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January 2007 books

Momentous times as I started my new job and new office. My first visitor was former Labour MP Dick Leonard, who will turn 90 this December, all being well. I travelled to London in the first week of January to meet new colleagues, and to Kosovo and Cyprus later in the month for business. Despite only just starting one new job, I interviewed for another when a long-dormant application came to life; I did not get it. I also had the miserable experience of having a laptop stolen at the Gare du Nord in Brussels.

Young F delighted us with this piece of fan art (which I still use for Doctor Who related posts here).


Now that I had started commuting largely by train, my reading rate shot up and I read the following books in January 2007:

Non-fiction 7
The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
Actors of the Century: a Play-Lover's Gleanings From Theatrical Annals, by Frederic Whyte
About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1963-1966, by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles
Machiavelli in Brussels: The Art of Lobbying the EU, by Rinus van Schendelen
Who on Earth is Tom Baker?
To Engineer is Human, by Henry Petroski
From Behind a Closed Door: Secret Court Martial Records of the 1916 Easter Rising, by Brian Barton

Non-genre 4
The Sexual Life of Catherine M., by Catherine Millet
The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot
The Book of Proper Names, by Amélie Nothomb
Starter for Ten, by David Nicholls

SF 7
A Clash of Kings, by George R.R. Martin
Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett
The Secret Visitors, by James White
The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Variable Star, by Robert A Heinlein and Spider Robinson
The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass
Tau Zero, by Poul Anderson

Doctor Who 1
The Eight Doctors, by Terrance Dicks

Comics 2
Preacher [#3]: Proud Americans, by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon
Caricature, by Daniel Clowes

6,500 pages
4/21 by women
1/21 by a PoC

The best new reads here were the first of the Wood and Miles Doctor Who volumes, which you can get here, and the first of Bujold's Sharing Knife series, which you can get here. The worst was Rinus van Schendelen's incomprehensible guide to EU lobbying; you can get the revised (and possibly improved) edition here.

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From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull

Second paragraph of third chapter:
During my grandmother Edwina's childhood, the family used it primarily as a shooting lodge. It was lit by candles and oil lamps and had just one bath. Water from a well was carried a quarter of a mile uphill by donkey. The sandy beaches on which the children played rolled into dunes and fields. Seal colonies lived nearby and birdlife abounded. The Gaelic language and culture were still strong, relative informality was the norm, and the tempo of life was gentle.
This is quite a gruelling read. In August 1979, 14-year-old Timothy Knatchbull was seriously injured when the IRA blew up his grandfather’s boat; his parents were also seriously injured, but survived; his maternal grandfather, his paternal grandmother, a teenage boy who was helping out on the boat, and also Timothy’s twin brother Nicholas were all killed. This would be a shocking enough event no matter who the victims were, but the boys’ grandfather was Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, whose nephew Philip was and is the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. It was a direct attack by the IRA on the British royal family, and it succeeded.

That same day, eighteen British soldiers were killed in two bomb attacks at Narrow Water Castle, County Down, and their colleagues mistakenly shot and killed a civilian in the belief that they were returning fire. It was one of the worst days of the Troubles, with the biggest single loss of life for the British army. Of the two events on 27 August 1979, the Narrow Water attack hit much closer for me. Roger Hall, whose family still owns the castle, was a close friend of my father's, and their sisters, Moira Hall and my aunt Ursula, shared a house in London for many years where we were always welcome.

But everyone has their own story, and Timothy Knatchbull tells his very eloquently. Many people have suffered violent bereavement, but very few lose an identical twin, and Timothy carefully unpacks the nature of his relationship with Nicholas, and his adaptation to life without him. Getting closure was a long process; Timothy was too badly injured to attend the funerals, and only years later did he uncover the post-mortem reports and photographs of his brother's body being recovered from the sea, which were crucial for his coming to terms with the past.

As one might expect, Knatchbull's relationship with Ireland is very complex. It was a magical place of childhood holiday memories, which turned to horror in an instant. He is fulsome in his tributes to the people who rescued him and his parents, and the Sligo medical team who saved their lives. Most of the Irish people who he quotes deplored the attack on his family. But not all. He looks in detail at the Garda investigation and subsequent trial - Thomas MacMahon, who was convicted of planting the bomb, had actually been arrested two hours before it exploded, which rather clearly indicates that he was not the only person involved. There is a tangible suspicion that not every stone was left unturned. Knatchbull twice quotes a senior Irish politician to the effect that this was the biggest crime in the history of the State. (Actually I would dispute that on behalf of Kevin O'Higgins, whose killers were never arrested, even though it is now well known who they were.)

Mountbatten was clearly capable of inspiring devotion as a father and grandfather. I still can't warm to him; he flirted with the overthrow of British democracy in 1968, and his botching of the partition of India killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Oddly enough the latter experience made him more personally sympathetic to Irish nationalism. In any case, the IRA did not kill him because of his colonial and military record, still less his political views; they killed him, and two children and an old woman, purely because of who his nephew had married. The effect in the short term was to harden the positions of both the British and Irish governments against the IRA, and in the medium and long term to deepen suspicion and make peace and reconciliation more difficult. This was not a win in any way. (And today's Sinn Féin supporters need to own that this act of murder was celebrated by SF at the time.)

Knatchbull has found his equilibrium, and welcomes the peace process which has (largely) brought an end to traumas like his. (I don't think I have ever met him, but his last year in Cambridge as an undergraduate at Christ's was my first year at Clare, so we may well have been in the same room on occasion.) He has found a way of making sense of the terrible thing that was done to his family. Many other victims of the Troubles have not been able to do that. A book like this is important as a demonstration that a personal reconciliation with the past is in the end possible, although the necessary resources (time, space and often money) are not equally available to everyone. You can get the book here.

I bought the book because it won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize for 2009-10, but it took me years to get around to it and eventually it was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on that pile is Yugoslavia’s Implosion, by Sonja Biserko.
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The Ghost of Lily Painter by Caitlin Davies

Second paragraph of third chapter:
The keeping of a journal will also, I trust, provide an opportunity to note down observations relating to my work, although I have no intention of producing anything resembling the sort of police memoir so popular these days. I find such publications devoid of personal interest, containing as they do a series of anecdotes written for no other purpose than that of self-aggrandisement. What is missing, one feels, is the reflections of an ordinary police inspector doing an extraordinary job. For the role of the police officer today is no longer confined to the prevention of crime, rather we are expected to fulfil the role of social inspector. Be there bonfire or smoke, traffic accidents or tardy dust contractors, abandoned children or missing dogs, then a person's first port of call is a police officer. Divisions differ of course: an inspector at Kensington is likely to be inundated with elderly ladies reporting the loss of a cat or a purse, while an inspector at Tottenham Court Road will find himself in a veritable hot bed of crime. When it comes to Upper Holloway, barely a day passes without one sergeant or another bringing in a drunk or a thief. And then there are the children, particularly around the Seven Sisters Road, who quite deliberately get themselves 'lost' and report as much to the beat constable in the hope of being taken to the station for a slice of bread and jam. Divisional Superintendent Dyball has let it be known that this practice is to cease forthwith. Instead, any stray children with homes to go to are to be given a good clip round the ear and told to make their way whence they came.
One of those novels I had picked up years ago on a whim; Annie Sweet, recently separated from her husband in 2008, becomes obsessed with tracking down the story of Lily Painter, a teenage music hall performer who lived in the same house in 1901. I'm afraid that I worked out what the twist ending was going to be about half way through, and I was also annoyed by the policeman character who seems to have very little grasp of police procedure and writes implausible diary entries. But it's told with a certain amount of emotional force, and if I were in a less cynical mood at the moment it might well have worked better for me. You can get it here.

This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is The Inside of the Cup, by the other Winston Churchill. But it will have to wait until I have finished all the books I acquired in 2014 (I'm getting through them fairly rapidly).
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Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, by Rana Mitter

Second paragraph of third chapter:
Decades after the deaths of Mao and Chiang, it is possible not only to look at those two major figures with some perspective, but also to pay more attention to the context around them. There is an alternative to regarding the early 20th century as a clash of the two Chinese giants: instead we can treat the period from the establishment of Chiang’s Nationalist government in 1928 to the present day as one long modernizing project by two parties that agreed as well as disagreed. Both the Nationalists and the Communists wished to establish a strong centralized state, remove imperialist power from China, reduce rural poverty, maintain a one-party state, and create a powerful industrialized infrastructure in China. Both parties launched powerful campaigns against ‘superstition’, believing that ‘backward’ spiritual beliefs were preventing China from reaching modernity. The major ideological difference was that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) believed that none of these goals, especially rural reform, was possible without major class warfare. The Nationalists opposed this, in part because it was captive to forces that opposed economic redistribution. This division led to a deadly falling-out by the mid-1920s, which was resolved only by the Communist victory in 1949. Ironically, though, by the end of the century, the CCP had also abandoned class war, although only after decades of factional, often highly destructive, conflict between classes.
Rana Mitter was a friend in Cambridge days, now Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University, and after renewing contact with him a couple of years ago (and also conscious of the growing dominance of China in the world) I decided to get this book as a starter. (I've previously bounced off a couple of histories of China.)

It's a good readable, brief and almost breezy introduction to China as it has developed in the last century or so. By taking modern China as his subject, he more of less starts with the 1911 revolution (with occasional contextualising from the past) and argues for a relatively linear development from Sun Yat-Sen to Chiang Kai-Shek to Mao to Deng, Jiang, Hu and Xi; many things changed, but there is a lot of continuity too. The history section is only half of the book; he also looks at society as a whole, the Chinese economy and Chinese culture, this last of course extending well beyond the People's Republic. The second edition was published in 2016, when it was already clear that Xi was heading in a less liberal direction; now of course we are seeing the vicious crackdown on Hong Kong (which is very sad but surely not surprising), and the appalling treatment of the Uighurs, both clearly directed from the top. But Mitter seems to think that this can't last forever, and that there will be an inevitable pressure for liberalisation which Xi, or possibly his successor, will have to deal with; millions of Chinese live in democratic and open countries, most locally in Taiwan, and we should not underestimate the flexibility that already exists. It's a good book and you can get it here.

Another friend, Peter Martin, is about to leave Beijing after a couple of years there with Bloomberg; I will miss his regular reporting. I have signed up for the POLITICO weekly briefing but it's a bit US-focused. Open to advice for a regular update that I can skim on a weekly basis.

This was top of my pile of unread books by non-white writers. Next in that list is Guban, by Abdi Latif Ega.
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A hundred days after lockdown

Not sure how much longer I will keep up this series of posts every ten days. The numbers of hospitalisations, deaths, etc in Belgium are now back to where they were before lockdown, which basically means that it's barely distinguishable from background noise in the statistics. The government has announced further relaxation of the restrictions from 1 July (ie next Wednesday) including reopening cinemas and theatres, and allowing events of up to 200 people indoors and 400 outdoors, to double in August all being well.

And I'm inclined to think that all probably will be well. I have a slightly heretically optimistic take: I suspect that very few people were infected after the lockdown, except probably in care homes (which have been a disaster), and the numbers we have seen since then have largely been the outworkings of the pool of active and latent infection that existed in late March, and the very few people who came into contact with that pool. In that case, the first wave will have left a population that is still vulnerable to future infection, but hopefully very few infectious people; and a future outbreak will be much easier to contain, because we are prepared. So I am cautiously positive about the way things are heading.

I think this does justify the severity of the lockdown in the first place, but it's quite possible that it could have been relaxed sooner, provided that we kept to social distancing and hygiene rules (as we will continue to do). And it's certain that if the lockdown had been imposed a week earlier, about two thousand lives would have been saved.

For us, the major development of the last ten days was that we were finally able to see B, on her 23rd birthday. We had to wear masks and gloves, and were accompanied at all times by two of the carers from the Stichting, but she was clearly pleased to see us as we were to see her.

Little U will come home tomorrow, for the first time since March, and will stay with us for ten days or so. She has apparently understood that something big is happening tomorrow and has been a bit nervous. We were not able to see her last week because she would certainly have wanted to come home with us immediately.

Also as previously noted I went to church last Sunday, the doors open for business at last.

I went to work by train yesterday, again for the first time since 13 March. I treated myself to a first-class ticket, which was silly because there were so few fellow passengers that there was no real difference in comfort level. I took the train rather than driving because we had an internal social event in the office yesterday evening, after which I went to the Place de Londres with some colleagues for a drink, just like one might in normal times. We're doing drinks again tomorrow evening for a departing colleague, al fresco in the park. The forecast is that it will be very sunny and warm. I think the good weather has played its part in lifting everyone's spirits, but the main thing is the gradual resumption of normal social life, and a feeling that the trajectory is firmly upward.
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Thursday reading

Current
The Complete Secret Army: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Classic TV Drama Series by Andy Priestner
Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, by John Bolton
The Wicked + The Divine vol 6: Imperial Phase Part 2, by Kieron Gillen etc
De dag waarop ze haar vlucht nam, by Beka, Marko, and Maëla Cosson

Last books finished
The Wicked + The Divine vol 4: Rising Action, by Kieron Gillen etc
De dag waarop de bus zonder haar vertrok, by Beka, Marko, and Maëla Cosson
Dreaming In Smoke, by Tricia Sullivan
The Wicked + The Divine vol 5: Imperial Phase Part 1, by Kieron Gillen etc

Next books
The Overstory, by Richard Powers
Tooth & Claw, by Jo Walton