In honour of the national festival, I’ve produced this list of books about Ireland which I have reviewed on-line. This is not a reading list for Irish studies – I ran through most of that when working on my PhD. But I hope some of you will find some points of interest here.

Non-fiction

Medieval history
**** A History of the Black Death in Ireland, by Maria Kelly
***½ Malachy, by Brian Scott – biography of the 12th-century saint

Sixteenth century
****½ Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470-1603 by Steven G. Ellis – best of three on the period
**** Contested Island: Ireland 1460-1630, by S.J. Connolly
***½ Sixteenth Century Ireland, by Colm Lennon

Seventeenth century (and on)
**** The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates, by Des Ekin – how the population of a Cork village were sold to Algiers in 1631
**** Battle of the Boyne 1690, by Padraig Lenihan
**** Science, Culture and Modern State Formation, by Patrick Carroll – science and the state in the 17th and 18th centuries
****½ Belfast, c. 1600 to c. 1900: The Making of the Modern City, by Raymond Gillespie and Stephen A. Royle – found this fascinating

Nineteenth century (and on)
***½ Scholars and Rebels, by Terry Eagleton – intellectual life in nineteenth century Ireland
***** Home Rule: An Irish History 1800-2000, by Alvin Jackson – draws some interesting parallels
**** The Independent Irish Party, 1850-9 by John H Whyte – my father’s first book
**½-**** Four biographies of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh
**** Parnell – The Uncrowned King of Ireland: His Love Story and Political Life, by Katherine O’Shea – biography of leading Irish political figure by the woman who loved him
**** A Bachelor’s London: Memories of the Day before Yesterday, 1889-1914, by Frederic Whyte – autobiography of a distant cousin of mine; some Irish content
***** Lost Railways of Co. Down and Co. Armagh, by Stephen Johnson – does what it says on the tin

1916
****½ Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, by Charles Townshend – comprehensive account
**** Dublin Castle and the 1916 Rising: The Story of Sir Matthew Nathan, by Leon Ó Broin – looks at one senior official’s experience
**** Slide Rule: An Autobiography, by Neville Shute – the novelist’s father was in charge of the GPO
**½ From Behind a Closed Door: Secret Court Martial Records of the Easter Rising, by Brian Barton – relies too heavily on its source material

The Troubles
***** Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea – heart-rending and complete
***** Making Sense of the Troubles, by David McKittrick and David McVea – excellent overview of What It All Meant
***** The Elusive Quest: Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, by Norman Porter – on the importance of reconciliation, and how to get there
****½ Troubled Images: Posters and Images of the Northern Ireland Conflict from the Linen Hall Library, Belfast, ed. Yvonne Murphy, Allan Leonard, Gordon Gillespie and Kris Brown – fascinating collection of visual images
***½ Endgame in Ireland, by David McKittrick and Eamonn Mallie – chronology from 1984 to 2001.
*** Northern Ireland: A Political Directory, 1968-1999 by Sydney Elliott and W.D. Flackes with John Coulter – previous edition of essential directory

Other 20th century
***½ What If? Alternative Views of Twentieth-Century Ireland, by Diarmaid Ferriter – less interesting than it sounds

Literature
***½ The Star Factory, by Ciaran Carson – literary memoir of growing up in Belfast
***½ More Real Than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts, edited by Donald E. Morse and Csilla Bertha – scholarly essays

Fiction

Non-sf
****½ Improbable Frequency, by Arthur Riordan and Bell Helicopter – Myles na gCopaleen and Schrödinger
****½ The New Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction, edited by Dermot Bolger and Ciaran Carty – short stories by new writers
**** A Game of Sharopened Knives, by Neil Belton – De Valera and Schrödinger
**** Odd Man Out, by F.L. Green – base for the classic film
***½ Green Shadows, White Whale: A Novel of Making Moby Dick with John Huston in Ireland, by Ray Bradbury – uneven but interesting

Science Fiction
***½ The Secret Visitors, by James White – aliens in Portballintrae
***½ The Green Gene, by Peter Dickinson – you can tell they’re Celts by their skin colour
*** The Rising of the Moon, by Flynn Connolly – women fighting repression in a future theocratic Ireland
*** Darkness Audible, by Graham Andrews – short shories with linking narrative
** Masters of the Fist, by Edward P Hughes – the only fertile man in the post-Holocaust world gets to impregnate all the women of the village

Fantasy
***** The Third Policeman, by Flann O’Brien – my favourite of his writings
***** Thud!, by Terry Pratchett – not explicitly about Northern Ireland but it’s not difficult to work it out
****½ The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson – classic fantasy, though the Irish setting is rather incidental
**** At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien – generally regarded as his masterpiece
**** The Prize in the Game, by Jo Walton – interesting Cuchulain treatment
**** Master of Earth and Water, by Diana L. Paxson and Adrienne Martine-Barnes – Finn MacCool treatment
**** The Hounds of the Morrigan, by Pat O’Shea – good fantasy novel, for younger readers
**** The Compleat Enchanter, by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt – last section is another Cuchulain yarn
**** Preacher: Proud Americans, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon – vampire’s eye view of the Easter Rising
***½ Emerald Magic: Great Tales Of Irish Fantasy, ed. Andrew M. Greeley – fifteen fantasy stories, most published here first
***½ Gossamer Axe, by Gael Baudino – time-travelling rock musician rescues her girlfriend
***½ Red Branch, by Morgan Llewellyn – yet another Cuchulain treatment
*** Too Long a Sacrifice, by Mildred Downey Broxon – more time-travelling, from ancient times to the Troubles
*** Most Ancient Song, by Kenneth C. Flint – unexceptional fantasy novel
*** Carolan’s Concerto: a toast to the three sacred pastimes of old Ireland: Music, Storytelling and Whiskey, by Caiseal Mór – Celtic Mist
**½ The Meeting of the Waters: Book One of the Watchers Trilogy, by Caiseal Mór – more Celtic Mist

Along with my various other reading projects I’m slowly working through Gibbon, who may not be a laugh a minute but has a surprising number of jokes. I was struck by his conclusions regarding climate change, which are more or less along the right lines if not quite for the right reasons:

Some ingenious writers have suspected that Europe was much colder formerly than it is at present; and the most ancient descriptions of the climate of Germany tend exceedingly to confirm their theory. The general complaints of intense frost, and eternal winter, are perhaps little to be regarded, since we have no method of reducing to the accurate standard of the thermometer the feelings or the expressions of an orator, born in the happier regions of Greece or Asia. But I shall select two remarkable circumstances of a less equivocal nature. 1/. The great rivers which covered the Roman provinces, the Rhine and the Danube, were frequently frozen over, and capable of supporting the most enormous weights. The barbarians, who often chose that severe season for their inroads, transported, without apprehension or danger, their numerous armies, their cavalry, and their heavy wagons, over a vast and solid bridge of ice. Modern ages have not presented an instance of a like phenomenon. 2/. The reindeer, that useful animal, from whom the savage of the North derives the best comforts of his dreary life, is of a constitution that supports, and even requires, the most intense cold. He is found on the rock of Spitzberg, within ten degrees of the Pole; he seems to delight in the snows of Lapland and Siberia; but at present he cannot subsist, much less multiply, in any country to the south of the Baltic. In the time of Caesar, the reindeer, as well as the elk and the wild bull, was a native of the Hercynian forest, which then overshadowed a great part of Germany and Poland. The modern improvements sufficiently explain the causes of the diminution of the cold. These immense woods have been gradually cleared, which intercepted from the earth the rays of the sun. The morasses have been drained, and, in proportion as the soil has been cultivated, the air has become more temperate. Canada, at this day, is an exact picture of ancient Germany. Although situated in the same parallel with the finest provinces of France and England, that country experiences the most rigorous cold. The reindeer are very numerous, the ground is covered with deep and lasting snow, and the great river of St. Laurence is regularly frozen, in a season when the waters of the Seine and the Thames are usually free from ice.

My first reaction is, I wish I could write like that; and my second is to note the usual bigotry against the “savage of the North” with “his [not her] dreary life”. But apart from that, it is a passage with interesting resonances.

Of course, Gibbon is probably unaware of the Gulf Stream warming northwestern Europe (Benjamin Franklin described it a few years later, in 1786). It’s also fairly clear to the modern reader that human destruction of their habitat alone is enough to drive the reindeer and elk beyond the Baltic, rather than the trees providing some sort of continental cooling effect as Gibbon seems to believe. Like Gibbon, I do wonder a bit if the cold was exaggerated by Roman writers – he footnotes Ovid describing frozen lumps of wine being served at dinner, but I would observe that the Danube was a cold place for Ovid in more ways than one, and he was also a master of figures of speech.

Data are few and dubious, but the “Little Ice Age” generally described as having lasted from about 1500 to 1850 seems to have let up – and warmed up – specifically at the time that Gibbon was writing. It’s not at all clear if this took Europe back up to the temperature levels of the first or second century, though. Yet his fundamental conclusion, that the major cause of climate change was anthropogenic and related to environmental exploitation, is well ahead of his time, even if the details are mostly wrong.

This is a collection of short stories, all but two of which are set in contemporary Ireland, by new Irish writers none of whom I had previously heard of (apart from one, Eileen Brannigan, who I went to school with in Belfast). The whole collection is rather a good perspective of life in Ireland today, and reminds me a bit of the way Frank O’Connor depicted the very different Ireland of the 1920s and 1930s in his stories – indeed, one or two here seemed to have direct resonances with his work, and all are in his shadow.

I wouldn’t want to push that too far, though. The difference with O’Connor and his time is that this collection has much less writing about work and religion, and much more openness about dysfunctional relationships – between men and women (now that we can admit that sex happens outside marriage, and that marriages do not always last for life), and between men (mostly) and alcohol. Sixty years ago, Michael McLaverty was able to write a funny story about the schoolteacher making poteen under the nose of the authorities; it’s difficult to imagine anyone writing a funny story centering around alcohol now.

There is another recurrent dysfunctional relationship, that between the Irish and the countryside, which kills (bodily or spiritually or both) the viewpoint characters of several of these pieces (including in Eileen Brannigan’s story). Where the writers of the mid-twentieth century were a bit suspicious of modernity and romanticised the rural virtues of the past, the writers of the early twenty-first seem to have gone the other way; the country is a dangerous, unforgiving, lonely place, and we humans mess with it at our peril.

The two least successful stories are the two set outside the present day – a vignette on the execution of Erskine Childers which can’t quite decide if it is drama or documentary, and an sfnal piece written as a far-future scholarly analysis of a nude picture of Pamela Anderson rescued from the ruins of Los Angeles, which is not as good as the description makes it sound (and that is not saying much). The others are all excellent.

I do have one fairly serious gripe with the presentation. It is not made clear what relationship these stories actually have with the Henessy Literary Awards. Apparently they were all first published in the Sunday Tribune, and thus were also somehow eligible for the Hennessy process, but I think the editors, Dermot Bolger and Ciaran Carty, could have spared a couple of sentences to clarify what the set-up is.

I’ve had this one on the shelves for ages, and eventually it bubbled to the top of not one but two of my reading lists simultaneously. I have previously read both War And Peace and Anna Karenina, and I think the first thing to say is that Resurrection is an easier read – shorter, for a start, and with fewer characters who also appear to have fewer variations in their names. The thirty-something Prince Nekhlyudov, who is Tolstoy here as Levin is in Anna Karenina, is serving as juror in a murder trial when he recognises one of the defendants as the girl he seduced ten years before. She is wrongly convicted, and Nekhlyudov’s consciousness and conscience are suddenly activated with respect to the horrible injustices of the penal system and of Russian society as a whole. He follows her to Siberia in an attempt to compensate her.

The social commentary is biting and convincing, and the account of life with convicted criminals and revolutionaries pretty vivid, and likewise his commentary on elite attitudes and behaviour. It’s unfortunate that Nekhlyudov, the viewpoint character, is rather a bore. His decision to marry Katusha seems based much more on what will make him feel better about himself, rather than any attempt to discern what her needs may be. (She never seems very keen on the idea, even before she meets Simonsen.) One feels that, rather than try and write a character with a story, Tolstoy has put himself into the book as a commentator on society. I’m sure it caused quite a stir among his fans in the 1890s, but the ideas that prisons might be unpleasant places or the judicial system imperfect are hardly news to today’s reader. (Are they?) Nekhlyudov’s sudden discovery of these facts seems rather artificial.

Whatever its flaws, though, it’s prettuy digestible and might be a good jumping-off point for readers who haven’t otherwise tried Tolstoy.

So, as Fianna Fáil abandoned the ragbag of right-wingers with whom they sat in the European Parliament in order to join a major group, the British Conservatives are doing the opposite. (Hat-tip to Tim Roll-Pickering, who unlike most Tories actually understands Europe and thinks, in my opinion a bit wishfully, that this won’t last.)

I was unimpressed with the last Doctor Who story I read with a Chinese setting, but David McIntee has done a lot better here, with the Doctor and Romana I drawn aside from their quest for the Key to Time to deal with the legacy of the Doctor’s Victorian theatrical adventures in 1937 Shanghai, where Chinese and Japanese factions and agents are competing over various assets which turn out to include Mr Sin, a nuclear reactor and an attempt to divert Magnus Greel from his fate. Several pleasing nods to continuity, and I think he captures the Baker / Tamm / Leeson dynamic rather nicely as well. One of the better Missing Adventures.

Doug Muir at A Fistful of Euros informs us that Yunus-Bek Yevkirov, the new President of Ingushetia, was also the leader of the March on Pristina in 1999.

One can lead a column to Pristina every day, but of course here in the republic, things are far more difficult.

Alexandra Bell and Ben Loehrke on Democracy Arsenal compare missile defence to snake oil (which I think is a bit unfair on snake oil):

… technology that does not work against a threat that does not exist…

Henry Farrell on Crooked Timber defends the European Parliament:

…complaints about the self-importance and amour-propre of MEPs seem to me to really miss the point.

On a lighter note, Maria Farrell, also on Crooked Timber, muses on kissing:

I do a fair bit of cheek-kissing and hugging, both socially and at work, probably more than most but not unusually so (I haven’t had any complaints yet).

Finally, back to Henry again who has advice for prospective graduate students.

I’m running out of actual BF Who audios to listen to, but there are still a few spinoff series to get through.

I have enjoyed all of Mike Tucker’s previous audios (The Genocide Machine, which brought back the Daleks; Dust Breeding, which brought back the Master and Caroline John; and The Stone’s Lament, which was the best of the second Benny series), so it’s disappointing to report a relative dud. Bringing Benny to a small world caught between Sontaran and Rutan lines is intrinsically a good idea, but I personally got lost between the real people and Rutans pretending to be Benny and Bev, and also between the various factions of Rutans. A good idea wasted.

Quite a long time back I enjoyed but wasn’t overwhelmed by The Dark Flame, to which this is a sort-of sequel. The Draconian Rage brings Benny to the Draconian emperor in a fairly straighforward story of conspiracies and court politics, with alien civilisation subjected to a different alien threat, and it is told well – though poor Benny is subjected to gruesome torture, from which she bounces back rather unrealistically fast.

For the first time ever, I have to mark a BF audio down quite severely for poor production values. The Poison Seas brings Benny back to the world of The Secret of Cassandra to visit an old friend who happens to be a Sea Devil colonist. Unfortunately the Sea Devil characters are almost incomprehensible thanks to their distorted sibilant voices, and their computer is completely impossible to make out. The plot seemed OK, and Jenny Livsey as human conspirator Carver showed promise, but the annoyance of not being able to hear half the dialogue properly made this in places quite an unpleasant listening experience.

The whole of this series relies pretty heavily on continuity, both with Classic Who and with previous audios. Death and the Daleks is, as I understand it, the audio sequel to a Bernice spinoff short story collection, Life During Wartime, in which the Braxiatel collection has been occupied by a military regime called the Fifth Axis which appears to be led by Benny’s father. It is greatly to Paul Cornell’s credit that despite the fact that the audio starts effectively in the middle of the story, it is pretty easy to pick up what is happening, even with excursions back to Heaven and various nods to Braxiatel continuity. It’s a pretty good account of Daleks, their unwitting human puppets, resistance under occupation, and Benny’s personal history coming back to meet her. I think I would have liked it even more if I had read Life During Wartime, which does make me wonder if it is a good idea to build cross-media continuity so strongly into the narrative.

So in summary, The Draconian Rage is recommended for those with strong stomachs; Death and the Daleks for those who don’t mind catching up with a bit of continuity; and the other two not really recommended at all.

Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.
(Decline and Fall, chapter VII)

…about two thirds of you who answered the previous poll didn’t have the faintest notion what I was on about.

A relatively sympathetic article revealing the answer is here. The Guardian, God bless them, are spinning this story as the British rightwing press being outraged for the sake of outrage.

But I’m afraid this is part of a pattern in the last few days: Hillary Clinton presented her Russian opposite number, Sergei Lavrov, with a gag “Reset” button which had the word “reset” in both English and Russian. Except that the Russian for “reset” was a) spelt wrong and b) in the wrong alphabet anyway.

Come on guys. I was overjoyed when you won; please pay attention to the tiny details. They matter.

I was in Berlin earlier in the week, and decided to trace the route of the Wall through the centre of the city. It’s quite easy to do: from this site I discovered that there was a convenient corner of it near my hotel where the Kommandantenstraße meets the Axel-Springer-Straße, and followed it westwards along the Zimmerstraße, past Checkpoint Charlie, through the Niederkirchnerstraße, up the Stresemannstraße to the Potsdamer Platz, then along the Ebertstraße to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. Basically my route lay to the left from the lower right of this map, and then up the left side:

Almost everywhere it’s pretty easy to follow. This is from near the start of the trail on the Zimmerstraße, looking west:

And this is at the end of that leg, looking east along the Niederkirchnerstraße from the Stresemannstraße:

Here it is snaking across the Potsdamer Platz (strictly speaking this may be the nearby Fontane Platz):

Here’s the view north along the Ebertstraße to the Brandenburg Gate (the sun had come out by now):

Here it is snaking around the Brandenburg Gate (off this line of vision to the right; the Reichstag in the background):

And here we are looking south from the Reichstag to the Brandenburg Gate (the sun having gone in again):

And you can just see it here in the road in front of the Gate:

From these lines in the road, which cars casually park on and drive over, it is almost impossible to imagine what the wall meant to those of us who are old enough to remember the Cold War. What seemed then an immovable barrier has been reduced to a few bricks at street level. It still seems incredible to me.

There is one short stretch still standing on the Niederkirchnerstraße, here looking “West” (actually south-west from this angle) to the Martin Gropius Building, museum and exhibition hall whose entrance was basically blocked by the Wall for many years. (NB the graffiti is post-’89: this was the “Eastern” side of the wall.)

And this is the same stretch looking “East” (really northwest) to the new Berlin parliament building. (Notice absence of graffiti, no doubt all chipped off by souvenir hunters in 1989 or shortly thereafter.) Here it forms part of a permanent open-air exhibition called “The Topography of Terror” to mark the site of the SS and Gestapo headquarters. Hitler’s bunker was a few blocks further north.

The wall skirts a number of other interesting structures. Here is what is left of Checkpoint Charlie, looking southeast past the old US guard post to the Checkpoint Charlie museum (which I went to a few years back; it’s pretty impressive).

The old sign is still there too:

Up near the Reichstag is this little memorial to those who were killed trying to cross the Wall.

The restored Reichstag is remarkable:

The new Chancellery building less so:

Everything in Berlin is well sign-posted – this was the end of my walk:

The most impressive of the memorials occupies a full block between the Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

I recommend you go and see for yourself.

This is a collection of sixty or so speeches made by Graham Watson MEP since he became leader of the Liberal group of members of the European Parliament. I know the author, and inevitably – especially given that it’s a book of speeches – I hear his gentle Rothesay accent in my head as I read the words. (Although he is a Scot, he actually represents South-Western England. And Gibraltar.)

Speeches are odd: on the one hand, they can be pretty ephemeral, on the other hand, they can be tremendously difficult to prepare. I did one in Berlin myself yesterday, addressing diplomats and academics from Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, South Africa, India, China and Indonesia. The topic was one that I have thought about quite often, and talked about occasionally, but had never had to marshall my thoughts on before, let alone present them before an audience of complete strangers. I had a sleepless night on Saturday, dreaming that I would miss my plane, and a sleepless night on Sunday, dreaming that the speech would go badly. In the end I think it went OK – it was in the German foreign ministry, where you can easily work up the last-minute adrenalin by leaping in and out of the paternosters. I’ll probably write it up here eventually – I took the precaution of recording myself on my MP3 player. (And it was tighter than I had anticipated to catch my plane this morning as I caught up on lost sleep from the two previous nights. I was in no danger of missing the flight, but did miss breakfast.)

Graham Watson’s speeches are all much shorter – the longest of these can’t be more than a quarter of an hour, the shortest are parliamentary interventions where MEPs are speaking against the clock. Some are very specific – Russia, Gibraltar, Cyprus, the poor management of his own election campaign in 1999. Others are broader. I don’t think anyone could read the collection and come away from it with the feeling that they didn’t know what Graham Watson stands for; he’s pretty clear on his concept of liberalism, and he has obviously managed to make it appealing to large numbers of MEPs (and, hopefully, their voters); the size of the Liberal group has doubled under his leadership, without his dialling down his own rhetoric in any way, and continues to pull in recruits.

Graham has announced that while he is running for re-election to the European Parliament, he will stand down as leader of the Liberal group after seven years and will instead pitch for the position of President (ie Speaker) of the parliament as a whole. It’s a bit of a long shot, but I would like to see him get it.

I thought on first reading it that this was one of the less successful of the Harry Potter books, and my prejudices were confirmed re-reading it now. It’s rather marking time between the scene-setting of volume 1 and the big reveals of volume 3. It’s also marred by the poor world-building of the politics of wizardry – the nature of the power relationships between the Minister for Magic, Lucius Malfoy, Dumbledore and the Weasleys’ father is never made very clear or credible. It seems extraordinary that no action beyond sidelining Dumbledore is taken after the outbreak of petrifactions, and even more extraordinary that the fraudulent Gilderoy Lockhart is allowed to remain in his job for a week, never mind three terms. Do the parents of Hogwarts pupils not care about their children being turned to stone, or set exam questions on their teachers’ autobiographies?

(One other niggle: given that Harry is so rich, why doesn’t he upgrade the Gryffindor Quidditch team’s broomsticks and get Ron a new wand?)

There are two saving graces to the book, though. The first is the diary – an artifact that seduces poor Ginny to do evil, that maintains Voldemort’s secret original identity. It’s a very creepy betrayal of intimacy. (Of course, if your diary is a Livejournal, it talks back to you in many voices…)

The other is the key moral message of the book that bigotry is wrong. It’s not only the nastiness of cheap insults like “Mudblood” and “Squib” and the consciousness of wizardly privilege; there’s also the moment when Harry inadvertently exposes himself as a Parseltongue, and his reputation plummets. It’s character-building for him, and hopefully thought-provoking for those readers who may not previously have had to think much about prejudice and privilege.

Anyway, Azkaban next, which is my favourite of the series.

< 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 >

Masters of War is the latest in the BF Doctor Who Unbound series of audios, featuring David Warner as an alternate Third Doctor. I decided that before listening to it I would give the first Warner!Doctor story, Sympathy for the Devil, another go. I must say I appreciated its strengths even more two years on, with the Warner!Doctor / Gatiss!Master relationship sonewhat eerily mirrored by that between Nicholas Courtney’s failed Brigadier and his arrogant successor (played by David Tennant).

Unfortunately I didn’t think Masters of War matched up. There are some excellent performances – Terry Molloy as Davros, Courtney as the Brigadier, Briggs as the Daleks, Amy Pemberton as one of the Thals – but there’s a bit of a gap at the centre as Warner doesn’t quite seem to know what hs Doctor is really doing. The plot, too, disappointed – it’s a great idea, taking the Doctor and Brigadier to a post-Genesis Skaro where Davros parted from the Daleks on his own terms – but the key to the story turns out to be some rather dull all-powerful aliens manipulating Thals, Kaleds and now Daleks, and the plot has a lot of standing around getting bombed or shot at. It’s not actually awful, but it is average where it could have been excellent.

“Carl is nervously waiting for the result of the North Korean parliamentary election today…”

(“Carl” is the Swedish foreign minister. It is genuinely his facebook account.)

…is far and away the top-rated review of the book on Library Thing!

If you voted for it, thank you!

Dualeh is a senior Somali political figure, currently Somaliland’s Minister of Finance. In this 2002 book he reminisces about his own life and reflects on the future of the Somali people.

In an interesting book, the most interesting chapter for me was the second chapter, on Dualeh’s education in the colonial British system. He was expelled from the Somaliland boarding school at Sheikh for persistent truancy, but then went to Aden and got a good Catholic schooling (like most Somalilanders he is a pretty secular Muslim). Then he went to Britain and ended up getting military training in preparation for joining Somaliland’s armed forces. There is an amazing moment when he ends up earning money from his illiterate British fellow squaddies for writing their letters home for them; he is stunned that an Englishman (probably in fact a Scot, from context) could not write his own language.

The other particularly fascinating chapter is his account of being Somalia’s ambassador to Uganda during the reign of Idi Amin, who he got to know rather well (and chided directly for being too ostentatiously public in his mosque attendance). There is an extraordinary anecdote of his amost walking in on a meeting between Amin and the Minister of Finance, where Amin demanded that, if the country was running out of money, they should just print more. The minister refused, and fled Uganda that evening, probably wisely.

It’s a bit frustrating that the chapters are arranged in slightly haphazard order: we have the story of the author’s failed 1961 coup after the story of his subsequent trial, and the account of the 1990s collapse of Somalia comes before the account of the misrule of the 1970s and 1980s which caused it. And I found myself wondering for several chapters why it was that the international community failed to mediate when the 1960 arrangements broke down (cf Cyprus where they didn’t do much but at least did something); and eventually the answer appeared – Somalia was a Soviet client state, so nobody was much interested in helping sort out its internal governance problems.

Dualeh makes a very clear case for Somaliland’s recognition as an independent state. It easily clears the hurdle of the Montevideo criteria

Looking the other way round from a previous post, this is a list of Doctor Who actors who have appeared in Shakespeare.

William Hartnell did small walk-on parts on stage in his first job as a teenager with Frank Benson’s Shakespearean Company. No Shakespeare on IMDB though.

Jacqueline Hill was Lady Capulet in the 1978 BBC Romeo and Juliet.

Early in his career, Patrick Troughton did several Shakespeares, two of which were Hamlet – he was Horatio in a 1947 production, and rather more famously the Player King in Olivier’s 1948 version. In the latter year he was also Edmund in a TV King Lear. A few years later he was back with Olivier to be the murderous Tyrell in the 1955 Richard III.

The closest I can get to a Shakespeare connection for Jon Pertwee is his appearance as the Soothsayer in Carry on Cleo.

Caroline John was Hero in a 1967 BBC production of Much Ado About Nothing.

Tom Baker‘s film debut was in a 1968 release of The Winter’s Tale, as the Bear, which seems a bit inglorious.

Lalla Ward was Ophelia to Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet in the 1980 BBC production.

Peter Davison has published commentaries on a number of Shakespeare plays, including the First Quarto version of Richard III, Henry IV Parts I and II, Othello, Richard II and Henry V, though he is better known as a scholar of George Orwell. I refer of course to the former Professor of English at De Montfort University in Leicester, not to the actor whose real name is Peter Moffatt and who doesn’t appear to have any Shakespearean credits.

Colin Baker has done a fair amount of stage Shakespeare but nothing on screen.

Sylvester McCoy plays the Fool (so not much new there) in the recent Trevor Nunn / Ian McKellen King Lear.

In the same year as he became the Eighth Doctor, Paul McGann was Bassanio in Channel 4’s The Merchant of Venice.

Christopher Eccleston was Ben Jago in Andrew Davies’ 2002 update of Othello.

Billie Piper was Hero in David Nicholls’ 2005 update of Much Ado About Nothing.

David Tennant has done a lot of Shakespeare on stage, and I’ve been enjoying his performances on the Arkangel series of audios as well – Henry VI, Antipholus of Syracuse, Laucelot Gobbo, Edgar, Mercutio, and I’m looking forward to him as the Porter in Macbeth which is next on my list. Apparently his Hamlet is coming out on DVD; I can’t wait.

Not aware of any Shakespeare action from Matt Smith