January 2025 books

Posted on 31 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Non-fiction 8
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy
Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan
Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith
Fifty Years On: The Troubles and the Struggle for Change in Northern Ireland, by Malachi O’Doherty
The Atlas of Unusual Borders: Discover intriguing boundaries, territories and geographical curiosities, by Zoran Nikolić
Burned: The Inside Story of the ‘Cash-for-Ash’ Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, by Sam McBride
The Atlas of Unusual Languages: An exploration of language, people and geography, by Zoran Nikolić
How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir, by Hans Rosling

Non-genre 5
A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll
The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong
The Soul of a Bishop, by H.G. Wells
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, by H.G. Wells

SF 10
Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow
Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman
The Song, by Erinn L. Kemper
Vagabonds!, by Eloghosa Osunde
The Ultimate Earth, by Jack Williamson
Navigational Entanglements, by Aliette de Bodard
Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomon
The Lights Go Out in Lychford, by Paul Cornell
Ithaca, by Claire North

Doctor Who 4
Doctor Who annual 2025, by Paul Lang
Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons
On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell (audiobook)
Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones (audiobook)

Comics 2
The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond
Once and Future, vol 5: The Wasteland, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain

7,200 pages
10/29 by non-male writers (McNicoll, Datlow, Harvey, Harpmann, Kemper, Osunde, de Bodard, Solomon, North, Bonvillain)
4/29 by non-white writers (Vuong, Osunde, de Bodard, Solomon)
2/29 rereads (The Ultimate Earth, Killing Ground)
247 books currently tagged unread, down 14 from last month, down 58 from January 2024.

Reading now
Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, by William Godwin (group read, almost finished!)
De bondgenoten, by Brecht Evens
Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki

Coming soon (perhaps)
The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle et al
Mission: Impractical, by David A. McIntee
Doctor Who: TARDIS Type Forty Instruction Manual, by Richard Atkinson
Under the Lake / Before the Flood, by Kevin Decker and Ryan Parrey
A Brilliant Void, by Jack Fennell
Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump, by H. G. Wells
Braver, Greener, Fairer: Memos to the EU Leadership 2019-2024, ed. Maria Demertzis
The Secret Places of the Heart, by H. G. Wells
Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh
Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott
DallerGut Dream Department Store: The Dream You Ordered is Sold Out, by Miye Lee
Of the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis
Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett
Lies Sleeping, by Ben Aaronovitch
A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths, by Dr John Barton
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple
“Hell is the Absence of God”, by Ted Chiang
City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Footnotes in Gaza, by Joe Sacco
The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire, by Bart van Loo
All American Boys, An Insider’s Look at the U.S. Space Program, by Walter Cunningham
Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb
Métal Hurlant Vol. 1: Le Futur c’est déjà demain, by Mathieu Bablet et al

(Books in italics were also on last month’s list.)

Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty

Posted on 30 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

She had been in Madden’s Bar in Belfast and had turned to a man she thought was me and said hello.

I was lucky enough to be in Northern Ireland on the day that this book was launched, attended, bought it and got it signed. I know the author if not very well; I guess we have been on each other’s radar for a long time.

It’s about the fifty years in Northern Ireland, more specifically Belfast, from 1969 to 2019, of which the first thirty were consumed with the Troubles and the next twenty with the new post-peace process society as it develops. It’s a big book – almost 400 pages – and covers not only the politics of violence, and the constitutional question, but also the more fundamental shifts to what was a very conservative society in the 1960s: women’s rights, gay rights, language rights.

It’s a very personal tale, explaining better than I’ve seen from anywhere else how very much the outbreak of violence in the late 1960s was a bolt from the blue, unanticipated by anyone including the perpetrators, and how the prelapsarian geography of Belfast got reshaped by sectarian brutality. As well as recounting his own memories, O’Doherty interviews a lot of current players with different views than his own, including on the diehard Loyalist side, and gives them space to articulate their perspective.

I was inwardly amused that the people in the book who I do know personally are concentrated in the feminism / gay rights chapters rather than the more political chapters. Though on reflection perhaps this does point to a gap in the perspectives presented; I miss any mention of integrated education, mixed marriages, or the growth of the vote for non-aligned political parties. Less exciting perhaps, but not unimportant.

I see some reviewers complaining that if you don’t already know much about Northern Ireland, the wealth of information and number of personalities make it difficult to follow. I’m not in the at-risk category of not knowing enough about Northern Ireland, and I very much enjoyed it, and even learned a few things from it. You can get it here.

This was (shamefully) the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread pile. Next up there is Braver, Greener, Fairer: Memos to the EU Leadership 2019-2024, ed. Maria Demertzis.

Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith

Posted on 29 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

The 2009 Hugos were the only year of the seven from 2006 to 2012 where a Doctor Who episode failed to win, comprehensively thrashed by Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, though with Turn Left coming third. (Sorry that the final ballot stats on the right are cramped, but you can click to embiggen.)

When I first write about this TV story in 2009, I said:

Unlike a lot of people I wasn’t overwhelmed by Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. On re-watching, I enjoyed it more, but still feel it is weaker than Moffat’s previous New Who stories. Perhaps I am being unfair, and I guess that expecting another Blink is not reasonable. I must admit that as sf, its concept works very well – the intersecting levels of reality, the time-traveller who meets a lover from his own future; and as drama it is pretty effective, with Alex Kingston and Catherine Tate particularly strong, and the utterly horrible creepiness of the ghosting data chips (“Who turned out the lights?”, etc).

My two problems with it are both to do with River Song’s story. To get the easier one out of the way, her ending is not a particularly happy one; she is still dead, and gets to spend an ersatz afterlife in the computer’s memory with her crew rather than with the man she loves. (If you work or have ever worked in a team with other people, just consider for a moment whether you would prefer to spend eternity with them or with your lover.) The script didn’t quite do justice to the tragedy of River’s story for me.

My other problem is that while the story works as sf and (apart from the above niggle) as drama I’m not so sure it works as Doctor Who. Back in 2006 I enjoyed The Girl in the Fireplace, but rated it below School Reunion, because one of my sources of enjoyment in Who is its dealing with its own mythology, and another is the relationship that we as viewers build up with the regular characters, and TGitF did not deliver much on the second and nothing on the first of these. Now, where at least TGitF had a decent start and closure to the Doctor’s love story, with Renette’s death ending their relationship, SitL/FotD cheats us because we are asked to care very deeply about the Doctor/River dynamic, without getting the payoff of it becoming a regular plot theme. (No televised return to explore River’s past relationship with the Doctor seems likely now, and anyway it would hardly get satisfactory treatment in the time we have left.) So while this episode may well get strong support from Hugo voters who are not regular Who watchers, I was and am surprised by the favour it has found among fans.

It’s rare that I come back to a review and admit that I was completely wrong, but as it turned out, I was completely wrong. River Song went on to be a fixture of the Eleventh Doctor’s era, her origins were a major plot line for Series 6, and she has made the occasional appearance since then (plus a well-received set of Big Finish spinoff audio plays). Looked at now, the story is a clever pitch-rolling for the future arc of the show. An important data point is that it was written precisely at the moment that Stephen Moffat was deciding whether or not to be the new show-runner.

And I mentioned it in my first paragraph, but did not give enough credit to the story’s success as drama. The ghosting data chips are truly horrible and awful and compelling, and Donna’s alternative history rather moving (capped with Lee’s inability to get her attention at the last moment). Midnight is still my favourite episode of a good season, but Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead succeeds better than I allowed at the time.

Dale Smith’s Black Archive on the story ranges far and wide across Stephen Moffat’s œuvre, not only in Doctor Who but in Press Gang, Coupling, etc, to explore where the themes of the story come from. The first chapter, “An Irrational Fear of the Dark”, considers Moffat’s vision for Doctor Who as fairy tale, not at all in a negative way.

The second chapter, “Please Tell Me You Know Who I Am”, looks at the origin and subsequent life of River Song, and at Moffat’s attitude to time-travel and continuity.

The third chapter, “Nothing More Than Virtual Reality”, looks at the philosophical and biological basis of identity, and death. Its second paragraph is:

The idea that real life is a simulation is one with a long history, from 1 Corinthians 13:12³, via Descartes’ evil demon⁴, to the more SF idea of the brain in a vat, fed false images of the world it is living in⁵, like Morbius if Solon had been of a more philosophical bent. It’s an extension of any number of conspiracy theories that provide comfort by putting somebody secretly in charge of the apparently arbitrary randomness and cruelty of real life, only better because it is unprovable: whoever runs the simulation has complete control over our ability to perceive that we are simulations, and so anything that might seem to disprove the idea can simply be re-assimilated as proof of the opposite. It is the perfect teapot in space⁶, an idea maintained by faith alone and with so little impact on day-to-day life as to be completely useless. But in Silence / Forest, it is uncomplicatedly positive: a chance to cheat death and live for as long as there is a Lux family willing to ensure the real-world hardware doesn’t go down.
³ ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly’, The Bible, King James translation.
⁴ Descartes, René, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’.
⁵ Putnam, Hilary, ‘Reason, Truth and History’.
⁶ Russell, Bertrand, ‘Is There a God? [1952]’, In Slater, John G. (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11, pp 542-548.

The fourth chapter, “It Can’t Be the Books, Can It?” looks at books and archives, with a diversion into classification systems, and the power of the written word.

The fifth, final, and longest chapter, “Brilliant and Unloved”, looks at how Stephen Moffat writes women, how he writes men’s relationships with women, and how this all adds up to the writing of River Song.

This is an unusual Black Archive in that it ranges far beyond the story in question to look at the work of the story’s writer. But Stephen Moffat is one of the two most significant writers of New Who (I’ll not choose here between him and RTD as to who is #1 and who is #2), and so it’s definitely worth the excursion into the bigger picture. It does mean that the book isn’t as much about the actual story in question as most of the Black Archives are, but there is no harm in variety. You can get it here.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong

Posted on 28 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

A woman, not yet thirty, clutches her daughter on the shoulder of a dirt road in a beautiful country where two men, M-16s in their hands, step up to her. She is at a checkpoint, a gate made of concertina and weaponized permission. Behind her, the fields have begun to catch. A braid of smoke through a page-blank sky. One man has black hair, the other a yellow mustache like a scar of sunlight. Stench of gasoline coming off their fatigues. The rifles sway as they walk up to her, their metal bolts winking in afternoon sun.

I came across this when compiling my list of the best known books set in Vietnam; it wasn’t clear to me from online commentary if it satisfied my criterion of more than 50% of it being set in the country. Now that I’ve read it, I can tell you that it doesn’t; the majority of the book is set in Hartford, Connecticut, with a fair bit of back-story in Vietnam and a bit in New York at the end.

It’s quite a tough read. The protagonist is growing up queer and Asian in a very white and straight town. His mother endured unspeakable traumas in Vietnam and passes these on to him to a certain extent. The language is lyrical and convincing but the content rather gruelling. You can get it here.

This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on that pile is Eight Cousins, by Louisa May Alcott, the best-known book published in 1875.

Two Fifteenth Doctor audiobooks – On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell, and Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones

Posted on 27 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

There’s a whole run of original Doctor Who audiobooks which I have only recently discovered. (List on Tardis.wikia, as there doesn’t seem to be an official listing page.) I had listened to several of them without realising it, but now that I have a full list I can go through them systematically.

I am starting, of course, at the end, with two recently produced stories of the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby. On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell and read by Susan Twist, takes the two of them to the County Durham coastline in 1958 where they get tangled up with a ghost story and deal with intruders from another dimension. It’s nicely done, though Susan Twist makes the Doctor more Scottish than Ncuti Gatwa actually sounds. You can get it here.

Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones, read by Genesis Lynea, did not satisfy me as much. The TARDIS lands in contemporary Washington State, where we encounter a park ranger and Bigfoot hunter. Inevitably the Sasquatch turn out to be aliens on their own mission, dealing with rather yukky parasitic telepathic worms. I think the story is basically fine, but Genesis Lynea (who played Sutekh’s Harbinger in The Legend of Ruby Sunday) took some time to get into her stride in the reading, starting off rather flat and oddly paced; it’s quite a different skill from stage acting. So it’s less warmly recommended, I’m afraid. You can get it here.

Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan

Posted on 26 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

There is, however, much to learn yet if Paddy Mac is to succeed in the tricky task of acquiring the sort of profile that can help carry him to the Taoiseach’s office. One critical thing our Aspirant Prince must embrace is the role of art in high politics. Before Paddy Machiavelli gets nervous, we are referring to art as in the learning of a profession, rather than writing poetry or painting or suchlike. He can, of course, go a long way in Irish politics without treating it as a form of art. Talent (rarely), hard work (occasionally), or the sort of hard neck more common in a timeshare salesman may bring Paddy Mac as far as the cabinet table. But, unless he brings some form of artistry to his public discourse, when it comes to the great prize, he will be like a pony trying to jump an eight-foot fence and win the Puissance.

Some kind person, I know not who, sent me this just before Christmas, correctly guessing that I would enjoy it a lot. (Edited to add: the gift-giver eventually revealed himself to be Alyn Smith, former MEP and MP. Thank you, Alyn!) I’m sorry to say that I wasn’t familiar with Drennan as a journalist; he came to prominence only after I had left Irish politics, and he mostly wrote for the Sunday Independent which I rarely read. I think I have been missing out; his witty takedown of the entire Irish political system and its leaders over the years is also passionate and well-observed. It’s easy to be cynical, and to accuse others of being cynical; but I don’t think that is the point of this book, which is holding up a mirror to the Irish political process and describing it in painful detail. Here, for instance, near the end, Drennan reflects on the preference of Irish voters for older leaders in typical style:

…in Irish politics, with rare exceptions, youth will not have its fling. The U.K. and America may have a tradition of youthful leaders, such as Thatcher, Blair, Obama, Clinton and Cameron. We, however, prefer our leaders to resemble the elderly habitues of a bishops conference. That FG soberside, Liam Cosgrave, even when he was young, was not youthful: Garret was a national grand-uncle; Jack Lynch came draped in the sepia of de Valera’s Ireland; whilst Albert, though lively, was a child of the showband era ruling a country nudging the envelope of the Celtic Tiger. Lemass might have been in a hurry, but he was an old man. Haughey too was past his best by the time he secured power, though that might have been a good thing. Mr Bruton, though youngish in years, was a figure who gave the impression of a man who would have been more at home within the Irish Parliamentary Party. Bertie Ahern was seen to be a man who belonged to a youthful age, but he too was a creature who resided intellectually in the age of putting posters of de Valera up by gaslight. As for Enda, he is a child of flaming turf sods and Liam Cosgrave.

The book was published in 2014, in the middle of Enda Kenny’s unexpected / long-awaited (delete as applicable) term as Taoiseach, so Drennan failed to take into account the ascension of Leo Varadkar (Taoiseach at 38) or Simon Harris (Taoiseach at 37). But despite that, it’s a good summary of the popular wisdom about each of the leaders of the last fifty years, based on anecdote and experience. I have encountered a small number of the many people who he talks about (only briefly in most cases, though I was friendly with John Bruton), and felt in every case that he is writing about the people who I met.

I fear this is not a book for people who don’t know or care much about Irish politics, and it also won’t satisfy anyone who is hungering for political change; it’s about the internal workings of the old parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, and to a lesser extent how they manage their coalition partners in office. But personally I tend to feel that a swing back to the default state of dominance by the older parties is more likely than not; so this may turn out to be as useful a guidebook to the future as to the past. You can get it here.

Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons

Posted on 25 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The worry and the lack of sleep were making him nauseous. Madrox didn‘t help. He had summoned Taggart to a cell and made him witness to a brutal interrogation. The victim was the man in whose care the shattered rebel leader had been placed a decade and a half ago, to live out his days as an example to dissidents. Madrox had bullied him, bribed him and punched him, but his opponent had kept an obstinate silence. When finally he removed his blaster from its holster, Taggart felt like attacking him, disarming him, killing him. But he didn‘t.

Second last in my run of re-reading Sixth Doctor novels which I failed to blog in 2015. It features Grant Markham, a books-only companion, who the Doctor takes back to his home planet which is under attack from horrible metal creatures. It is a gritty tale of Cybermen; people who want to be like Cybermen; and people trying to fight Cybermen by becoming worse than Cybermen. Some chilling moments, and thought-provoking considerations of what it is that the Cybermen actually want and mean. You can get it here.

Next up: Mission: Impractical, by the much-missed David A. McIntee.

I Who Have Never Known Men aka The Mistress Of Silence, by Jacqueline Harpman

Posted on 24 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third section:

Moi, je n’avais jamais rien entendu de semblable, mais les femmes se figèrent aussitôt car elles avaient reconnu la sirène d’alerte. C’était une clameur énorme qui montait interminablement en arrachant les oreilles. Je fus saisie de stupeur et je crois que, pour la première fois depuis que je l’avais acquis, je perdis le décompte du temps. Les femmes qui étaient assises se levèrent d’un bond, celles qui étaient à la grille pour prendre la nourriture reculèrent. Le gardien lâcha son trousseau en le laissant dans la serrure et se retourna vers les autres. Ils se regardèrent un instant puis, d’un même mouvement, prirent leur élan et coururent vers la grande porte, poussèrent les bat-tants devant eux en les ouvrant tout à fait, ce qui n’avait jamais eu lieu, et sortirent.

I’d never heard anything like it, but the women froze, because they’d recognised the sirens. It was an ear-piercingly loud, continuous wail. I was dumbstruck and I think I lost track for the first time since I’d acquired the ability to count time. The women who were seated leapt up, those who were at the bars collecting the food, recoiled. The guard let go of the bunch of keys, leaving them in the lock and turned to face the others. They looked at one another briefly, and then they all rushed towards the main exit, flinging the double doors wide open – something they’d never done before – and ran out.

translation by Ros Schwartz

Our unnamed protagonist has spent her entire life locked up with with thirty-nine adult women in a cage in an underground bunker. The first third of the short, punchy book sets that up in some detail. And then, suddenly, it all changes. The guards disappear and the women manage to escape – but to where? Are they on Earth? Is there any chance of rescue? Is there anyone else left alive at all? It’s not a very happy book, but it is gripping, and you can get it here.

I’m astonished that I had never heard of this before. Jacqueline Harpman, a Belgian psychiatrist, also wrote Orlanda, a gender-switching fantasy which I enjoyed last year. Unfortunately those are her only two books which have been translated into English. Her others include La Dormition des amants, which is set in the Spanish court in an alternative sixteenth century; and Mes Œdipe, a retelling of the Oedipus myth. Sadly I don’t think my French is quite up to attempting them.

This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh, which I have actually read before but I’m going to take it together with its sequel.

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

Posted on 22 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

For today a crew of four is on its way to the moon and has just surpassed the space station’s shallow orbiting distance of two hundred and fifty miles above the planet. The lunar astronauts are catapulted past them in a five-billion-dollar blaze of suited-booted glory.

This book surprised a lot of us by winning the Booker Prize. It’s a short, intimate, realistic account of a day in the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station. I almost hesitate to classify it as science fiction, since it’s a description of people in today’s world dealing with today’s technology. But there is also a fictional lunar mission happening in the background, which perhaps pushes it over the edge into sff.

I liked it a lot; quietly humorous, good observation of human nature in a very peculiar environment, sensible treatment of Russian language phrases (unlike some), reflection on What It All Means, also capturing the sensawunda of just having a semi-permanent human outpost in outer space. I’m still surprised that it won the Booker Prize, but I am familiar enough with how juried awards operate that I can see how it could happen.

Recommended, and digestible. You can get it here.

The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond

Posted on 21 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third original issue:

Two completely different stories in a single album here, both featuring the Eleventh Doctor with Amy and Rory, both pretty firmly tied into the sequence of events in the TV series.

(And by the way, congratulations to Karen Gillan on the recent birth of her daughter Clementine!)

“The Hypothetical Gentleman”, by Andy Diggle with excellent art by Mark Buckingham, starts with a somewhat disconnected section fighting Nazis in London in 1936, and then takes the team to 1851 and a time-stealing monster. I found the pacing of squeezing two stories into the space for one a bit odd, but the 1851 bit of the story worked perfectly well as Doctor Who.

The second half, “The Doctor and the Nurse”, is written by Brandon Seifert with art by Philip Bond. I didn’t warm to Bond’s art which seemed to me cartoonish and not really looking like the characters. The story is a comedy about the Doctor and Rory having some guy time together, while Amy finds herself dealing solo with the Silents infiltrating the TARDIS. Comedy Who can go horribly wrong, but this one sticks the landing.

You can get it here.

Next in this sequence: The Eye of Ashaya, by Andy Diggle et al.

Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow

Posted on 20 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“Whimper Beg”, by Lee Thomas):

They’d spent hours in this space, drinking good whisky and talking about work, their families, fishing, and politics. He’d been introduced to two state senators in this room, both of whom had promptly received a check from Scotty, and both of whom he still supported to this day.

This was one of the books in the 2020 Hugo packet, but I have only now got around to reading it. There are thirty stories here, two of them over a century old (by Ford Madox Ford and F. Marion Crawford) and the rest newly commissioned for this anthology. They are all somewhat spooky, as you would expect from the title, but there are a lot of inventive variations on the standard themes. There was just one story I didn’t like, by an author who I also dislike personally, but it is short. The rest are all great.

I must admit I was looking at the 800-page PDF with some trepidation, and it did take me almost three weeks to read; but I really enjoyed this collection, and found myself positively looking forward to returning to it each time. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book book acquired in 2020. Next on that pile is The James Tiptree Award anthology 2, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffrey D. Smith.

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

Posted on 19 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

When did it all begin? We have an exact date for the start of the Viking Age in Britain: June 8, 793. On that day, Viking pirates who had probably set out from Norway attacked and pillaged a Christian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne off the English coast. They drowned some of the monks in the sea and took others into slavery before disappearing with the monastery’s treasures on their longboats. During the same decade, the Vikings/ Normans, who would eventually give their name to the province of Normandy, appeared near the shores of France. The Viking Age had begun.

I got this soon after the war started, almost three years ago now, but have only just got around to reading it. It’s an important explanation of the story of Ukraine, starting from Kievan Rus and going through the various semi-autonomous realms of the Middle Ages, through the centuries of Russian rule, and then independence up to 2014.

Some interesting nuggets: the daughters of the eleventh century Grand Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav the Wise, and his Swedish wife, married the kings of Hungary, Norway and France, and one of his sons married the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor. I see that there is also a theory that another daughter married an English Saxon prince and was the mother of Edgar Ætheling and Saint Margaret of Scotland, though Plokhii doesn’t mention it.

It was by no means historically inevitable that Ukraine would spend much of its history under Russian rule. Connections northwestward, to Poland, Lithuania and what’s now Belarus, were always strong, and there were always links with Constantinople and to a lesser extent Vienna as well. The Cossack states of the early modern period and the national revivals of the nineteenth century demonstrate that Ukraine is not just something invented in the twentieth century.

Speaking of which, the twentieth century history of Ukraine is pretty awful, and also pretty closely linked to Russia. After losing the 1917-1921 war of independence, Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR, and was economically very important with its concentrations of both agriculture and industry. Khrushchev made his political career there; Brezhnev was born there; Konstantin Chernenko, who briefly ruled the USSR near the end, was born to a Ukrainian exile family.

But Stalin executed almost all of the senior political and intellectual leadership, and then the Holodomor, the great famine, killed millions more. Stepan Bandera, the far right political figure who Russians love to hate, was never in fact very successful, but the Soviets had good reason to worry about Ukraine’s loyalty (and assassinated the exiled Bandera in Munich in 1959 by spraying him with cyanide).

And when both Ukraine’s Communist leadership, and the Ukrainian people when consulted at the ballot box, refused the offers of a new relationship made by Moscow in 1990-91, the result was the disintegration of the USSR as a whole. In the 1991 independence referendum, there was more than a 50% vote in favour in both Crimea and Sevastopol, and more than 80% in Donetsk and Luhansk; those were the four least pro-independence oblasts.

I said many years ago that all European borders are tidemarks in the ebb and flow of empires, and this is particularly so in the case of Ukraine. But that doesn’t make Ukraine a fictional concept, or Ukrainian a fictional language, or Ukrainians a fictional people, as the tankies would have you believe. Ukraine deserves external support to maintain and restore its integrity as a state, and this book is a good introduction to its history. You can get it here.

This was both my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on those piles respectively are Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple, and Ithaca, by Claire North.

The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells

Posted on 18 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter (a long ‘un):

Almost wholly I think I was dreaming of public service in those days. The Harbury tradition pointed steadfastly towards the state, and all my world was bare of allurements to any other type of ambition. Success in art or literature did not appeal to us, and a Harbury boy would as soon think of being a great tinker as a great philosopher. Science we called “stinks”; our three science masters were ex officio ridiculous and the practical laboratory a refuge for oddities. But a good half of our fathers at least were peers or members of parliament, and our sense of politics was close and keen. History, and particularly history as it came up through the eighteenth century to our own times, supplied us with a gallery of intimate models, our great uncles and grandfathers and ancestors at large figured abundantly in the story and furnished the pattern to which we cut our anticipations of life. It was a season of Imperialism, the picturesque Imperialism of the earlier Kipling phase, and we were all of us enthusiasts for the Empire. It was the empire of the White Man’s Burthen in those days; the sordid anti-climax of the Tariff Reform Movement was still some years ahead of us. It was easier for us at Harbury to believe then than it has become since, in our own racial and national and class supremacy. We were the Anglo–Saxons, the elect of the earth, leading the world in social organization, in science and economic method. In India and the east more particularly we were the apostles of even-handed justice, relentless veracity, personal cleanliness, and modern efficiency. In a spirit of adventurous benevolence we were spreading those blessings over a reluctant and occasionally recalcitrant world of people for the most part “colored.” Our success in this had aroused the bitter envy and rivalry of various continental nations, and particularly of France, Russia, and Germany. But France had been diverted to North Africa, Russia to Eastern Asia, and Germany was already the most considered antagonist in our path towards an empire over the world.

As I continue to march across the lesser-known terrain of Wells’ fiction, I meet Stephen Stratton and Lady Mary Christian, who have a love affair immediately before and after she marries someone else; eventually Mary’s husband Justin finds out and they part, leaving Stephen free to marry the much less stressful Rachel, while he carries on his important work of Changing The World; after a few years Mary and Stephen strike up a deeply friendly but chaste correspondence; and then the novel ends in unexpected and somewhat jarring disaster.

I liked a lot of this, in particular the idea that your former lover can actually become a good friend who does not threaten your current relationship, a rather positive model for transcending one’s emotional history; so I felt rather betrayed by the tragic ending, which seemed to suggest that Wells himself didn’t actually think this is really possible in real life. Wells probably had a lot more experience of trying this sort of balancing act than most people, so I guess that he was writing about what he knew. I note that of the two film adaptations, one (1922) keeps the tragedy and one (1949) does not.

There’s also a brief section set in Ireland, where Stephen goes in search of Mary at one point, which I think is maybe the first time I have seen any serious mention of Ireland in Wells’ writings. It rains dismally throughout that one short chapter. Stephen spends more time, more vividly described, in South Africa during the Boer War.

A subplot is Stephen’s plan to create a single World Government, apparently the first time that Wells set this idea out so clearly. I was a bit bored by the lengthy discourses on political theory and society, though interested that Wells mainly puts these in Mary’s mouth rather than Stephen’s.

Anyway, you can get it here.

This was top of my unread Wells pile. Next on that list is The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman.

Doctor Who annual 2025, by Paul Lang

Posted on 17 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third section:

One of my big complaints about the Chibnall era was that the Doctor Who Annuals were very thin indeed, with only weakly regurgitated plot summaries of recent episode and a few rather pathetic puzzles. This must have been set from the top, because although the credited author of the 2025 Annual, Paul Lang, is the same as for the last few, there seems to be a new energy to this side of things.

Yes, we have each episode retold briefly in hard copy; but it’s more of a sideways look, with the story told from a different angle than on TV, and the Fourteenth Doctor stories are interspersed among the first few Fifteenth Doctor stories. We also have a print adaptation (by veteran Steve Cole) of the Comic Relief skit with Davros. And even the puzzles seem to have a new level of sophistication.

I don’t seem to have read the 2023 or 2024 Annuals; I had better put that right.

Meanwhile you can get the 2025 Annual here. I think it’s excellent value for money (£10 or so).

A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll

Posted on 16 January 2025 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Everyone is waiting outside of the classroom to go in, so I decide to approach Jenna. We’ve been friends since nursery, and she’s even stayed over at my house. But I haven’t seen her at all over the summer and she has spent every minute of term so far with Emily.

11-year-old Addie is autistic. She goes to the normal school in her Scottish village. She finds it challenging but in general she can cope. She has the support of her parents, and one of her older twin sisters is autistic too.

Addie’s former best friend abandons her, and her new teacher thinks autistic children should be in special education. Meanwhile she has become very interested in the persecution of witches in the Middle Ages, and starts to campaign for a permanent memorial in the village.

It’s not difficult to draw the parallel between the things that were said about the witches in the Middle Ages, and the things that are said about autistic people today. Addie is a smart kid, and she makes the connection immediately.

This is a short book with a lot of heart, told with conviction from Addie’s point of view. It has been made into a TV series which has had two seasons so far. I would recommend it, not only for neurodivergent younger readers, but perhaps even more so for any adults who may have difficulty understanding the world that autistic people live in.

This was the first book that I finished in 2025.

You can get it here.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: bookblog 2025

January 2025 books

Fifty Years On, by Malachi O’Doherty

Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong

Two Fifteenth Doctor audiobooks – On Ghost Beach, by Neil Bushnell, and Sting of the Sasquatch, by Darren Jones

Paddy Machiavelli: How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics, by John Drennan

Killing Ground, by Steve Lyons

I Who Have Never Known Men aka The Mistress Of Silence, by Jacqueline Harpman

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

The Hypothetical Gentleman, by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond

Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, ed. Ellen Datlow

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy

The Passionate Friends, by H.G. Wells

Doctor Who annual 2025, by Paul Lang

A Kind of Spark, by Elle McNicoll