I know they are within their rights, but it’s a crying shame that the BBC have leaned on YouTube to take down all the Doctor Who videos, including the one that particularly pacified little U…

…you assume that the John Piper who is the subject of a set of quiz show questions is the evangelical Christian writer rather than the stained glass artist.

…hypothetically speaking, if you’ve had an idea for a book (non-fiction in this case), and you want to pitch it to a publisher, do you ask one publisher at a time or try several at once?

…or is every really aggressive and irresponsible driver on the motorway driving an Audi?

I was alerted during the week to the fact that the Northern Ireland Boundary Commission has finalised its recommendations for the new parliamentary constituencies, though it now looks like they will not be needed as soon as they might have been. In fact they have stuck to their recommendations from May last year.

In related news, thamks to Conal Kelly, the 1950-1970 Westminster election results for East Belfast, North Belfast, South Belfast, West Belfast, North Antrim, South Antrim, Armagh, Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Londonderry, North Down, South Down, and Mid Ulster are all now on my site.

Two Doctor Who audios this week – yes, the month that Big Finish are publishing the 100th in their series of plays, I have got around to #50, Zagreus, a three-CD extravaganza with four Doctors (Davison, C Baker, McCoy and McGann); and I also listened to Slipback, the first proper Doctor Who audio play (I shall justify this controversial claim below), broadcast by the BBC in 1985.

Zagreus is surely the best (so far) of the various anniversary offerings. The Three Doctors is rather poor, The Five Doctors is at least an honest effort, and the less said about the 30th anniversary the better. But here we have the “current” Eighth Doctor/Charley pairing (the sparkling Paul McGann/India Fisher combination) meeting a whole host of characters, more or less real, played by former cast members of the televised series. I didn’t recognise all the voices on first listening, partly because I wasn’t expecting so many, but I may even try listening again with a crib sheet in front of me; as well as Lalla Ward and Louise Jameson reprising Romana II and Leela, with splendid Time Lady/savage bitchiness setting up the scenario for the Gallifrey spinoffs (plus John Leeson as K-9), we have the voices of Polly, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, Nyssa, Turlough, Peri, Erimem, Evelyn Smythe, Mel, Ace, Benny, and the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors all playing other parts, and also Don Warrington as Rassilon, three years before he became President of Britain. Oh, and Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, even though he had died seven years earlier. I’m not wild about the main plot strand, though it develops quite well from the previous Eighth Doctor story, Neverland, but the device of exploring the Doctor’s past through distorted reflections in his subconscious works – it could have been really gruesome and self-indulgent, but in fact you can’t wait to find out what happens next. I am not surprised to find that Alan Barnes, who is my favourite of the Big Finish writers, gets an authoring credit here.

Slipback was produced in the 18-month hiatus between Colin Baker’s two full seasons, a six-part radio series starring Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the Sixth Doctor and Peri. It’s an odd contrast to the more recent Big Finish audios featuring Baker and/or Bryant. The first difference to strike you is that Baker really doesn’t much reflect the egotistical brash persona of the Sixth Doctor as seen on TV and heard in the videos. (Bryant is unmistakeably Peri though.) The second difference is that the six episodes only last ten minutes each, which really is the wrong length. If this had been successful, we might have seen a seamless transitioning of Doctor Who to audio instead of television, more than a decade before Big Finish got into it. But it wasn’t. The problem is that the author was Eric Saward, trying to channel Douglas Adams and not doing it very well. One of the characters is a computer with a squeaky accent, combining Eddie and Trillian from the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide. Valentine Dyall is wasted as an insane spaceship captain who enjoys his baths. The whole thing fails to gel.

None the less, this is the first “proper” Doctor Who audio play. The 1976 Fourth Doctor audios don’t count: in Doctor Who and the Pescatons, most of the narrative is carried by the Fourth Doctor telling the story, with occasional voicing from Sarah Jane Smith and the villain, and in any case it isn’t a “real” BBC production. Exploration Earth is too didactic to count as proper drama. The two Third Doctor audio stories were recorded later. So Slipback is in a lot of ways the fons et origo for  Big Finish’s subsequent triumphs.

Ancestral rivers of the world

What if the Ice Ages had been less icy?

(Hat-tip to

tsm_in_toronto

 commenting in reply to

james_nicoll

.)

I’ve tended to rather rush through writing up the Pertwee stories I have been watching, as they are much of a muchness, but this is different. I remember back in 1981 when it was re-broadcast, we really wondered why – surely there were other, better Pertwee four-parters out there? The Terrance Dicks novelisation is only average. It seemed as if Carnival of Monsters had been chosen mainly because it followed on in continuity directly after The Three Doctors. Spoiled as we were by the Hinchcliffe and Williams years, Carnival of Monsters did not seem all that special.

I must say that now it does. The 1973 season was probably Pertwee’s second best (after his first, the 1970 season) and Carnival of Monsters is surely the best story in it – followed by Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks, which are both OK but not spectacular, and ending with  The Green Death which is also a good one, particularly because it gets rid of Jo. The one thing that lets it down is the visual effects, rather a lot of dodgy CSO being used. But if you can shut your eyes and pretend you are still six during those bits, the rest is fantastic – Robert Holmes at his very best in the script, Michael Wisher in pre-Davros days as the main villain, Ian Marter in pre-Harry Sullivan days as a minor character, a real feeling of several different completely alien cultures (the two classes on Inter Minor and the Lurmans), and an absence of the blatant padding that mars so many Pertwee stories. A special shout to Cheryl Hall, later the girlfriend of Citizen Smith, as showgirl Shirna.

And there’s a couple of serious reflections in there too – the MiniScope itself is a futuristic development of the zoo, and gives rise to a rather caricatured discussion of conservation versus entertainment’ more seriously, Inter Minor is clearly a communist totalitarian state, threatened to its very foundations by any influence from the outside. Michael Wisher’s character Kalik is the conservative brother of the unseen president Zarb. It’s nicely observed, although not all conservative backlashes end with the leader of the hardliners being eaten alive by a Drashig. Shame.

I mentioned a few days back about how I had got vol 4 of About Time by mistake from eBay, but as far as I could tell it was my error. I had a funny feeling that when I bid for it, the book advertised was definitely vol 5, which is what I wanted, but when I check all the email records and images on eBay it was definitely vol 4 that appeared. I reckoned it was unlikely that the seller had sneakily sent me the wrong book, and then changed the images on display on the web page to cover their mistake, so my own error was a more likely explanation.

But I just got an email from eBay, saying “Our records show that you were a bidder or buyer of one or more items from the seller, [***]. We recently removed this seller’s active listings and suspended the seller’s trading privileges.” It suddenly seems more likely that I was deliberately sent the wrong book.

I shall file a complaint, not that it is likely to do any good.

Thanks, everybody

Many of you reading this will know about our family situation. Those of you who aren’t on my livejournal friends list, or who I haven’t seen in person recently, may not know about the latest developments. Since things seem to be fairly certain now, this is a general public update on what has been happening and what will happen next.

Our daughter B has a very serious autistic learning disability. Having developed relatively normally for her first two years, she then lost the ability to talk, and many other facets of normal development, in the following six months. The reason we live way out here in the wilds of Flemish Brabant is that we found the best school for her to be Ter Bank near Leuven. Not only did B enjoy it, but when her little sister U turned out to have similar problems, she started attending the school as well, and still goes there.

Towards the end of last year, however, B’s behaviour had got too much for the school to cope with, and it clearly wasn’t doing her much good; so we moved her to another wonderful day-care centre, ‘t Prieeltje in Tienen, about a half hour’s drive east of here. She loved it there at first – indeed, you can see her on their web page at present, one of the pictures is of her clearly having a ball – but last June, just before her tenth birthday, she suddenly rebelled, by refusing to get into the car, which meant she could no longer be transported back and forth from here to there.

Since then she has been at home, and my heroic mother-in-law has been helping us out ever since, as B’s behaviour has been very difficult. To cut quite a long story short, we have been negotiating with the various potential care options; and they have now come up with a solution for us. On Monday, B will move to the St Oda institute in Overpelt, about an hour’s drive away from us; they specialise in monitoring and treating children with very serious behavioural problems, which is the category B clearly fits into. She will stay there for a few months, and will then transfer to the to a closer facility as her permanent (or at least long-term) home.

We know it already, as they had been on the horizon as a long-term care option for a while, and like the quality of the care that they offer, though again that leaves out significant chunks of the story. Indeed, B has already been there a couple of times, and they told us today that they can take her from tomorrow until Sunday for respite care. That means that tonight is the second last night she will be at home, and Sunday will be the last. We are relieved, but also sad.

You can never tell what is in the package. When B was born, we certainly never anticipated that she would leave our household a few months after her tenth birthday. Even until last year, I certainly thought we would probably have her with us until her early teens. But of course, there are other families who are less fortunate than us; whereas our daughter, F and U’s sister, will only be a few minutes’ drive away even after she has moved out, there are others who are separated from their children by eternity.

Here is B in our back garden. She has just in the last few months developed an interest in catching a ball if it is thrown to her, though she enjoys bouncing a ball on her own very much too.

And here she is one of her recent stays, in almost exactly the same pose; looking a bit doped up, I’m afraid, due to extra medication. But we think she will be happier there, and better looked after than we are able to manage.

I’m not doing the unread books meme again, because I actually invented it on Sunday. It’s funny how these things catch on – it seems to have been copied onto upwards of 300 blogs, and now has even reached the on-line section of the Daily Telegraph. Very gratifying.

1) The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie

This book starts well, but gets a bit heavy; still, I found it not too difficult to make it to the end. There were two themes that I found particularly attractive. First off, the whole story explores the way in which we change and adapt our personalities to new circumstances, new people: the two main characters find themselves magically transformed into an angel and a devil, and then back again, but each has also changed names and other things about themselves in presenting themselves to different countries, to family vs outsiders, to different women. It is not always subtle, but I found it very entertaining.

The second is the experience of London. I think there must be a common experience of both familiarity and alienation for all of us who encounter London as non-English but citizens of the former Empire. I’ve found this in a couple of other places (Memories of the Irish Israeli War, The Web of Fear) but I found Rushdie’s portrayal of the immigrant experience of the Big Smoke gripping and familiar. (It possibly helps that my own family visits to London when I was growing up had a Bangladeshi edge.)

For the rest, I really enjoyed the effervescent use of language in the very first chapter, difficult to excerpt, and kept hoping it would come back again later in the book (and once or twice it did). There are lots of neat allusions – one of the main characters acquires the surname Chamcha, which must be a reference to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa. Rushdie shows also a welcome sensitivity to classic sf, though his treatment of Doctor Who is less thorough.

Younger readers may need to be reminded that this book was somewhat controversial when first published. It’s pretty clear who Rushdie is “really” writing about in the two extended passages set in Mecca/Jahilia and Medina/Yathrib. To say that this is not meant to be “about” Muhammad is unconvincing. (I bought the two Rogerson books partly in anticipation of tackling this one.) However, I find it fairly mild stuff; perhaps my sensitivities have been blunted by reading too much of what other people write about Catholicism.

Ebay replacement for Volume 5 of About Time turns out to actually be Volume 4!!!!

And as far as I can tell it is my mistake not the vendor’s. So annoying!!!!

13) Belfast, c. 1600 to c. 1900: The Making of the Modern City, by Raymond Gillespie and Stephen A. Royle

This only just about counts as a book, but I’ll tally it anyway. It’s a 19-page pamphlet produced jointly by the Royal Irish Academy and Belfast City Council, attached to a gorgeous multi-coloured map illustrating the developing historical streetscape, with today’s map faintly visible in the background. The landscape we live in is a palimpsest; this little publication helps to establish what was there before.

What is most fascinating is that the defensive walls built in 1642 almost precisely map the security zone I remember well from my childhood. There are one or two shifts of a few metres, but on the whole the twentieth century security gates were placed pretty much on top of where the town’s defences had been, a third of a millennium earlier. Extraordinary. (If you consider Dublin’s history, by contrast, the commercial heart of the city has slipped about a kilometre downriver over the last thousand years.)

(Click to embiggen)

The streets are colour-coded by the age of the map they first appear on – the darkest green, Castle St, High St, Ann St, Bridge St, Waring St, North St, Cornmarket, etc all appear on the 1685 map; the next level, Donegall St and the various entries including Pottinger’s Entry, all appear on the 1757 map; Donegall Square and the old Smithfield market (E31) are laid out by 1833, and the lighter yellow streets by 1901-02.

The original thirteenth-century settlement is marked as C3 on the map, the location of the original Belfast Castle, between Castle Street and Castle Lane and east of Donegall Place. It burned down in 1708, and I don’t think there are any visible remains of it. (The current Belfast Castle, 6 km to the north, was built in 1870.) The oldest surviving building in Belfast, dating from 1711, is McHugh’s bar on Queens Square, north of the box marked E11 on the map (the 18th-century customs house, which replaced the original one at E10 on Waring Street and was in turn replaced by the current one a block to the north in 1856).

Anyway, I found it fascinating. Though it missed the charming detail from one of the very early maps of Belfast on display in the Ulster Museum, where the surveyors (presumably brought in by Lord Donegall from elsewhere) recorded the name or “Waring Street” as “Wern Street”. Even back then, the locals were capable of baffling outsiders with their accents.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users (as of today). As usual, bold what you have read, italicise what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book (that is, last time that the algorithm was done – when I checked, I found most of them had a few more added to the total).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (149)
Anna Karenina (132)
Crime and punishment (121)
Catch-22 (117)
One hundred years of solitude (115)
Wuthering Heights (110)
The Silmarillion (104)
Life of Pi : a novel (94)
The name of the rose (91)
Don Quixote (91)
Moby Dick (86)
Ulysses (84)
Madame Bovary (83)
The Odyssey (83)
Pride and prejudice (83)
Jane Eyre (80)
A tale of two cities (80)
The brothers Karamazov (80)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (79)
War and peace (78)
Vanity fair (74)
The time traveler’s wife (73)
The Iliad (73)
Emma (73)
The Blind Assassin (73)
The kite runner (71)
Mrs. Dalloway (70)
Great expectations (70)
American gods (68)
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius (67)
Atlas shrugged (67)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books (66)
Memoirs of a Geisha (66)
Middlesex (66)
Quicksilver (66)
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (65)
The Canterbury tales (64)
The historian : a novel (63)
A portrait of the artist as a young man (63)
Love in the time of cholera (62)
Brave new world (61)
The Fountainhead (61)
Foucault’s pendulum (61)
Middlemarch (61)
Frankenstein (59)
The Count of Monte Cristo (59)
Dracula (59)
A clockwork orange (59)
Anansi boys (58)
The once and future king (57)
The grapes of wrath (57)
The poisonwood Bible : a novel (57)
1984 (57)
Angels & demons (56)
The inferno (56)
The satanic verses (55)
Sense and sensibility (55)
The picture of Dorian Gray (55)
Mansfield Park (55)
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest (54)
To the lighthouse (54)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (54)
Oliver Twist (54)
Gulliver’s travels (53)
Les misérables (53)
The corrections (53)
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay (52)
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time (52)
Dune (51)
The prince (51)
The sound and the fury (51)
Angela’s ashes : a memoir (51)
The god of small things (51)
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present (51)
Cryptonomicon (50)
Neverwhere (50)
A confederacy of dunces (50)
A short history of nearly everything (50)
Dubliners (50)
The unbearable lightness of being (49)
Beloved (49)
Slaughterhouse-five (49)
The scarlet letter (48)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (48)
The mists of Avalon (47)
Oryx and Crake : a novel (47)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed (47)
Cloud atlas (47)
The confusion (46)
Lolita (46)
Persuasion (46)
Northanger abbey (46)
The catcher in the rye (46)
On the road (46)
The hunchback of Notre Dame (45)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (45)
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into values (45)
The Aeneid (45)
Watership Down (44)
Gravity’s rainbow (44)
The Hobbit (44)
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences (44)
White teeth (44)
Treasure Island (44)
David Copperfield (44)
The three musketeers (44)

Slightly to my surprise I am going to Octocon in two weeks time.

Anyone need a room-mate for the hotel?

My aunt and uncle on the early days of Bangladesh.

I have the first five Lensman books by E.E. “Doc” Smith – Triplanetary, First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Grey Lensman and Second Stage Lensmen. I have read the first three, but have no intention of rereading them or of reading the other two. All five are therefore on offer to the first person who expresses an interest in them.

(Thanks to

mizkit

 for stiffening my spine on this.)

Sometimes when you google old friends you find bad news.

And sometimes you find good news.

Two rather routine stories, followed by four very experimental ones and three stories revisiting old Who themes.

Nekromanteia: listened to it some time ago. Five, Peri and Erimem, rather incoherent plot with witches and planetary invasion, nice touch with the cat at the end.

The Dark Flame: felt this worked a bit better. Seven, Ace and Benny and a rather complex tale of identities and possession – seemed to borrow bits from Image of the Fendahl and The Hand of Fear, but no harm in that.

Doctor Who and the Pirates: billed as the Six and Evelyn musical story, though in fact the Gilbert and Sullivan songs are restricted to the third episode of the four. Bill Oddie as the pirate captain! But a very successful leavening of the comic overtones with a serious and tragic foundation.

Creatures of Beauty: Another experiment in format, with the plot fragmented non-sequentially across the four episodes, so that the crucial contribution of Five and Nyssa to the very beginning of the story only really becomes clear at the end. Very well done.

Project: Lazarus is a story in two parts, the first of which is (another) tragic tale with Six and Evelyn, and the second featuring Seven and Six together – or is it really Six? Rather on the horrific side for my taste, but well done.

Flip-Flop: Like Creatures of Beauty, requires some intellectual work from the listener. The two discs are alternate versions of the same planet’s history, in each case changed into the other by the intervention of the Doctor and Mel. Really very well done.

Omega: Five on his own, dealing with Omega who is attempting to re-manifest in this universe. Lots of creative playing with the listener’s head, culminating in a brilliant moment at the end of episode three. And an Irish time lord – Professor Ertikus, played by Patrick Duggan. Really liked it despite my lack of familiarity with Arc of Infinity. Despite the serious theme I thought it borrowed more than a few elements from Douglas Adams.

Davros: Alas, despite resurrecting Terry Molloy to play Davros, ex-Gulliver/Time Lord/Thal Bernard Horsfall to play the chief human villain, and the fantastic Wendy Padbury to play his wife, I felt the brilliant cast was let down by the plot, which has an episode of silly office bickering between the Sixth Doctor and Davros and then the predictable mayhem and slaughter.

Master: Again, alas, decent performances by all, rather let down by the plot which is an extended piece of the type of fan-fic we have all read so much of since June. (Except this is Seven/Beevers Master rather than Ten/Simm Master.)

In summary, the middle five of these are all excellent; not so sure about the two on either side, though Davros does have nostalgia value.

Two Third Doctor stories to write up here, neither of them particularly outstanding.

Colony in Space, from 1971, was the first Third Doctor adventure in space, after a sequence of earthbound adventures. The first episode is rather good, with the Time Lords manipulating the Doctor again, and Jo’s surprise at entering the Tardis being one of the better “it’s bigger…” scenes. Then I’m afraid I felt it lost its way in being padded out to six epsiodes. The danger signs are there when part two has exactly the same cliff-hanger as the part one! And, despite the valiant efforts of all actors, the sets and direction really fail to convey a convincing sense of the scale of this planet, of how far it is from one set of buildings to another. The Master gets in some good cackling and there are some tightly-choreographed fight sequences; but apart from that, nothing much really happens, and the moral message of the story is both plodding and muted.

Death to the Daleks, from 1974, also had good and bad points. This is Sarah Jane Smith’s first space adventure (as Colony in Space was Jo Grant’s) and we start off very well with her in a bikini. The set looks properly like an alien planet. The Exxilons are memorable aliens (and I reckon one of them is still wandering around the Tardis). The Daleks are well voiced by Michael Wisher, who was to become Davros a year later. The plot, unfortunately, has huge holes, and the Daleks’ plan (as usual) makes no sense at all. Wood and Miles identify the cliff-hanger at the end of Episode Three as the weakest in the history of the show, adn they have a point.

I see that both were directed by Michael Briant (who also did The Sea Devils, The Green Death, Revenge of the Cybermen and The Robots of Death

You decide.

12) First Lensman, by E.E. “Doc” Smith

The Lensman books are sitting on the shelf, looking at me; and every time I feel I need to cut down the “unread” pile by another notch, they look like an easy quick option. I will probably trudge through them all in the end, but this is another whinge: awful style, awful plotting (especially the way in which important concepts and characters are just plonked into the story without introduction), and the political message being that democratic institutions should be taken from the corrupt ordinary humans and handed over to the control of supermen. *rubs his eyes wearily*

There’s no harm in having ambitions.

Some people have been chortling about the fact that a script of President Bush’s speech to the UN got onto the internets, including helpful pronunciation guides for the more difficult foreign words. Myself, I’m sympathetic: lots of names out there are difficult. Even some pretty senior people in NATO have difficulty with the name of their own Secretary-General.

But what surprised me is that at least half of the pronunciation advice given to Bush is clearly incorrect!!! While I’m in agreement with the speechwriters on Harare [hah-RAR-ray] and Caracas [kah-RAH-kus], I have serious doubts about three of the other four cases:

• “Mauritania [moor-EH-tain-ee-a]” – surely the stress is on the third syllable, not the second?
• “Mugabe [moo-GAHbee]” – surely the last syllable is pronounced more like “bay” than “bee”?
• “Sarkozy [sar-KOzee]” – surely stress on the last syllable, sarko-ZEE /saʁkɔˈzi/ ?

Finally, “Kyrgyzstan [KEYRgeez-stan]” is a valiant effort (myself, I would stress the last syllable, though Wikipedia disagrees with me) but in delivering the speech Bush actually got it wrong.

10) Athens-Skopje: an uneasy symbiosis, ed. Evangelos Kofos and Vlasis Vlasidis
11) Μακεδονία (Macedonia): a Greek term in modern usage, [Georgia Daidikou and Anna Pasali]

One of the things about being in my line of work is that people often send you books to try and convince you of the intellectual credibility of their cause. The Research Centre for Macedonian History and Documentation, part of the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle Foundation, sent me these two books some time ago, and I’ve been looking through them this week. My own sympathies for the Skopje position on the Macedonian name dispute are sufficiently well-known that you will find me (and one of the authors from the first of these books) smeared as a fiendish conspirator with the Jews and the Turks to destroy Hellenism on certain nationalist websites.

Having said that, these are valiant and valid efforts to put forward the Greek side of the story. The first of them is a meaty volume of seven essays on the seven years of the 1995 Interim Accord between Greece and Macedonia agreeing to disagree on the name, and what will happen next (the authors’ prediction, borne out by the facts since, being that things can go on as they are). All seven authors are Greek, and it’s sad but not surprising that I find points of disagreement with most of them. There is a consistent tendency to gloss over the lasting damage done by Greece, both to the newly independent state to the north and to Greece’s own reputation as a responsible international actor, in the early 1990s. It is surely unreasonable to say that Greece cannot look at its own minority issues clearly until “foreign governments stop using minorities and ethnic groups living in border zones for propaganda purposes” (p. 81). It is all very well to state that the Yugoslav state did not officially use the word “Macedonia” to describe its southernmost territories before 1945 (p.191), but to imply that this means nobody did is utterly incorrect, as a quick glance at pages 631-831 of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon will demonstrate. I’m stunned to find an entire essay claiming to describe “The name dispute in FYROM after the signing of the Interim Accord” which takes most of its information about the political situation in (the Republic of) Macedonia from the Greek media. The essay on the presentation of Greece in the Macedonian media and education system actually gives the media a better write-up than I expected, and in its criticisms of school textbooks rather overdoes some reasonable points. The chapter on civil society is OK.

The biggest disappointment of the book is that it doesn’t really examine the reasons for the attitudes of either side in particular depth (though it’s understandable as such research has not always been profitable for the researcher). Oddly enough the second book, Μακεδονία (Macedonia): a Greek term in modern usage, does this rather better, if only for one side: it is a glossy assemblage of pictorial and historical evidence of the use of the name “Macedonia” by Greeks to mean Greeks going back over the last two hundred years or so, the basic message being that the Greek Macedonians are Not Pretending. Which is fair enough; of course, neither are the “Slav-Macedonians”. The introductory text to the last section of the book actually put the situation rather well:

The existence of another Macedonia, which was not Greek, was seen as illogical by those who had forgotten that a part of geographical Macedonia had not been included in the Greek state, as well as by those who had never learned that as a term of geographical origin, the word “Macedonia” was not a Greek monopoly.

The country with the memorial of gratitude to Napoleon in its capital city, and with (as a bonus) the grave of a nineteenth-century French ruler, is indeed Slovenia – as correctly established by

getawaywithit

,

drplokta

, elmyra,

saare_snowqueen

,

agirlnamedluna

,

arwel_p

,

annafdd

,

patchworkmind

, and most especially

sunnygirly21

. See it on Google maps here. (Or paste into your mapping programme: 46.0471,14.5028.)

The dead French ruler was the raving conservative Charles X as correctly stated by

miteque

 and

redfiona99

 (whose answer to the first half of the question was, er, not so accurate). If you want to see dead Bourbons – one real king, and a few pretenders to the throne – you need to go to the Kostanjevica monastery in Nova Gorica.