peter Haining
    2. Wooden Heart by Martin Day
    3. The Pirate Loop by Simon Guerrier
    4. Nightshade by Mark Gatiss
    5. Cat’s Cradle: Times Crucible by Marc Platt
14. Ian Rankin novels, in order (NB am expecting Strip Jack to arrive shortly in which case it goes at the head of the list):
    1. The Black Book
    2. Mortal Causes
    3. Let It Bleed
    4. Black and Blue
    5. The Hanging Garden
15. books owned only by me on LT, in order of entry into my catalogue (NB the first of these has since picked up other owners):
    1. Power & Light (The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volume Two) by Roger Zelazny
    2. Doctor Who Quiz Book #3
    3. "Doctor Who" Void Vision Activity Book
    4. Liberal Language: Speeches and Essays 1998-2003 by Graham Watson
    5. A People’s Peace for Cyprus: Testing public opinion on the options for a comprehensive settlement by Alexandros Lordos
16. books by PoC, in order of entry into my catalogue:
    0. Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul
    1. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
    2. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
    3. Wild Sweet Love by Beverly Jenkins
    4. Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman
    5. Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran
17. New list: books acquired before 2006, not otherwise listed or reviewed:
    1. An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that Changed the World by Toby Musgrave
    2. Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong
    3. Wheel Of Engaged Buddhism : New Map Of The Path by Kenneth Kraft
    4. Ta Hsueh and Chung Yung
    5. Mr. Bloomfield’s Orchard : The Mysterious World of Mushrooms, Molds, and Mycologists by Nicholas P. Money
18. Another new list: books acquired by me since 2005, not otherwise listed or reviewed:
    1. Paris Gold Guide (Bonechi Gold Guides) by Giovanna Magi
    2. Year’s Best SF 6, edited by David G. Hartwell
    3. Year’s Best SF 7, edited by David G. Hartwell
    4. Year’s Best SF 8, edited by David G. Hartwell
    5. Who Saved Bosnia by Vitomir Miles Raguz

Progress, as ever, to be reported here.

It’s time for an earwormy post.

Since childhood I have loved the traditional Irish song, “The Star of the County Down” – not so much because of the words, which are a decent enough encapsulation of male fantasy for the attractive babe who has just walked past, but more for the associations with my ancestral stmping grounds which are indeed near to Banbridge, and also for the tune which is very catchy and memorable. Tying in with certain of my other interests, one of my favourite renditions is by The Orthodox Celts, a band from Belgrade who have moved to adopt someone else’s culture (note the landscape shots, partly against a photo backdrop of authentic County Down drumlins and partly against very Serbian looking wheatfields):

(lyrics here.)

I listened to Classic FM a lot in the summer and to my surprise at one point heard this rather wonderful piece by Ralph Vaughan-Williams:

I recognised the tune at once, of course, but had never heard of “Dives and Lazarus”, upon which which this was supposedly a set of five variations, But it is a well enough known folk song, apparently, performed below by Vilma Pääkkö at a festival in Pori. (lyrics here.)

Anglicans being as they are, the tune has been adopted and adapted into the canon of hymn tunes as “Kingsfold”, and thus as the tune of “O Sing a Song of Bethlehem” and “I Heard the Voice of Jesus”. Version of the folk tune, according to Wikipedia, are also to be found as “Gilderoy” (in Scotland), “The Thresher” and “Cold blows the wind” (in unspecified localities) and “The Murder of Maria Martin” (in Norfolk). Classic FM seemed to know of several versions of it arranged by Holst as well. I didn’t find any terribly compelling performances of these on-line, but feel free to share if you know of any.