Second paragraph of third chapter:

I found in those books countless descriptions of how to hunt, kill or cook a hare, but not a word on how to raise them. I turned the pages quickly past endless colour reproductions of the still-life paintings featuring dead hares hanging upside down from hooks or slung across tables, their back legs tied with rope and blood pooling beneath their heads, which grace the walls of our galleries and museums. The meat of a single hare is sufficient to satisfy six to eight people, I read. The recipes, many of them ancient, included ‘hare in worts’ (meaning leaf vegetables); hare ‘with blood and bread’, seasoned with pepper and ale; hare with beer and chestnuts; hare with chocolate; hare stew; and lievre à la royale – hare fit for a king. Reportedly first prepared for Louis XIV and described as one of the ‘jewels’ of French haute cuisine, the recipe requires that the animal is boned, stuffed with foie gras, truffles and the meat of its own legs, and served with a red wine sauce fortified with blood. To read these violent accounts in the leveret’s vicinity felt like a form of betrayal.

It is only a few months since I read H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald, also an account of a human getting to know and become intimate with an animal, while the human world of the author is in flux – Macdonald is processing grief at the death of their father, Dalton is coping with the pandemic lockdowns. They are very different books though. While Macdonald is telling the story of domesticating a wild animal, Dalton allows the hare that she rescues to grow up and raise its own young alongside her, without constraining it in any way, and I must admit it did make me question how humane falconry can be considered to be.

I also realised how little I know about hares. I’m very familiar with rabbits, both from real life and from literature; I had not taken in that hares basically nest in quiet spots in the open country, and lead largely solitary lives apart from the requirements of breeding. One of the weird bits of hare biology is that doe can be have two different pregnancies simultaneously, so that when one set of leverets is born she may still be carrying their younger siblings.

An intense study of any relationship can be compelling reading, if it is well written – and this is. There’s something particularly fascinating about getting to know a creature whose motivations we can only guess at, especially if it allows us to share a bit of its world. Dalton experiences a new awareness of the natural world around her by observing the hare’s behaviour. This is movingly shadowed against the pandemic when a lot of us found ourselves spending more time with our neighbourhood.

Personally I don’t think I have ever seen a wild hare. (The so-called “Belgian hare” is a very big “fancy” domestic rabbit, as is the Flemish giant.) I’ll keep a closer eye out now.

You can get Raising Hare here.

This was my top unread non-fiction book. Next on that pile is Agathe Christie, by Lucy Worsley.

Second paragraph of third story (“Lonely”):

Marian stood in the dusty gravel road and listened to the advantages of renting one of his cottages with a slightly growing trace of boredom. What had she expected? When she’d felt that faint probe at her mind last night, she’d instantly thought of another esper, one unknown to her. But after a morning of searching in the direction from which the probe had stemmed and finding nothing but mind-blind people, she was ready to give up.

I know Kathryn well from Gallifrey One (though we first met on a Worldcon Doctor Who panel in 2005). She kindly gave me this collection of her stories a few years back. There are 22 of them in 240 pages; they are mostly very short, mostly previously published in fanzines between 1981 and 2014 (with two new for this 2017 volume), mostly fantasy, and mostly with female protagonists. Many of them are linked in particular sequences; some of them are standalone. I have a feeling that some of them have emerged from role-playing games (I have not checked with the author). They’re all good yarns – even the very shortest are more than just a vignette. Worth a look.

You can get Agents, Adepts and Apprentices here.

Shamefully, this was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next is British Summertime, by Paul Cornell (also acquired at Gallifrey One in 2023.)

Second paragraph of third letter (written November 1871):

And what will you say when I tell you that I can hardly pity one who suffers from Gout; though I would undoubtedly prefer that you should be free from that, or any other ailment.  But I have always heard that Gout exempts one from many other miseries which Flesh is heir to: at any rate, it almost always leaves the Head clear: and that is so much!  My Mother, who suffered a good deal, used often to say how she was kept awake of nights by the Pain in her feet, or hands, but felt so clear aloft that she made Night pass even agreeably away with her reflections and recollections

Fascinated as I am by Fanny Kemble (1809-1893), I picked this up from Project Gutenberg to get a sense of her from her friend, Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), who had had a big publishing hit in the 1860s with The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and was now living in comfort in Suffolk. I got fifty pages into it and have put it aside; I wanted to hear her voice rather than his, and while there’s nothing objectionable about him, there’s nothing terribly interesting either.

Though I did smile at this 1873 account of a letter gone astray:

Some while ago Carlyle sent me a Letter from an American gentleman named Norton (once of the N. American Review, C. says, and a most amiable, intelligent Gentleman)—whose Letter enclosed one from Ruskin, which had been entrusted to another American Gentleman named Burne Jones—who kept it in a Desk ten years, and at last forwarded it as aforesaid—to me!  The Note (of Ruskin’s) is about one of the Persian Translations: almost childish, as that Man of Genius is apt to be in his Likes as well as Dislikes.  I dare say he has forgotten all about Translator and Original long before this. 

“Carlyle” is presumably Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881); “Norton” is definitely Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908); “Ruskin” is of course John Ruskin (1819-1900); and “Burne Jones” must surely be the decidedly non-American Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898), though it seems odd that Fitzgerald had not heard of him – he was already pretty well known by 1873.

Anyway you can get it for free here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The episode [Gavin Williamson’s resignation] revealed from the outset quite how thin the ice was. Over twelve years of government a sizeable arsenal of unexploded bombs had accumulated beneath the surface, each threatening the new government’s shaky footing. Would these explosive scandals provide the finishing blow to Sunak’s nascent rule? Still fresh in everyone’s minds were the scandals that rocked Major’s government, still more Johnson’s. Hence Sunak’s and LBS’s [Liam Booth-Smith’s] ardent wish to bid goodbye to all that. ‘Ending the madness’ was the order of the day.

I enjoyed Seldon’s co-written demolition of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and also his similar hatchet job on Liz Truss (with reservations), so thought that I would give this a try too. Rishi Sunak was dragged rather unwillingly into the role of Prime Minister, not actually confirming to family and supporters that he wanted the job until the morning of 22 October 2022, two days after Truss had resigned and two days before he was elected leader of the Conservatives.

In fairness, he took the job very seriously once he got it, but Seldon and Egerton keep coming back to the rushed startup as a key problem for the Sunak administration. They treat it as a combination of unavoidable circumstance and Truss’ (entirely understandable) desire to get out of the door quickly once she had been shown it. However I think this was Sunak’s first serious mistake (of many); he had the same information as the rest of us, and could see that Truss’s government spent half of its duration on life support, and should have been prepared.

There are over 600 pages in the book, which I think is more than the subject deserves. I got it really to see if Seldon’s Truss book’s weird claims that she had inspired the Windsor Framework (which she actually detests) were given any further support, but apart from an unsupported throwaway remark or two, they are not. The account of the Windsor Framework is forensic but limited; it concentrates almost entirely on the palace politics at the Downing Street and Westminster end, with some small space for the local dynamics in Northern Ireland and even less for the, er, EU, and gives little indication that the authors actually understand the substance of the problem. This is not especially fair on their own sources, Sunak’s advisors, who clearly had a very good understanding of Northern Ireland.

That said, I agree with the authors that the Windsor Framework is one of Sunak’s (few) real achievements as Prime Minister, and more importantly that it’s difficult to see any of the alternative Tory leaders having achieved it. Johnson and Truss were already committed to blowing up the relationship with the EU rather than enforce the Protocol that Johnson himself had negotiated. I cannot really see Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove or Penny Mordaunt (the other alternative Tory leaders in 2022, had Sunak not been available or not lasted) having either the necessary brains or the necessary character for it either. (See here for a sympathetic portrait of Mordaunt by Iain Dale, not that it matters now.)

Seldon and Egerton also see Sunak’s support of Ukraine as one of his key achievements. Myself, I think that any of the alternative leaders – Hunt, Gove, Mordaunt – would have followed exactly the same policy as Sunak on Ukraine, as indeed Johnson, Truss and Starmer actually did, and Burnham is doing, and it’s very difficult to point to one thing Sunak did that they would not have done.

The other big story of the book is the migration issue. One of Sunak’s (many, entirely avoidable) mistakes was to choose “Stop the boats” as one of his five key pledges, as unpacked by Rachel Cunliffe in August 2023. It was unachievable and he must have known that it was unachievable. Admittedly Sunak had a difficult legacy – Johnson had taken a strong line rhetorically against migration but in fact had facilitated it by his actual policies, so Sunak started with a in-built credibility problem.

There was then a tension between the performatively vicious side of the party (Braverman and Jenrick, both of whom have since joined Reform) and those who actually cared about not breaking the law (less vocal but as it turned out more influential). Even Seldon and Egerton, who generally boost Sunak, admit that he failed on this one, though they don’t follow through to speculate on what could have constituted success. There seems to have been no reflection on what a results-based policy would look like (and there still hasn’t been),

Sunak’s decision to go for a July election is excused by most (but not all) of those around him as the least worst of three bad options, the other two being May and November. I tend to agree. The particular consideration I hadn’t realised was that he (or rather his key advisers) hoped to outflank Nigel Farage, who was personally not ready for an election, and whose initial response (before his sponsors thought better of it) was that he would sit this one out. It was a rational choice on Sunak’s part, though it did not really work.

There is some half-hearted analysis of the extent to which Sunak was to blame for the disastrous election result. But really it came down to the destruction of their own party’s credibility in government by Johnson and Truss, which gives rise to the book’s sub-title asking if Sunak will turn out to have been the last prime minister from the Conservative Party; the precedent of the Canadian Progressive Conservatives in the 1990s is mentioned (they were outflanked by a more right-wing party, called Reform, which they later merged with). Sunak bears some but not much blame for Johnson’s failures, and none for Truss’s. (Unless you think that he did not try hard enough to defeat her in the summer leadership election, but it’s clear that he lost because Tory members preferred a white woman to an Asian man.)

For the Conservatives to win in 2024 would have required not only the steady leadership that Sunak was able to provide, but an external shock of the kind that Donald Trump provided to the Canadian Liberals in early 2025, or an implosion of the Labour Party bigger than 1983 or 2019. Whatever the wider impact of Tory policies on biodiversity may have been, Sunak is not really to blame for the shortage of black swans.

Still, looking at the polls I was interested to note that the Conservatives started the campaign at an average of 23.5% and actually got 23.7% in the election, while Labour fell from a 45% average to 33.7%. The big gainers were of course Reform (from 9% to 14.3%) and the Lib Dems (from 10% to 12.2%). Sunak deserves credit for stemming the drain of votes from his own party. Awful as the 2024 result was, it could (and maybe should!) have been even worse.

In general I hesitate to recommend this book. It is too closely concerned with the kitchen politics of 10 Downing Street while being rather hazy on the big policy picture in the most important issues, and a bit too uncritically rooted in its own sources (interviews with Sunak’s team, and the Chief Whip’s published memoirs). But it’s a compelling insider account of the slow-motion car crash that was the Sunak government, and gets you inside the heads of the driver and his crew. You can get Sunak at 10 here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

From one end of the country to the other banks were held up with pistols, sawn-off shotguns and submachine guns on an almost daily basis. Smash and grab raids at jewellers’ shops became so common throughout that period that local police forces had hardly finished taking depositions from the shaking and often bleeding jewellers and their assistants than they were called away to another similar case within their own manor.

I was inspired to re-read this by delving into Hurd and Osmond’s Send Him Victorious, published four years earlier but with certain similarities. It remains a classic read. Even though the reader of 1972 knew (the reader of 2026 may have forgotten) that General de Gaulle was not actually assassinated in 1963, it is a tremendous ride as the Jackal prepares and implements his plan, while the French and British authorities are perpetually a step behind. There are some good bits set in a very seedy Brussels as well. (Moved to a more picturesque Genoa for the film, I think.)

Forsyth’s very tight writing, based on the true crime journalism which he had also practiced, keeps the pace going very well up to the explosive finale. Incidental characters are sketched (admittedly sometimes caricatured) economically yet vividly. There is no mystery about what is going on, and no real mystery about what will happen at the end, but we still race through the pages to find out.

There are two significant women in the story, the Baroness and Jacqueline, both of whom are there for sex and playing a small role in the development of the plot. There is reference to the wars of Africa and conflict in the Caribbean, and to the Corsican mafia. The bad guys are the colonial reactionaries, but the good guys are the conservative rulers of France and Britain – de Gaulle and MacMillan (who both make personal appearances).

On re-reading, I did note that the authorities spend quite a long time chasing the wrong trail until they hit the right one, taking a step (checking recent British passport applications) that really should have been taken much earlier; and that the reactionary Algerian OAS have a number of lucky breaks (and one very unlucky one). But you don’t write great stories about normal events, and this is a pretty good story. You can get The Day of the Jackal here.