One of the great things about Wikipedia is that it can be a sort of informal translation and transliteration service. I’ve been spending some happy if slightly pointless time looking at the ways in which different languages write John McCain’s name, taken from the sidebar of his Wikipedia entry. There are no less than 66 different language versions of the article on him (some very brief). 43 of those are in variations of the Latin alphabet, and 42 of those 43 use McCain’s own spelling of his name. The one exception is Azeri, where the letter “c” is pronounced like English “j”, so not surprsinigly “McCain” becomes “Makkeyn”; by way of compensation, “John” becomes “John”.

There are seven Cyrillic alphabet entries for McCain. Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian have united around Джон Маккейн (“Džon Makkeyn”) which is reasonably phonetic. Both versions of Belarusian drop a к and have Джон Макейн. Serbian actually has a letter for the English ‘J’ sound, but lacks the й letter, so there we have Џон Макејн. (There isn’t a Macedonian entry, but if there were it would have that spelling too.) The last Cyrillic entry is not a Slavic language, but Mongolian: Жон МакКэйн – in Mongolian, the letter Жж is pronounced like English “Ch” as in “church”, and they don’t have a “J” sound. I think this is the only non-Latin spelling where there is a capital letter in the middle of McCain’s surname.

Hebrew and Yiddish display another problem for the transliterator: do you try and capture the unwritten vowel in the first syllable of “McCain”? Of course, it comes from the Irish “Mac”, so (as the Cyrillic transcriptions do) you can write it with a vowel (as in Yiddish,דזשאן מעקעין); or you can reflect the fact that most English speakers more or less omit the vowel (as in Hebrew, ג’ון מקיין).

There’s a similar contrast between Arabic and Farsi – Arabic goes for including the first vowel in McCain – جون ماكي – but Farsi prefers instead to double the letter “ک” (as Russian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian double the “к”) – جان مک‌کی – unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a handy Urdu transliteration which would break the tie.

In Chinese, there’s no question of doubling consonants, but as far as I can tell the Mandarin 約翰·麥凱恩 and Cantonese 麥凱恩 would have you pronounce the first vowel, while the Wu version, 马凱恩, rather mutes it. (Slightly puzzled that Cantonese and Wu just seem to use his surname.)

Going back to scripts I can actually read, the Georgian ჯონ მაკ-კეინი innovates by adding an extra vowel to the end – “jon mik-keini”. Greek is fairly standard Τζον Μακέιν – “τζ” is normally pronounced “dz” in modern Greek, but is also the standard transliteration of the “j” sound.

The other transliterations, just for completeness, are Bengali/Bishnupriya Manipuri জন ম্যাককেইন; Marathi जॉन मॅककेन; Tamil ஜான் மெக்கெய்ன; Korean 존 매케인; Thai จอห์น แมคเคน and Japanese ジョン・マケイン.

Because Obama’s name is much more easy to spell in any language, the transliteration questions are not as interesting (assuming you found them at all interesting in the first place). It is striking that while there are 66 Wikipedia articles on McCain there are 91 on Obama. This inevitably means a few new alphabets:

ባራክ ኦባማ (Amharic, which is the main language of Ethiopia)
(Dhivehi, the main language of the Maldives) ބަރާކް އޮބާމާ
बराक ओबामा (Hindi)
ಬರಾಕ್ ಒಬಾಮ (Cambodian)
ബറാക്ക് ഒബാമ (Malayalam)

There now, aren’t you glad you know that!

1) The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, by Charles Nicholl

I was in Paris yesterday, and managed a quick ten minutes’ browse in that excellent bookshop, Shakespeare and Co. Not surprisingly, given their name, they have a shelf of books about Shakespeare, and this one attracted my attention.

It’s the story behind the only surviving documentary record of Shakespeare’s own spoken words, his evidence in a court case of 1612 relating to a family dispute in the household of his former landlord, Christopher Mountjoy. Back in 1604, Mountjoy’s daughter Mary had married his apprentice, Stephen Belott. Shakespeare was not only the upstairs lodger in the Mountjoy’s house; he also “perswaded” Belott to marry Mary and officiated at their handfasting ceremony a few weeks before their church marriage. The newlyweds then moved out and became tenants of George Wilkins, a brothel-keeper and occasional playwright, with whom Shakespeare was collaborating on Pericles. Both Stephen Belott and Christopher Mountjoy were French, and as Nicholl points out it is rather interesting that at precisely the same time as Shakespeare was persuading a young Frenchman to get married he was writing a play, All’s Well That Ends Well, featuring a young Frenchman who is persuaded into marriage.

Nicholl has produced a real gem of a book here. He takes us in and out of the small corner of London where it all happened (now buried by the Barbican); he goes deeply into customs of marriage and sex, and also the immigrant experience, illustrating them with a wealth of contemporary documents. (Though I could perhaps have been satisfied with two chapters rather than four on tire-making, the manufacture of ladies’ head-dresses which was the trade of the Mountjoys and Bellotts.)

Part of the charm of Nicholl’s approach is that he has clear views about the people whose actions he is reconstructing. Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare’s landlord, is described as a tight-fisted irritable git – the court case relates to his alleged non-payment of his daughter’s dowry (and was referred by the English court to the elders of the French church, who found for the Belotts but awarded them much less than they sought). On the other hand, Nicholl seems attracted to and fascinated by Mountjoy’s wife Mary, who had died by the time of the court case but is very visible in other surviving records of the early James I years, supplying headgear to the new Queen, consulting with the notorious astrologer Simon Foreman. Nicholl speculates that Shakespeare may have been a little in love with his landlady; one gets the feeling that Nicholl himself certainly is! He doesn’t quite dare to investigate Shakespeare himself too deeply, his most substantial point being that Shakespeare’s convenient and probably feigned uncertainty on a crucial fact in the court case probably prevented the Belotts from getting the settlement they deserved.

So, this is a brilliant example of how to take a single documentary source and weave a real historical apparatus around it, something I have seen done both well and badly by others.

Rant on tangentially connected subject: My biggest irritation is that the book has endnotes rather than footnotes – this is just about tolerable if the endnotes are mere citations of sources, but if as in this book they contain substantial nuggets of additional fact, it is bizarre to bury them hundreds of pages away, and a huge disservice to both writer and reader on the part of the publisher. In these days of advanced software, why not as a matter of course put the notes at the bottom of the page, where they clearly relate to the relevant text? I just don’t understand.

As evidenced by Katie Couric, Sarah Palin is unable to name any Supreme Court Case other than Roe v. Wade.

The Rules: Post info about ONE Supreme Court decision, modern or historical your lj. (Any decision, as long as it’s not Roe v. Wade.) For those who see this on your f-list, take the meme to your OWN lj to spread the fun.

I’m afraid that apart from Roe v Wade there is only one Supreme Court case that I could name offhand; and it is one that shows the American system essentially failing. I refer, of course to Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants, whether or not they were slaves, could never be citizens of the United States, and that slaves could not sue in court. Chief Justice Taney’s actual opinion is a profoundly offensive and appalling document, a disgrace to the Supreme Court and to the American constitution – to single out one passage, this is where he creatively interprets statement of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal”:

The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration, for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted, and instead of the sympathy of mankind to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.

To which I would respond: first, even if the Founding Fathers did not themselves live by those words, they are none the less words which one should aspire to live by; and second, they did indeed receive “rebuke and reprobation” for their hypocrisy at the time – Samuel Johnson had famously asked “how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of the negroes?”

The Dred Scott judgement was physically revoked by the outcome of the Civil War, and legally undone by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of 1865 and 1868, the first since constitutional amendments since 1804. Not a lot of use for Dred Scott himself, who died in November 1857, ten months after the Supreme Court ruling. In the meantime his emancipation had been bought by a former owner, so he did at least die a free man. (One minor additional irritating point in Taney’s judgement is that Scott’s owner’s name is misspelled – it was Sanford not Sandford.)

What name is missing?

James
John
William
George
Andrew, [ missing name ] and possibly Thomas

I discovered this week that someone I knew at university as a raving Tory is now press adviser to one of the Labour Party ministers in the current British government.

This is a nice match for the former leftie activist who is now Chief Executive of a British state institution and identifies her personal hero as Jack Welch, because of what he did for General Motors.

Apparently “Milan” is stressed on the first syllable.

And it is on a river which has tides.

How many LibraryThing users have copies of each Shakespeare play:

Hamlet 8675
Macbeth 6080
Romeo and Juliet 5851
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4599
Othello 4060
King Lear 4031
The Tempest 3394
Julius Caesar 2798
The Merchant of Venice 2689
Twelfth Night 2453
Much Ado About Nothing 2412
Sonnets 2238
The Taming of the Shrew 2033
As You Like It 1759
Richard III 1452
Henry V 1415
Antony and Cleopatra 1395
Henry IV, Part I 1308
Measure for Measure 1130
The Winter’s Tale 1001
Richard II 970
The Comedy of Errors 756
Henry IV, Part II 571
Coriolanus 565
Love’s Labour’s Lost 550
Titus Andronicus 541
Troilus and Cressida 533
All’s Well That Ends Well 464
The Merry Wives of Windsor 417
The Two Gentlemen Of Verona 362
Cymbeline 343
Pericles 325
Henry VIII 284
King John 280
Timon of Athens 277
The first part of King Henry the Sixth 205
The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth 182
The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth 153

The jump between the first and second plays on the list (Hamlet to Macbeth) is both absolutely and proportionately the biggest gap. The next biggest proportionate jump is at the bottom of the list, separating the three parts of Henry VI from Timon of Athens. The two other big gaps are i) just below the midpoint, between Richard II on 970 and Henry IV, Part II on 571, with The Comedy of Errors stuck between them on 756; and ii) between the top three (Hamlet/Macbeth/Romeo and Juliet) and the rest (starting with A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

Just thought you would like to know.

…as proposed by SciFi Now and contested by , here. Will go and post my own views later, but don’t let me stop you now.

Brilliant.

22) Expiration Date, by Tim Powers

I think this is one of the few Powers novels I hadn’t yet read. I enjoyed it. Set in California at Halloween 1992, it features the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison being pursued by various unsavoury people and entities. Powers conveys a real sense of the place and time – lots of references to the Clinton / Bush election campaign, and gritty portrayals of the people and localities of the greater LA area. Great fun.

21) In The Land Of Israel, by Amos Oz

I’d been putting off reading this since I work on enough conflicts professionally, and don’t rush to fill my leisure time with more. It is, however, a very interesting account of attitudes in Israel in the winter of 1982, just after the first invasion of Lebanon; the leftish author mainly reports on right-wing voters who disagree with him, though he has a couple of short chapters with Palestinians in Ramallah and Jerusalem.

I must say that my main reaction, having read this en route from Switzerland to Belgium after giving a conference presentation on the Balkans and the Caucasus, is that actually the Israel / Palestine conflict is a lot less special than its protagonists like to think it is. Certainly a lot of the attitudes expressed by Oz’s interlocutors could be found also among Ulster Loyalists, fairly mainstream Serbs, and among various sides in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and perhaps especially Russia.

20) Feast of the Drowned, by Stephen Cole

I’ve enjoyed two other New Series novels by Stephen Cole (here and here), so I’m glad to report now that I like Feast of the Drowned even more, which makes it the best Ninth or Tenth Doctor book I’ve read. It’s not that it has the literary depth that the best of the New / Missing / Past Doctor ranges have, but it’s very faithful to the spirit of Season Two (ie 2006, not 1964-5), and in particular it would fit awfully well into continuity between “New Earth” and “Tooth and Claw”; I found it easy to imagine what a TV version of this would have looked like.

We have here a return to Rose’s London; we have quite a lot of Mickey, and what he went through during the year that Rose had vanished – one of Mickey’s best outings in the canon (if this is canon). We have the Doctor being very David Tennant-ish, confusing friends and confounding foes, especially the military. As with the two other Cole books I’ve read, we also have shape-shifting aliens which share the Zygons’ aquatic habitat (but are otherwise original to him). Rose herself doesn’t come across terribly well, and the science is as bogus as anything else in New Who, but it is a very enjoyable romp.

19) Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470-1603, by Steven G Ellis

Perhaps it is just because I am getting used to the subject, but I found this book much more lucid and informative than either of the other two I have read on the sixteenth century in Ireland. In particular, I feel I have finally sorted out the geography in my own mind: most of the island divided up among Irish-speaking chieftains, and the English-speaking areas concentrated in two large chunks – the Pale and the Kildare / Fitzgerald lands near Dublin, and the Ormond / Butler and Desmond / Fitzgerald regions farther south, the former centred around Waterford, the latter sprawling erratically from Cork to Limerick to Dingle.

Ellis deliberately rejects any inevitability about the forging of Irish nationhood in the heat of English oppression. Instead, he argues that if the Henry VIII / Anthony St Leger policy of “surrender and regrant” had been consistently applied, Ireland could have been integrated into the Tudor realms without much more difficulty than Wales or the far north of England, with the Gaelic chieftains converted to loyal-ish subjects rather than fractious objects of military adventure. (The idea was that they would surrender their ancient claims to their land to the King, and he would then regrant them their territory and give them peerages; there were also usually provisions about adopting English dress and customs.)

This didn’t happen, of course. Partly, Henry VIII had doubts about the policy, and died almost as soon as he had got over them; but mainly, a succession of English governors got sucked into expensive military adventures which then developed their own logic. At times, the accounts of London and Dublin trying to identify which former enemy faction could be this year’s ally are uncomfortably reminiscent of the travails of the US in Iraq. The result of the military approach was that the potential loyalty of the Gaelic chieftains, and indeed the previous loyalty of the “Old English” magnates, was lost; and the island itself politically and economically devastated by the Nine Years War at the end of the Tudor period. (My one complaint about Ellis is that he rather runs out of steam in the 1590s.)

There were two further exacerbating factors. One was that the military policy created a new political dynamic – the “New English”, those who had come to Ireland and made good on grants of confiscated land and offices of state, had a vested interest in conflict rather than conciliation. They weren’t all that numerous, but had a critical mass in the machinery of government and the courts. Their policies were not always adopted; the Old English magnates still retained influence in London, especially when one of their number briefly married Henry VIII and more substantially when her daughter became Elizabeth I. But they were a new element in the Irish political equation which the rest of the island didn’t quite know how to adapt to.

The second exacerbating factor was the Reformation. Ellis confesses himself rather baffled as to why it did not work in Ireland. The dissolution of the monasteries was far from unpopular. Henry’s breach with Rome had little practical effect on the ground. There was no Irish equivalent of the Pilgrimage of Grace. In the end his conclusion seems to be that the Protestant leadership in England simply did not try hard enough to impose religious change on the neighbouring island; confusing instructions, failure to counter the Vatican’s fairly desultory defensive response, and a lack of suitably qualified staff – Trinity College was not founded until 1592, and by then it was too late; language was also an issue here. By the end of the century, the New English were by and large Protestants, and the Old English and their former Gaelic enemies by and large Catholics; but there was no inevitability about this.

Ellis mentions, and I’ll pursue it a bit further here, the other contemporary European country where the Reformation did not have the result desired by its rulers: the northern Netherlands, where Philip II actually lost sovereignty of a large chunk of territory. The Spanish supply lines to Brussels were of course much more difficult to maintain than the British lines to Dublin; also, in all fairness, the Spanish behaviour in the Netherlands was far more extreme than that of the British in Ireland; also it has to be admitted that Hugh O’Neill was not as gifted a statesman as William the Silent.

My reason for interest in this period is my ancestor and namesake, Sir Nicholas White, who I’m glad to say comes out of his three mentions in Ellis’ book rather well, as a consistent opponent of the military line and supporter of conciliation. He complains to the Queen about one of the more aggressive governors and helps get him sacked; he helps institute a revised version of “surrender and regrant” in Connacht in 1585; and he warns London against too much innovation in policy. Unfortunately the point where he fell from grace and died in the Tower of London is precisely the point (1592) where Ellis seems to lose interest in the narrative and there is no reference to this particular crisis. Despite this shocking omission, I very much recommend this book.

In answer to various questions asked on Facebook:

Victoria: yes, it was an easy procedure; once you’ve lived here for seven years (if you have an unlimited residence permit or authorisation to settle in Belgium) you just bring a translation of your birth certificate to the town hall and fill in a form. They charge you a tenner for giving you a new ID card (see illustration below, with my ID number and signature chopped out). There are various other more bureaucratic mechanisms, but it was pretty painless. See here for the full list, and here for the specific mechanism we used.

Svetlana: Obviously I understand why you, as a proud citizen of your own country, would never do such a thing!!!! But I explained it all here. The only practical difference in our lives is that voting in all elections is now compulsory.

Andy: Flemish. It doesn’t say so officially, of course, but you’ll notice that the card is basically in Dutch and English.

Tineke: I believe that it is an electoral district!!!!! (And I’m never home in time to watch that programme, but maybe I’ll start buying the comics.)

Peter/Howard: Ha ha, very funny.

Catie/Eleanor/Amadeo/Mark: Thanks!

The photograph isn’t very flattering, but such things rarely are!

I’m becoming a real cinema addict these days – September isn’t over yet, and I have seen four films this year!

Well, Cruel Intentions is running fourth out of four at present. I saw the Glenn Close / John Malkovich / Michelle Pfeiffer Dangerous Liaisons back in 1989 (with , if memory serves me right) and there is simply no comparison. Apart from anything else, Ryan Philippe, playing the male lead, cannot actually act, which is a fairly serious demerit since the story revolves around him. Meanwhile the female leads, Selma Blair, Reese Witherspoon and especially Sarah Michelle Gellar, do their level best with what they are given, but they are not given much. In particular, SMG is very good in the final scene where her reputation disintegrates, but I am afraid that Glenn Close was better. The incidental music is fun but not quite fun enough. I think even hardened Buffy fans can skip this.

A fascinating exchange about South Africa on BBC radio’s Today programme this morning. The BBC has been running with a particular narrative of what’s been going on with the downfall of President Thabo Mbeki, portraying events essentially as a subversion of the constitutional and democratic process by the populist and possibly corrupt Jacob Zuma. This morning’s piece had a South African businessman (with an obviously Afrikaaner name) and a South African business journalist (with a more English-sounding name) interviewed live to comment on turmoil in the Johannesburg stock markets following the rumoured resignation of the Finance Minister.

The BBC’s narrative collapsed; there is no other way of putting it. Apparently, in late-breaking news, the Finance Minister isn’t resigning after all, and the markets are recovering. What was even more striking was that the two South Africans both said that the removal of Mbeki was a good thing, from their perspective; he was arrogant, out of touch, and incompetent, and they are already getting better communication with the new government.

What was even more striking was a comment made by the finance journalist: “There are an awful lot of poor people in this country, and they ought to be listened to; and the old government wasn’t listening.” Can you imagine the averge Financial Times or Wall Street Journal or NRC Handelsblad correspondent spontaneously making that sort of remark?

The interviewer tried weakly to get them to agree that political instability in South Africa is now a serious problem. But the South Africans indicated that the problem was Mbeki’s behaviour, and the ensuing difficulty of getting rid of a leader who has spent all his political capital in a system that hasn’t done that before; and that has now been resolved, in a completely legal and democratic way. They rejected the BBC interviewer’s description of South Africa as a one-party state, pointing out that while the ANC is indeed strong and will probably win next year’s elections, all bets are off for 2014. And anyway, they saw the ANC as a middle-class, establishment party, leftish but not very, which was unlikely to lurch into new policy paths after the change of leadership.

I found it extraordinary that the BBC’s narrative, which I have been uncritically accepting for months, got blown apart by its own choice of interviewees (also of course the story hook they were using for the piece melted away). Also, it’s sometimes nice to discover that things are not as bad as you thought they were.

18) The Golden Transcendence

Sorry, but I’ve got a hundred pages into it and I’m giving up. The unlikeable protagonist is locked in mental battle with his adversary using various nanotech and other superpowers, and I suddenly realised I didn’t really care which of them won (indeed, as Ian Hislop said about the Mohamed al-Fayed vs Neil Hamilton libel case, I almost wished they would both lose). There are loads of other books on my shelves that I want to read more than this, so I’m putting the trilogy on BookMooch, unfinished.

17) Love and War, by Paul Cornell

This is the debut adventure of Bernice “Benny” Summerfield, one of the more memorable companions of Who spinoff fiction – future archaeologist, hard drinker, unsuccessful lover, heroine of numerous spinoff books and audio plays in her own right. The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive to explore the planet of Heaven; Ace falls in love with a Celtic crusty; the Doctor has difficulty distinguishing her from Susan and, of all past companions to pick, Dodo; and religious cults and various other locals and visitors are dealing, whether they know it or not, with a horrible intelligent fungus which is infecting their bodies.

Quite apart from Benny, whose debut is as memorable as I hoped it would be, this is a good novel for Ace, whose doomed love affair, recollections of her youth in Perivale, and tentative renegotiation of her relationship with the Doctor combine to make her much more interesting and compelling here than she ever was on screen. Some of the familiar Paul Cornell motifs are here – people trapped in a church or local equivalent; owls – but there are some very pleasing nods to the space opera future portrayed in Pertwee-era Who (the Draconians; the IMC) and the planet itself, and the gruesome invasive fungoids, are convincingly attention-grabbing. One of the better New Adventures, I suspect (not that I have read many of them).

The name “Semiramis” crops up as an epithet in both Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew, as a legendary ancient warrior queen.

I first encountered her in slightly different form as Semirama, a character in Roger Zelazny’s The Changing Land (the second of the two books about his character Dilvish the Damned, which is itself a sort of epilogue to William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland). I can’t lay hands on my copy at the moment but she was rather memorably brought to life the illustrator; in the book, she is an ancient queen, resurrected centuries after her death to help contain the mad deity at the centre of the story.

I have no idea how Zelazny intended her name to be pronunced, but I automatically read it as along the same lines as semiCOLon or semiFINal, thus “SemiRAMa” or in the traditional version “SemiRAMis”. (I never really thought about why she would be half of a Rama or Ramis, though.)

However, it’s absolutely clear that Shakespeare has a different pronuniciation in mind:

To wait, said I? To wanton with this queen,
This goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph,
This siren, that will charm Rome’s Saturnine

Ay, come, Semiramis – nay, barbarous Tamora,
For no name fits thy nature but thy own!

Or wilt thou sleep? We’ll have thee to a couch
Softer and sweeter than the lustful bed
On purpose trimm’d up for Semiramis.

I guess it wouldn’t have occurred to me so quickly if I was just reading the plays rather than listening to them as well, but it’s obvious that Shakespeare is stressing the antepenultimate (or, as we say in English, third last) syllable: “SeMIRamis”.

Wikipedia, as so often, has much interesting information about Semiramis, including that her original name may have been the Babylonian “Shammur-amat“. Ancient Babylonian is not one of my languages, so I don’t know where the stress would be in “Shammur”.

Then again, when you consider how different the modern pronunciation of “Julius Cæsar” is from the way he probably said it (“Yoolius Kaiser”), Semiramis would probably be glad to know that she is remembered at all this long after her death, and not too worried about the pronunciation of her name by people in countries she did not know existed.

16) Zlata’s Diary: a child’s life in Sarajevo, by Zlata Filipović

This is the diary of a bright eleven-year-old, Zlata Filipović, whose relatively normal life growing up in Sarajevo was suddenly and abruptly disrupted by the outbreak of war in April 1992; her daily life shifts suddenly from worrying about school and partying with friends and family, to hiding from snipers and artillery fire in her home and waiting to hear which of her friends has been killed. For those of us who deal with international affairs on a daily basis, it’s a pretty good reminder that conflict is not really about the political leaders whose childishness Zlata excoriates; it is about ordinary people whose lives suddenly become hell because of evil decisions made by evil men.

Zlata comes across as a perceptive child, and it is interesting how her interpretation of the conflict shifts from essentially reflecting the Sarajevo consensus to more bitter and wiser invective against everyone responsible for the situation. But this is also a story whose telling in itself changes the teller: by the middle of the book, her diary-keeping has made her a celebrity; by the end (December 1993), she is being evacuated from Sarajevo with her family at the personal instructons of the French Minister of Defence.

But she doesn’t let it go to her head. Comparisons with Anne Frank by external commentators are inevitable; Zlata just remarks that she hopes not to suffer the same fate. Even after the outside world “discovers” her, she still writes about family gossip as unselfconsciously as she did before the war started.

I’ve been a bit disingenuous in writing this so far, because I did not get to know the author through reading this book. I first encountered Zlata Filipović as the bright and efficient intern in ICG’s Paris office in 2002, before the penny dropped for me that I had actually heard of her for other reasons. She lives in Dublin these days, and has followed through on the instincts recorded in her diary to build a career in peace-building and international relations. If you happen to see this via your Facebook feed or by other means, Zlata, well done!

One of my regular google alerts is for news stories and blog entries naming our village. Usually this just throws up stories about the football team and newly posted Wikipedia pictures of the railway station. This weekend, however, it flagged up for me this rather sweet account by a blogger of her aunt’s wedding in our local town hall.

It wasn’t until I clicked on the photo album at the end of the entry that I realised there was something about the happy couple which would have made their marriage impossible in a lot of places.

Sometimes I really like this country.

From and also :

List 10 books you have on your bookshelf that you think nobody else on your friends list has on theirs.

1. Becoming Somaliland, by Mark Bradbury.
   (Just finished this today – study of the emerging state in the Horn of Africa.)


2. ‘with all faults’, by David Low.
   (Rather dull autobiography of a Charing Cross Road bookseller.)


3. Collision Course: NATO, Russia and Kosovo, by John Norris.
   (Insider’s account of the 1999 negotiations.)


4. Roger Zelazny by Jane Lindskold.
   (Literary study of the writer by the woman who became his lover.)


5. Lords of Parliament: Manners, rituals and politics, by Emma Crewe.
   (An anthropological study of the British House of Lords.)


6. A Bachelor’s London: Memories of the Day before Yesterday, 1889-1914, by Frederic Whyte.
   (Literary autobiography of a distant cousin)


7. Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land: The Pensionnat Heger and Other Brontë Places in Brussels, by Eric Ruijssenaars.
   (Looks at the effect of Brussels on the Brontë sisters, and vice versa.)


8. Ten Years to Oblivion, by “Clem Macartney”.
   (Mediocre sf book by veteran Ulster political journalist W.D. Flackes.)


9. The Banovina, by Donka Stančić and Miško Lazović.
   (Architectural history of the government building of the Vojvodina.)


10. Malachy, by Brian Scott.
    (Biography of the Irish saint.)

15) Becoming Somaliland, by Mark Bradbury

Bradbury has done a good job here of untangling the complex set of politics and conflict which have led to the former British colony of Somaliland repudiating its 1960 union with the neighbouring Italian colony, and instead constructing a home-grown democracy, despite its non-recognition by the international community and generally chaotic neighbourhood. Somaliland remains a very poor country, crucially dependent on exporting its cattle across the Gulf of Aden (with mineral resources now coming into the picture as well); yet it has managed to overcome internal conflict and build a robust democratic system with only minimal engagement from the outside world (which has instead wasted its time empowering warlords from the east and south of the disintegrated Somalia).

One of the interesting facets of Somaliland’s development has been the process of introducing democratic structures to a clan-based and partly nomadic society, particularly because one often hears the assertion that some cultures are simply not suited to democracy. The contrast between Somaliland and the other Somalis in the neighbourhood demonstrates that it really isn’t a matter of culture, it is a question of leadership.

That leadership has been provided in large part by the Guurti, the upper house of parliament which consists of nominated clan elders, and still retains immense political credibility in comparison with the elected lower house and perhaps even the president. Yet one must remember that this is a work in progress; the lower house was only elected for the first time in 2005 (and elections due this year were postponed because of the immense technical difficulties of organising them).

I said when I left my previous job two years ago that if you are working in international politics and not doing anything for Africa, you need to ask yourself why. Since the start of last year I have been privileged to work for and with the Somalilanders, trying to get the rest of the world to live up, if not to its principles, at least to their promises to these affable, decent, long-suffering people. It is tremendously rewarding.

Somaliland would certainly satisfy the criteria defining statehood in the 1933 Montevideo Treaty ((a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states). So, of course, would a lot of other secessionist entities.

These days the principle of territorial integrity, generally accepted, provides that international frontiers are recognised as inviolable except by agreement. This is intended to deter wars or territorial aggression; and if you look at the map of how Europe’s borders changed in the fifteen years after the Montevideo Treaty was signed in 1933, you can see why. Preventing such wars in general is clearly a Good Thing; but sometimes the principle of territorial integrity comes into serious conflict with the reality on the ground. The break-ups of the old Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union give us plenty of examples.

Somalia/Somaliland is another one. The current Mogadishu government is much further from satisfying the Montevideo criteria than is the Republic of Somaliland, but it is the former rather than the latter that gets to sit in the UN and other international bodies, despite the fact that it barely controls Mogadishu and a few other towns. But then, who ever said that international poolitics made sense?

Before 1689, only three kings of England had set foot in Ireland during their reign. Can you name then?

Answer: As worked out by and , the answer is Henry II, John and Richard II.

Henry II visited in 1171 and was proclaimed Lord of Ireland, a title that English kings kept until 1534. He passed the title to his youngest son John in 1177.

John visited Ireland, rather disastrously, in 1185 before he inherited the English throne, but came again with a military expedition in 1210.

Richard II came with a very large military expedition in 1394-95, and then again in 1399, but was overthrown by Henry IV while out of England and died in captivity the following year.

13) Walking Dead, by C.E. Murphy

This is the fourth novel in the Walker Papers (see also Urban ShamannovellaThunderbird FallsCoyote Dreams), featuring a Seattle policewoman with mystical powers; it won’t be published until next year, but kindly let me have sight of it. NB that she has been posting short stories on her livejournal this last week, including another Joanne Walker one yesterday.

I’ve described these books before as being slightly in the Buffy mode (and if you like one you’ll probably like the other). One difference, though, is that Joanne is part of the normal system of authority, rather than revolting against it in the way that Buffy does. However, mystical powers and police procedure are not easy bedfellows, and a lot of the tension underlying the narrative comes from her (and to a lesser extent her colleagues) attempting to reconcile her two roles as shaman and detective. I think this book explores this interesting side of things rather more than its predecessors.

In Walking Dead, as apparently it is to be called, Joanne is called on to investigate the disappearance of an ancient cauldron, and soon finds herself dealing with the consequent undead zombies, calling on mystical and human (and half-human) allies to find the person responsible, while also dealing with her mildly messy personal life. As ever, both the mundane streets of Seattle and the supernatural forces spilling into them are vividly imagined, along with Joanne’s more personal dilemmas. Fun.

They are handing out more free yoghurt in the Metro stations!