I mistakenly started on this well-known novel under the false impression that it was a classic sf text; it isn’t – it is a novel of didactic philosophy, but entirely about architects in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, with no sfnal elements at all.

Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, as epitomised by her heroic architect Howard Roark, is frankly repulsive. Her viewpoint characters utter tedious tirades against the very concept of altruism; the two-dimensional bad guys use evil concepts like equality and collective action to repress the creativity of her heroes, which is their sole motivation. There is also a Mary Sue heroine whose determination to marry the wrong man several times over is rather creepy (as are her rather odd sexual preferences). On the whole I found this an unpleasant book, and one which I would not recommend to other readers. (Thanks for the warnings, and , it may be a while before I pick up either Anthem or Atlas Shrugged.) It is striking that none of Rand’s characters have or want to have children.

There are two mildly redeeming factors. The first (and lesser) is that, when she is concentrating on story-telling rather than polemic, Rand does have some good moments of characterisation that linger in the mind. The second, and more important, is that New York in the 1920s and 1930s seems to have been a particularly interesting and exciting time and place to be around. The Fountainhead is set in much the same time and place as, say, West Side Story, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Dorothy Parker, the Futurians, the early years of the New Yorker, at a slight remove The Great Gatsby. It’s a fascinating period which I should read more about, and apart from her peculiar political notions, Rand depicts it compellingly.

Anne picked up De Morgen this morning, and we have been discussing a peculiar article by one Luc Van Doorslaer about how evil the Francophone Belgians are. Van Doorslaer has two pieces of evidence for his thesis, one being an academic survey of Belgian media that demonstrates that Flemish journalists read more English-language sources than Francophone journalists do, the other being – get this, folks – Wikipedia.

I fear that Van Doorslaer’s commentary reveals more about the intellectual weakness of the Flemish nationalists than the Walloons. He hasn’t really demonstrated that French-speakers in general take the French version of Wikipedia particularly seriously; and he hasn’t demonstrated at all that the offending article was even written by a Belgian, rather than, say, a Parisian or Quebecker to whom all dialects of Dutch are a mere patois. It would be more impressive if Flemish commentators like Van Doorslaer started reading the francophone press in Belgium directly, rather than relying on academic studies and Wikipedia articles, in order to get a better understanding of what their fellow citizens think – and in particular, to explain to the Flemings what the Walloons say about themselves and vice versa. Otherwise it is mere polemicism masquerading as analysis.

The trains are haywire again this evening; I waited for my connection in sub-zero temperatures for an hour and a half in the Brussels North station before I finally escaped. But I used my chilly wait profitably. Jeff Dudgeon has, once again, done me the favour of drawing my attention to the Dublin Review of Books, and I’ve been reading several of the essays in the latest issue.

My eye was immediately drawn to Martin McGarry’s piece on the future of Belgium, written before last month’s crisis which brought down Yves Leterme’s government, but very insightful as to how we got to where we are – in particular, he describes the infamous BHV problem perfectly adequately in a single sentence, and he enlightened me as to the peculiar dynamic between the N-VA and the CD&V. (A lot of Belgian politics revolves around acronyms.) McGarry is much more readable than Witte, Craeybeckx and Meynen, the authors of the only one of the books he is ostensibly reviewing which I have myself attempted. He’s pessimistic about the long term future of Belgium, but doesn’t quite explain why.

A little-remembered historical linkage between Belgium and Ireland is that Daniel O’Connell was given a vote in the choice of the first King of the Belgians (who, if his first wife had lived, would have been Prince Consort of the UK instead). Paul Bew and Patrick Maume review Patrick Geoghegan’s new biography of O’Connell, and achieve the task of both disagreeing with it and making you want to read it (though I may wait until the second volume comes out – the first takes us only to 1829). I had in fact read MacDonagh’s biography when it came out almost 20 years ago; it sounds like Geoghegan has found more humanity than sainthood in the man, with a more realistic assessment of his religious beliefs, his sex life, and his tendency to go over the top in his oratory. Bew and Maume ask, but don’t answer, the question of whether Parnell or O’Connell was the more significant figure. There’s no doubt in my own mind that it was O’Connell, and frankly I find his large-hearted liberal nationalism much more attractive than Parnell’s somewhat neurotic and narrow ideology.

Leaping forward a hundred years or so, the essay that is closest to my own work and experience is Eunan O’Halpin’s review of Paul McMahon’s book on British espionage in Ireland between 1916 and 1945. From the narrow Irish perspective, this books sounds like a useful corrective (and even in part an explanation) for the Sinn Féin obsession with “securocrats”. But it is also a good set of case studies of how intelligence services operate successfully (eg the collaboration between the RUC and the Garda Síochána on keeping a lid on Republican dissidents in the late 1930s and early 1940s, despite the fact that their respective governments were not on speaking terms) and unsuccessfully (the “German Plot” allegations of 1917-18, uncritically accepted by key British ministers despite the lack of actual evidence).

There’s a wider lesson as well: if, as a government, you keep open the official channels of communication with your neighbours and potential rivals, you are less dependent on the particular idiosyncracies of a small number of intelligence agents, at least when it comes to dealing with actual governments. It is rather extraordinary that there was no British diplomatic presence in Dublin until 1939! And I can think of a good dozen contemporary examples of this sort of short-sightedness. I will stop here.

Alarming news (though other reports say that it’s “only” 13 employees, ie just under half the total workforce).

LJ Archive has stopped working for me – I think my archive is too big – so I’m using this.

I blame Paul Cornell for my late arrival at home this evening.

Belgium was blessed with the miracle of snowfall yesterday (the first day back after the hols for most of us) and those of you who stalk me on Facebook and Twitter will have seen that my journey to work today was not quick: the bus failed to arrive, the train failed to arrive, and eventually my long-suffering spouse dropped me at the main line station in Leuven. Having left home at 0830, I arrived at the office roughly three hours later.

That wasn’t the bit that was Paul Cornell’s fault.

Coming home again this evening, the various main line trains were delayed by varying amounts. If you travel from Brussels North or Brussels South, you will generally be OK because your train tends to stick to the particular platform without being changed, there being enough platforms to go round. But in Brussels Central (which is much smaller) there are only six platforms, three in each direction, and then we find trains being switched rather arbitrarily between platforms at the last minute, especially if they are all running a bit late.

We are getting to the bit where it is Paul Cornell’s fault.

As it happened, my commuting listening today was the Big Finish audio play, Circular Time, which is actually four linked narratives featuring Peter Davison’s cricketing Doctor Who and his companion Nyssa, played by Sarah Sutton. The strongest of the four (which are all very good) is the third, “Autumn”, which has Davison’s Doctor exploring the relationship between male sexuality and cricket, and Sutton’s Nyssa tangling romantically with a local villager.

I was sufficiently glued to the MP3 player as I listened that I somehow misunderstood which train I was getting on at Brussels Central. When I looked up again, I had arrived in the airport, rather than in Leuven as planned. If I had been listening to a less good play, I would have been better able to concentrate on my surroundings, and would have got home in time to catch the start of University Challenge. Luckily the next couple of trains were just sufficiently late that I got home at five past the hour, just about twelve and a half hours after leaving in the morning. (And University Challenge was a close match, wasn’t it!)

I need hardly tell you who wrote Circular Time. As will be obvious from the above, it is All His Fault.

BTW I think I have managed to fix this so that it only appears on Facebook as a Note on my Wall, but is a full status update on Twitter. Howver, I’m going to sleep now, and shall check in the morning.

Now we are onto the Germans, who Gibbon likes much more than the Persians.

The most civilised nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of Germany, and in the rude institutions of those barbarians we may still distinguish the original principles of our present laws and manners.

Sadly his vies on the Germans are rather cliched – noble freedom-loving barbarians. I found much more interesting his guesses about climate change:

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.

It’s difficult to be very sure of any clinatological data; what little I could find suggested that Gibbon’s end of the 18th century was rather warm by (then) historical standards. He gets the relationship between fauna and forest cover backwards, but is probably right in the basic point that climate change is anthropogenic even at this stage of history.

He seems very taken with the manliness and general excellence of the Germans, and then suddenly takes a swipe at the long-forgotten Swedish scholar, Olaus Rudbeck. And it turns out that the ancient Germans weren’t so great either, because they were illiterate,

…and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.

And it turns out that the Germans had no cities, no metal, no desire to work hard, and too much fondness for liquor (that is Gibbon’s word). But then we are back into fantasy territory, as their tradition of freedom through popular choice of rulers and judges is recited. Also they were more sexually controlled due to not being corrupted by civilisation.

This is one of the sillier chapters so far.

Now we turn away from Rome to the neighbouring states, most especially Persia.

In the more early ages of the world, whilst the forest that covered Europe afforded a retreat to a few wandering savages, the inhabitants of Asia were already collected into populous cities, and reduced under extensive empires, the seat of the arts, of luxury, and of despotism.

Well, we’re into the origins of the Sassanids now, and the early career of Artaxerxes before he became an emperor:

…it appears that he was driven into exile and rebellion by royal ingratitude, the customary reward for superior merit.

Artaxerxes gains control of Persia. (Balkh is surprisingly far east for a capital.) He decides to reform the Zoroastrian religion, and Gibbon gives us a (probably inaccurate) thumbnail of Zoroastrian theology.

Every mode of religion, to make a deep and lasting impression on the human mind, must exercise our obedience, by enjoining practices of devotion; and must acquire our esteem, by inculcating moral duties analogous to the dictates of our own hearts. The religion of Zoroaster was abundantly provided with the former, and possessed a sufficient portion of the latter.

Gibbon is impressed with the ecological and practical teachings of the Zoroastrians, though not with their religious practice. He is also impressed by Artaxerxes style of government. The Romans have meantime annoyed the Persians by gratuitous sacking of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, and annexation of Osrhoene (which I knew as Edessa). The Persians declare war; the Romans under Alexander Severus invade (this sheds some light on the events of the previous chapter) but are kicked back, and Alexander is killed. Artaxerxes has been weakened too, though Gibbon still has a sneaking admiration for him:

Several of his sayings are preserved. One of them in particular discovers a deep insight into the constitution of government. “The authority of the prince,” said Artaxerxes, “must be defended by a military force; that force can only be maintained by taxes; all taxes must, at last, fall upon agriculture; and agriculture can never flourish except under the protection of justice and moderation.”

He concludes that the Persians, and the Sassanids in particular, may not have been very scientific in their waging of war but were very keen on the practice, and hostile to Rome.

A glorious start: the problem with he Roman Empire was that it wasn’t hereditary enough. (You would have thought that Commodus and Caracalla were fairly good counter-arguments, but there you go.)

Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule. Is it possible to relate, without an indignant smile, that, on the father’s decease, the property of a nation, like that of a drove of oxen, descends to his infant son, as yet unknown to mankind and to himself; and that the bravest warriors and the wisest statesmen, relinquishing their natural right to empire, approach the royal cradle with bended knees and protestations of inviolable fidelity? Satire and declamation may paint these obvious topics in the most dazzling colours, but our more serious thoughts will respect a useful prejudice, that establishes a rule of succession, independent of the passions of mankind; and we shall cheerfully acquiesce in any expedient which deprives the multitude of the dangerous, and indeed the ideal, power of giving themselves a master.

In the cool shade of retirement, we may easily devise imaginary forms of government, in which the sceptre shall be constantly bestowed on the most worthy, by the free and incorrupt suffrage of the whole community. Experience overturns these airy fabrics, and teaches us that, in a large society, the election of a monarch can never devolve to the wisest, or to the most numerous, part of the people. The army is the only order of men sufficiently united to concur in the same sentiments, and powerful enough to impose them on the rest of their fellow-citizens: but the temper of soldiers, habituated at once to violence and to slavery, renders them very unfit guardians of a legal or even a civil, constitution. Justice, humanity, or political wisdom, are qualities they are too little acquainted with in themselves, to appreciate them in others. Valour will acquire their esteem, and liberality will purchase their suffrage; but the first of these merits is often lodged in the most savage breasts; the latter can only exert itself at the expense of the public; and both may be turned against the possessor of the throne, by the ambition of a daring rival.

The superior prerogative of birth, when it has obtained the sanction of time and popular opinion, is the plainest and least invidious of all distinctions among mankind. The acknowledged right extinguishes the hopes of faction, and the conscious security disarms the cruelty of the monarch. To the firm establishment of this idea, we owe the peaceful succession, and mild administration, of European monarchies. To the defect of it, we must attribute the frequent civil wars, through which an Asiatic despot is obliged to cut his way to the throne of his fathers. Yet, even in the East, the sphere of contention is usually limited to the princes of the reigning house, and as soon as the more fortunate competitor has removed his brethren, by the sword and the bowstring, he no longer entertains any jealousy of his meaner subjects. But the Roman empire, after the authority of the senate had sunk into contempt, was a vast scene of confusion. The royal, and even noble, families of the provinces, had long since been led in triumph before the car of the haughty republicans. The ancient families of Rome had successively fallen beneath the tyranny of the Caesars, and whilst those princes were shackled by the forms of a commonwealth, and disappointed by the repeated failure of their posterity, it was impossible that any idea of hereditary succession should have taken root in the minds of their subjects. The right to the throne, which none could claim from birth, every one assumed from merit. The daring hopes of ambition were set loose from the salutary restraints of law and prejudice; and the meanest of mankind might, without folly, entertain a hope of being raised by valour and fortune to a rank in the army, in which a single crime would enable him to wrest the sceptre of the world from his feeble and unpopular master. After the murder of Alexander Severus, and the elevation of Maximin, no emperor could think himself safe upon the throne and every barbarian peasant of the frontier might aspire to that august, but dangerous station.

Gloriously bigoted stuff. Note the way “prejudice” is presented as a positive thing.

Sadly we don’t get a very good idea of why Alexander was killed, though Maximin sounds like an impressive character, with a serious chip on his shoulder. He turns out to be greedy and incompetent, and it’s more surprising that the Empire survives his rule at all than that he gets overthrown.

A real laugh-out-loud moment when we get to the younger Gordian:

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.

Alas, he and his father get killed off pretty quickly. But by now Rome itself is in revolt, and we have Maximus and Balbinus as alternate emperors. Maximin is killed by his own troops, after much tension. Gibbon thinks he was a Bad Man because of his humble background.

But Maximus and Balbinus go the same way, leaving only the youngest Gordian as undisputed emperor. And he ends up by accident with a decent minister, Misitheus. This is OK until Misitheus dies, and his replacement, Philip, “was an Arab by birth, and consequently, in the earlier part of his life, a robber by profession.” Philip soon promotes himself to the top spot, and throws a big party for the people of Rome to make sure he stays there.

It’s been a dramatic chapter, with the Year of the Six Emperors (238 AD) central to the story. Gibbon concludes with more reflections on the overall problem:

The discipline of the legions, which alone, after the extinction of every other virtue, had propped the greatness of the state, was corrupted by the ambition, or relaxed by the weakness, of the emperors.

Which is all very well, except that he is arguing that the emperors were both too weak and too strong. Really the problem was that state institutions were not robust enough to cope with poor leadership.

Despite his negative assessment of Severus, sounds fairly sympathetic in the first para:

Distracted with the care, not of acquiring, but of preserving an empire, oppressed with age and infirmities, careless of fame, and satiated with power, all his prospects of life were closed. The desire of perpetuating the greatness of his family was the only remaining wish of his ambition and paternal tenderness.

Severus dies in Britain, leaving the empire divided between his two sons Caracalla and Geta, the former of whom kills the latter but does not last much longer himself, despite his aspiration to be a new Alexander the Great.

in no one action of his life did Caracalla express the faintest resemblance of the Macedonian hero, except in the murder of a great number of his own and of his father’s friends.

Macrinus takes power but doesn’t last long – is he the first emperor who doesn’t even make it to Rome in his reign? Gibbon seems to see him as a reformer but that appears to be code for “jumped-up bureaucrat”. Then we get Elagabalus, who introduces his own religion to Rome.

In a magnificent temple raised on the Palatine Mount, the sacrifices of the god of Elagabalus were celebrated with every circumstance of cost and solemnity. The richest wines, the most extraordinary victims, and the rarest aromatics, were profusely consumed on his altar. Around the altar a chorus of Syrian damsels performed their lascivious dances to the sound of barbarian music, whilst the gravest personages of the state and army, clothed in long Phoenician tunics, officiated in the meanest functions, with affected zeal and secret indignation.

I don’t know about the indignation, it sounds rather fun! Alas, Elagabalus turns out to be a Bad Emperor not so much because has sex with lots of women, which Gibbon doesn’t mind too much, but because he shags men as well. The end of his story is by now a familiar one. (Is he the second emperor to be killed by the Prætorian Guards?)

Gibbon is not a feminist.

In every age and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, of the two sexes, has usurped the powers of the state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life. In hereditary monarchies, however, and especially in those of modern Europe, the gallant spirit of chivalry, and the law of succession, have accustomed us to allow a singular exception; and a woman is often acknowledged the absolute sovereign of a great kingdom, in which she would be deemed incapable of exercising the smallest employment; civil or military.

Indeed, what is striking is that after he condemns Mamæa just for being a woman, he goes on to explain just how good she was at running the empire through her son Alexander Antoninus.

The provinces, relieved from the oppressive taxes invented by Caracalla and his pretended son, flourished in peace and prosperity, under the administration of magistrates, who were convinced by experience, that to deserve the love of the subjects was their best and only method of obtaining the favour of their sovereign.

Much on Alexander’s efforts to reform the military, though I would have liked an assessment of how far he got. He also declared all free-born inhabitants to be citizens, which is surely worth more attention than Gibbon gives it.

Then a passage on the economics of the empire, which I found a bit lacking in substance; also I’m not an economist and the vocabulary here seems to have shifted quite a lot in the last 230 years. The explanation for the grant of universal citizenship is that it meant more money for the treasury; I really want to know more about the political currents leading up to it.

This chapter is about the rise of Severus, who Gibbon does not like, though he does not really explain why; Severus seems no more monstrous than, say, Vespasian.

Begins with a discussion of having a standing army, especially as an instrument of state authority:

THE power of the sword is more sensibly felt in an extensive monarchy than in a small community. It has been calculated by the ablest politicians, that no state, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.

Then goes on to the Prætorian Guard, and their auctiionong the Empire (or more accurately the title of emperor). Then the revolt of the three regional commanders. Gibbon defends Clodius Albinus’ good relationship with Commodus:

The favour of a tyrant does not always suppose a want of merit in the object of it; he may, without intending it, reward a man of worth and ability, or he may find such a man useful to his own service.

On Pescenniis Niger:

the voluptuous Syrians were less delighted with the mild firmness of his administration, than with the affability of his manners, and the apparent pleasure with which he attended their frequent and pompous festivals… whilst he enjoyed the vain pomp of triumph, he neglected to secure the means of victory.

On Septimius Severus’ leadership skills:

During the whole expedition he scarcely allowed himself any moments for sleep or food; marching on foot, and in complete armour, at the head of his columns, he insinuated himself into the confidence and affection of his troops, pressed their diligence, revived their spirits, animated their hopes, and was well satisfied to share the hardships of the meanest soldier, whilst he kept in view the infinite superiority of this reward.

After Severus takes Rome:

The almost incredible expedition of Severus, who, in so short a space of time, conducted a numerous army from the banks of the Danube to those of the Tiber, proves at once the plenty of provisions produced by agriculture and commerce, the goodness of the roads, the discipline of the legions, and the indolent subdued temper of the provinces.

But Gibbon has to fit Severus’ success into his overall thesis that it’s downhill from here:

The uncommon abilities and fortune of Severus have induced an elegant historian to compare him with the first and greatest of the Caesars. The parallel is, at least, imperfect. Where shall we find, in the character of Severus, the commanding superiority of soul, the generous clemency, and the various genius, which could reconcile and unite the love of pleasure, the thirst of knowledge, and the fire of ambition?

He then goes on to criticise Severus’ use of deception to defeat Albinus and Niger, but doesn’t make a good case for the prosecution, IMHO.

Interesting analysis of why wars last longer in the present day:

The civil wars of modern Europe have been distinguished, not only by the fierce animosity, but likewise by the obstinate perseverance, of the contending factions. They have generally been justified by some principle, or, at least coloured by some pretext, of religion, freedom, or loyalty. The leaders were nobles of independent property and hereditary influence. The troops fought like men interested in a decision of the quarrel; and as military spirit and party zeal were strongly diffused throughout the whole community, a vanquished chief was immediately supplied with new adherents, eager to shed their blood in the same cause. But the Romans, after the fall of the republic, combated only for the choice of masters.

On the wisdom and justice of Severus’ government:

The true interest of an absolute monarch generally coincides with that of his people. Their numbers, their wealth, their order, and their security, are the best and only foundations of his real greatness; and were he totally devoid of virtue, prudence might supply its place, and would dictate the same rule of conduct.

Criticises Severus for recruiting the reformed Prætorian guards from outside Italy, with the result that: “the Italian youth were diverted from the exercise of arms, and the capital was terrified by the strange aspect and manners of a multitude of barbarians.”

Concluding para:

The contemporaries of Severus, in the enjoyment of the peace and glory of his reign, forgave the cruelties by which it had been introduced. Posterity, who experienced the fatal effects of his maxims and example, justly considered him as the principal author of the decline of the Roman empire.

This chapter is about 70% Commodus and 30% Pertinax; the former reigned for 13 years and the latter less than three months. Though from what Gibbon says, Pertinax is much the more attractive of the two as characters.

Some serious misogyny here, as Gibbon condemns the loose morals of Faustina and Lucilla (and poor Lucilla is condemned for having tried something very sensible, the assassination of Commodus). Meanwhile Commodus is condemned by Gibbon not so much for shagging lots of women and boys, but more for fighting as a gladiator.

A lot about Commodus himself, but it is rather long on outrage and short on detail; compared to Caligula he seems fairly small beer. Just a nice turn of phrase at the end about Lucilla’s husband, “who lamented the cruel fate of his brother-in-law, and lamented still more that he had deserved it.”

But then the story of Pertinax is told succinctly and well. An old man, unexpectedly made emperor, trying to do his best to undo his predecessor’s mistakes and then move forward, but very quickly brought down by the military. Gibbon has been warning all through of the problems of the unaccountable power of the military, especially (as in this case) the Prætorian Guards, and this is an object lesson – in fact, I think the first time the Prætorians ended an Emperor’s reign, though they had previously been responsible for Claudius’ accession.

The details of the constitution. Here he goes back in time to get inside the mind of Augustus / Octavian setting up the new state. Lots of political theory, starting with the very first paragraph:

THE obvious definition of a monarchy seems to be that of a state, in which a single person, by whatsoever name he may be distinguished, is entrusted with the execution of the laws, the management of the revenue, and the command of the army. But, unless public liberty is protected by intrepid and vigilant guardians, the authority of so formidable a magistrate will soon degenerate into despotism. The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people. A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against enterprises of an aspiring prince.

On Augustus taking control of the Senate:

The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.

A pithy summary of how it all worked (and I have been to countries where this is still the case):

To resume, in a few words, the system of the Imperial government, as it was instituted by Augustus, and maintained by those princes who understood their own interest and that of the people, it may be defined an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth. The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed.

On the limited usefulness of declaring recently deceased emperors to be gods:

Even the character of Caesar or Augustus were far superior to those of the popular deities. But it was the misfortune of the former to live in an enlightened age, and their actions were too faithfully recorded to admit of such a mixture of fable and mystery, as the devotion of the vulgar requires. As soon as their divinity was established by law, it sunk into oblivion, without contributing either to their own fame, or to the dignity of succeeding princes.

On why Antoninus was a good emperor:

His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

Three other important themes in this chapter, which unfortunately I couldn’t find a pithy phrase to illustrate: 1) the power of the army in backing up the emperors’ power; 2) the importance and urgency of choosing a desigbated successor; 3) a rather unconvincing final passage about the difficulties of fleeing political repression in the Roman Empire (he doesn’t demonstrate that anyone actually cared about their lack of liberty, and totally discounts the neighbouring states where one could take refuge).

The Roman empire as an ideal society, guided by atheist philosophers who allow the populace to pursue their primitive beliefs in a spirit of toleration. Yet as soon as we get into specifics we learn that this is not so: the Druids are suppressed in Gaul, the Egyptian cults banned from Rome – though the latter did not work, as “the zeal of fanaticism prevailed over the cold and feeble efforts of policy.”

Rome succeeds by offering citizenship (eventually) to all its subjects, and by the universality of Latin, though this doesn’t quite work for the stuck-up Greeks or the lazy Arabs. Slavery is a bad thing, but it is difficult to emancipate them.

It is impossible to read this chapter in particular without wondering what Gibbon is telling us about British policies in North America, the Caribbean or India.

On the Roman empire’s population:

The total amount of this imperfect calculation would rise to about one hundred and twenty millions of persons; a degree of population which possibly exceeds that of modern Europe, and forms the most numerous society that has ever been united under the same system of government.

Is that still considered to be true? Surely China had a greater population, even in Gibbon’s time?

Herodes Atticus as exemplary private philanthropist, at least as far as funding buildings goes.

I hadn’t realised that Trajan’s column is the height of the original hill which was dug away to make the Forum! A hell of a lot of earth must have been moved; where did it go, I wonder?

Achievements of the Romans in the spread of agriculture.

Trade with India: I should not have been surprised by the extent of Roman seamanship as described in the previous chapter, since they were sailing to Ceylon at every monsoon.

But at the end of the chapter, after a para about the wonderfulness of the Roman empire, he castigates them for a lack of military courage and for failing to produce any great literature, allowing peace to produce indolence. So it’s not quite as perfect a picture as he appeared to be wanting us to believe at first.

This is essentially scene-setting, but very good scene-setting. I had not realised that Roman fleets circumnavigated Great Britain and went the whole way round the Arabian peninsula. Gibbon praises the Roman empire for its lack of military adventurism beyond its borders, though then takes some delight in describing the conquests of Britain (at some length) and Dacia (more briefly). There is then a lengthy description of the military – the army being concentrated on the European frontier, the Danube and Rhine – and then a gazetteer of the entire empire, which I found pretty clear even without a map (though I admit I know the geography fairly well).

Good quotes:

Why the Romans didn’t want to conquer Scotland:

The masters of the fairest and most wealthy climates of the globe turned with contempt from gloomy hills assailed by the winter tempest, from lakes concealed in a blue mist, and from cold and lonely heaths, over which the deer of the forest were chased by a troop of naked barbarians.

On Croatia and Bosnia in the present day:

the former obeys an Austrian governor, the latter a Turkish pasha; but the whole country is still infested by tribes of barbarians, whose savage independence irregularly marks the doubtful limit of the Christian and Mahometan power.

One of the many attractive features of Librarything is that you can compare your own library with the libraries of famous dead people, including the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Mary Queen of Scots. I score best in comparison with Ernest Hemingway, with whose bookshelves I have the following in common:

Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
Pride and prejudice by Jane Austen
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis
The consolation of philosophy by Boethius
The life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
The Martian chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The golden apples of the sun by Ray Bradbury
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The flowering of New England, 1815-1865 by Van Wyck Brooks
Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and through the looking glass by Lewis Carroll
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The riddle of the sands by Erskine Childers
The moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
The red badge of courage by Stephen Crane (Hemingway: "Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house." I rather agree.)
The inferno by Dante Alighieri
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Great expectations by Charles Dickens
A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Crime & punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Twenty years after by Alexandre Dumas
Bitter lemons by Lawrence Durrell
Esprit de corps by Lawrence Durrell
Murder in the cathedral by T. S. Eliot
As I lay dying by William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Hemingway: "Floubert is a great writer but he only wrote one great book– Bovary– one 1/2 great book L’Education, one damned lousy book Bouvard et Pecuchet.")
Lord of the flies by William Golding
The scarlet letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo
Main street by Sinclair Lewis (Hemingway: "Buddenbrooks is a pretty damned good book. If he were a great writer it would be swell. When you think a book like that was published in 1902 and unknown in English until last year it makes you have even less respect, if you ever had any, for people getting stirred up over Main Street, Babbit and all the books your boy friend Menken [H.L. Mencken] has gotten excited about just because they happen to deal with the much abused Am. Scene.")
Eastern approaches by Fitzroy Maclean
Moby Dick by Herman Melville (Hemingway: “… we have had, in America, skillful writers… It is skillful, marvelously constructed, and it is dead. We have had writers of rhetoric who had the good fortune to find a little, in a chronicle of another man and from voyaging, of how things, actual things, can be, whales for instance, and this knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric like plums in a pudding. Occasionally it is there, alone unwrapped in pudding, and it is good. This is Melville. But the people who praise it, praise it for the rhetoric which is not important. They put a mystery in which is not there…”)
The seven storey mountain by Thomas Merton
When we were very young by A. A. Milne
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Apologia pro vita sua by John Henry Newman
Nineteen eighty-four by George Orwell
Swann’s way by Marcel Proust
Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
The Guermantes way by Marcel Proust
Cities of the plain by Marcel Proust
[The Captive appears to be missing, though he also had a complete set in two volumes.]
The sweet cheat gone by Marcel Proust
The catcher in the rye by J. D. Salinger
Memoirs of a fox-hunting man by Siegfried Sassoon
The complete dramatic and poetic works of William Shakespeare
The real Charlotte by E. ΠSomerville
Starling of the White House by Edmund W. Starling
The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
The elements of style by William Strunk
Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
War and peace by Leo Tolstoy (Hemingway: “I’ve been reading all the time down here. Turgenieff to me is the greatest writer there ever was. Didn’t write the greatest books, but was the greatest write. That’s only for me of course. Did you ever read short story of his called The Rattle of Wheels? It’s in the 2nd vol. of A Sportsman’s Sketches. War and Peace is the best book I know but imagine what a book it would have been if Turgenieff had written it. Chekov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer. Tolstoi was a prophet. Maupassant was a professional writer, Balzac was a professional writer, Turgenieff was an artist.” – "…Books should be about the people you know, that you know, that you love and hate, not about the poeple you study up about… Then when you have more time read another book called War and Peace by Tolstoi and see how you will have to skip the big Political Thought passages, that he undoubtedly thought were the best things in the book when he wrote it, because they are no longer either true or important, if they ever were more than topical, and see how true and lasting and important the people and the action are. Do not let them deceive you about what a book should be because of what is in the fashion now." – see also his note on The Red Badge of Courage.)
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
The adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Put out more flags by Evelyn Waugh
The once and future king by T. H. White
The master by T. H. White
William Heinemann, a memoir by Frederic Whyte
To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

A lot of these aren’t very surprising; you would expect Hemingway to be well grounded in the classics. But it’s rather charming to find him also a fan of Ray Bradbury, and also to find some more obscure books that we had in common.

I don’t think (embarrassingly) I’ve ever read a single word of Hemingway, but he features in one of my imminent self-imposed writing assignments, so perhaps I had better start.

Well, John Barrowman is great fun as Robin Hood, even if he was a little throaty and there appeared to be some lines going astray occasionally. Still, he did a great rendition of a couple of classic songs. Even better, though, was ventriloquist Paul Zeldin as Will Scarlet, who had to carry a lot of the audience interaction and did it awfully well. Also very enjoyable were the veteran Don McLean (“Crackerjack!”) as Friar Tuck, and Helen Baker and Pete Gallagher, neither of whom I had heard of before, as Maid Marian and the Sheriff of Nottingham. Some of the jokes, thank heavens, were a bit above F’s head but we all enjoyed it.

So, tracking down The News on the way home proved not very difficult. Yet again, they’ve chosen someone I haven’t heard of; I must say I think it’s a bit adventurous to go with someone in that age range, but I guess they know what they are doing. I suppose we will find out in this year’s Christmas special – if there is one.

A quick and not terribly profound read. Rowling presents this as Hermione’s new translation of traditional wizardly tales, with notes by Dumbledore as annotated by Rowling. The stories are all rather straightforward moral lessons; the Dumbledore annotations don’t add much (apart from some curiously misplaced jabs at another Potter, ie Beatrix). Pretty easy to digest, except the middle story which is rather gruesome.

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…Tony Gregory has died.

I hadn’t heard he was ill, though clearly this was not unexpected.

Dear God, a Doctor Who story set in Belgium, featuring Marcel Proust??? Why did nobody tell me about this before????? Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as Six and Peri check into the Hotel Palace Thermae in Ostende in the year 1913, and find other guests played by Maureen “Vicki” O’Brien, Michael “Vila” Keating, Adjoa “Martha’s mum” Andoh, and most of all Paul Brookes, who I hadn’t previously heard of, as Toby the Sapient Pig. The question of whether or not it is any good is contested among fans: I am in the minority who liked it, especially with all the references to Proust (who is also staying in the hotel and is assaulted by the Doctor off-stage at one point). The showdown takes place in Brussels, and I could more or less see it coming, but it is a fun ride.

1) The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates, by Des Ekin

On 20 June 1631, pirates from Algiers descended on Baltimore in County Cork and kidnapped over a hundred of its inhabitants, most of the population, bringing them back to Africa and selling them into slavery. Ekin describes this as “the most devastating invasion ever carried out by the forces of the Islamist jihad on Britain or Ireland”, and while I regret that he asserts the jihadism of the pirates, who were clearly less interested in religion than, say, Sir Francis Drake or Oliver Cromwell, you can see what he means.

Yet in fact very little of this is quite as it seems. The leader of the pirates was a Dutch renegade whose sons settled in New Amsterdam (or as we now call it, New York), and whose descendants include, for instance, Caroline Kennedy. The kidnapped villagers were a small Calvinist colony in a hostile territory; Ekin makes a good case against a local Irish Catholic dignitary for having organised the pirates’ raid in the first place, and makes it quite comprehensible that when the opportunity of ransom came aroud fifteen years later, only two of the hundred-plus former villagers of Baltimore chose to go home. Algiers had a decent health service, running water in the houses and a decent climate; Baltimore is still lacking in some of these respects and certainly lacked all of them in the seventeenth century. (I was there when I was nine, but did not check the water or the health service; the weather, however, was poor.)

Ekin is a journalist rather than a historian, and (as points out) has got perhaps a bit carried away by his research into what life was like for the slaves of Algiers, his description of which occupies most of the book. (Having said that, his attitude is properly sceptical and his documentation scrupulous; my criticism is of his structure, not his methods.) He also doesn’t appear to have visited Algiers personally, which is not a criticism, it’s just a shame that he doesn’t give us the benefit of today’s perspective.

Even so, the story is a fascinating insight into the world of seventeenth-century maritime commerce linked by the Atlantic Ocean: New Amsterdam at one end, Don Quixote and Zoraida at the other. The fact that Algiers and New Amsterdam were such cosmopolitan places, with people moving pretty freely between them and Western Europe, makes it rather difficult to justify describing one city as “Islamic” or indeed the other as “Christian”. (And makes his choice of words to describe the raid even more regrettable.)

Anyway, fascinating stuff, which has got my 2009 reading off to a good start.

Just to record briefly that I watched a couple more films in the last few days of last year, both of which bring moisture to the eye at appropriate moments.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – had seen this when it first came out, and loved it then; now it does seem a bit long, but the great moments – Tereza’s frenzied love-making to Tomas, the Russian invasion and immediate aftermath, the idyllic retreat to the countryside and unforgettable ending – remain great.

WALL-E – normally I hate cute robots, but WALL-E and EVE are just made to make you go awww. A couple of musical nods to 2001 (Strauss and Wagner) and Sigourney Weaver as the voice of the computer to delight us older fans; the plot is pretty simple and a lot of its details don’t really withstand scrutiny, but I have to remember that I am not the main target audience.

Some Doctor Who plays that I listened to over the holidays:

The Gathering is a sort-of sequel, sort-of prequel to Lidster’s Six/Peri/Cybermen story, The Reaping – set in 2006 rather than 1984, with Peri’s schoolfriend Kathy now practicing in Brisbane, Australia, and treating a certain Ms Tegan Jovanka for brain cancer. I thought the portrayal of the Doctor/Tegan relationship, picking up after 20 years, was fantastic, and although it leans very heavily on the precedent of School Reunion, it does at least take it somewhere slightly more interesting, with us getting a much better feeling of how Tegan has tried to fit her experience of travelling with the Doctor back into her normal life in Queensland. The ending is rather bittersweet, but very plausible.

Unfortunately the bit of plot with the Cybermen is pretty dull except where it is gratuitously horrific, but I still liked it much more than The Reaping.

At one point in Memory Lane, C’rizz complains with some reason that he, Eight and Charley have been landing in a lot of prisons lately, as the eponymous lane turns out to be yet another one. It isn’t as threatening as some, but it is definitely rather weird, with its prisoners believing themselves happy and usually back in their childhood (which gives an excuse to bring back Anneke Wills as Charley’s mother). I wasn’t completely satisfied by the explanation of the means and motivation of the imprisoning entities, but the cast just about manage to make it work.

If C’rizz has reason to complain about landing in prisons, Hex and Ace can equally complain about war zones, having jumped from 1649 in Ireland to 1917 on the Western Front, in a British field hospital near the eponymous No Man’s Land where mysterious things are happening and a murder has been announced. The story turns out not to involve any alien or time-travelling presence other than our regular cast, but does invoke some scientific knowledge which is probably more advanced than what the British really had at the time. There are some potentially interesting thoughts on the horrors of war, but these are weakened by the plot being a bit too clever by half, and by the implausibility of some of the behaviour the characters display. Also The Settling did the horrors of war rather better.

Jumping ahead to the latest Big Finish regular audio, we have Six and Charley arriving in today’s Manchester where they meet up with a memorable detective character who apparently features in one of the earlier audios I haven’t heard yet, Anna Hope’s D.I. Patricia Menzies. Here she is investingating odd goings-on in a casino that turns out to run by aliens. The Raincloud Man of the title has a special ability which I believe originates in a Douglas Adams novel, and operates here rather for the convenience of the plot. Charley is urged by another character to reveal her secret to the Doctor, but doesn’t do so. However the sparks from Anna Hope’s Mancunian policewoman very much keep it going.

In summary, The Gathering and The Raincloud Man are OK; less wowed by the other two.

On a rather tangentially related subject, most of the people I know who are from Manchester are also lesbians. Is there something in the water?

…the Channel Tunnel.

Some of you reading this will remember those crazy days when to get from England to France, and vice versa, you had to take a boat or an aeroplane. Very early in our courtship, and I took it into our heads to buy a bunch of European papers one Sunday morning in, I guess, 1991. As it happened, it was the day after the tunnelers between England and France had made contact, deep beneath the Channel. It is amazing how many countries found it appropriate to giggle at the scent of garlic which had, no doubt, been detected wafting northwards through the workings.

Nowadays the tunnel sous la Mancheis well open for business. There are two ways you can use it. If you just want to get on a train in Paris or Brussels, and get off in London (or vice versa) then you take Eurostar. The stations are in all cases decently central (Gare du Nord in Paris, matched symmetrically by Bruxelles-Midi/Brussel-Zuid; in London it’s now St Pancras rather than Waterloo, which is a shade less convenient for my own work, but I recognise that I am in a minority). It’s far more pleasant than a plane flight and (if you take into account check-in etc) probably quicker.

The other possibility is to drive your car to Calais or Folkestone (not Dover!) and load it onto the train to whiz under the sea-bed. These trains are about 500 metres long, and the carriages (for cars at least) are double-deckers, so you can work out how many fit on each run. It’s actually much more like the old ferries, except that it is a) faster and b) a train rather than a boat. Whoomph! You’re underground, in darkness (apart of course from the bright cabin lights in the carriages). Whoomph! You’re in England, or France, depending, and just have to remember which side of the road to drive on.

My first memories of both methods are quite special. When we drove to Bosnia from Belfast in late September 1997, we had baby B, then three and a half months old, in our little old Skoda. (We travelled from Kidderminster to Brussels that day, little realising that it would become a regular run for us in the future: then stopped twice overnight in Germany, before reaching Zagreb and then Bosnia.) Poor B reacted badly to the change of pressure in the tunnel, and howled all the way. Of course, 35 minutes is not all that long, but it seemed a bit eternal at the time. (She also reacted badly in those days to Bosnian mountain passes. She grew out of it, and anyway doesn’t travel much any more.)

A year or so later, I took a weekend in Brussels to mutually size up a potential employer. I needed to be in London anyway for a funeral, and my prospective boss recommended that I take the Eurostar, declaring that “it is a most agreeable experience”. Indeed it was, and this led to a sufficiently good set of first impressions that I ended up working for him for the next three years.

I must say that if I can avoid it I will never fly between Brussels and London again. Even doing it for connecting flights to elsewhere in the UK, my experience has been hellish – I remember one attempt to return from Belfast where I got home ten hours later than I expected thanks to the Curse of Heathrow. Quite apart from the environmental impact, the train is simply a lot more pleasant.

It’s weird, though, in a way. I am just old enough to remember the last of the Apollo missions, when moon landings were current affairs and the Channel Tunnel a fantasy. Now it’s the other way round.

I tried this last year, and it proved rather a useful guide to books I might like to read during the year. So, this is the list of unread books on my shelves (excluding, rather arbitrarily, Doctor Who and Shakespeare): which of these have you read?

Book review of the year

Non-fiction

Best in category: Anne Frank’s Diary, a re-read for me (though this edition has all her original text in); a searingly unforgettable account of life in an intolerable situation.

Also excellent: Primo Levi’s Periodic Table, and Alain de Botton’s guide to Proust.

Very very good: The Know-It-All, A History of the Arab Peoples, Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, Trillion Year Spree, The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street, Aung San Suu Kyi, Thant Myint-U, Julian Cope on megaliths, Daniel Keyes on Algernon, Patricia Fara on magnetism, Ellis and Connolly on Tudor Ireland, Bose on conflicts, Doctor Who locations, Tat Wood on Who seasons 22-26 (and The Movie).

Very good: Longitude, Lawrence of Arabia, Bertrand Russell on Christianity, Julius Caesar on Gaul, Tony Judt on Europe, Jeremy Paxman on the English, David Starkey on Elizabeth, Zlata’s Diary, Alastair Cooke, Amos Oz on Israel, Jonathan Bate on Shakespeare, Tulloch and Alvarado on Who, Time Out on Rome, Fage on Africa, Glavin on extinction, Nancy Soderberg on US foreign policy, A History of the Black Death in Ireland, The Battle of the Boyne, The Cecils, English Place Names, Jean Sibelius, Dublin Castle and the 1916 Rising, Becoming Somaliland, James Pettifer on Kosovo, Cyprus 1974 from Ankara’s viewpoint, ex-President Clerides reminisces, making a new Cyprus constitution, Brussels versus the Beltway, Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh’s hunting expedition in the Adriatic, Sarah Steele’s biography of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh.

Good, with reservations: Alison Weir on Elizabeth I, Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches, Andrew Roberts on Waterloo, Christopher Hitchens on Cyprus, The Penguin Dictionary of Jokes, Teach Yourself to Learn a Language, Endgame in Ireland, Oxford Take-Off in Russian, After-Dinner Stories, The Fantastic in Irish Literature, Berlitz Turkish, Rosemary Freeman on Edmund Spenser, Ten Historical Fantasies, analyses of the Lisbon Treaty, local history of our village, McCormick’s biography of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh.

OK: Ancient Wine, essays on Liberal Democracy and Globalisation, Kenneth Kavanagh’s biography of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh

Less good: Daniel Grotta’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, David Cohen’s biography of Arthur McMurrough Kavanagh.

Couldn’t finish: God’s Politics by Jim Wallis, Daughters of Britannia by Katie Hickman, A History of India by John Keay.

Fiction (not sf):

Best in category: Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s story of life among the declining gentry of the early nioneteenth century.

Also excellent: Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet, Proust vol 6, Roald Dahl, The Office vol 2.

Very very good: An Instance of the Fingerpost, Mystic River, True History of the Kelly Gang, No Great Mischief, When Nietzsche Wept, Proust vol 5, The Office vol 1, A House for Mr Biswas.

Very good: Don Quixote, The Prince of Tides, Death in Holy Orders, The Moving Toyshop, Saturnalia, Odd Man Out.

Good, with reservations: Gösta Berling’s Saga, Emma.

OK: Peter Abelard by Helen Waddell.

Couldn’t finish: The Duke and I by Julia Quinn

Comics (other than Doctor Who)

Best in category: The Fixer, Joe Sacco’s questionable tales from Sarajevo before, during and after the war.

Also very good: Alias vol 4.

Good: Fables vol 1, The Burma Chronicles, Berlin vol 2, Macedonia.

Less Good: Tales of Human Waste.

Shakespeare Plays

Best in category: A Midsummer Night’s Dream – a marvelous, inventive play.

Also excellent: The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It.

Very very good: Richard III  

Very good: Julius Caesar

Good, with reservations: The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV part I, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, King John, Henry VI Part I, II and III.

OK: Richard II, Henry IV Part II.

Less good: Henry V.

Awful: The Taming of the Shrew, Love’s Labour’s Lost.

SF and fantasy (other than Doctor Who)

Best in category: Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, which I hadn’t read before.

Also excellent: Heaney’s Beowulf (which is certainly fantasy), The Owl Service, Nation, Silverberg’s Hall of Fame anthology.

Very very good: I Am Legend, The Last Hero, Summerland, Vellum, Halting State, Farthing, The Cornelius Quartet, Teranesia, Brasyl, Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology, Collected Short Stories by E.M. Forster (which ten are fantasy, one sf, and one not), Improbable Frequency (stage play).

Very good: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, The Atrocity Archives, Islands in the Net, Matter, Expiration Date, The Rediscovery of Man, The Child Garden, Rogue Moon, The Phoenix Exultant (Wright), The Execution Channel, The Carhullan Army, the most recent Captain Underpants, Children of the Atom by Wilmar Shiras, C. E. Murphy’s Negotiator trilogy, The Seeds of Time (Wyndham collection), Healy’s New Tales of Space and Time anthology, 5th Interzone Anthology, Year’s Best SF 13 (Hartwell/Cramer 2008 anthology), National Lampoon’s Doon.

Good, with reservations: The Possibility of an Island, Jhereg, The Faded Sun Trilogy, Gene Wolfe’s Peace, Gossamer Axe, Naked to the Stars by Gordon R. Dickson, Template by Matthew Hughes, the first seven Captain Underpants books, Walking Dead by C.E. Murphy (I read the pre-editing draft; no doubt final version will be great).

OK: The Historian, Abarat, The Pilgrim’s Regress, The Last Colony, The Ill-Made Mute, Great War: Breakthroughs (Turtledove), Sunrise Alley (Asaro), Humility Garden (Felicity Savage), Rising of the Moon (Flynn Connolly).

Less good: Little, Big (Crowley), Again, Dangerous Visions (Ellison-edited sequel anthology), Wandering Stars (Jack Dann’s Jewish sf anthology).

Poor: Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer, Astra and Flondrix by Seamus Cullen, Masters of the Fist by Edward P. Hughes.

Awful: Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice.

Couldn’t finish: Shadowkings (Michael Cobley), The Golden Transcendence (Wright), The Sword of Shannara.

Doctor Who spinoff fiction (print)

Best in category: All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane, in which the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny encounter Sherlock Holmes and the Great Old Ones. Glorious.

Also very very good: Eye of Heaven, Time and Relative.

Very good: The Feast of the Drowned, Winner Takes All, Love and War, Escape Velocity, Venusian Lullaby, City of the Dead, Year of the Intelligent Tigers, Psi-Ence Fiction, Campaign, The Dark Path, Decalog 2 anthology, The Doctor Who Storybook 2007 (anthology), Doctor Who Complete Ninth Doctor Comics, The Thirteenth Stone (Sarah Jane audiobook), Revenge of the Slitheen (Sarah Jane novelisation).

Good, with reservations: The Infinity Doctors, The Witch Hunters, Drift, Corpse Marker, Terry Nation’s Dalek Special, Doctor Who Storybook 2008 (anthology), Invasion of the Bane (Sarah Jane novelisation), Eye of the Gorgon (Sarah Jane novelisation), Warriors of Kudlak (Sarah Jane novelisation), The Glittering Storm (Sarah Jane audiobook), Another Life (Torchwood audiobook).

OK: The Stone Rose, Alien Bodies, The Gallifrey Chronicles, Interference (both books), Theatre of War, Cold Fusion, Last Man Running, The Roundheads, Doctor Who Monster Book Vol 2, Doctor Who Annual 1966.

Less good: Match Of The Day, The Adventures of K9 and Other Mechanical Creatures, Doctor Who: The Pescatons.

Doctor Who audios

Best in category: The Kingmaker, by Nev Fountain, a hilarious inversion of the story of Shakespeare’s play Richard III. (I won’t do a comprehensive review here, and they are not strictly speaking books anyway, but at some future moment I’ll do the whole Big Finish run.)

Doctor Who novelisations

Best in category: The first one published, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, by David Whitaker. (General roundup here.)

I won’t nominate a single Book of the Year, as it is too much like comparing apples to geodes; but I will admit that it is Anne Frank who comes back to mind when I least expect her to.

This is the list of books I’ve read this year – please tick if you have read (including started but not finished) any of them They are blocked out by category, and (except for the very last section) ranked in order of appearances in the LibraryThing catalogue. Books in italics have a female author or editor credited. I’ve split two collections (by Roald Dahl and Dav Pilkey) where their components appeared to be better known; interestingly, this wasn’t the case for Cherryh or Moorcock. A more analytical post is on its way, explaining which ones I actually liked.

Two Second Doctor novels to finish off the year.

15) The Roundheads, by Mark Gatiss

Gatiss takes the Second Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie back to late 1648 for a pure historical story: they get involved with Oliver Cromwell and a plot to liberate Charles I from captivity. I’ll have to say up front that this didn’t completely work for me. Simon Guerrier handled this period (setting his story a year later, and the other side of the Irish Sea) far better in The Settling

Hooray for Sir Terry!

On Israel/Hamas: Ian.

Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League won bigtime! Even if I didn’t have family connections, I would still hope that this is a chance for a new start.

Meanwhile on the other side of the ocean (not Atlantic or Pacific), President Yusuf has resigned. The French Presidency of the EU salutes his efforts for peace in his country, efforts which were invisible to other observers. Unless you count the army disintegrating.