The Sunday Times has an article finding that Andrew Wakefield faked the research for his 1998 article which found a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The article also points out that as a result of his frightening parents out of taking up the MMR vaccine, the rate of measles in the UK has gone up by more than 2000% and two children died from it last year alone. Further comment is superfluous.
(Hat-tip to
A number of you have been linking to the glorious Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks, which is indeed truly teeth-grinding.
I have a humble example of a similar nature from my daily work to entertain you with. I get a regular news summary about country X, which is produced by officials from country Y, which does not officially recognise country X. The news summaries therefore refer to the “president”, the “prime minister” and the “government”, all in quotation marks. Country Y also questions the legitimacy of the “university” in country X, which can lead to amusing references to “students”. Yes, I’ve encountered “students” in my time, too, and not only in country X…
More BF plays, fairly heavy on the Fifth Doctor this time. Most of them pretty good, actually.
So, all the Fifth Doctor stories in the above list are good (with the exception of Mission of the Viyrans – another single episode one with Five and Peri which is let down by the ending). The rest are OK but not as good as they could have been.
This book’s full title is The Comprehensive UN Sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – Aims, Impact and Legacy, published through the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and it was sent to me by the author, a tall Norwegian who I know from Kosovo.
It’s a pretty good dissection of the sanctions regime in place against the FRY (Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo) from 1992 to 1995, concentrating on its actual effectiveness as a means of achieving its expressed aim, to bring the Bosnian war to an end. Knudsen is damning on this point: the fact that the war lasted for three years after the sanctions were put in place is a pretty good indicator of their success. She also finds little evidence to suggest that the sanctions played much of a role in their unspoken secondary aim – undermining Milošević’s grip on power; if anything, his popularity was greatest when the sanctions regime was at its peak. While she (rightly) does not doubt the fact that Serbia, and Milošević in particular, bear the chief responsibility for the outbreak of conflict in the first place, she points out that the sanctions regime actually enabled a victim mentality among Serbs who became (and in many cases remain) convinced that the wars in Bosnia and Croatia were nothing to do with them.
I drew a couple of useful general points from this. First, that in the wider literature on sanctions, there is very little support for the “naive theory” that if you impose sanctions on a population as collective punishment for the policies of their leadership, they will react by forcing the leadership to adopt different policies (or by installing a new leadership). This was apparently demolished by Johan Galtung with regard to Rhodesia as far back as 1967. There are a few positive cases (including I suppose South Africa) but Yugoslavia is not one of them.
On the whole sanctions are really imposed to satisfy the demands of the domestic electorate among those imposing them, to make it look as if Something Is Being Done, but not Too Much. The reason for the failure of sanctions is often (and certainly in this specific case) because they become the last stop of the policy line – usually a substitute for diplomatic activity rather than an active peace-building move, and particularly pointless if not combined with credible threats of further coercive action, including the use of force.
Not Nick. Or “Nico”. That is all.
I think this was given to me as a Christmas present several years ago; it languished on the shelves for a long time, and finally bubbled to the top of my list yesterday.
Wow. Once I got going, I really couldn’t put it down. It’s a really impressive autobiography, of a woman growing up in Australia before, during and after the second world war, as a child on a remote sheep station (the Coorain of the title, which some diligent Googling locates here), and then at school and university in Sydney, suffering the deaths of her father and brother and the slow decline of her mother. Yet at the same time it’s a story of empowerment and enlightement, of spiritual, intellectual and moral development, as the young Jill realises what it means to be a white woman in Australia, and later to be a white Australian woman in the rest of the world.
Her descriptions of the landscape of western New South Wales are lyrical, which makes her account of the long years of drought that killed her father and their lifestyle all the more gruelling. (Six decades on, things weren’t much better). Then, after the move to Sydney (she was eleven), she is compelling on the human landscape, both of the silent girl from the bush suddenly immersed in the ways of the city, and of the daughter struggling with her mother’s ambitions and her own aspirations. The ending, of course, only points to new beginnings.
I know some of you reading this are Australians by one definition or another: I would be very interested to know how this book was received there. I confess I know very little about the place, despite my four and a half years working for your former foreign minister. While I’ve enjoyed my dabbling in Peter Carey’s novels, I have to say that they did not whet my enthusiasm anything like as much as The Road from Coorain has.
From the unread books shelf between Forbidden Acts, a horror collection edited by Nancy Collins, and John Coulthard’s graphic treatment of The Haunter in the Dark.
This was a book which has generated some discussion previously (here, here and to an extent here) so I was prepared to either love it or hate it.
In the event, I enjoyed it, though not massively. The Pacific Ocean descriptions (and to a lesser but important extent the bits in Toronto) were compelling. I wasn’t quite so sure about the parts in India or Mexico. When we got to the bit with the French sailor, and then the bit with mysterious island, I had a good idea of what was up, and so felt a lot happier about the ultimate reveal than I did with Atonement, especially because we already know from an early stage that the narrator survives. The basic message seemed to me to be about the importance of Story, rather than the deep messages about human nature that some reviewer found.
From the unread books shelf between Earth Logic, by Laurie Marks, and The Shakespeare Handbook, by RW Maslen and Michael Schmidt.
I first read this back in March 2000, on my way back from my first ever visit to Kosovo, on the recommendation of some American friends working there. It remains a good read; one of the effects of having seen the films, of course, is that it’s now impossible to read Hagrid or Snape without hearing Robbie Coltrane or Alan Rickman in your head.. (Let alone Radcliffe, Watson or Grint.)
Indeed, one ability Rowling displays here which she rather let slip in some of the later books is the skill of telling a thrilling story with hints of the historical background and wider world of wizardry in a mere 220 pages. It is a good tale, engagingly told.
< Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire | Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix | Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | The Tales of Beedle the Bard >
Pope not infallible – Vatican source.
Sex in space!!!!!!!!! (Hat-tip to
Google latitude – please add me!!!! (I’m not going to gratuitously send out invites.)
Wii Fit – the truth. (Hat-tip to
I knew almost nothing about this play, but really enjoyed it. The plot is very straightforward: the modestly born but intelligent Helena fulfills the conditions set by her reluctant husband, by tricking him into having sex with her while under the impression that she is someone else. Also there’s a subplot with his dubious friend Parolles getting publicly humiliated. Slightly tricky to do this well, I imagine: Helena has to engage the audience’s sympathy, and Bertram’s reluctance to allow her to be foisted on him turns around rather rapidly in the last scene; also Parolles has to be sufficiently unpleasant that the audience laughs at his downfall rather than sympathising with him. But Arkangel largely make it work, with Emily Woof (whose name I don’t remember from anything else, and I think I would have done) excellent as Helena, and good old Clive Swift an impressive King of France, cured by her medical knowledge. (Is there any earlier depiction of a woman doctor in literature? I see this story comes from Boccaccio, but Shakespeare may have introduced that detail.) An unexpected pleasure, and I put other reading aside to finish it on my way home.
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III / Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II / Richard II | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part 1 / Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet / Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All’s Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus / Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter’s Tale / The Winter’s Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment) | Double Falshood/Cardenio
(Hat-tip to someone with very good taste who posted this in a locked entry.)
I have loved this book since I read it for the first time as a teenager attending a convent school. It won the Hugo in 1961, and traces the rise and renewed fall of human civilisation after a nuclear holocaust in three snapshots of crucial moments in the history of a monastery, the resting place of much of human knowledge which has otherwise been lost (in an anti-intellectual reaction to the original war). It does not wear its learning lightly and I am glad that there is a reader’s guide readily available.
How things have changed since the late 1950s! On the one hand, we no longer accept the inevitability of the destruction of civilisation by nuclear war (which Miller has happening not once but twice). The Cold War seemed inevitable and unescapable in 1959, and indeed for most of the next three decades. We have different concerns now.
On the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine a serious writer today taking such a positive view of the Church. Benedict XVI is very different from John XXIII; the Vatican has boxed itself in politically. There is a greater tension now than then between religion and science, thanks to the foolishness of the religious right on the one side and the determination of Richard Dawkins to miss the point on the other; Miller’s understanding of the Church’s role in the Dark Ages has itself been weakened (though not totally disproved) by later scholarship. And Miller is able to largely ignore sex and women in his novel, which I think would be impossible for anyone writing about the Church today.
For all that, it’s a great book, and rightly won the Hugo in 1961 (of its rivals, I’ve read Budrys’ Rogue Moon and Anderson’s The High Crusade) Miller explores faith, history, tradition, political engagement, the advancement of science, and grace; and does it all with a wry and sympathetic humour. The Wandering Jew who pops up from time to time in the narrative is thought by some romantics to have been inspired by Judith Merrill, but clearly comes from many sources (and is occasionally the author’s own viewpoint). And there is the continuing enigma of Mrs Grales at the end.
It is sad that this was basically the end of Miller’s literary career. He seems to have agonised for thirty-five years over Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman before ending his own life, and never published another story.
Shakespeare: 4
Fiction (non-sf): 4
SF (non-Who): 6
Who: 1
Comics: 1
3/20 by women (Greer, Rand and Rowling).
1/20 by PoC (Tomine)
Total page count ~5700.
Owned for more than one year: 5 (The Go-Between, Rasselas, Fortunata and Jacinta, A Case of Conscience [reread], Most Ancient Song)
Also reread: Twelfth Night, Starship Troopers, Farmer in the Sky, The Stainless Steel Rat Omnibus (for a total of 5).
A story of a young boy who becomes involved in a secret romance – some similarity with McEwan’s Atonement, though the outcome is quite different. I found the narrator very naïve for a thirteen-year-old – at that age I was devouring Agatha Christie novels and I like to think I’d have worked out what was going on. However, otherwise Hartley has some acute observations about the way adults treat children, and each other. The coda, set two generations later, manages to be a satisfactory conclusion to the novel and yet shows that the story is not over (and perhaps never will be).
Well, it took me a while to get into it, but I have developed a healthy relationship with Wii Fit. Since the start of the year I have successfully established a routine of doing half an hour on it in the mornings – two yoga exercises, and one fron each of the other three categories – and am at the stage which I never came close to reaching during my flirtation with the gym, where I actually get out of bed looking forward to it, and have missed only one day a week so far. On top of that, I think it is actually doing me some good. I haven’t lost any weight – that will take some attention to my diet, I think – but I feel that it’s better distributed, and working better for me. (In any case my weight is only a shade above the desirable band.)
Meanwhile we seem to have acquired a number of games for the Wii. Young F kindly got us the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix game for Christmas, and has inevitably spent more time on it than we have (I can’t get the levitating to work). He is now campaigning for us to connect the Wii to the internet so that he can do Mario Karting with people round the world. No chance.
I’ve had this hanging around for ages, and eventually read it last week – it is very short, only 112 pages in my Penguin edition, and the original was only 93. Rasselas, as the title declares, is a prince of Abyssinia, who lives in a happy valley of the kingdom where he and his friends and family are preserved from all disturbing outside influences. With his friend, Imlac, his sister Nekayah, and her companion Pekuah, they tunnel out of the happy valley in search of adventure and take up residence in Cairo. They meet a deranged astronomer, and get him back in touch with reality; they get their adventure when Pekuah is kidnapped by Arabs; but she is rescued without too much drama. At the end of the book, they conclude that their dreams are unattainable and resolve to go back home.
I was interested that the action is exclusively set in Africa. There is mention of Europeans being in Cairo, and this making it a cosmopolitan city, but I don’t think we meet any of them. I was also interested that the astronomer character, whose delusion is that he is in sole control of the planets and the weather, is aware of the moons of Jupiter. We are clearly meant to read the African characters as disaffected young English men and women, and that is how they are portrayed (with a touch of Orientalism) in the illustrated editions on-line; I don’t think Johnson is really trying to say anything about Africa (though he had translated Jerónimo Lobo’s book about Abyssinia twenty-five years earlier).
It’s striking that this was written 250 years ago this month, the same year (1759) as Candide, which has a similar basic concept, but the timings I think are such that neither Johnson nor Voltaire can have much influenced the other. It seems to have been the last fiction (indeed, the only prose fiction) that Johnson published. It is somewhat pessimistic but very engaging.
My obsessive scheduling of Who books and audios sometimes throws up interesting moments of convergence.
This is a graph plotting the Big Finish Doctor Who audios by internal chronology versus order of release. (Apart from the most recent 8th Doctor ones.) Sourced from the WikiPedia lists.
| Fifth Doctor | Sixth Doctor | Seventh Doctor | Eighth Doctor |
| BFA 91 Circular Time (i) BFA 4 The Land of the Dead BFA 10 Winter for the Adept BFA 15 The Mutant Phase BFA 26 Primeval BFA 34 Spare Parts BFA 44 Creatures of Beauty BFA 66 The Game BFA 91 Circular Time (ii) BFA 93 Renaissance of the Daleks VI Return to the Web Planet BFA 107 The Haunting of Thomas Brewster BFA 110 The Boy That Time Forgot BFA 113 Time Reef & A Perfect World BFA 91 Circular Time (iii) BFA 47 Omega BFA 1 The Sirens of Time Ex1 Excelis Dawns BFA 2 Phantasmagoria BFA 20 Loups-Garoux BFA 76 Singularity BFA 8 Red Dawn BFA 95 Exotron & Urban Myths BFA 24 The Eye of the Scorpion BFA 38 The Church and the Crown DWM4 No Place Like Home BFA 41 Nekromanteia BFA 56 The Axis of Insanity BFA 59 The Roof of the World BFA 69 Three’s A Crowd BFA 71 The Council of Nicaea BFA 81 The Kingmaker BFA 87 The Gathering DWM9 Cuddlesome BFA 99 Son of the Dragon BFA 102 The Mind’s Eye BFA 104 The Bride of Peladon BFA 102 Mission of the Viyrans BFA 117 The Judgement of Isskar BFA 91 Circular Time (iv) |
BFA 48 Davros IV Cryptobiosis BFA 90 Year of the Pig BFA 3 Whispers of Terror BFA 35 …ish BFA 86 The Reaping BFA 51 The Wormery BFA 33½ The Maltese Penguin BFA 14 The Holy Terror DWM3 The Ratings War Ex2 Excelis Rising III Her Final Flight BFA 94 I.D. & Urgent Calls BFA 6 The Marian Conspiracy BFA 1 The Sirens of Time BFA 9 The Spectre of Lanyon Moor BFA 11 The Apocalypse Element BFA 22 Bloodtide BFA 23 Project: Twilight BFA 37 The Sandman BFA 40 Jubilee BFA 43 Doctor Who and the Pirates I Real Time BFA 45 Project: Lazarus BFA 57 Arrangements for War BFA 60 Medicinal Purposes BFA 78 Pier Pressure BFA 84 The Nowhere Place BFA 100 100 BFA 105 The Condemned BFA 108 Assassin in the Limelight BFA 111 The Doomwood Curse BFA 114 Brotherhood of the Daleks VII Return of the Krotons BFA 116 The Raincloud Man BFA 27 The One Doctor BFA 65 The Juggernauts BFA 68 Catch-1782 BFA 73 Thicker than Water BFA 97 The Wishing Beast & The Vanity Box |
BFA 70 Unregenerate! BFA 85 Red BFA 39 Bang-Bang-a-Boom! BFA 46 Flip-Flop BFA 12 The Fires of Vulcan BFA 5 The Fearmonger BFA 7 The Genocide Machine BFA 21 Dust Breeding BFA 25 Colditz BFA 36 The Rapture BFA 58 The Harvest BFA 67 Dreamtime BFA 74 LIVE 34 BFA 79 Night Thoughts BFA 82 The Settling BFA 89 No Man’s Land BFA 92 Nocturne BFA 106 The Dark Husband BFA 115 Forty Five BFA 13 The Shadow of the Scourge BFA 42 The Dark Flame Ex3 Excelis Decays DWM2 Last of the Titans BFA 45 Project: Lazarus BFA 49 Master V Return of the Daleks BFA 1 The Sirens of Time BFA 96 Valhalla BFA 98 Frozen Time BFA 109 The Death Collectors & Spider’s Shadow BFA 112 Kingdom of Silver & Keepsake |
II Shada BFA 16 Storm Warning BFA 17 Sword of Orion BFA 18 The Stones of Venice BFA 19 Minuet in Hell BFA 28 Invaders from Mars BFA 29 The Chimes of Midnight DWM5 Living Legend BFA 30 Seasons of Fear BFA 31 Embrace the Darkness BFA 32 The Time of the Daleks BFA 33 Neverland BFA 50 Zagreus BFA 52 Scherzo BFA 53 The Creed of the Kromon BFA 54 The Natural History of Fear BFA 55 The Twilight Kingdom BFA 61 Faith Stealer BFA 62 The Last BFA 63 Caerdroia BFA 64 The Next Life BFA 72 Terror Firma BFA 75 Scaredy Cat BFA 77 Other Lives BFA 80 Time Works BFA 83 Something Inside BFA 88 Memory Lane BFA 101 Absolution BFA 103 The Girl Who Never Was |
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir is apparently about to become Prime Minister of Iceland.
I hope that the various commentators on this do at least make an effort to spell her name correctly.
Has anyone else ever noticed that in the train carriages where it tells you not to lean out if the window, it is phrased as a direct imperative – “Nicht hinauslehnen!” “Ne pas se pencher au déhors!” “Do not lean out!” – in German, French and English, but in Italian it is “E pericoloso sporgesi!” – you are given the information that it is dangerous, but it’s up to you whether you choose to lean out or not!
There are five countries in the world (out of 173 surveyed, though there are 192 UN member states so some must have fallen through the cracks) which do not provide, or require employers to provide, any form of paid maternity leave.
Four of them are Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea.
Can you guess what the fifth is?
(Hat-tip to Steven Hill on the always excellent
This was one play of which I knew almost nothing except that it is a love story set during the siege of Troy between Troilus, the son of King Priam, and a woman called Cressida. Actually I found it one of the most interesting plays from the point of view of sex and gender, disappointingly weakened in the final scenes (though probably a skilled director could rescue it).
The most striking thing is that the Greeks are all men, and their camp is a boys’ club (Achilles sulking in his tent because they won’t play with him on his terms, laddish carousing with Hector the night before he is killed). The city of Troy on the other hand is more gender-balanced: Cressida, of course, but also Helen, Andromache and especially Cassandra play important roles in the scenes set there.
Cressida is one of the great Shakespeare women characters. She is much more reflective about her situation than similarly placed Juliet and Rosalind; she bonks Troilus senseless (no qualms about marriage vows, we note); she is clearly deeply upset at being sent to join her father in the Greek camp, but banters successfully with the Greeks once she arrives.
And then there’s Act 5 Scene 2, where Troilus, Ulysses and Thersites witness Cressida apparently cheating on Troilus with the Greek soldier Diomede. The play fails in that we don’t really get Cressida’s side of the story. She gets a valedictory monologue of just six lines, and then vanishes from the script – she does send Troilus a letter but he tears it up without reading it. It’s a poor sendoff to an interesting character; her attraction for Diomedes seems to come out of nowhere. Probably an imaginative director and a good actress could put some credibility into her situation, but it is uphill work for that last scene or two.
The other love affair is that of Achilles with himself, a love shared by his Myrmidons who cut Hector down in the final scene. There is a lot of homoerotic subtext on the Greek side, and Thersites must be the campest character in the whole of Shakespeare.
I abandoned Arkangel’s audio production of this play at quite an early stage, as I was having difficulty telling the Greeks apart, and watched instead the 1981 BBC production. Jonathan Miller as director and Suzanne Burden as Cressida don’t really resolve her part of the story satisfactorily. There are some good performances: The Incredible Orlando (real name Jack Birkitt) as Thersites, Benjamin Whitrow as Ulysses, and most impressively Charles Gray as Pandarus (that’s Charles Gray with an a, the actor, not Charles Grey with an e, the 18th-century lover of the Duchess of Devonshire after whom Earl Grey tea is named). But Miller for some reason trims a lot of Thersites and most of Achilles’ Myrmidons, and there are a lot of moments when the actors’ beards seem to be performing better than their owners.
Henry VI, Part I | Henry VI, Part II | Henry VI, Part III | Richard III / Richard III | Comedy of Errors | Titus Andronicus | Taming of the Shrew | Two Gentlemen of Verona | Love’s Labour’s Lost | Romeo and Juliet | Richard II / Richard II | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | King John | The Merchant of Venice | Henry IV, Part 1 / Henry IV, Part I | Henry IV, Part II | Henry V | Julius Caesar | Much Ado About Nothing | As You Like It | Merry Wives of Windsor | Hamlet / Hamlet | Twelfth Night | Troilus and Cressida | All’s Well That Ends Well | Measure for Measure | Othello | King Lear | Macbeth | Antony and Cleopatra | Coriolanus / Coriolanus | Timon of Athens | Pericles | Cymbeline | The Winter’s Tale / The Winter’s Tale | The Tempest | Henry VIII | The Two Noble Kinsmen | Edward III | Sir Thomas More (fragment) | Double Falshood/Cardenio
Tiptree award meme: bold if you’ve read it, italic if you’ve started, struck through if you hated it. (From
2006 The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente and Half Life by Shelley Jackson; with special recognition for Julie Phillips biography of James Tiptree, Jr., James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
2005: Air by Geoff Ryman
2004: Camouflage by Joe Haldeman and Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo
2003: Set This House In Order: A Romance Of Souls by Matt Ruff
2002: Light by M. John Harrison and "Stories for Men" by John Kessel
2001: The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto
2000: Wild Life by Molly Gloss
1999: The Conqueror’s Child by Suzy McKee Charnas
1998: "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation" by Raphael Carter
1997: Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey and "Travels With The Snow Queen" by Kelly Link
1996: "Mountain Ways" by Ursula K. Le Guin, and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
1995: Waking The Moon by Elizabeth Hand and The Memoirs Of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Theodore Roszak
1994: "The Matter of Seggri" by Ursula K. Le Guin and Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer
1993: Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
1992: China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
1991: A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason, and White Queen by Gwyneth Jones
Retrospective Award: Motherlines and Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas; The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Female Man and "When It Changed" by Joanna Russ
Not too bad, but capable of improvement.
When the person you are arguing with claims to be able to read your mind, it is probably time to walk away from the argument.
Blondy’s real interest is in Malta under the rule of the Knights, as you can tell from the enthusiasm with which he mentions them here when he can. He tends otherwise to concentrate on the standard Greek Cypriot version of the island’s history, which made my revisionist hackles rise: quite apart from the Turks, what happened to the Latins who were so powerful under the Lusignans and Venetians? When do we first see a permanent Islamic presence on the island? What difference did the Suez Canal make? None of these questions is asked, let alone answered.
I shouldn’t be too harsh: one can’t expect too much from books in the Que sais-je? series. There were lots of facts here I hadn’t known (eg that Cyprus was the birthplace of the philosopher Zeno and Paul’s disciple Barnabas). I didn’t catch any actual errors of fact other than omission. And I haven’t seen any history of Cyprus of this short length covering such a long time period. But I couldn’t really recommend this as more than a starting point for French (or Dutch) readers.
