He was on a street corner when he stopped, hand abrupt and white- knuckled on the wet metal of a lamppost, and took a few deep breaths with his eyes closed.
Another one from last year’s Best Editor Hugo packets (edited by winner Ruoxi Chen). A story of gay magicians in a very slightly parallel late Edwardian England. I actually thought the pacing was a bit off here, with the middle half set around the protagonist’s visit to his love interest’s family mansion, and then an abrupt jump forward in time before we get to the final section. But an unusual magic system, lushly described. You can get it here.
This was the top unread sf book in my pile. Next up is The Outcast, by Louise Cooper.
John had also overseen a complete change of regular cast, and once ‘Logopolis’ was completed in the early weeks of January 1981, he would be in charge of a show that he had totally cast himself. The unveiling of Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor had afforded a welcome shot of publicity, and the show now needed to capitalise on this.
The one Who book that I picked up at Gallifrey One this year, this is the archive of papers retrieved from John Nathan-Turner’s estate after his death, briefly running through most of the days of each of the years in which he was in charge of the show. The bones of the story have been told elsewhere, notably by Nathan-Turmer himself and by Richard Marson, so this is just extra supporting documentary evidence.
I did find a couple of points of interest, all the same. I hadn’t appreciated that JNT and Peter Davison were already friends from All Creatures Great and Small, which both had worked on. It’s clear that the 1986 cancellation crisis was caused in part by JNT taking his eye off the ball and doing too many pantomimes and US conventions. And I don’t think I had absorbed that the eventual cancellation in 1989 came about almost accidentally after a co-funding opportunity for the show fell through.
It’s also interesting to see the scripts that never were. A few of these have since been completed and recorded by Big Finish, most notably “Song of the Space Whale” by Pat Mills. I wonder what happened to American writer Lesley Elizabeth Thomas, who submitted a four-part story which never got to screen? There’s not much else about her online; I bet she is mainly known under a different name.
Anyway, this really is for the completist only, but the completist will enjoy it. You can get it here.
It was the only thing they really rowed about, the biggest stumbling block to their relationship and the main reason they’d split up in the first place. Alex carried on where he was, working at the Gateway supermarket in Queen’s Road and trying to amass enough money to get away on. He found he couldn’t forget Linda though. He kept waiting for her to get back in touch but she didn’t. At the end of three months he finally caved in and phoned her.
Kindly given to me by the author in 2016, after it was one of the few BSFA shortlisted novels of the previous year that I did not read (I was burnt out by my first Clarke run). It’s a really good linkage of four stories, set in at least two different parallel near-contemporary Earths, with enhanced greyhounds and deep dark family secrets. Reflects on gender and gender violence, and on journeying to find yourself. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was the most popular unread book on my shelves acquired in 2016. Next on that pile is Can You Solve My Problems?, by Alex Bellos.
I’m proceeding through the Discworld books that I have not previously written up online, in order of their popularity on LibraryThing, and that has brought me to Guards! Guards!, the first of the Watch books. I think that this is the first that is really about politics and government – recurrent features in the previous ones, but here Pratchett introduces and / or develops the characters of the Patrician and Vimes, and of course Carrot, as three different takes on how the state could or should be run – contrasted with the conspirators with their unnamed king and then the dragon. Almost all of the humour is well-aimed (there’s a skit with a rich beggar that landed rather poorly for me) and it’s a good example of Pratchett getting into his humane and angry mode. I was glad to return to it. You can get it here.
For most books I review, I like to publish the second paragraph of the third chapter, or section; or just the third paragraph if there are no chapters or sections. For comics, I try and identify the second frame of the third issue, but this is a compilation of a short singleton story and two two-part stories, whose four parts are actually merged into a whole to the point where you can’t easily see where the issues started and finished. So here is the third frame of the first story.
Starts with a short and breezy story about the Tenth Doctor, Gabby and the Tardis’s washing machines, answering the question my mother always used to ask about how the Doctor and companions keep their clothes clean.
Then we’re into a story marketed under two titles, “The Fountains of Forever” for the first two parts and “Spiral Staircase” for the third and fourth, set in New York where an unexpectedly rejuvenated movie star become the focus of the Osirians attempt to return to Earth after the Pyramids of Mars. There’s a nice little moment where the Tenth Doctor retro-regenerates into the Ninth, and back again. Good atmospherics in general. You can get it here.
I’ve had better luck with this Who reading project than with some. Next up is The Endless Song, by the same team.
‘One hundred and nineteen days, Prime Minister. George Canning,’ replies an aide.
Tantalised by the reviews and published snippets, and searching for something very different to read after finishing the Clarke submissions, I gave in and coughed up $11 (on American Amazon) for this much discussed book about the dreadful mess of Boris Johnson’s term as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It’s not just, or not even a matter of policy; he was quite simply a very bad prime minister.
I think readers will be aware that I was never Johnson’s biggest fan. He cynically supported Brexit because he thought (correctly) that it would make him Prime Minister (though he screwed up on the first attempt in 2016), building on a career of lies about Europe and about his personal life. In office as Foreign Secretary, he displayed casual incompetence to the point where he endangered the life of a British citizen held captive in Iran. He endorsed Theresa May’s Brexit deal with the EU, before deciding that it would be more convenient to resign in protest, disrupting and upstaging a Balkans conference in London that the UK had laboured on for months. From then on, it was only a matter of time before he got to Number 10.
Seldon and Newell have interviewed hundreds of people who worked in the Johnson government, mostly but not all off the record, to build a comprehensive picture of how and why it was such a disaster. And the answer is pretty clear. Like Lloyd George a hundred years before, Johnson came into the office distrusted by large parts of the political system and with a chaotic personal life distracting him. But Lloyd George was good at surrounding himself with other strong figures and listening to them, and also had a vision for what he wanted to achieve, which enabled him to achieve it.
Johnson filled his cabinet with mediocrities and created a team in Number 10, including his partner/wife, whose main job was sniping at each other. (His mayorship of London had been supported by a strong team of advisers, most of whom refused to work with him again in Number 10.) His vision did not exist, beyond winning the 2019 election and “getting Brexit done”. But most of all, his personality is so flawed that he is unable to exercise leadership. He says one thing before a meeting, another in the meeting and something else entirely after it is over. He hates making decisions. He doesn’t really like or understand people in general. He has no idea how government works, and is therefore incapable of governing.
Seldon and Newell have arranged their book thematically rather than chronologically. This is sometimes a little confusing as events come out of order, but probably for the best overall. They look at Johnson’s rise, Brexit, the 2019 election, the (lack of) agenda, COVID, Cummings, domestic policy, foreign policy, the shifting cast of characters in Number 10 and the eventual collapse. The Cummings chapter is the longest, at 69 pages, and his gaunt shadow looms over most of the rest. At the end the authors ask which of the many possible culprits was most responsible for Johnson losing office, and the answer is clear: it was Johnson himself.
There are a couple of points to be said in Johnson’s favour. He did win an election with a clear majority, which is a notable achievement even in the supposedly decisive British system (helped of course by the incompetence at the time of Labour and the Lib Dems). He was seriously committed to Net Zero, and was ready to argue the toss on climate with sceptics in his own party, though less good at doing the preparatory legwork for the Glasgow COP meeting. He came in early and strong on Ukraine’s side in the war, and helped consolidate the G7 and NATO in support. (Though there too, the UK is a smaller player compared to the US and the EU.)
But otherwise there is nothing much to be said for him as a prime minister. His Brexit deal was deeply deficient; I wish the authors had gone a bit more into the Northern Ireland Protocol, though I must admit they may be right to leave that to the specialists. His flagship “levelling-up” agenda got nowhere because he was unable and unwilling to give it leadership. His reluctance to lock down earlier in the COVID waves cost thousands of lives. He allowed Cummings to erode the structures of the constitution, and tolerated unethical behaviour by his allies to beyond the breaking point of government standards. He learned nothing, and forgot nothing. (Also, he seriously thought you could build a bridge/tunnel between Northern Ireland and Scotland.)
None of this can come as any surprise. Johnson’s character flaws were obvious, and widely reported by those who had previously attempted to work with him, going back to his days as a schoolboy at Eton. I have some sympathy for those who joined his team after the event, hoping to make the best of a bad job. But nobody who supported Johnson’s rise to power deserves to have their political judgement trusted on anything else. (And that includes Rishi Sunak, whose late endorsement during the leadership campaign was an important moment.)
This is already long enough, but I was interested in personal glimpses of two people who I know a little and a third who I am fascinated by. I knew Martin Reynolds, the Principal Private Secretary to Johnson, when he was a mid-level diplomat in Brussels fifteen years ago. He is more capable than most officials, but was nonetheless out of his depth in the sheer awfulness of trying to manage the Johnson system. On the other hand, John Bew, Johnson’s main foreign policy advisor, is one of the few people to come out of the book looking good; he gave sound advice and wrote a substantive paper on UK global strategy post-Brexit. His father was a colleague of my father’s; I last saw John when he was about ten years old, and I’m glad he is doing well.
The third person of interest is the late Queen Elizabeth II. Although manipulated by Johnson into proroguing Parliament, she did him a massive favour during the pandemic by giving him permission to jog in the grounds of Buckingham Palace – a nice human gesture, at palatial scale. Much more importantly, it’s strongly hinted that the crucial breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations, when Johnson and Leo Varadkar spoke on the afternoon of 8 October 2019 (after a disastrous conversation between Johnson and Merkel), was directly suggested to Johnson by the Queen. It’s certainly difficult to identify anyone else who could have made the suggestion and that he would have listened to, and impossible to imagine him thinking of it on his own. If so, it’s one of the most consequential personal political interventions of her reign.
The acknowledgements include this peculiar back-hander:
We would like to thank Isaac Farnworth and John Paton, but cannot for the life of us remember what you did to help.
This is not a great book. The writing style is breathless and occasionally out of breath, sometimes repetitive, sometimes clunky. The trees get a lot of attention, the forest as a whole not so much and the outside world very little. I can really recommend it only to fascinated spectators of slow-motion political train crashes (though I admit that I am one, and there are a lot of us around). 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Next in the sequence of Black Archive analyses of Doctor Who, and the first to tackle the Thirteenth Doctor, published in 2019 about a story broadcast in 2018. I did not much like Kerblam!, and thought it one of the weakest stories of Jodie Whittaker’s first season. I wrote at the time:
[Kerblam!] left me cold. I was not happy that the Doctor leaves an evil system un-overthrown, having defeated the revolutionary who was trying to bring it down. As Darren Mooney points out, “The episode’s happy ending has the company giving the employees four weeks off, but only paying them for two of those four weeks.” It is totally out of whack with the show’s progressive history. The script, performances and especially the effects were all good, but the politics left a bad taste in my mouth.
Re-watching it four years later, I felt much the same. I also felt that the fridging of the youngest woman guest character was a bit gratuitous.
The Black Archive on the story is by Naomi Jacobs, who co-wrote the volume on Human Nature / The Family of Blood which I enjoyed, and Thomas L. Rodebaugh, who wrote the volume on The Face of Evil, which I enjoyed rather less. The result is somewhere in between.
An introduction admits that the story is politically problematic, and also asks about Doctor Who’s attitude to robotics and artificial intelligence, finishing with the question, “Who killed Kira?”
The first chapter, “Political Animals”, goes to some lengths to try and quantify the political ideology of the Doctor (and the show) along left-right and libertarian-authoritarian axes, which I did not really find compelling. It makes a valid comparison between the Doctor’s approach to Charlie in Kerblam!, and his approach to Taran Capel in The Robots of Death, making the point that the resort to violence is generally a problem for the Doctor. But this ignores the fact that Taran Capel is literally genocidal, whereas Charlie is not.
The second chapter, “Thinking Machines”, looks into the concepts of artificial intelligence and thinking machines, and the extent to which we could realistically expect a future computer to behave like the computer behind Kerblam.
The third chapter, “Some of my best friends are Robots!”, looks at the depiction of robots in fiction in general and in Doctor Who in particular. The second paragraph, along with the quote it introduces, is:
Karel Čapek first used the word ‘robot’ in his 1920 play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which told the story of artificial workers in a factory who gain self-awareness and incite others around the world to rise up against the humans. The word was originally coined by his brother Josef, and comes from a Czech word ‘robota’, which means ‘forced labour’ or an indentured servant 1. The play deals with issues not dissimilar to Kerblam! in considering human dependence on commodified labour and its consequences. The word and concept have a long history in science fiction, and the research field of robotics takes its name from the works of writer Isaac Asimov, who popularised many of the modern ideas and concepts of robots in his work. Most famously, he coined the Three Laws of Robotics, rules that he described as forming the foundations of the programming of any autonomous robot. These are: ‘First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. ‘Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. ‘Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.’ 2 1 Pappas, Stephen, ‘Karel Čapek and the Origin of the Word Robot’. 2 Asimov, ‘Runaround’ (1942), reprinted in the collection I, Robot (1950).
The fourth chapter, “Making Connections”, looks at the Internet of Things and RFIDs and drones as they are today, and compares their depiction in Kerblam! with that in the Twelfth Doctor story Smile.
The fifth chapter, “Automated for the People”, looks at automation and employment, and the economic effects of greater mechanisation of work.
The sixth chapter, “Automated Message”, looks frankly at the weakness of the episode’s writing, proposing that it evades deeper analysis of the societal questions raised by its setting because of the demands of writing an exciting plot. It also looks at why the death of Kira is so problematic – unlike the traditional fridging, it doesn’t even change the behaviour of the key character (Charlie in this case). “[W]e are left with the sense that it is perhaps not so much that the episode doesn’t know what to do with the exciting inspiration from which it has plucked ideas, but that it thinks that merely using them in pursuit of structure and plot is clever enough.”
The seventh chapter, “Wrapping it all up”, finds a convincing metaphor for the story and indeed for the book. “The bubble wrap is not a plot hole, but, as with Kira’s death, is symptomatic of how the allegiance to the story’s structure makes many of the story’s clever concepts seem somewhat hollow: shiny on the surface, but liable to burst if some critical pressure is applied.”
Like Philip Purser-Hallard’s volume on Battlefield, this volume looks at a story I did not like so much and analyses what it was trying to do. I found it refreshing that the authors admitted the story’s weaknesses, but I ended up not really convinced that it could sustain the level of analysis that they had brought to bear. Be that as it may, you can get it here.
If he likes the tilt of your hat or the colour of your luggage, if the smell of the cologne you’ve splashed on in the washroom reminds him of all those Oldsmobile days hung up with his jacket on the peg by the door, Sam My Man will solicit you with his magic never-ending cup of coffee. He’s a dealer in biography, paid for by the minute, the hour, however long it takes until the driver calls you on into the night. Sam My Man has whole lifetimes racked away under the bar where he keeps the empty bottles. He can tell a good vintage just by looking: given the choice between the kid in tractor hat, knee-high tubes, and cut-off T-shirt, the bus-lagged pair of English Camp-Americas propping their eyelids open with their backpacks and coffee the strength of bromine, and the old man with the old precise half-inch of white beard and the leather bag like no one’s carried since the tornado whisked Professor Marvel off to the Emerald City, Kelly By the Window knows which one he’ll solicit with his little fill-‘er-ups of complimentary coffee.
I got this at the Eastercon where Ian McDonald was a Guest of Honour in 2015, and he kindly signed it for me; though looking at it now, I realised that I cannot read what he had written, and when I sent this picture to him, he said he he couldn’t read it either!
This is a great collection of great stories by a great writer, taking in the first 25 years of his career from 1988 to 2013. A lot of them I already knew, some of them are set in the same world as some of his novels, some were completely new to me. I guess from the earlier stories, the one that stood out for me was “After Kerry”, a tale of dysphoria and dysfunctional families; of the later ones it was the Belfast-set “Tonight We Fly”. Ian McDonald doesn’t set all that many of his stories in either part of Ireland, but that’s still more than most writers. All written in that lush, enviable prose. I’ll come back to this, I think. You can get it here.
This was (shamefully) the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Creation Machine, by my former cohabitee Andrew Bannister.
Second paragraph of third story (“A Moment in History”, by Andy Frankham-Allan):
At least this time he wasn’t a child. If he were to guess, he’d place his new… host? As good a term as any… in his mid- to late-twenties. Intelligent blue eyes, fair hair slicked back, cut very short, and dressed in formal clothes. Shirt and tie, brown slacks, brown shoes. A professional of some sort? Although, going by the paraphernalia in the surrounding room, he had a feeling this was just how men dressed in the era he’d found himself in. The bedroom had a distinctly 1930s feel to it. Everything from the light shade hanging from the ceiling, to the dresser before him and the design of the blanket covering the ornate looking bed. But who was he?
A set of short stories set in the sub-sub-narrative of the Laughing Gnome, where Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart and his comrades Bill Bishop and Anne Travers Bishop find their minds displaced into people and places in the past century or so. I must say that while I have been frankly disappointed with a couple of the novels of this sequence, the short story format worked very well for me. Particular standouts are S.J. Greonewegen’s “Locked In”, a quick tale on a botched WW2 military exercise that has more than it seems, and Roland Moore’s “The Last House on Sandray”, which brings back an unexpected character from Classic Who. Overall generally an uptick. You can get it here.
Two formatting points though: there is no table of contents, and the editor (if it is Shaun Russell) is credited in tiny print on the inside cover.
Next in this sequence: Home Fires Burn, by Gareth Madgwick.
I hugely enjoyed Bechdel’s first major work, Fun Home, a secret biography of her father, but was less wowed by her second, Are You My Mother? In The Secret to Superhuman Strength, she turns to herself, and her own relationships with fitness, literature, writing and other women. I loved this. Wry and self-deprecating, but also raging when it is appropriate and necessary, she takes us into the world of the fitness maniac (which I am not, though many are) and also relates her own struggles to those of, for instance, Wordsworth and Coleridge; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller; and Jack Kerouac and Adrienne Rich. Margaret Fuller in particular sounds like someone I should know more about.
Anyway, this is excellent and would be a great gift for any fitness fanatics, literature nerds or even normal people in your life. You can get it here.
‘Ah, of course,’ he remarked. ‘I suppose you can’t enter the building without permission? Like a vampire?’
I gave the Faction Paradox series a try last year before abandoning them as just not really interesting enough. This short novel would have been next in the list if I had persisted. It’s actually not bad, with the Factions of the series getting tangled up in Chinese politics (and European interference) of the Boxer Rebellion period, and the return of the enigmatic Doctor Who character Compassion (featured in several of the Eighth Doctor novels). I was interested enough to finish reading it, though not enough to try getting back into the series again. (I do have one more to get through.) You can get it here.
The young women who entered Wellesley in the fall of 1955 (the class of’ 59) were either the last of the silent generation with its contingent of bright, dutiful daughters prepared to join the ranks of well-educated, bright, dutiful wives or the first class of women eager to be taken seriously in the workforce and recognized as independent individuals, not just appendages to their much sought-after husbands. Actually, they were both; in any case, I was both. I was preparing myself for a career in journalism or diplomacy, while I wanted to get married as soon as possible to the perfect partner. The notion that there might be a contradiction between these two aspirations didn’t occur to me. So I concentrated on my studies and worried about my social life.
My closest encounter with Madeleine Albright was in Banja Luka in the summer of 1997, when she descended on the Bosnian Serb capital with the full force of the State Department to visit the local leader, President Biljana Plavšić. The US government took over the central Hotel Bosna for the day; I was among the crowds that watched as the official motorcade took the Secretary of State from the hotel to the President’s offices in the main government building, the Banski Dvor. But the Banski Dvor is literally across the road from the Hotel Bosna, the front doors being less than 100 metres apart; the American motorcade was literally longer than the distance it needed to travel. It was a strange sight.
Anyway, this is a fascinating if rather long first-person account of life on the way to the top, and then at the top, of American politics. Though born in Prague in 1937, her family fled to the USA after the Communist take-over in 1948 and she settled down to become a smart American in an immigrant family. Her father, formerly a zech diplomat, became a political science professor; she followed in his footsteps, but also managed to catch a superbly well-connected journalist husband, which can’t have done any harm as she rose in DC.
A side hobby of fund-raising got her the attention of Democratic veteran Ed Muskie, who hired her for his Senate team in 1976; Zbig Brzezinski then snagged for the the National Security Council in the Carter presidency. The Democrats were out of office for the next twelve years, though she was involved as a senior foreign policy adviser in the unsuccessful 1984 and 1988 campaigns. Finally, a victorious Bill Clinton appointed her as ambassador to the United Nations in 1993, and Secretary of State in 1997, shortly before my near brush with her in Bosnia. She was also closely involved with the National Democratic Institute, my employers in Bosnia, though she had stepped back from it while in office. The book was published in 2002, very soon after the end of the Clinton presidency.
The circumstantial detail of her life before Washington is all very interesting, but like most readers I was fascinated by the insider accounts of Washington (and New York) policy-making. The Rwanda genocide, the Bosnia and Kosovo wars, the escalation against Saddam Hussein (which was firmly bipartisan in Washington in those days), relations with China and Russia, and above all the ins and outs of the Middle East from the high point of the Oslo accords in 1993 to the failure at Camp David in 2000, are all lucidly described; I am more familiar with some of these than others, but had no difficulty in following the thread. She is pretty clear on her own motivation, which usually coincided with US policy – though not always; she happily confirms that she tended to be on the hawkish side regarding the use of force, particularly after Rwanda.
There is a particularly moving chapter where, newly appointed as secretary of state, she discovers that her parents were Jewish and that three of her grandparents, who she remembered from her own childhood, had been killed in the Holocaust (one grandfather had died in 1938). Her parents had brought her up as a Catholic and she had no idea of her personal connection. Having been delving into my own family history of late, I know the feeling of genealogical surprises, though I don’t think that anything quite like that is lying in wait for me.
Anyway, it’s a lengthy book, but I found it enlightening. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a woman writer. Next on that pile is Winter, by Ali Smith.
Next in the sequence of Tenth Doctor comics, this one published in 2015 but set immediately after the departure of Donna. The Doctor visits Brooklyn, and ends up with a new companion, Gabby Gonzalez, fresh from working at her father’s laundromat – where it is the washing machines that provide the terror of the title. I must say I’ve always thought of them as potentially a gateway to another dimension; there’s something primordial and strange about the rotational sloshing of the water. The opening three-part story is very good, the other two parts are a new story, “The Arts in Space” which is a bit sillier but still gives Gabby some more characterisation as well as just being fun. This series clearly had a lot of vim. You can get this here.
Next up is The Weeping Angels of Mons, by Robbie Morrison with art by Daniel Indro and Eleonora Carlini.
This was actually the first non-Clarke book that I finished reading in March, so my blogging here is almost exactly a month behind my real-life reading.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 22) Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright Management Lessons fromGame of Thrones: Organization Theory and Strategy in Westeros, by Fiona Moore Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins Wordsworth’s French Daughter, by George McLean Harper Kerblam!, by Naomi Jacobs and Thomas L. Rodebaugh William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, by Émile Legouis The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, by James Mortimer The Kosova Liberation Army, by James Pettifer The Face of Britain, by Simon Schama
Non-genre 1 (YTD 4) Ratlines, by Stuart Neville
SF 23 (YTD 64) θ3 (did not finish) ι3 (did not finish) κ3 (did not finish) λ3 μ3 ν3 ξ3 (did not finish) Luca, by Or Luca Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances, by Aliette de Bodard Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky ο3 The Best of Ian McDonald Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, eds. Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan and Troy L. Wiggins π3 ρ3 σ3 τ3 υ3 φ3 χ3 (did not finish) ψ3 (did not finish) ω3 α4
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 10) Warring States, by Mags Halliday The HAVOC Files: The Laughing Gnome, ed ???
Comics 2 (YTD 7) Revolutions of Terror, by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande and Arianna Florean The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel
7/37 (YTD 21/110) by a non-white writer (θ3, ξ3, Luca, de Bodard, ο3, Thomas/Wiggins, ψ3)
395 books currently tagged “unread”, 10 more than last month with the final Clarke submissions in.
Reading now Redwood and Wildfire, by Andrea Hairston β4 γ4 The Weeping Angels of Mons, by Robbie Morrison, Daniel Indro and Eleonora Carlini Galactic Girl, by Fiona Richmond
Coming soon (perhaps) Erasing Sherlock, by Kelly Hale Home Fires Burn, by Gareth Madgwick Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke Doctor Who and the Silurians, by Robert Smith? Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson The Underwater Menace, by James Cooray Smith The Cyprus Crisis and the Cold War, by Makarios Drousiotis Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister The Race, by Nina Allan The Shape of Sex to Come, ed. Douglas Hill My Family And Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, by Paula Fredriksen Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett 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“Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson The Memory Librarian, by Janelle Monáe “Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris Falling to Earth, by Al Worden Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman Doctor Who Magazine Presents: Daleks Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam
