This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
The most important news of the month was getting my first COVID injection. Weird to think that the pandemic had been going on for fourteen months at this stage. I also seemt o have started going back to the office at this stage, and we were holding office parties in the nearby parks.
With the public holidays, I had two excursions southwards: to Mons on my own, and with two colleagues to see Merovingian metalwork at Mariemont near Mons.
Non-fiction 2 (YTD 16) Doctor Who: The Pandorica Opens: Exploring the Worlds of the Eleventh Doctor, by Frank Collins Statement and Correspondence Consequent on the Ill-Treatment of Lady de la Beche by Colonel Henry Wyndham, edited by Ann Auriol
Non-genre 3 (YTD 10) Schindler’s List, by Thomas Keneally The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom
SF 7 (YTD 54) The Evidence, by Christopher Priest In the Days of the Comet, by H. G. Wells Cloud on Silver by John Christopher All the Fabulous Beasts, by Priya Sharma Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton Finna, by Nino Cipri City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Comics 4 (YTD 14) DIE, Volume 2: Split the Party, by Kieron Gillen, Stephanie Hans and Clayton Cowles The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine Ghost-Spider vol. 1: Dog Days Are Over, by Seanan McGuire, Takeshi Miyazawa and Rosie Kämpe Invisible Kingdom, vol 2: Edge of Everything, by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward
4,600 pages (YTD 25,900) 6/16 (YTD 39/98) by non-male writers (de la Beche/Auriol, Sharma, Cipri, Hans, McGuire/Kämpe, Wilson) 3/16 (YTD 18/98) by PoC (Sharma, Tomine, Miyazawa)
All the Fabulous Beasts, by Priya Sharma, is really fantastic. You can get it here.
Way back in 1989-90, as the world changed forever, I shared a house in Cambridge with a guy called Andrew. Years passed and we fell out of touch, and then it suddenly turned out that he was writing science fiction as a side gig from his environmental consultancy job, and we net for the first time in a quarter of a century at Eastercon in 2016. It is a small world sometimes.
This was his debut book, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve only now got around to reading it. It is jolly good. There are two and a half interlinked plots: one follows the memorable villain, the other the spunky heroine, with flashbacks to explain the history of her relationship with her AI guardian. Both villain and heroine are chasing abandoned ancient tech of mindblowing capability (the eponymous Creation Machine). It’s mostly space opera but leaps into cyberpunk at the end. I found it compellingly written, and I shall get the sequels in the trilogy – though I’m glad to say that this first volume is self-contained. You can get it here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is The Second ‘If’ Reader, ed. Fredrik Pohl.
This was the first non-Clarke book that I finished reading this month, so now I’m only a week behind. But once the Clarke shortlist is announced, I’m going to start publishing brief reports on the books that I read through to the end but were not shortlisted.
When I first listened to the audio of The Underwater Menace in 2007, and watched what was then the only remaining episode, I had fully absorbed the fan consensus that it is terrible, and I wrote:
The Underwater Menace, from Patrick Troughton’s first season in early 1967, is notorious – even the normally upbeat Howe and Walker describe it as “undoubtedly the weakest of the second Doctor’s era, if not of the sixties as a whole”. Fortunately, in a way, only episode three (out of four) survives, and today’s fan can buy the soundtrack with narration by Anneke Wills who played Polly (the story featuring her, Ben and new companion Jamie). This means that we are not subjected to the awful production values and can let our imaginations fill in for the cheap-looking sets. As a sound only production it comes close to succeeding, with the main problems being the baffling ballet of the fish people in episode three (which in fact becomes more rather than less confusing when you actually see it) and the utterly clichéd villain, Professor Zaroff, who actually ends the third episode by declaring that nothing in the world can stop him now. The director, Julia Smith, went on to create EastEnders; this cannot have been a high point of her early career.
It does feature the most extensively featured Irish character in any Doctor Who story [arguably until Thaddea Graham as Bel in 2021], P.G. Stephens’ trapped sailor Sean (who is teamed up with Jacko, a trapped Asian sailor played by Paul Anil). As I have previously noted, there is not a lot of competition. It is not fair to say that he has “the least convincing Irish accent in television history”, as he has a long acting career both in Ireland [dead link] and England (playing mainly Irish parts, including a comedy IRA bomber [another dead link]), but he is certainly as wobbly in his acting as any of the rest of the guest cast, especially in the deeply embarrassing scene where he urges the fish people to revolt.
Ow. The Underwater Menace is the first really bad story for some time, in fact almost as bad as The Sensorites which is my least favourite story so far. The plot is dreadfully padded – the Tardis crew faffing around getting captured in the first episode, wandering around in caves in the second episode, the hideously embarrassing fish-people dance in the surviving third episode, more cave wanderings in the last episode. The plot is fundamentally stupid, and Joseph Furst intensely annoying as Professor Zaroff. (Likewise Peter Stephens, doing a reprise of Cyril the schoolboy as Lolem the high priest; and the risible parts written for Token Irish Guy and Token Black Guy.)
As minor compensation, it looks decent enough, and the early Dudley Simpson score generally works; and some of the supporting cast are good – Ara (played by 16-year-old Catherine Howe who went on to a successful career in music) is clearly deeply in love with Polly, in the most overt gay crush in Who since Ian and Marco Polo. And Troughton carries it well, conveying at least his own confidence in the story (however feigned that may have been). Episode Three is the thirteenth Second Doctor episode, but the earliest to survive. I can’t help feeling that any one of the previous twelve would have been better.
A year later, of course, the missing second episode was recovered, and I watched it for the first time last month in preparation for this post; and you know what? I have revised my opinion of the story substantially upwards. Perhaps it’s that the second episode generally looks good enough; perhaps it’s that the intervening decade since 2011 has seen Moffat and Chibnall stories which were easily as silly in their premises as The Underwater Menace; perhaps my own tastes have matured enough that I am confident in my own judgement without relying on fan wisdom. The fish people are still a bit strange, but we’ve seen similar in New Who. I think my tolerance for what Doctor Who should be like has been broadened by the last two show-runners. You can judge for yourself by getting the DVD with reconstructions here and the audio only narration by Anneke Wills here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation by Nigel Robinson, introducing Dr Zaroff, is:
Lolem stalked angrily up to the figure who had just entered the temple and had evidently given the black uniformed guards their orders. The newcomer was tall and dressed in a high-collared white coat; a short black cloak hung over his shoulders. A shock of prematurely white hair covered his head, and a pencil-thin moustache topped his cruel mouth. The skin of his long aristocratic face was sallow but his large eyes gleamed with an icy-blue brilliance.
When I read it for the first time in 2008, I was also unforgiving:
This is very poor. It’s not quite as bad as Robinson’s novelisation of The Sensorites, and in the earlier chapters I thought it seemed quite promising. But the prose soon descends into his trademark clunkiness, and the story’s most famous line actually manages to come over even worse on the printed page than it does in the original.
Again, I don’t think I was being fair. It’s a perfectly adequate novelisation; a bit of back-story is given to Ara, Sean and Jacko, and even to Zaroff. You can get it here (if you are lucky).
This is the first time in this run of rewatches that I have found myself substantially revising my opinion of a story. Of course, it’s partly that there was a whole new episode here that I had not seen before. I was therefore in an open frame of mind when I started on James Cooray Smith’s Black Archive monograph; he had already done yeoman’s work on The Massacre and The Ultimate Foe, so my expectations were high.
And I was not disappointed. This is a more personal account than some of the Black Archives have been, as Cooray Smith was actually present at the BFI event in 2011 when, without any prior warning, the missing episode was shown to a crowd who had mainly come to the event for other reasons. Several of the Black Archives have made the point that our reception of past Doctor Who episodes is often dynamic rather than static; this is a very good case in point.
The first chapter, “Prehistoric monsters” looks at the reception of The Underwater Menace before 2011, pointing out that it was one of the most obscure of Old Who stories.
It neither introduces or writes out any memorable characters, nor features any popular monsters or villains. There are no references to it in subsequent television Doctor Who. It is one of a vanishingly small number of 20th-century Doctor Who stories to have no substantial sequel or prequel in any medium. With very few photographs taken during production, there was little visual material for use in the various glossy Doctor Who history books produced in the 1980s, whose printing of often striking colour photographs from black-and-white serials did much to shape fandom’s perceptions of the series’ earliest years.
The second chapter, “Hope it’s the Daleks”, describes the event on 11 December 2011 when Mark Gatiss presented both the third episode of Galaxy 4 and the second episode of The Underwater Menace. I remember this vividly too, though I was not there; the news hit Twitter as I was dining in a bistro near the main station in Luxembourg, on my way to a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, possibly the first time I learned something important from Twitter as a news source. Cooray Smith also points out that the episode’s subsequent DVD release was a bit underwhelming.
The third chapter, “Please let it be… 1966”, briskly recounts the fraught writing and production of the story. Its second paragraph is:
The Tenth Planet (1966) had been rewritten as a swansong for William Hartnell’s Doctor and then its third episode had been hurriedly redrafted1 when Hartnell became unavailable. The Power of the Daleks required the temporary return of former Story Editor Dennis Spooner to the role (in addition to work performed by Davis in that capacity and rewrites by credited writer David Whitaker). The Highlanders (1966-67), made before The Underwater Menace but commissioned and initially intended to be made after it, was written by Davis after the contracted writer, BBC executive Elwyn Jones, failed to deliver any material at all, and was scripted with such urgency that all the necessary paperwork surrounding Davis’ commission was delayed until after most of the story had been made. 1 The original version, the Doctor playing a larger role in events, is retained in Gerry Davis’s novelisation.
The fourth chapter, “What have I come upon?”, looks in depth at Episode 2 and how watching it changes one’s perceptions of the story as a whole, exactly the experience I had had myself a few days before reading the chapter.
What the recovery of episode 2 has gifted us, however, in addition to a whole extra episode of 20th-century Doctor Who to enjoy, is a tremendous real-time demonstration of how any even only partially missing Doctor Who serial cannot ever really be understood as a piece of television, no matter how much secondary and supplementary material exists.
One utterly glorious bit of trivia. For many years, the only surviving segments of Episode 2 were those that had been cut from it by Australian censors for being too scary. The recovered copy of the episode turned out to have been the very one from which the Australian censors had cut the scenes, so they were reinserted into the master copy, half a century later on a different continent.
The fifth chapter, “Science is in opposition to ancient temple ritual”, looks at the tension between science and religion in the story, in the course of which the Doctor allies himself with the High Priest against Professor Zaroff, not the usual way around for these situations in Doctor Who.
The sixth chapter, “Nothing in the world can stop me now!”, offers a redemptive reading of the character of Professor Zaroff. Again, now that we have episode 2 as well, I can see that Joseph Furst’s performance, and the character as written, are much less over the top than fan lore would have had you believe.
The seventh chapter, “I should like a hat like that!”, looks at the question of the Second Doctor’s tall hat, which is seen for the last time in The Underwater Menace. Cooray Smith reckons that it was badly damaged in the filming of the previous story, The Highlanders, and thus quietly abandoned.
The eighth chapter, “Look at him! He’s not normal, is he?”, makes a good case that Troughton’s performance as the Doctor only really settles down after The Underwater Menace.
The ninth chapter, “A New Atlantis”, looks at the very little that is known of the writer, Geoffrey Orme, and examines the socialist elements of the plot – notably the strike of the Fish People as one of the few cases of industrial action in Doctor Who, and speculates that their infamous dance is rooted in the work of Ernst and Lotte Berk, with whom Orme had professional connections. I was convinced.
An appendix, “Vital secret will die with me! Dr. W”, looks in amusing and extensive detail at the question of whether the name of the lead character of the show is “Doctor Who” or not.
A second and final appendix reviews the production schedule of the story, whose studio sessions were recorded only a week before they were broadcast.
It’s all very satisfactory, and after a run of Black Archives which I was less happy with, this is reassuringly back to the usual excellent form.
Having said that, there is one very annoying production glitch. As has sometimes been the case before, it involves the footnotes; in this case, most of them are duplicated. It rather breaks up the reading experience.
Other than that, I really recommend this – after you have seen the recovered second episode. You can get it here.
Current The John Nathan-Turner Doctor Who Production Diary, 1979-90, by Richard Molesworth The Race, by Nina Allan A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske
Last books finished Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister The Fountains of Forever, by Nick Abadzis et al ω4 α5 (did not finish) Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett β5 (did not finish) ψ4
Next books Home Fires Burn, by Gareth Madgwick The Shape of Sex to Come, ed. Douglas Hill The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross
Anne and I had a little 24-hour excursion at the end of the long weekend just gone, mainly exploring the arrondissement of Avesnes-sur-Helpe in the département du Nord of the Hauts-de-France region, a small corner of the Republic that ended up French rather than Belgian due to the 1678 Treaty of Nijmegen which allowed Louis XIV to take it from the County of Hainaut. It has been rather neglected by its overlords in the 345 years since.
But before we got there, we stopped off at the Collegiate Church of St Ursmer in the small town of Lobbes near Charleroi. It is supposedly the oldest church in Belgium, and this year is celebrating the 1200th anniversary of its consecration in 823. Little is known of St Ursmer, a local boy who became bishop and is buried in the crypt (well, most of him; bits and bobs are in reliquaries). But the crisp, clean geometrical arches of the ninth-century church fabric are currently crowded with an exhibition of the iconography of the saint and how this affected the church.
The external view shows the ancient core and 19th-century spire.
St Ursmer’s major miracle was exorcising a demon from a nun, whose name has been forgotten, though artists agree that the demonic presence was expelled from her mouth.
The exhibition will stay in the church until, er, next Monday, and will then transfer to the former sacristy of the Abbey of Good Hope in Lobbes from 18 June, if you want to catch it there.
The church is only 10km from the border with France, and so we slipped across to the small French village of Sars-Poteries where various menhirs from the neighbourhood have been collected. My Celtic soul is still a bit revolted at the thought of moving the sacred monoliths from the places where their builders put them, but I suppose it is better than losing them altogether. One of them stands proud and upright in the centre of the village; the others recline in retirement nearby.
We stayed at Les Mout’ânes, a pension in the small town of Saint-Hilaire-sur-Helpe, where a luxurious double room with breakfast costs a mere € 89. Strongly recommended. They also have donkeys.
They don’t, unfortunately, do dinner for groups of less than four, so in the evening we headed down to La Petite Ferme de Lucien in Fourmies, a steakhouse in the style of an American diner except with French culinary standards. Very yummy.
On Monday morning we decided to explore the Parc naturel régional de l’Avesnois, which occupies most of the land surface of the arrondissement. This proved a little difficult; there are no real centres of tourist information, no established walks, and not a lot of information on the ground. We stopped at the arboretum in the Forest of Mormal near Locquignol where there are a couple of amusing wooden statues.
As we drove on to our next destination, we passed a sign labelled “Wilfred Owen”, and went back to investigate. Like all UKanian schoolkids, we were taught several of his gut-wrenching war poems in our English Literature classes. The house where he wrote his last letter to his mother on 31 October 1918 has been transformed into a large sculptural memorial, but sadly was not open on 1 May.
We parked there anyway and walked for twenty minutes through the woods to his grave in the nearby village of Ors; a few dozen British soldiers are buried in the municipal cemetery, including Wilfred Owen, who was killed exactly a week before the war ended. The woods were alive with birdsong and the cemetery was quiet. It was a thought-provoking walk.
I should add that I had consulted many French tourism websites about things to see in the arrondissement, and not one of them mentioned Wilfred Owen’s grave. We found it completely by accident.
Our destination at that point was the Matisse museum in the former bishop’s palace at Le Cateau-Cambrésis, the town where he was born. As is often the case with such museums, most of his best known art is elsewhere – there are two other museums in France alone which have more of his work. But there is enough here to show his evolution as a painter, from the 1899 First Still Life with Orange:
…to the 1906/07 portrait of his daughter Marguerite:
…to his later experiments with cut-outs, as with the 1946 Océanie – La Mer.
Upstairs, the museum has a lot more art by modern artists – lots of Alberto Giacometti, some Miró, a Picasso, a few by Fernand Léger (who impressed me at the Kröller-Müller Museum last year); and a large collection of art by Auguste Herbin, another local boy who neither Anne nor I had previously heard of, but who completely wowed us. This is a case where almost none of his art is elsewhere and the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau-Cambrésis has almost all of it. He started fairly representational, eg these early Chrysanthemums:
But then he went completely geometric in various media. Here’s a flat piece with the title Napoleon:
Here’s a more three-dimensional piece whose title I failed to record:
Here are two stools with Herbin covers:
And most spectacular of all, here’s a stained glass window, with the title Joy, that he designed for a local elementary school (this is an exact copy; the original is still in the school, where we later saw it from the outside).
This stunning museum charged us € 4 each as the cost of entry. I can certainly think of many occasions when I have spent five times as much to have five times less fun. It was practically empty and it was well worth the trip. (The same, sadly, could not be said for the lunch at the Restaurant du Musée Matisse across the street, where the service was slow and the food a bit disappointing.)
Finally we stopped off at Bavay for a look at the huge ancient Roman forum there; but unfortunately it was closed due to the bank holiday. We’ll have to go back.
Why his followers had this experience is an interesting question. After all, many other Jews in this period followed other charismatic, prophetic figures (John the Baptizer comes readily to mind); but none of their movements outlived the death of their founder. Why was this group different?
An interesting book on the very early history of Christianity, between the time of Jesus and the fall of Jerusalem, looking at what are effectively trace fossils in the records to get a sense of what the followers of Christ believed and did. The only real contemporary witness is St Paul in his letters, though Fredriksen also gives a lot of weight to Flavius Josephus.
The crucial point is that the early Christians expected the apocalypse at any moment, and structures therefore didn’t need to be established for the long term; but they gradually evolved from being dissident groups within local synagogues to becoming free-standing communities, a process partly driven by their acceptance of non-Jews among the ranks. (Fredriksen observes that Jesus himself was a bit hesitant about non-Jews.)
The destruction of the temple – and indeed Caligula’s earlier threat to desecrate it – convulsed the Jewish world and shook the Christians definitively into a separate channel. That’s a different story, but the decades leading up to that are well depicted in this book. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2019; next on that pile is One Bible Many Voices, by Susan E. Gillingham.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Another month when I mainly stayed at home, apart from a birthday excursion to the east of Belgium for more megaliths.
Worldcon continued to provide drama, with the publication of the final ballot arousing much controversy, and the entire convention being postponed until December (giving rise to further arguments about the rules). More positively, it was announced that I would be a Guest of Honour at the next year’s Eastercon.
Non-fiction 1 (YTD 14) Kathedralen uit de steentijd, by Herman Clerinx
Non-genre 2 (YTD 7) The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
SF 12 (YTD 47) Worlds Apart, by Richard Cowper Network Effect, by Martha Wells Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo The Gameshouse, by Claire North Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish) The Relentless Moon, by Mary Robinette Kowal The Serpent Sea, by Martha Wells The Orphans of Raspay, by Lois McMaster Bujold Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi Doctor Who 1 (YTD 2, 4 inc comics) Adventures in Lockdown, ed. Steve Cole Comics 5 (YTD 10) Muse vol 1: Celia, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi Muse vol 2: Coraline, by Terry Dodson & Denis-Pierre Filippi Le dernier Atlas, tome 1, by Fabien Vehlmann, Gwen De Bonneval and Fred Blanchard Feeders & Eaters & other stories, by Neil Gaiman, art by Mark Buckingham Sculpture Stories, by Neil Gaiman with Lisa Snellings
4,800 pages (YTD 21,300) 9/21 (YTD 33/82) by women (Wells x2, Krasnostein/Rios, Vo, North, Deonn, Kowal, Bujold, Pinsker) 3/21 (YTD 15/82) by PoC (Onyebuchi, Vo, Deonn)
There were a couple of these that I did not like, but you know what, let’s celebrate half a dozen that I liked very much.
Kathedralen uit de steentijd: hunebedden, dolmens en menhirs in de Lage Landen, by Herman Clerinx (get it here) The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris (get it here) Kaleidoscope: diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories, eds Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios (get it here) Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi (get it here) The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo (get it here) Two Truths and a Lie, by Sarah Pinsker (get it here)
We ate breakfast out in the garden, under the small tangerine-trees. The sky was fresh and shining, not yet the fierce blue of noon, but a clear milky opal. The flowers were half-asleep, roses dew-crumpled, marigolds still tightly shut. Breakfast was, on the whole, a leisurely and silent meal, for no member of the family was very talkative at that hour. By the end of the meal the influence of the coffee, toast, and eggs made itself felt, and we started to revive, to tell each other what we intended to do, why we intended to do it, and then argue earnestly as to whether each had made a wise decision. I never joined in these discussions, for I knew perfectly well what I intended to do, and would concentrate on finishing my food as rapidly as possible.
As a teenager, I read several of Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical notes on collecting animals in Africa with great interest and enthusiasm. Nowadays I’m not so sure about the ethics of bringing animals out of their home environments, to which they are well adapted, to be gawked at by Europeans in cages. I’m sure that there are good arguments to be made on both sides.
Anyway, this is the story of Durrell’s childhood on the island of Corfu, as the youngest of a large family who settled there in the 1930s. He was already a keen collector of animals, and clearly drove his eccentric relatives mad with the inevitable domestic accidents that took place. But it’s a very affectionate portrait of an untroubled childhood, even if it leans a little too much on the funny foreigners that happen to live in foreign parts. You can get it here.
This was both my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired last year. Next on those piles are A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford, and The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman.
NB that this post is not a complete history of the Cyprus problem; it is more of a note to myself about why two different publications are interesting. I should also say that my employers, former and current, are under no obligation to agree with me on any of the below.
Second paragraph of third chapter of The Cyprus Crisis and the Cold War: USSR duplicity versus US realpolitik (1974-1977), by Makarios Drousiotis:
Military operations had displaced 160,000 Greek Cypriots – one-third of the population – from their homes. Most of them fled empty-handed. They were housed wherever they could be accommodated, with tens of thousands living in tents and under trees. Approximately 13,000 Greek Cypriots remained enclaved in the northern part, mostly in the Karpas peninsula. By the end of the military operations, 25,000 of the 120,000 Turkish Cypriots remained in the south. Of these, about 10,000 fearing reprisals, fled to the British Bases west of Limassol. Around 10,000 Turkish Cypriots lived in Paphos and a smaller number in Larnaca. Those who were close to the Attila line left easily for the north. The two-way movement of people, whether pushed out by force or prompted by fear, and the control of the northern part by the Turkish army created a new reality on the ground.
Second paragraph of third section of An Island Divided: Next Steps for Troubled Cyprus, by the International Crisis Group:
The working groups set up through this process reached preliminary agreement on citizenship and voting issues, as well as much of the post-unification governance framework. In their first meeting off the island, during a round of negotiations in Mont Pèlerin, Switzerland, in November 2016, the two leaders agreed on a range for the area of the island’s territory the Turkish Cypriot constituent state would cover: from 28.2 to 29.2 per cent.
A quirk of fate threw these two documents together for me. They cover rather different periods of the recent history of Cyprus, but end up in depressingly similar places. Drawing on many official documents, including those recently declassified, Makarios Drousiotis has compiled a good and authoritative book-length account of what actually happened immediately before, during and after the Turkish military operations of July and August 1974, as a result of which the island has been divided between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot territory ever since (with also a UN-controlled buffer zone and two sovereign British military bases). Talks to reunify the island have made very little progress since then, or really since 1963.
Drousiotis’ explicit aim in writing the book was to puncture the myth that the Americans and Henry Kissinger in particular were behind the Turkish military intervention; and also the myth that the Soviet Union had been helpful and supportive of the Greek Cypriots throughout. Both of these propositions are widely believed among Greek Cypriots, and elsewhere. Neither, as Drousiotis shows, is true.
The contemporary evidence is clear: when the Greek junta attempted to kill Archbishop Makarios and overthrew his government, they were condemned by pretty much everyone, including the Soviet Union. The swiftness, extent and brutality of the second Turkish military operation in August came as a surprise to all other international actors, including the Americans. Drousiotis writes of personally witnessing a friend dying under the wheels of a British armoured vehicle during one of the subsequent protests.
The Americans, consumed by the domestic crisis leading up to Nixon’s resignation on 9 August, were concerned to keep Turkey on board with NATO, didn’t care too much about the government of Greece, and cared even less about Cyprus except in so far as it was a nuisance factor. The USSR on the other hand didn’t care about Cyprus at all except that they wanted to prevent the island being used by NATO, and if possible to use it to weaken Turkey’s relationship with NATO. There was no grand scheme to aid the Turkish intervention from the USA, and no coherent strategy of opposing it from the USSR.
The full detail of failed negotiations between Denktash and Clerides / Makarios over the next three years, up to the sudden death of Makarios, is actually rather tedious. Neither side was really interested in reaching a settlement, because both felt that they would be strengthened by the passage of time. Despite the massive investment of time and energy in the process from the United Nations, the UK, the USA and others (though not the USSR), negotiations were basically a sham to cover the race between the principals to be out of the door second. I found a compelling 1974 quote from Makarios on one of the key issues:
“If I have to choose between the 40% held by the Turks and the 28% that we shall probably end up with, I prefer that they keep the 40% even against our will, rather than that they hold 28% with our consent.”
Well, he got what he wanted, or at least what he wanted at that point.
It is striking just how poorly most of the Cypriots on both sides behaved. Makarios appointed Clerides as chief negotiator and then undermined him from the first moment. Denktash knew his side had won the ground war, and enjoyed watching the Greek Cypriots tie themselves in knots. Even Clerides, who generally gets a good press (and usually deserves it), decided at one point to ally with the remnants of EOKA B who had connived in the short-lived July 1974 coup. (Not mentioned here, but he had also overseen the expulsion of Turkish Cypriot MPs in 1963.)
In the last few months of his life, Makarios suddenly decided that he wanted a settlement after all, and was ready to concede bizonality, a vital Turkish Cypriot demand. But he had not prepared his own hardliners for this about-face, and was losing authority at the time of his death. Another good quote has him at this stage telling hardliner Vassos Lyssarides (who died only two years ago at the age of 100),
It is not sufficient to remain on the heroic ramparts but it is necessary to advance.
But it was too late – not just three years too late, but fourteen. In his closing summary, Drousiotis assesses Makarios’ record brutally; it was his choices and strategy that led to the Greece-backed coup and the Turkish intervention in 1974; even though the Greek and Turkish government obviously bear responsibility for their own actions, better choices by Makarios (and other Greek Cypriot leaders, but he was at the top) from the very beginning would have prevented the situation from getting to that stage.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. You can get it here. Next on that list is American Gridlock: The Sources, Character, and Impact of Political Polarization, by James A. Thurber.
The International Crisis Group’s latest report on the situation, An Island Divided: Next Steps for Troubled Cyprus, rehearses in convincing and depressing detail the internal (and external) blocks to any new negotiation process starting, let alone finishing. I was a bit stunned by the bleak conclusion; I am used to Crisis Group making virtuous if not always practical recommendations for what could be done to improve a particular situation, but in this case it’s just “the parties should try a more conciliatory approach”. Well, yes.
A helpful appendix lists 22 proposals related to trade, hydrocarbons and/or Varosha/Maraş which were put forward between 1978 and 2022. Eighteen of them were completely blocked, and only four of them were in any way implemented; the opening of checkpoints, the demining process, the EU’s regulations and the interoperability of the cellphone network. Otherwise we are where we were in 1974.
The report has particular resonances for me because 19 years ago, when I was Crisis Group’s Europe Program Director, I wrote an op-ed signed by my bosses, former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans and former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, advocating the Annan Plan for the reunification of the island (NYT, ICG). I wrote then:
A failure to seize the opportunity of a peace deal now, against the imminent time-scale of EU membership, will mean years of further stalemate, with no refugees returning anywhere, continued armed presence on the island, and an EU member state government that controls only 60 percent of its own territory.
Well, I told you so. The plan was passed by the Turkish Cypriots but rejected by Greek Cypriots in twin referenda a few days later, and the situation now is exactly what I predicted in 2004. (I don’t claim any special genius in making this prediction; I was certainly not alone.)
Two years later, in 2006, I went to Nicosia, Athens and Istanbul to present Crisis Group’s first report on Cyprus. We were among the first to say directly that the Greek Cypriots had voted for continuing partition by rejecting the Annan Plan. This was not universally popular, and one newspaper accused me of coming to the island with “the impudence of a thousand monkeys”, “με αναίδεια χίλιων πιθήκων”. But I think it had to be said.
Shortly after, I left Crisis Group to join Independent Diplomat, where I became an adviser to Denktash’s successor as Turkish Cypriot president, Mehmet Ali Talat, a sincere and modest man who was genuinely committed to reunifying the island but lacked a serious partner on the other side. (Tassos Papadopoulos was too hardline, and Dimitris Christofias too stupid.) A Greek commentator, Marios Evriviades, in a blog post of around 2011 that has been widely reprinted on Greek nationalist sites (I won’t link, you can easily Google them), states:
Whyte, υπεύθυνος της ICG για την έρευνα και την συγγραφή της κυπριακής έκθεσης, εξαναγκάσθηκε σε παραίτηση διότι άρχισε να αντιδρά στο μακρύ χέρι της Άγκυρας και να διαφοροποιείται κάπως από τη μέχρι τότε απόλυτα φιλοτουρκική στάση του ICG.
Whyte, ICG’s head of research and writing of the Cyprus report, was forced to resign because he began to react to the long arm of Ankara and diverge somewhat from the ICG’s until then completely pro-Turkish stance.
This is all completely untrue, and it is very much to Evrivriades’ discredit that he allows these untruths to continue to circulate years after I informed him of the facts. My ICG job was not head of research; I was not the major writer of the first Cyprus report, though I agreed with it and was its main editor; I was not forced to resign from ICG; I didn’t and don’t diverge from ICG’s stance which I think was and is largely correct; I don’t think that ICG’s stance was completely pro-Turkish, beyond the obvious facts; and in any case I moved from ICG to a job where I was actively working with the Turkish Cypriot leadership, which hardly supports the proposition that I was reacting against the long arm of Ankara.
President Talat lost the 2010 election, and my personal involvement with Cyprus ended there; I have only been back once since then. His successor was a hardliner; he was in turn succeeded by a pro-settlement leader; he too was unable to reach a deal at Crans-Montana in 2017, lost election in 2020 and has been replaced by yet another hardliner.
I no longer think it matters. Back in the day when I was involved, I did think that it was possible that there might some day be a convergence of a pro-settlement leadership on both sides of the island, with or without the blessings of Ankara and Athens. I think this has now been disproved by the failure of the rounds of negotiations since then. I know and admire several of the previous chief negotiators on each side, but I think their task is impossible.
Both Drousiotis’ book, dealing with the mid-70s, and the Crisis Group report, from almost half a century later, make it clear that there is not and has never been a critical mass in Greek Cypriot political discourse in favour of agreeing a deal with the Turkish Cypriots that will involve sharing power and territory with them. On reflection, I think that this has been consistently the case since at least 1963. The default position now is still Makarios’ “I prefer that they keep the 40% even against our will, rather than that they hold 28% with our consent”. It doesn’t matter who the Turkish Cypriots elect; the systemic blockage is on the other side.
As I said, I am no longer involved in the situation myself; I’m just saying that the status quo, which has now lasted since 1974 is likely to be the long term situation, and that’s probably a better basis for strategy than wishful thinking about any comprehensive settlement. I am very sorry about that. Cyprus deserves better, and so do we all.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 27) The Cyprus Crisis and the Cold War, by Makarios Drousiotis My Family And Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell The Silurians, by Robert Smith? When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, by Paula Fredriksen The Underwater Menace, by James Cooray Smith
SF 23 (YTD 87) β4 Galactic Girl, by Fiona Richmond γ4 ε4 (did not finish) ζ4 (did not finish) Redwood and Wildfire, by Andrea Hairston δ4 θ4 ι4 (did not finish) κ4 (did not finish) η4 λ4 ν4 (did not finish) ξ4 (did not finish) ο4 (did not finish) π4 (did not finish) ρ4 (did not finish) σ4 (did not finish) μ4 τ4 (did not finish) υ4 (did not finish) φ4 (did not finish) χ4
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 13) Erasing Sherlock, by Kelly Hale Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson
Comics 1 (YTD 8) The Weeping Angels of Mons, by Robbie Morrison, Daniel Indro and Eleonora Carlini
6,500 pages (YTD 32,700) 11/32 (YTD 57/142) by non-male writers (Fredriksen, β4, Richmond, Hairston, θ4, κ4, ν4, ρ4, Hale, υ4, χ4) 2/32 (YTD 23/142) by a non-white writer (β4, Hairston)
389 books tagged “unread”, as of last night; that is 6 fewer than last month as I get through the Clarke submissions, and did not go wild at Eastercon.
Reading now Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett ψ4
Coming soon (perhaps) The Fountains of Forever, by Nick Abadzis et al The John Nathan Turner Production Diary, 1979-90, by Richard Molesworth Home Fires Burn, by Gareth Madgwick Doctor Who – Vengeance on Varos, by Philip Martin Vengeance on Varos, by Jonathan Dennis The Rings of Akhaten, by William Shaw The Race, by Nina Allan The Shape of Sex to Come, ed. Douglas Hill American Gridlock, by James Thurber The Second ‘If’ Reader, ed. Fredrik Pohl A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard Winter, by Ali Smith The Cider House Rules, by John Irving The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe “Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris One Bible Many Voices, by S E Gillingham Falling to Earth, by Al Worden Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman DALEKS Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
Current Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett ψ4
Last books finished υ4 (did not finish) φ4 (did not finish) When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, by Paula Fredriksen Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson χ4
Next books The Fountains of Forever, by Nick Abadzis et al The Race, by Nina Allan A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske
Green Book won the 2018 Best Picture Oscar, and two others: Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley) and Best Original Screenplay. Bohemian Rhapsody, which I also enjoyed, won four Oscars that year, more than any other film. As well as Bohemian Rhapsody, the other contenders for Best Picture were Black Panther, which I have also seen, and BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Roma, A Star Is Born and Vice, which I haven’t. The Hugo that year went to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, with Black Panther second.
The only other films I have seen from that year were Bohemian Rhapsody, First Man and the six Hugo finalists, which I did not comment on because I was the administrator of the awards. I voted for Black Panther, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, A Quiet Place, Sorry to Bother You, Annihilation and Avengers: Infinity War in that order. IMDB users rate Green Book 4th and 7th best film of the year, with no film ahead of it on both lists.
Here’s a trailer.
A couple of high profile returnees from previous Oscar-winners here. Viggo Mortensen, starring as Tony Lip, led the Army of the West to the gates of Mordor before being crowned King of Gondor as the second of two title characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. (He was of course in the two previous films of the trilogy as well.)
Mahershala Ali, here the other main character Don Shirley, was Juan in the first section of Moonlight two years ago.
Nick Vallelonga, the writer of the film and son of Tony Lip, appeared as a young wedding guest in The Godfather, 45 years before, and also has a minor speaking part here. (Tony’s father and father-in-law are played by his real-life brother and brother-in-law). I didn’t spot any other Hugo/Nebula or scar crossovers, let alone Doctor Who.
I rather enjoyed this. True, it’s the story of a white man’s education about racism, rather than an in depth exploration of racism from the point of view of the oppressed; but it’s also a witty buddy movie, of two men who are different in many ways coming to a joint understanding of their common humanity, and each having a humanising effect on the other. The mixture of music is sensitively done. The scenery all looks like Louisiana, because it all is Louisiana despite being set in various other places. Loses marks for Tony being a white saviour a little too often, and for not much agency for the women characters. But the banter between the two principals is crackling.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Another month when due to COVID restrictions I did not leave Belgium, and indeed I appear to have gone to the office only twice. It was a year since the first lockdown. Apart from diplomatic walks in Brussels parks, my two excursions were to the Dolmen of Duisburg and the video games museum at Tours et Taxis.
I also researched the parenthood of the baby in the park, but came to the wrong conclusion.
Hugo Award nominations closed, and it became clear that we had some potentially controversial finalists, including a blog post whose title gave a very direct instruction to a well-known author. From the technical point of view it was relatively smooth; we had one nominated editor decline nomination, one artist inform us that they were not eligible and one TV series that we disqualified from the Long Form category because it also had two episodes in Short Form. (Some felt that we should have disqualified others too, but we did not.)
I read 20 books that month.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 13) The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, by Paul Kincaid Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd, by Nick Mason It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of?, by Adam Roberts Romeinse sporen: het relaas van de Romeinen in de Benelux met 309 vindplaatsen om te bezoeken, by Herman Clerinx Scottish independence: EU membership and the Anglo–Scottish border, by Akash Paun, Jess Sargeant, James Kane, Maddy Thimont Jack and Kelly Shuttleworth
Non-genre 1 (YTD 5) Dances With Wolves, by Michael Blake
Scripts 2 Driving Miss Daisy, by Alfred Uhry Mostly Void, Partially Stars, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
SF 12 (YTD 35) The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson Comet Weather, by Liz Williams “Sandkings”, by George R.R. Martin Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds Enemy Mine, by Barry B. Longyear The Doors of Eden, Adrian Tchaikovsky Threading the Labyrinth, by Tiffani Angus The Fountains of Paradise, by Arthur C. Clarke Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake Light of Impossible Stars, by Gareth Powell Water Must Fall, by Nick Wood The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, by M. John Harrison
5,600 pages (YTD 16,500) 3/20 (YTD 24/61) by women (Williams, Angus, Sargeant/Thimont Jack/Shuttleworth) 1/20 (YTD 12/61) by PoC (Paun)
A lot of these were very good, and I’m going to recommend three by friends which were also shortlisted for the BSFA Award:
When I first watched Doctor Who and the Silurians in 2007, I wrote:
Doctor Who and the Silurians was the second story of Jon Pertwee’s first season in 1970 (and for some reason the only TV story with “Doctor Who and” in the title). Those who have seen Quatermass are keen to point out the links; for me, it was one of the most X-Files-like of Doctor Who stories, with our team of investigators checking out mysterious happenings which turn out to have an entirely Earthly explanation (rather rare among Who stories). The first three episodes seemed reminiscent of yer standard rural horror story, but the second half, alternating between science labs and the Silurian caves, steps back into familiar territory. Very familiar in fact – there’s Peter Miles, to return playing essentially the same character in Invasion of the Dinosaursand even nastier in Genesis of the Daleks; there’s Geoffrey Palmer, who lasts two episodes this time before dying horribly (he was only in one episode of The Mutantsbefore dying horribly; and now of course he is due to return as the captain of the Titanic – spot a pattern here?); and, most surprising, there’s Paul Darrow, nine years before Avon became one of Blake’s Seven, being the Brigadier’s second-in-command. The Young Silurian is overacting a bit though. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Spearhead from Spaceand Inferno, but I can see why some regard this as Pertwee’s best season.
In 2010, when I came back to it for my Great Rewatch, I was less forgiving:
There are some good bits in Doctor Who and the Silurians, but they are an awful long way apart; this would have been an undisputed classic if it were a four-parter. The length of the story may not have been the choice of director Timothy Combe (who also did Evil of the Daleks and The Mind of Evil, after which he was apparently barred from future Who work), but it has other problems that clearly are his fault: too many static scenes of the Brigadier sitting talking to someone in an office, several of which are interrupted by the Doctor arriving just as his whereabouts are beng discussed. This all made me wonder about the distance between the research centre and the caves; I didn’t get a good sense of that (and Malcolm Hulke’s map in the novelisation is actually a bit confusing).
The story falls quite naturally into two halves – the “something nasty in the woodshed” bit before we actually meet the Silurians properly, and the “clash of civilisations” bit when we do. The two halves are not linked well (what’s the story with the dinosaur, for instance? or the Silurians’ relationship with Quinn?) but the second half is better, and for once we get monsters with decent characterisation, balanced by the Brigadier’s monstrous behaviour at the end – the first time we have seen a regular character defy the Doctor so wilfully, and as a result we viewers are asked to sympathise with the alien agenda rather than the forces of the British state.
It’s also a great story for spotting guest stars: Avon is the Brigadier’s second-in-command, Khrisong / Hieronymous is also there, Nyder is running the research centre, and Geoffrey Palmer, who dies horribly every time he is on Doctor Who, is the Permanent Under-Secretary. (If you haven’t heard the super two-hander audio between Paul Darrow and Peter Miles set in Kaldor City, I do recommend it.) Finally, of course, by pure chance I was watching it immediately after the New Who two-part Silurian story was broadcast, but my thoughts on that will have to wait.
This time around I found myself in between my two previous takes. The pacing is slow, and not everything in the early episodes makes sense compared with what we learn in the later episodes. But the tensions between and among the human and Silurian characters are well depicted, and this time around I was particularly grabbed by Fulton MacKay, in his only Doctor Who appearance of a distinguished career, as the misguided and doomed Dr Quinn. And after recent years, I must say that I sat up and paid attention a lot more during the plague sequences.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation, Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, is:
Miss Dawson’s mother had died, of incredibly old age, a year ago. At last free, Miss Dawson immecliately applied for, and got, this job at the research centre at Wenley Moor. Derbyshire wasn’t exactly Australia or America, but at least it was some distance from London, and it was the start of her new life.
This was a favourite when I was a kid. When I reread it in 2008, I wrote:
This was the second original novel in Target’s series of novelisations after Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, the first of Hulke’s six books for the range. It is a good one; Hulke tells the story in part from the point of view of the eponymous cave monsters (the word “Silurian” is not used here), showing us humans as alien vermin. He also makes the story a more overt parable about authority and power, and adds little bits of character especially for the Brigadier and Liz. (And see note below on a minor character.) I suspect this will be near the top of my list of Third Doctor novels.
[It has an explicit reference] to Northern Ireland, which are otherwise very rare in the Doctor Who mythos (though see also Daragh Carville’s play, Regenerations). In Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, we get the following back story for Major Barker (renamed from Baker in the TV story, where he was played by Norman Jones without a beard):
“…he saw himself one rainy day in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, leading a group of soldiers who were trying to pin down an IRA sniper. The sniper had already shot two of his men dead, and wounded a third. The Major carefully worked his men into a position so that the sniper was completely surrounded. Then he called upon the sniper to surrender. A rifle was thrown down from a window, and a man appeared with his arms raised. As Major Barker called on his men to break cover and arrest the sniper, shots rang out from a sniper in another building, instantly killing the young soldier next to Major Barker. Without a second’s thought, Barker aimed his revolver at the sniper standing with his hands up in surrender, and shot him dead. For that moment of anger, Major Barker had been asked to resign from the British Army and to find another job.”
Things had changed rather drastically in Northern Ireland between the time of broadcast of this story (January-March 1970) and Hulke’s novelisation, published four years later. According to the grim and masterly Sutton index, before the summer of 1970 the only people killed by the British Army in Northern Ireland were two Protestants shot during riots on the Shankill Road. IRA sniper attacks on the army began only in February 1971. (I don’t know if this is at all helpful for the UNIT dating controversy.) The idea that Barker would have been removed from the army in the circumstances described is rather grimly laughable; even the odious Lee Clegg was eventually allowed to walk free and return to the ranks.
I still think that the book is one of the best novelisations, with a lot of the plot points rounded off, the Silurians (not given that name here) getting much more characterisation and agency, and Major Barker voicing the ideas that Hulke himself hated.
‘It’s as plain as a pikestaff there’s sabotage going on,’ said Barker, taking the Doctor’s bait without realising it. ‘Anyone can see that.’ ‘I may agree with you,’ the Doctor said. ‘But sabotage by whom?’ ‘Communists, of course.’ Major Barker gave his answer as though it should have been obvious to everyone. ‘Why should communists cause these power losses?’ said the Doctor. ‘They hate England, that’s why.’ Barker started to warm to his subject. ‘They train people to come here to destroy us.’ ‘I see,’ said the Doctor. ‘Are these Chinese communists or Russian communists?’ ‘There’s no difference between them,’ said Barker. ‘And if it isn’t them, it’s the fascists. Or the Americans.’ ‘The Americans?’ said Liz, almost but not quite laughing. Major Barker turned to Liz. ‘Miss Shaw, England was once the heart of an empire, the greatest empire the world has ever known. But the bankers and the trade-unionists have destroyed that great heritage. Now we are alone, backs to the wall, just as we were in 1940, only there is no Winston Churchill to lead us. The whole world is snapping at us like a pack of hungry wolves. But the day will come, Miss Shaw, when England will rise again…’
I also want to salute Chris Achilleos’ lovely internal art, a tradition that I wish had been continued for novelisations of later years (of course I understand the commercial constraints too). They gave us a tremendous sense of the visuals of the story, at a time when we had no reason to think we would ever be able to see it for real.
After all of that, I found Robert Smith?’s Black Archive monograph on the story, titled just The Silurians, a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, he explores the themes of the story in some depth. But on the other, I found his presentation of some of the political issues a bit out of date; and in particular, I don’t think you can really write properly about any Malcolm Hulke story without reference to Doctor Who and the Communist, by Michael Herbert, which looks at the relationship between Hulke’s politics and his writing. Only one previous Black Archive volume is mentioned; I think the book could have benefitted from more dialogue with its own predecessors.
The first chapter, “Can Technology Solve All Our Problems?”, looks at the Cyclotron as a supplier of free (or at least cheap) energy, and the shadow of the atom bomb, as twin aspects of technology.
The second chapter, “What’s the Ideal Length for a Doctor Who Story?”, defends the length of Doctor Who and the Silurians, arguing that, for instance, the whole Hartnell era could be considered as one long story, if you like. It would have been interesting to know if there are other episodic Sixties and Seventies series from which comparisons could be drawn.
The third chapter, “What’s the Point of UNIT?”, actually concentrates on the Doctor’s role and character especially in an Earth setting. The second paragraph is:
‘In science fiction, there are only two stories. They come to us or we go to them.’3 So claimed Malcolm Hulke, when despairing of the then-new Earthbound format that he felt Doctor Who had been saddled with for the start of the 1970s. Consequently, he went and wrote a story that was neither: they come to us, except that they’ve always been here. 3 Quoted by Gordon Roxburgh in Matrix, Issue 6.
The fourth chapter, “Who Has the Moral High Ground Here?”, looks at the story’s takes on colonialism and violence.
The fifth chapter, “Is Doctor Who a Science Show?” points out the rarity of science as such actually being portrayed in the show (as it is here), also veering into conspiracy theories and animal rights.
The sixth chapter, “Could the Silurian Plague Have Killed Us All?” is the one which turned out to be the most timely for a book published in January 2020. Unfortunately this also means it has dated badly; most of the gosh-wow facts about epidemics are now either common knowledge or overtaken by events. This is hardly Smith?’s fault, of course.
The seventh chapter, “Who’s Responsible for All This?”, attempts to round off the narrative by looking at the Doctor, especially the Third Doctor, as a character and explaining that the end of the story ought to be a “hyperobject”, a concept that is not really well explained.
A brief look at one particular year in the career of Belgian actor Andrée Tainsy, born in Etterbeek 112 years ago today, on 26 April 1911. She trained in Paris in the mid-1930s where she fell in love with the singer Jane Bathori, thirty-four years older; they stayed together until Jane’s death in 1970. Together they fled the Nazis to Argentina, where they set up a French theater in exile; back in Paris after the war, Andrée kept acting until the end of her life (she lived to be 93). She appears uncredited in Woody Allen’s Love and Death.
In 1967, the year that she turned 56, Andrée Tainsy was a well established character actor in France, and thanks to IMDB we know what TV shows she appeared in. Her big project that year was a French TV version of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, shown on 24 October, where she plays Hedda’s husband’s aunt Julie.
She also appeared on 18 July 1967 in an episode of a historical crime docudrama series, En votre âme et conscience, as Anne Dumollard, wife and accomplice of the nineteenth-century serial killer Martin Dumollard.
Here she is in video, in an episode of the show Allô police, shown on 20 June, where she plays a grumpy concierge (from 12:06):
https://youtu.be/0gxjhlRRwOM?t=726
I have a smaller picture of her from one more crime show episode that she filmed that year, as the dodgy nanny in a kidnap story from Malican père et fils, shown on 24 July:
I’m posting this because I was born on Andrée Tainsy’s 56th birthday in 1967, and today is my 56th birthday. I think she wore her years well, and I hope I have the energy to keep going until I am 93!
I think I prefer her to another figure born on the same day, Paul Verner, who became the second most important man in the Communist regime of East Germany. Here he is receiving a delegation of the Free German Youth in 1967:
More positively, the noted photographer Max Yavno was also born on 26 April 1911. Here is his photograph “California Street”, from 1967:
26 April 1911 was also the day that Albanian chieftains declared independence in the northern village of Orosh, and Australians rejected two referendums on strengthening their federal government. The F.A. Cup Final, replayed after a draw on 22 April, was won 1-0 by Bradford City, beating Newcastle United. Aren’t you glad you know that?
I have been fortunate enough to travel to many places. In fact, the number of countries I have been to has generally kept pace with my calendar age. Today seems like a day to reflect on the places I have been, in seven-year cycles.
I was born in Belfast, and celebrated my 7th birthday in Washington DC. In the meantime I had also been to the Republic of Ireland, Italy, France and Canada, for a total of 6 countries before my 7th birthday.
By 1981, we had had family summer holidays in Bulgaria, Romania, Malta, Spain (with a side trip to Andorra), and we lived for a year in the Netherlands with side trips to Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Yugoslavia as it then was (Ljubljana and Zagreb), Switzerland and Liechtenstein. That got me to 19 countries by the time I turned 14.
By 1988, I had added only three small countries to the list – Monaco and San Marino in our 1981 family summer holiday, and the Vatican City while inter-railing with my then girlfriend in 1986 – for a total of 22 countries by the time I turned 21.
By 1995, Yugoslavia had split up, giving me an extra notch for the earlier visit to Zagreb and Ljubljana which were now in separate countries; I’d had a Nordic trip to Finland in 1990 with my sister, going overland via Denmark and Sweden with a side trip across the water to Estonia (then still part of the USSR); I went to Portugal with another girlfriend, and then to Cyprus on honeymoon when I married her, which all got me to 29 countries by the time I turned 28.
By 2002, I’d added what were then the other successor states of the former Yugoslavia – Bosnia/Herzegovina (where I lived in 1997-8), Serbia/Montenegro (Serbia in 1998, Kosovo in 2000 and Montenegro in January 2002), and Macedonia, now North Macedonia (first visited in 1997, and I love going back – my favourite of the Balkan countries). I’d also visited Hungary, Greece, the Czech Republic, Moldova, and Israel, with a foot into the territories not internationally recognised as part of Israel. So that takes me to 37 or 38 countries, as they then were, by my 35th birthday.
By April 2009, I had added the three South Caucasus countries – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – also Russia and Ukraine, and the last South-East European gaps, Albania and Turkey, and Slovakia for extras. In addition, the independence of Montenegro (2006) and Kosovo (2008) gave me another two. So that takes me to 47 or 48 by the time I turned 42.
The following year added another four, as my trips to South Sudan (then part of Sudan) took me through Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. (I have never been to the northern part of what was then Sudan, so I get no extra point for South Sudan’s independence in 2011.) I went to Poland for the first time in 2013, and 2014 brought business trips to Iraq and Nigeria. So as of my 49th birthday, I had been to 54 or 55 countries.
The last seven years (especially the last three) have seen fewer additions to the list. I went to South Africa in 2017 and Latvia in 2018. So as of today, my tally is either equal to my calendar age, 56, or still one ahead on 57 if I’m allowed to count the Latrun salient and/or East Jerusalem. (I am not tallying the TRNC, or the Green Line, separately from the rest of Cyprus, for technical reasons.)
I still have not been to four European countries – Iceland, Norway, Lithuania and Belarus. I’ve never been to Latin America or the Caribbean, or to Africa outside Nigeria, South Africa and the eastern cluster, or to Asia apart from three countries in the Middle East, let alone the Pacific. But I hope I will have a few more years to put some of that right.
As I landed in Azerbaijan for the first time in May 2004 in the company of my then boss, I mentioned to him that it was my 41st country. He growled that he was roughly 100 ahead of me. I suspect that he still is.
OK. No reason to panic. Why should he suspect a dirty wench with her head in the fireplace? Still, it was all terribly déjà vu, or unpleasantly coincidental, seeing as I’d had my head in a fireplace when they’d spoken of whores. And me.
Last of the books I bought when I was thinking of giving the Faction Paradox sequence a try, and I must say the most enjoyable of those that I have read, perhaps because it is barely connected to the incomprehensible main story-line. Our protagonist is a far-future researcher who installs herself as a maid at 221b Baker Street in order to observe the young Sherlock Holmes at work. Romance, sex and criminal violence ensue. I really liked it. Hale’s Sherlock Holmes is not the somewhat austere figure of Doyle (and indeed most theatrical presentations); he’s a young man starting to establish himself, often short of money, emotionally vulnerable, and a lot more convincing as a human being. Good stuff. You can get it here.
I’m afraid that one hit out of five for the Faction Paradox series is not enough for me to want to continue/resume reading, though.
He batted her hand away. “Just ’cause you finally be sixteen, you know it all, huh?”
A pretty intense novel set between 1898 and 1913 (with a brief excursion to 1893), partly in Georgia and partly in Chicago, about the relationship between Redwood, a young black woman, and Aiden Wildfire, half Irish and half Seminole, and their friends and relatives in the course of their separate journeys. There is a lot of magic; there is a lot of racist oppression; there is a decent amount of romance; I thought it was pretty good. You can get it here.
Redwood and Wildfirewon what was then the James Tiptree Jr Award for 2011 in 2012. The Honor list included five novels and four short stories; I have read I think one of the five novels, God’s War by Kameron Hurley. The long list included eight novels, five shorter works and one collection. Again I have read one of the novels, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, which won the previous year’s BSFA Award.
I was interested to see that one of the other long listed novels is Outies by my old friend Jenny Pournelle, who I had not realised was also a published author among her many other talents; it’s an authorised sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye and The Gripping Hand by her father.
Next in this sequence are the two Tiptree winners for the following year, The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan and Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam, as I have already read the BSFA and Clarke winners.
Got through a lot of Clarke submissions this week…
Current When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, by Paula Fredriksen Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister
Last books finished λ4 Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke ν4 (did not finish) The Cyprus Crisis and the Cold War, by Makarios Drousiotis ξ4 (did not finish) My Family And Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell ο4 (did not finish) π4 (did not finish) ρ4 (did not finish) σ4 (did not finish) μ4 The Silurians, by Robert Smith? τ4 (did not finish)
Next books Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson The Race, by Nina Allan Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
(Content warning: aeroplanes being destroyed in mid-air, consequent deaths)
Insomnia can lead you to some strange places, and this is one of the places it has brought me recently: an unsolved mystery almost ninety years old, where I humbly propose an explanation of what might have happened.
On 10 October 1933, a Boeing 247 airliner operated by United Air Lines, on the Cleveland to Chicago leg of a journey from Newark, NJ, to Oakland, CA, crashed near Chesterton, Indiana, killing all four passengers and three crew. Subsequent investigation determined that a nitroglycerine charge in the blanket cupboard above the toilet had exploded, blowing the tail off. Two of the four passengers were immediately sucked out of the plane to their deaths; its front end then flipped over, crashed into the ground and burned to a cinder with the other five victims still on board. It is the earliest known case of a civilian plane flight being destroyed by sabotage.
(That is, the first known definite case of sabotage destroying a civilian flight. Just over six months before, on 28 March 1933, a British passenger flight caught fire and crashed in western Belgium, killing all fifteen on board. Suspicions were raised at the time, and have lingered, that one of the passengers might have deliberately caused the crash. But personally, I am not convinced, and I agree with the conclusions of Wout Wynants, who thinks that a bird strike or similar accident severed the fuel lines which then ignited the rest of the plane.)
In 2017 the FBI declassified 324 pages of investigation of the October 1933 crash by its predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, already run by J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover put his best man in Chicago, the notorious Melvin Purvis, on the case. Before the end of the next year, Purvis would achieve fame as the man who trapped and killed several of Chicago’s most notorious gangsters, including Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger. The Mob was a prominent element of American life in 1933.
One has to admire the thoroughness of the investigators. Every lead was followed up, with Purvis reporting on the state of play to Hoover personally. But it all led nowhere. Could it have been left-wing activism over a labour dispute? Actually the labour dispute had been resolved a few days before, and anyway none of the crew were involved. What about the package that one of the passengers guarded jealously? It was probably liquor (which was still illegal, for a few more weeks), and his interests did not run beyond baseball and duck hunting. Several travellers had had reservations on the fatal flight and then changed their plans, but all for good and non-suspicious reasons. The case was eventually closed with no resolution.
Three points occurred to me as I read through the files. The first is that no detonating mechanism was ever found. A timing device or pressure switch would have been pulverised by the explosion, but there would still have been some recognisable components in the debris. I suspect that the bomber stowed the nitroglycerine in the blanket cupboard in a glass or metal flask, hoping that it would be spontaneously set off by the shock of an air bump in mid flight, and the fragments of the flask were indistinguishable from the other wreckage. But managing raw nitroglycerine is not an exact science, and also nobody had ever blown up a plane before. So in my view, the Cleveland to Chicago flight on 10 October may not have been the real target of the bomber.
The second point is that although the mechanic who inspected the plane before it took off from Newark said that he did check the blanket cupboard, he admitted that he only slid his hand behind the folded blankets and did not actually take them out to check that there was nothing else there. (Page 65 of the dossier.) I think he missed the fairly small but deadly flask concealed behind them, as did whoever had checked the plane the previous day or days. And of course he may have been exaggerating his diligence in doing the check. A fatal mistake; but again, nobody had ever bombed an aeroplane before, so how was he to know?
The third point (see page 228 of the FBI’s 324-page dossier) is that two days before the bombing, on 8 October 1933, the same plane had done the same run from Cleveland to Chicago with two very interesting passengers on board: Joseph B. Keenan (1888-1954) and Adlai Stevenson II (1900-1965). Keenan was an anti-Mob prosecutor from Ohio, who had just been appointed as a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney-General, and three months later became Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division. In October 1933, he would have been very high up the list of public officials who were an inconvenience to organised crime. After the war, he was the Chief Prosecutor of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.
Adlai Stevenson II became a notable historical figure. In October 1933, he was in his first government job, special attorney and assistant to the general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, but was preparing to become chief attorney for the Federal Alcohol Control Administration as soon as Prohibition was repealed. This would make him interesting to the Mob, but not as much as Keenan. He went on to be Governor of Illinois, was the losing Democratic candidate in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections (both won by Eisenhower for the Republicans), and was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations at the time of his death. (His grandfather, Adlai Stevenson I, was elected Vice-President of the United States in 1892 for Grover Cleveland’s second term, and ran again and lost in 1900.)
The investigators actually interviewed Stevenson about the 8 October flight (page 252 of the dossier); he said that he recognised Keenan but did not speak to him until they reached Chicago, and nothing on the flight seemed out of the ordinary.
(The G-Men did not quite dare to interview Keenan himself.)
My theory is that an opportunistic mobster in Cleveland spotted that Keenan was planning to take the flight and somehow slipped the nitroglycerine into the blanket cupboard. Explosives were easy enough to obtain; one would need a little specialised knowledge to pull this off, but only a little – the absence of an actual detonator is telling. And it would be smart of the Mob to have informants in the airports in their areas of operation. I think that the bomber hoped that the explosive would be triggered by an air bump between Cleveland and Chicago, eliminating Keenan and his fellow passengers. (Another possible jolt – someone closing the toilet door too firmly. One of the two passengers who was sucked out had been seated near the front of the plane, suggesting that he was at the rear near the toilet at the time of the explosion.) Indeed, I think it was triggered by an air bump or door slam between Cleveland and Chicago, but two days later than planned, and was not spotted during the cursory checks of the plane in the meantime.
Most of this theory is not actually original to me. The Chicago Tribune ran a story on 3 November 1933 (pages 120 and 136 of the dossier) saying that a gangster brought the nitroglycerine onto the plane on an earlier flight, feared that it would be found if he was searched on landing, and left it in the blanket cupboard. It seems to me vanishingly improbable that anyone would casually take raw nitroglycerine in their cabin baggage in the first place; I think it’s much more likely that it was planted by someone who did not travel on the plane at all (and the investigators did investigate everyone who did travel on it, as far as possible). However it’s close enough to my theory that I think that one of the investigators in Washington had come to much the same conclusions as me, based on the same evidence, and leaked it to the Chicago Tribune. We’ll never know the full story.
These were the seven people who died on United Air Lines Trip 23, the first victims of airborne terrorism:
Pilot: Richard Harold “Hal” Tarrant (“Harold R. Tarrant” in most reports), born 8 April 1908 in Swindon, England; aged 25; married Bessie Olsen in May 1932. Boarded the plane in Cleveland to replace Robert Dawson, later to become a celebrity pilot, who had flown it from Newark.
Co-pilot: Harold Eugene “Harry” Ruby (“A.T. Ruby” in some reports), born 19 September 1905 in Milwaukee; aged 28; married Catherine Davis in 1926; married again to Pearl Eichholz in June 1933; appears to have had a daughter.
Stewardess: Alice Theresa Scribner, born 11 September 1907 in Bancroft, Wisconsin; aged 26; was engaged and planning to get married a few weeks later. Her funeral was conducted by the minister who had planned to preside at her wedding. The first United Air Lines stewardess to die in service.
Warren Fairhill Burris, born 22 July 1888 in Fairhill, Pennsylvania, aged 45 (death certificate says he was 35, but this is wrong). Married Helen Leona Miller in 1918. Radio operator with United who was flying to a work assignment. Two sons and a daughter; the younger son and the daughter both died as recently as 2012.
Emil Smith, born 14 December 1888 in Chicago, aged 44; had sold the family grocery shop and was living on savings; single; attracted attention from the investigators because he brought a package onto the flight which he was very protective of; but in the end turned out to just be an average guy with an interest in baseball and duck-hunting. Although his assigned seat was near the front of the plane, it was he and Burris who were sucked out by the explosion at the back, so he must have been out of his seat at the time.
Frederick Irving Schendorf, born in Wauconda, Illinois on 14 November 1904, aged 28; married Christine Mulroy in 1929; two sons; manager of a refrigerator company. Wrote on a feedback card that he was “quite satisfied with the ride” just before the explosion happened.
Dorothy M. Dwyer, born 13 October 1907 (according to her death certificate), supposedly about to turn 26; her parents were both born in Ireland but emigrated in the mid-1890s; I have not been able to locate her birth certificate, and census returns suggest that she was actually born before 1907 (7 years old in 1910, 17 in 1920; but 24 in 1930); she would not be the first or last person to adjust her official age.
Hers is the saddest story of the lot, and they are all sad stories. Dorothy Dwyer was flying to Reno, Nevada to marry her fiancé, Theodore Baldwin, who had just got his divorce from a previous marriage; she missed the flight she was originally booked on because of a puncture and so ended up on United 23. Baldwin was distraught as he flew east to take her body home to Massachusetts, raving to fellow passengers that his girl had been killed by a bomb; he worked in mining and knew about explosives. Her brother had been killed in a car accident only five months before.
A final point that struck me is that the victims were comparatively young – five in their 20s and two in their 40s. Clearly, commercial plane travel was already reasonably affordable for Americans – Schendorf was well off and flying for business, and Burris presumably had his ticket paid for by United, his employers; but Smith and Dwyer were not especially rich, and were flying for pleasure. (Smith had savings, of course, and Dwyer a rich boyfriend; but still.) It’s for another post, but my sense is that the victims of the Diksmuide crash six months earlier were in general much wealthier.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Still under lockdown, my biggest expedition that month was to visit a bunch of Belgian megaliths with the hardy J.
That month’s Worldcon crisis was the unprecedented revocation of Guest of Honour status for a publisher whose website hosted far right discussions, in the context of the 6 January coup attempt in the USA. More Worldcon drama was to come in future months (this was by far the most dramatic of the seven Worldcons I have been involved with).
Stuck at home, I read 22 books that month.
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 8) The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China A Buzz in the Meadow, by Dave Goulson Ties That Bind: Love in Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Francesca T. Barbini Goodbye To All That, by Robert Graves
Non-genre 2 (YTD 4) Sugar and other stories, by A.S. Byatt Three Daves, by Nicki Elson
SF 13 (YTD 23) The Kappa Child, by Hiromi Goto Koko Takes a Holiday, by Kieran Shea Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark The Autumn Land, by Clifford D. Simak The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin Bold As Love, by Gwyneth Jones Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, by Gary Wolf Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Whiti Hereaka A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher Who Framed Roger Rabbit, by Martin Noble, based on the screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter Seaman Club Ded, by Nikhil Singh – did not finish Ivory’s Story, by Eugen M. Bacon Science Fiction: The Great Years, eds. Carol and Frederik Pohl
Comics and photo books 3 (YTD 5) My Father’s Things, by Wendy Aldiss Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor – Old Friends, by Jody Houser A.I. Revolution vol. 1, by Yuu Asami
5,400 pages (YTD 10,900) 13/22 (YTD 21/41) by women (Aldiss, Barbini, Byatt, Elson, Goto, Jemisin, Jones, Hereaka, “Kingfisher”, Bacon, C Pohl, Houser, Asami) 8/22 (YTD 11/41) by PoC (Puyi, Goto, Clark, Jemisin, Ihimaera/Hereaka, Singh, Bacon, Asami)
Of these, I particularly loves Wendy Aldiss’ elegiac My Father’s Things, commemorating the possessions of Brian Aldiss after his death. You can get it here. I also really liked Graves’ Goodbye to All That, which you can get here, and N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, which you can get here. On the other hand, I totally bounced off Club Ded, by Nikhil Singh, which you can get here.
Robinski looked charming in her simple rages. Her one perverted extravagance, was a pair of shoes with flat mirror buckles. She was knickerless and her pudenda shone brightly from her feet. Her footwear had been a gift from Fatman; and yet another example of his peculiar sexual tastes.
This book is a novel by ’70s sex symbol Fiona Richmond, about a young woman astronaut whose husband, also an astronaut, has been replaced by an alien double in league with the Soviets. At least I think so; it was quite difficult to follow the plot, with a densely written sex scene every couple of pages. (And yet the sex doesn’t have a lot of variety – I counted precisely one blow-job, quite close to the end, and there’s one scene of girl-on-girl action in the middle.) The kindest thing to say is that it has not aged well. But you can get it here.
I bet that Richmond’s other books of the time, billed as autobiographical (Fiona, Story of I, On the Road, The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful) are just as fictional. I won’t especially be looking out for them.
This was the shortest unread book I acquired in 2016, at Eastercon where I’m always on the lookout for women authors who I haven’t previously read. Next on that pile, continuing the theme perhaps, is The Shape of Sex to Come, ed. Douglas Hill.
Next in the sequence of Tenth Doctor comics, continuing his adventures with New Yorker Gabby Gonzalez. Most of the album is taken up with the title story, which on the face of it looks well qualified for my list of Belgium references in Doctor Who, except that most of the action is explicitly set across the border in the (fictional) French town of St Michel. Gabby gets a bit more character development here, and knowing as we do what the ultimate fate of Amy and Rory is, the Angels are a source of real menace. A shorter story at the end, Echo, takes Gabby back to New York to fend off an alien threat and reconnect with her family. Enjoyable stuff. You can get it here.
This was the first book I finished this month, so I’m running almost three weeks in advance right now.
Next in this sequence is The Fountains of Forever, by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande, Eleonora Carlini, Rachael Stott, Leonardo Romero, H-Fi and Arianna Florean.
Le Sueur had helped complete the sculpture for the Pont Neuf and, evidently, he wanted to make something as imposing for Charles I, who, like his father, James I, had styled himself King of ‘Magna Britannia’ – Great Britain. When Inigo Jones, James’s master builder, came through Paris and suggested that Le Sueur (a Protestant) travel to England, the sculptor crossed the Channel, arriving in 1625, the same year as Charles’s French Queen, Henrietta Maria, a time when London artists were still overwhelmingly a foreign colony: Flemings, Dutchmen, Italians and a few French. Under Elizabeth, there had been little call for monumental sculpture, but the Stuarts, with their grandly European taste, changed that. Le Sueur was hired to produce frieze figures for the bier of James I, designed by Jones, and for the late King’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. Charles, an avid collector and connoisseur, wanted his own copies of famous classical statuary – the Spinarioof a boy pulling a thorn from his foot and the recently excavated Gladiator (actually a swordsman) in the Borghese collection, so Le Sueur was sent to Rome to take moulds from which casts could be made back in England.
This book is about pictures in the UK’s National Portrait Gallery, attached to a BBC series which I didn’t see. I have come to appreciating art rather late in life, and perhaps as a result I really enjoyed this look at the history and culture of portraiture. Every chapter is a nicely shaped story about a particular artist or group of artists, or occasionally about their subjects – the section on Emma Hamilton is a real eye-opener if all you know about her is her romance with Nelson. It’s a big book – 600 pages before you get the the end notes – but well illustrated and well worth it.
It’s always great to find new artists to enjoy, and my particular discoveries here were Gwen John, who I had at least heard of before, and Laura Knight, who I’m ashamed to say was a new name to me. This in itself says something about my previous encounters with art – she is not a minor figure, and lived to be 93, and I see that the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester has 13 of her works but I failed to notice any of them when I was there. Her Self-Portrait with Nude is absolutely stunning.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
The rest of the world will remember January 2021 for the attempted coup by supporters of Donald Trump against the democratic system, a terrible moment of political deterioration.
Over here, we were still under tough COVID restrictions, and I continued my ten-day posts, four of them on the 1st, 11th, 21st and 31st:
The farthest I travelled was with B, to visit a necropolis in Tienen and a new park in Landen.
But the most significant and unexpected development was that in one of several bizarre twists in the story of the 2021 World Science Fiction Convention, the entire Hugo Award administration team resigned, as did one of the co-chairs. I offered to pick up the work of the WSFS Division, as it’s new Division Head, and my offer was accepted. I rapidly put a new team in place, and we managed to get Hugo nominations open before the end of the month (the departing team had left things in good shape).
Tired of lockdown and busy with Worldcon, I read 19 books that month.
Non-fiction 4 Out of Africa, by Karen Blixen Endgames: Political Cartoons and Other Stuff, 2015-2020, by Martyn Turner Watling Street, by John Higgs T.K. Whitaker, by Anne Chambers
Current The Cyprus Crisis and the Cold War, by Makarios Drousiotis My Family And Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell λ4 μ4
Last books finished θ4 ι4 (did not finish) κ4 (did not finish) η4 Erasing Sherlock, by Kelly Hale
Next books Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, by Paula Fredriksen
He parked the Vauxhall Victor in the small courtyard adjoining the guesthouse. Fitzpatrick had handed him the keys along with a roll of pound and ten shilling notes, telling him not to go mad on it.
A thriller set in and around Dublin in 1962. President Kennedy is coming; a series of brutal murders has eliminated several former Nazis who had been given unofficial asylum by the Irish government, specifically by the justice minister, Charles J. Haughey; and our protagonist, Irish military intelligence officer Albert Ryan, is brought in to protect former SS commander Otto Skorzeny, the most prominent of the fugitives. It turns out (this is hardly a big spoiler, given the theme and timing) that the Israelis are behind it.
I feel rather ambivalent about the book. The violence is unrelenting, graphic and icky. Ryan as protagonist makes some very strange choices of allegiance, and it’s not clear what his motivation is. There’s a girl who performs the function of peril monkey. For all that, it’s exciting stuff, tautly written.
My other reservation is that Haughey is depicted as the sinister and corrupt bastard that he certainly became by the end of his career. But he was only 37 in 1962, and in his first real job as minister for justice, where he was an innovative and (relatively) liberal figure. I felt that his portrayal here was a bit lazy (as is the revelation that the Israelis are Behind It All).
Neville has written a lot more Irish crime fiction, and I might give some of his more contemporary stuff a try. I’m not sure why I bought this – it must have been an impulse. Anyway, you can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor.
In the chaotic new climate in Tirana, the Communist state remained intact at a formal level but was disintegrating from within. The party leader Ramiz Alia was interested in the possibility of freedom in Kosova and had seen the Irish Republican Army as a possible model for a military force against the Yugoslav People’s Army.11 When his interest became known to Western governments via their spies in Tirana, they feared a ‘Greater Albania’ might soon emerge if the old barriers between Tirana and Prishtina collapsed.12 Alia saw the secular, class-based ‘Official’ IRA as a much better model for the KLA than the Provisional IRA with its Catholic nationalist ideology.13 It is questionable, though, whether Alia and other Albanians really understood that it was the Provisionals who had shown the capacity to bring back guerrilla warfare to the streets of Western Europe for the first time since the Second World War, and the Official IRA had not.14 The LPK avoided contacts with radical Eastern bloc countries in this period — insofar as they still existed — and had never had contacts with countries like Cuba or radical Arab and Islamic states. The Albanian link was all-important to them. 11 Interview with James Pettifer, Tirana, see above. 12 This was a main preoccupation of British foreign intelligence officials in 1991-92. 13 Interview, Tirana, July 2005. 14 See B. Hanley and S. Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers Party, London, 2010.
A substantial and important book by one of the UK’s major experts on Albania and Albanians. Pettifer has unparalleled access to all the key players in Kosovo and Albania, and in the western part of North Macedonia, and I don’t think it will ever be possible to improve on the factual detail of his blow-by-blow account of how, where and by whom the Kosovo Liberation Army was set up and its progress to the point where its leadership became a key political force in pre- and post-independence Kosovo. I was paying pretty close attention at the time, I thought, but there is a lot here that I had only suspected or had not suspected at all – not only in the 1995-99 period, but also in the 2001 Macedonian conflict. A number of myths are very helpfully and convincingly exploded here. I am sure that there are points of historical incident where there is still room for argument, but the narrative shape of the KLA’s origins and progress is clear. With all that material, it’s surprisingly short, only 256 pages for the main text.
There are some irritating weaknesses along with the mastery of the facts. One of them is Pettifer’s treatment of ideology – the KLA founders are described as “Enverist” without that term ever being defined, and it is never demonstrated that political ideology was a strong motivator for the behaviour of leaders or followers, rather than the existential question of survival in a hostile state. Another is that several key actors are described as being puppets of the Serbs, or the British, or the French, or the Americans, or the Italians, or the Vatican; it’s as if nobody had free will to make their own decisions, except for the people the author is really interested in. And there are some annoying mistakes with names – mostly simple misspellings of Serbs and Macedonians, but also my old friend Ian Oliver is confused with my old friend Iain King; I don’t think that they even know each other in real life.
Apart from those issues of coloration, I think it’s an essential book for understanding the Kosovo conflict. You can get it here.
On first watching The Sound of Drums in 2007, I was blown away, but kept my commentary for the following week, posting merely (under the title “Anticipation“):
Well, It wasn’t actually bad, but it was disappointing; didn’t rise to the heights of Blink, or even of the two previous season finales. The pacing was curiously off, almost always a problem with RTD scripts.
Martha in general was pretty cool throughout, including her (temporary?) departure, and her links with the real world. The devastated Earth was well done, though you know immediately that this means that the cast just have to find the Reset button and press it.
I did like the Doctor/Master relationship, and the Doctor’s devastation at being the last of his people again, even though I am Old Skool enough that I cannot really believe it is the Master without a beard or a decaying face.
The Doctor-goes-all-glowy bit is, IMHO, actually a homage to the end of the Pertwee story The Mutants, where the same effect is tried (not on the Doctor but on another character) and done really really badly. Several other Pertwee-era homages, mainly to stories I haven’t seen (Claws of Axos, Sea Devils).
The Doctor-turns-into-Dobby-the House-elf bit was, sadly, rubbish; and the Master keeping Martha’s family alive on the off-chance that she might show up doesn’t make sense.
Jack didn’t get much to do except turn into the future Face of Boe, did he? And Mrs Master did hardly anything except shoot her husband. Waste of good characters.
The “with a bound they were free” transition [from Utopia] to The Sound of Drums is a bit annoying given the buildup to the cliffhanger the previous week, but after that we are on fairly solid ground again, with Simm’s Master’s first appearance being much his best. Despite his obvious insanity, at this stage his intention to simply capture the Doctor and friends and do unspecified nasty things is pretty clear, and it gives the plot a terrific momentum. Apart from the regulars, Alexandra Moen is superb as Lucy Saxon, given few lines but an inescapable presence. And the continuity with Old Who’s Gallifrey is terrifically pleasing, and completes a theme we’ve had since the start of the season (if we count The Runaway Bride as such). I found that I didn’t even mind the “Here Come the Drums” song as much on rewatch; I felt it intrusive first time round.
And then, alas, we have Last of the Time Lords. On first watching, I was just slack-jawed in disbelief that such a promising setup had been so badly wasted, and unable to articulate quite why I hated it so much. This time round, I knew what was coming so was spared the crashing disappointment of the first broadcast, and actually thought it was not quite as awful as I had remembered. But that is not saying much.
Where it fails first, I think, is that the humiliation meted out to the Doctor and friends by the Master is neither funny nor interesting. There’s something very skeevy indeed about making some of the most visible black characters ever in the show into slaves, and the script never quite acknowledges that. Torturing Jack Harkness is just nasty. Turning the Doctor into Dobby the House Elf is bizarre and incomprehensible, and then transforming him into Tinkerbell at the end is an appalling lapse of dramatic judgment. The story of Martha is a decent enough plot thread (and of course Freema Agyeman carries it well), and the Doctor’s emotion for the Master is effective but would have been a lot more so without the previous 40 minutes, and the massive plot reset button actually comes as a relief because of the inanity of what has come before.
Rewatching both episodes again ten years on, I remain of the same view. The Sound of Drums is fast-paced, exciting, and builds anticipation. Last of the Time Lords squanders that for the sake of spectacle, always an obsession of RTD’s. Ten years on, I’m also more aware of just how good an actress Adjoa Andoh is, and how much she is wasted as Martha’s mother. It’s the first (but not the last) example of New Who getting the season finale not quite right.
The one point that did jump out at me was the Tenth Doctor’s invitation to the Master:
MASTER: You still haven’t answered the question. What happens to me? DOCTOR: You’re my responsibility from now on. The only Time Lord left in existence. JACK: Yeah, but you can’t trust him. DOCTOR: No. The only safe place for him is the Tardis. MASTER: You mean you’re just going to keep me? DOCTOR: Mmm. If that’s what I have to do. It’s time to change. Maybe I’ve been wandering for too long. Now I’ve got someone to care for.
The Twelfth Doctor more or less does exactly this with Missy. I had not spotted that before.
There are two spinoffs available about Martha’s year of circumnavigating the globe. The first was The Story of Martha, a 2008 anthology of three novellas, edited and with a linking narrative by Dan Abnett. When I read it in 2010, I wrote:
A book set during the year while the Master ruled the Earth, as seen at the end of New Who Season 3, with a rather good linking narrative by Dan Abnett, during the course of which Martha recounts four of her past adventures with the Doctor to people she meets. The embedded stories are less good than the framing narrative, with the exception of Robert Shearman’s excellent “The Frozen Wastes”.
…better [than the Abnett anthology], getting off to an excellent start in The Last Diner by the always reliable James Goss, a more Western-y The Silver Medal by Tim Foley, and a well-executed climax in Deceived by Matt Fitton. Martha is joined by Adjoa Andoh playing her mother Francine, who has apparently escaped the Master, and Serin Ibrahim as old friend Holly. (Also Clare Louise Connolly plays the Toclafane in all three stories.) Guest stars include Marina Sirtis, best known as Deanna Troi in Star Trek, in the first episode.
James Mortimer’s Black Archive analysis of the two-parter starts with the premise that both episodes are equally good (or bad) in different ways, which as will be by now fairly clear is not my starting point. (And I’m not alone – IMDB users rate The Sound of Drums at 8.7 out of 10, and Last of the Time Lords at 8.3.)
The first of three long chapters, “The Saxons”, looks in depth at the Master as developed over the years to this point, and at the problematic depiction of Lucy and the Jones family.
The second chapter, “The Heroes”, looks in even more depth at Martha and at her relationship with the Doctor, and the problematic aspects of that portrayal.
The third chapter, “The Lonely God”, starts with the Doctor as religious figure and then diverts into the Hero’s Journey as engaged in by Martha and the justification for the Toclafane. Its second paragraph, with footnotes, is:
This idea of a ‘lonely god’ is reinforced by the use of religious imagery that Davies deploys throughout the series. Indeed, when the Doctor is ‘transfigured into a being of light’2 at the close of Last of the Time Lords, in a process generated by what the Master calls ‘prayer’, it’s hard to deny the visual similarities to how one might imagine the return of a Messiah. It is, in Davies’ words, a ‘glorious’ return3. When the Doctor forgives the Master, it is hard not to be aware of the religious connotations of this. 2 McCormack, Una, ‘He’s Not The Messiah: Undermining Political and Religious Authority in Doctor Who’, in Bradshaw, Simon, Anthony Keen and Graham Sleight, eds, The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T Davies Era of the New Doctor Who (2011), p51. 3 Davies, The Valiant Quest.
The conclusion returns again to the issue of Lucy’s black eye and the enslavement of the Joneses and expresses disappointment that these are not well addressed in the episode itself.
An appendix justifies treating Utopia as “a separate story even if it’s not a separate arc”.
I’m afraid that this is not my favourite Black Archive. Mortimer has written much more about the second episode than the first, and that’s not where I’d have placed the balance. He raises a lot of good questions, but some of his points are rather belaboured. The Black Archives have a lot more hits than misses, but this is one of the weaker volumes. You can get it here.
I was put onto the story of William Wordsworth’s French daughter by Alison Bechdel, in her The Secret of Superhuman Strength:
An interesting footnote to literary history, I thought. A quick bit of googling brought me to Wordsworth’s French Daughter, by George McLean Harper, published in 1921; and a little more to William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, by Émile Legouis, published in 1922. Both are available online. Harper’s book is very short and has no sections; its third paragraph is:
Sara Hutchinson, Mrs. Wordsworth’s sister, was to accompany Dorothy. They dreaded the inconvenience and dangers of travel, these two middle-aged ladies, in a foreign country against which England had been at war for nearly twenty years, and wished they could go under the protection of Henry Crabb Robinson, the more so as they intended to carry presents of English manufacture. From a letter begun on the last day of 1814, we learn that the wedding was postponed till April and that they were hesitating about going so late in the spring because they expected to stay nine or ten weeks and would thus be in Paris in June, when King Louis XVIII was to be anointed. They feared the public disturbances and possible outbreak of civil war which might attend that event. “Besides,” adds Dorothy, “the journey will be very expensive, which we can ill afford, and the money would be better spent in augmenting my Niece’s wedding portion. To this effect I have written to her. She would not consent to marry without my presence, which was the reason that April was fixed.”
Legouis’ book is a bit longer. The second paragraph of the third section, including poetic quote, is:
We know what Paul’s physical appearance was: he was a small dark man, with a thick-set neck, and large bold eyes under heavy black brows. We have a glimpse of his character in the memoirs of his grandson Amédée, a magistrate, who declares him to have been “one of the wittiest men he had the privilege of knowing” with an excellent heart. His chivalry and generosity tended to excess, and his carelessness of money was so great that his financial position suffered by it. The appearance of Annette’s daughter is also known to us. It is a face which, according to its age, wears a look of frank gaiety, or a gently mischievous smile. But Annette dwells so much on her daughter’s likeness to her father that it would be illusory to expect to find the expression of the mother in the face of the child. The portrait of Annette published in this volume is not well enough authenticated for us to place much reliance on it. It does not seem as if liveliness had been outstandingly characteristic of her, though kindness and generosity certainly were. In the letters of Annette that have recently been discovered the dominant note is that of an irrepressible, exuberant sensibility which is a trait of her nature and is not exclusively due to the harassing circumstances in which the letters were written. She abounded in words, was prone to effusions and tears. These emotions of a “sensitive soul” were, moreover, quite of a nature to win her the young Englishman’s heart. He himself was in those years inclined to melancholy and the elegiac mood. His very first sonnet <super><small>1</small></super> had been inspired by the sight of a girl weeping at the hearing of a woeful story. At that sight, he said, his blood had stopped running in his veins:
Dim were my swimming eyes my pulse beat slow, And my full heart was swell’d to dear delicious pain.
The maiden’s tears had made manifest her virtue. The poet’s turn for sentimentality found in Annette many an opportunity of satisfying itself, while the garrulity of the young Frenchwoman fell in splendidly with his intention of learning the language.
The story is very simple. In early 1792, William Wordsworth, about to turn 22 and fascinated by revolutionary France, fell in love with Marie Anne Vallon, known as Annette – not in Paris, as Alison Bechdel would have it, but in Orleans, 110 km to the south. She was four years older; her family were strongly Royalist and Catholic, and the political pendulum was swinging against them.
Harper takes the view that for such a family, marriage would have been impossible that year, as hardliners like the Vallon family would have simply boycotted the state-run Church and the state’s annexation of marriage registration. Legouis is more sanguine; he points out that for the upper middle classes in France and England, having children out of wedlock was really not as big a deal in the late eighteenth century as it would be in the mid nineteenth century (or indeed the early twentieth century when he and Harper were writing). For Wordsworth as a foreigner, it would anyway have been difficult to stay in France.
On 15 December 1792 the state registry office in Orleans registered the baptism of Anne-Caroline, daughter of Marie Anne Vallon and William Wordsworth. He and his sister Dorothy stayed in touch with Annette and, when she was old enough, with Caroline too, as far as possible through the wars. They met only twice. During a brief period of international peace in 1802, Dorothy and William spent a whole month with Annette and Caroline in Calais. Wordsworth wrote this sonnet about the nine-year-old daughter who he was seeing for the first time:
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquillity; The gentleness of heaven broods o’er the Sea: Listen! the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder—everlastingly. Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, Thy nature is not therefore less divine: Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year; And worship’st at the Temple’s inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not.
Wordsworth married his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson a few weeks later, having come into an inheritance which enabled him both to marry and to make arrangements for his first daughter. He and Mary had five children, two of whom died young; Annette did not marry again and had no more children.
In 1816 Anne-Caroline, now 23, married in her turn, Wordsworth giving his formal consent (and Anne-Caroline signing her surname as Wordsworth). The wedding had originally been planned for April 1815, and Dorothy was all set to attend it with Sara Hutchinson, Mary Wordsworth’s sister, but the Hundred Days intervened.
The whole lot of them finally got together in Paris in October 1820, William, Mary and Dorothy spending a week with Annette, Caroline, Caroline’s husband Jean Baptiste Martin Baudouin and their first two daughters, the older nearly four and the younger ten months old, Wordsworth’s first grandchildren. They never met again, though Annette lived until 1841 and Wordsworth until 1850.
The older daughter in due course married the painter Theodore Vauchelet. Legouis has a great compare and contrast between Vauchelet’s portrait of his mother-in-law, Wordsworth’s daughter Caroline, and the classic portrait of Wordsworth himself: There’s something pretty unmistakable about the nose.
Legouis has much more to say about Annette’s life. He has a fascinating account of how her monarchist family twisted and turned to stay alive during the First Republic and the Empire. Annette’s brother Paul was imprisoned several times and could easily have been executed; Annette herself was a firm opponent of the new regime (Wordsworth’s feelings were more ambivalent).
The whole story only came to light just over a hundred years ago, seventy years after Wordsworth’s death. Wordsworth’s literary executor was his nephew Christopher Wordsworth, an Anglican clergyman and future bishop, and apparently he destroyed all the records he could find relating to Annette and Caroline in the family correspondence; Harper and Legouis have done their best from incidental notes in Dorothy’s diary and also the rich store of French official records.
Just one of Annette’s letters to William and Dorothy survives, written in 1793 when Caroline was still a baby. It survives because the police seized it and it remained unseen in the Blois city archives for 125 years. Strictly there are two letters, one to William and one to Dorothy folded up together. Legouis transcribes them both in an appendix, and it’s riveting to get her voice so clearly, still at that stage desperately hoping that she and William (and indeed Dorothy, who she cannot have met) would someday soon get together.
signoff to WIlliamsignoff to Dorothy
It’s always good to hear a voice speaking as clearly as this from the past, reminding us that there’s more to history than names and dates.
Edited to add: a reader has contacted me to ask if Caroline has living descendants. The answer is yes; I find a number of people on the various genealogy sites whose personal family trees trace back to Caroline or to one of her daughters. Possibly her most famous and possibly also her longest lived descendant was her great-great-grandson Emmanuel Hublot (1911-2003), a general in the French army who commanded in Indochina and Algeria; his mother Marie Caroline Christine Ramus (1877-1973) was the daughter of Jeanne Marguerite Marie-Louise Vauchelet (1852-1910), who was the daughter of Caroline’s older daughter Louise Marie Caroline Dorothée Baudouin de Saint-Firmin (1816-1869) and the painter Théodore Vauchelet. Emmanuel Hublot has living children and grandchildren (and probably more).
PS: Jetpack tells me that this is one of the most looked-at pages on this blog. I would love to know how you came across it, either in a comment here or email to nicholas dot whyte at gmail dot com.
Doctor Who 1 (YTD 2, 4 inc comics)
Comics 5 (YTD 10)
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