I am totally delighted to hear that Martti Ahtisaari has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, "for his important efforts, on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts". It’s quite possible that a lot of readers haven’t heard of him; he is probably best known for having been President of Finland between 1994 and 2000, but he has done numerous other important things as well – in particular, he was the UN Special Representative who shepherded Namibia to independence in 1989-90, and as such is perhaps the only person now alive who has been in charge of two different countries in two different continents. He also more recently brokered the peace settlement in the long-running conflict in Aceh, Indonesia.

I’ve known Ahtisaari since 2000, when he took on the chairmanship of my then future employers, the International Crisis Group, and so we saw each other a fair bit at Balkan events in Brussels. We also chatted then about his role in the Northern Ireland peace process. I joined ICG as director of their Balkans programme in 2002, and at our first internal meeting I quoted Shaw’s line from John Bull’s Other Island about one’s duty to Ireland, Finland and Macedonia; Ahtisaari laughed much louder than one expects from a Finn. He left the ICG board in 2004, but we stayed in contact as he was put in charge of the UN process of finding a final status for Kosovo; I remember one visit to his office in Vienna where our conversation was delayed by his trying to get his latest Nokia gadget to work (his son at the time was Nokia’s director of design strategy). Ahtisaari is fascinated by the role technology can play in helping to resolve conflict, and as well as other continuing behind-the-scenes work, he is these days most involved with his Crisis Management Initiative, which will carry on his vision into the future (he is 71).

The Nobel Peace Prize often goes to interesting people, and I’ve met several others who have won it, but this is the first time it has gone to someone I know at all well; and he richly deserves it.

6) Gossamer Axe, by Gael Baudino

I’ve been using Bookmooch to collect a few of the books on my list of sf and fantasy set in Ireland, and this one was fairly easy to track down.

The premise of the book sounds, frankly, awful. Christa, born in sixth-century Ireland but exiled to 1980s Denver, assembles an all-female heavy metal band (called “Gossamer Axe”) to blast open the mystical portals and rescue her girlfriend from the twilight realm where she is imprisoned. To do this she reincarnates her magical harp as an electric guitar.

Yet it’s actually rather good. Of course it is rather earnest about paganism, feminism and magic, but the only point where the writing is cringingly embarrassing is in the early sections where Christa is converted from Irish harp music to heavy metal. Apart from that, though, the various romantic and personality plot threads are compelling, and the Irish bits are not overdone. The whole thing is written with a genuine passion which in the end is easier to respect than mock.

It won the 1990 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Science Fiction & Fantasy, and was also chosen as one of the “top 5 gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender genre works of all time” by Gaylaxicon 2000’s “The List” panel. (I wonder what the others were?)

Has anyone else been getting a lot of comment spam, or am I being specially favoured? I’ve had over a dozen in the last couple of hours.

(Apologies if this is already a matter of discussion all over my f-list – I’m posting from my phone and haven’t checked LJ since before it started.)

We were giggling earlier about this glorious Kate Bush video:

I think her dancing must surely have been inspired at least in part by this:

Views?

I started my Shakespeare project at the end of August, and have now got through nine of the 38 plays. So I probably won’t finish this year; at this rate it will be some time in February 2009. Though I do have at least one transatlantic trip coming up, which may shorten the process.

The three best of the first quarter were (in reverse order) Richard III (would have been higher, but a bit too lengthy); The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a real discovery which I’m surprised is not better known; and best of all The Comedy of Errors, which I guess was the only one of this run that had made much impression on me before.

My least favourite was The Taming of the Shrew, where I just didn’t like the basic concept. The basic concepts in Titus Andronicus are pretty unpleasant too, but it is not being marketed as a comedy. Love’s Labour’s Lost is half decent and half incomprehensible.

I’m taking a position on the three parts of Henry VI, which is that Part 2 was written first and then Part 1, with Part 3 last. Part 2 has too much sticking closely to the history books, and feels very much like a beginner’s effort to extract drama from Holinshed. The other two parts feel more confident, and Part 3 clearly leads straight into Richard III. Indeed, Part 3 and Richard III are so much better that I rather feel Shakespeare must have been working on other stuff in between, perhaps some of the earlier comedies, or even his scene for Thomas More.

But basically, I have discovered that the reason these plays are classics is that they are (mostly) very good.

4) The Gallifrey Chronicles, by Lance Parkin

My decision to read the BBC’s Eighth Doctor Adventures in a peculiar order has brought me to the end of the line, in internal chronology, after reading fewer than a tenth of them; so I could be filling in the gaps for some time to come.

Anyway, I thought at first that this was going to be a too-clever-by-half tale of intersecting rival continuities. It’s better than that, I’m glad to say. A lot of the plot features another Time Lord exiled to Earth, who has been writing science fiction novels over the last century or so (these are the Gallifrey Chronicles of the title, a beautifully developed concept); he bears a grudge against the Doctor, and triggers an invasion of Earth by loathesome insects to get even. (I loved the idea of the insects spraying goo which doesn’t actually kill people but makes everyone else believe the victim is dead.)

There are some slightly baffling bits of continuity. I still don’t have the backstory abouit the destruction of Gallifrey (in EDA continuity, that is; I have enjoyed the Big Finish version) but it’s not as relevant to the plot as I expected. Likewise the Doctor’s adopted daughter Miranda makes an appearance, the first time I had encountered her.

This was also the first book I’ve read with companion Trix, who has replaced Anji as female sidekick to Fitz (though Anji makes a welcome cameo appearance). Trix and Fitz take advantage of the approaching end of the sequence of novels and fall in love, after travelling together for some time – I think the most overtly physical relationship between two companions in the whole extended canon before New Who, though it’s not particularly explicit and is abruptly interrupted.

The ending is not really as conclusive as you would have liked for the termination of a series of more than 70 books. Of course, this is probably Russell T Davies’ fault more than Lance Parkin’s, but it’s a bit of a shame.

Anyway, once again Lance Parkin has produced a mildly confusing if generally readable book. Once again, I find myself thinking that I wouldn’t recommend it as a starting point for anyone wanting to get into the Eighth Doctor Adventures; but I have to admit I haven’t really identified such a starting point as yet.

Today there is a general strike in Belgium in protest against inflation, demanding that the government do something or other about it in this month’s federal budget.

Being a child of the Thatcher era, who witnessed the taming of the unions in the UK, this seems to me extraordinary. While I support anyone’s right to join a trade union and to go on strike to improve their circumstances of employment, I don’t believe that the unions should be allowed to call a strike over an issue that doesn’t particularly concern their relations with their employers. The people inconvenienced by today’s strike are, on the whole, not those responsible for the recent increase in the prices of food and fuel; indeed, very few of the latter reside in Belgium, so the strike completely misses its ostensible targets.

As you know, Bob, Belgium has not only Socialist trade unions, but also Christian and Liberal unions, each organised into a separate national federation. Aha, you are perhaps thinking, the strike today is presumably called by one or two of the three sets of unions at least partly in protest against their rivals being more closely linked to the government. Well, no. First of all, the current government includes the Liberal, Christian and (Francophone) Socialist parties (the Flemish Socialists are in disarray). Second, all three national federations are supporting the strike. So the federations essentially appear to be striking against their own political allies in the government.

Or are they? I think this is really a manifestation of the cosy, collusive nature of Belgian politics. One or both Socialist parties have been in government solidly since May 1988, indeed for two-thirds of the last half-century; in that same time frame the Christian Democrats have been in government for all but the eight years of Verhofstadt’s premiership. In a political system where you can’t really vote the bastards out, indeed where layers of government proliferate so that a party, and a party leader, who lose one election can pop up again almost immediately elsewhere, the occasional general strike may be a useful safety valve to fool the workers into believing that they have more impact on the system than they really do. Of course it infuriates those of us from the ranks of the self-employed and small businesses, for whom today’s action has no obvious benefit and for whom it causes immense and (what seems to us) avoidable inconvenience. But the system has other ways of buying our allegiance.

Edited to add: I am fundamentally hostile to the idea of a general strike bringing down the entire system of government, for reasons local to my birthplace.

3) Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney

I got this some time back and skimmed it rather casually; but this weekend I have taken a short break from Shakespeare to read it thoroughly. It is a tremendous achievement. I think I had read two other adaptations of the epic poem, one probably by Roger Lancelyn Greene, the other a re-telling of the story from Grendel’s point of view by John Gardner. I also saw Julian Glover recite most of it on stage in Belfast many years ago. I haven’t seen the recent film as we so rarely get to the cinema.

Heaney has tried to retell the poem in its own terms, and his recasting of the poet’s original imagery is vivid – we can almost smell Grendel and his mother, and Smaug’s hoard seems a pale reflection of the dragon which brings about the tragic end of Beowulf’s life. (Of course, Tolkien was one of the leading Beowulf scholars of the twentieth century, and there are entire sections of The Hobbit which have practically been copied from here.)

Apart from the gloriousness of the overall narrative, three things struck me, two more or less for the first time. First, it is actually an explicitly Christian poem, if in a rather weird way. Hrothgar commissions Beowulf to fight Grendel in terms that sound like God the Father sending his Son to defeat evil. Although the setting is the pagan past, the writer makes frequent allusions to Judeo-Christian concepts of destiny and virtue; the only explicitly non-Christian characters are the monsters.

Second, and related, there are numerous reflections on what makes a good king – not just the narrator’s own oft-repeated phrase, “þæt wæs god cyning!” but also discourses from various characters in the midst of the action. It practically makes Beowulf a treatise on political science, along with its many other features.

Third – and this was the point I had noticed on previous skimming of the text – is the occasional diversion of the narrative to tell some other story only tangentially related by theme or personality to the main narrative. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that it doesn’t work well for me, and I can’t believe it worked well in oral presentation (I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure Julian Glover skipped those bits in his stage show). I am inclined to think that the compiler of our version used the opportunity to fold in some other bits and pieces of epic poetry which he or she had handy, so that they would not be lost to posterity.

Anyway, this is (quite literally) epic stuff.

A few days ago I linked to a brilliant fanvid showing all the times that the phrase “What are you doing here?” or variations thereof is used in Doctor Who – including the very first words spoken in the role by William Hartnell in the first episode.

Actually it has a long and glorious literary history. In Beowulf, back in the 7th century, the very first lines of direct speech in the poem are these words of Hrothgar’s herald greeting Beowulf’s party:

Hwæt syndon gē             searohæbbendra,
byrnum werede,             þē þus brontne
cēol ofer lagustrǣte             lǣdan cwōmon,
hider ofer holmas?

which Seamus Heaney renders:

What kind of men are you who arrive
rigged out for combat in coats of mail
sailing here over the sea-lanes
in your steep-hulled boat?

or in summary

What are you doing here?

(Lines 238-241, if you want to check.)

Over the last few weekends I’ve been watching rather gradually the 2001 production of Nancy Mitford’s novels, The Pursuit of Love and  Love in a Cold Climate, which have long been favourites of mine. Things I liked: i) the music by Rob Lane (now writing for both Merlin and John Adams). ii) John Wood as Lord Merlin, a bit part character but a really memorable one. iii) the other three rather more monstrous male leads, Alan Bates as the barking mad paterfamilias, Anthony Andrews as the louche Clark Gable look-alike Boy Staunton, and Daniel Evans as the gay Canadian Cedric. iv) two of the three key female leads: Rosamund Pike as Fanny the narrator, and Elisabeth Dermot Walsh as the ultimately tragic Linda.

Love in a Cold Climate is certainly the funnier of the two books; and it would have worked really well as an ironic counterpoint to the more tragic plot of The Pursuit of Love except that I felt Megan Dodds as Polly really wasn’t up to it, and since she is such a central figure that kills the story despite the excellent performances of the male leads in that plot strand; you rather wonder what Boy saw in her. Also, I have to say that my memory of the end of the book was that there is a strong implication that Boy and Cedric have settled down with Polly’s mother as a threesome, an aspect which I missed from the TV play.

The Pursuit of Love is probably the better of the two books, but it also wasn’t terribly well served by the production; Rosamund Pike had to more or less support Fanny’s story single-handed, matched up against a series of unimpressive males (apart from her father). Having said that, the TV format perhaps shows Linda’s love-life a bit more vividly than Mitford’s original text, and some of the best scenes are when she is a) being converted to communism and b) being confronted with the Spanish civil war; and at the very end, I thought it came out just about right, with Frances Barber as the Bolter coming back into the story and providing an ironic perspective on it all, which I have to admit brought a certain moisture to my eyes as the final titles rolled.

I really wish the 1980 version, starring Judy Dench as Linda’s mother and Anthony Stewart Head as Linda’s first husband, was commercially available, but you can’t have everything.

2) The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

A friend of mine has been writing a vampire novel set in the Balkans. When I first became aware of The Historian, I expressed a friendly concern to him that his book might suffer from being in its shadow. My friend snorted derisively that his book was much better, so he wasn’t going to let it worry him. Having now read The Historian, he was right; his book is much better. I’m glad to say he now has a publishing contract, but I will leave you in suspense about it until it is actually on the shelves.

Unlike The Da Vinci Code, with which it has sometimes been compared, The Historian is not a bad book. The basic plot concerns a series of twentieth and twenty-first century researchers getting caught up with the legacy of Vlad Ţepeş, alias Count Vlad III of Wallachia, alias Dracula, who turns out to be still around in undead form. The scenery features Slovenia, Croatia, Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria (with a peculiar climax in France), and people who know little or nothing about the Balkans will probably be intrigued enough to find out more about the region; and that’s not a bad thing. The nested narratives and understated romances are rather sweet, and will appeal to the sentimental reader who wants to be made to feel they now understand a bit more about history. But there were three things that really annoyed me about it.

1) The nested narratives just don’t work. At one point we have the unnamed narrator reading her father’s account of listening to Dr Stoichev translating his joint edition with Professor Angelov of Zacharias of Zographou’s note of the dying words of Stefan of Snagov. Yet all of these people sound remarkably similar. In addition, the jumps between different levels of narrative get rather abrupt in the second half of the book, as if Kostova had given up on smooth transitions between them. It is a striking contrast with, say, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, surely a model of how this sort of thing can be done well. Not very surprisingly, the climax, where most of the narrative lines combine, is confused and ineffective.

2) The Balkanology. Probably few will be as irritated as I was about this, but really, why disguise Ljubljana as “Emona”? Are readers so thick that they can’t cope with the spelling? And after many pages of insisting on “Ţepeş”, and on the Hungarian and Turkish diacriticals, why then spell Târgovişte incorrectly? Rather more seriously, the Getzi family of the narrator’s grandmother are presented as being Romanian speakers, when clearly they would much more likely have been Magyars trapped the wrong side of the border by the Treaty of Trianon. (The Wikipedia entry for the book points out other anachronisms.)

3) As so often, I was utterly unconvinced by the means and motivation of the villain. All this carry-on with scholars across the decades and the continents, and it turns out that Dracula just wanted to hire a librarian? There are easier ways of doing it. (At least so I understand.)

Anyway, I’m glad that’s over.

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!