How Would You Define Hephaestus Books’ Interesting ‘Paradigm’?

I haven’t had an intemperate rant for quite a long time now, but I feel a series coming on, of which the first is:

Whilst browsing through Amazon looking for books on a variety of subjects recently I have been stumbling over books published by Hephaestus Books – or at least I presume they are the publisher, Amazon give ‘Hephaestus Books’ as author, and publisher usually as ‘Unknown’, which always looks a little strange when one comes across it on Amazon – how can they not know who the publisher is?

At first I found books about places – I was looking for information about the history and architecture of Cromarty in Scotland, and so trying to find out whether there had been a volume in the Scottish Burgh Survey. One of the first books to show on a title search for ‘Cromarty’ was Scottish County Towns, Including: Stirling, Kirkwall, Dumfries, Wigtown, Stonehaven, Cromarty, Ayr, Forfar, Elgin, Moray, Lerwick, Dornoch, Dumbarton, priced at about £15. Looking for information about the Weald brought up Houses in West Sussex, Including: Arundel Castle, Petworth House, Standen, Uppark, Saint Hill Manor, Goodwood House, Cowdray House, Weald and Downland at £13.99 for 64 pages; also Museums in West Sussex; Charities Based in; Gardens in; and Protected Areas of West Sussex; Railway Stations Opened in 1865; in total, 21 books published by these people.

Only today did I find that they do titles which appear to be fiction as well. I use the words ‘appear to be’ for a reason.

For £13.99 you can buy Dragon Prince Series, Including: Melanie Rawn, Dragon Prince, Sunrunner’s Fire, the Star Scroll, Sunrunner, High Prince, Stronghold (Novel), the Drago. How many people have bought this (& any the many other similarly titled items) thinking they’re getting the set of novels? The book has 100 pages.

Even more surprising: Books by John Lloyd, Including: The Book of General Ignorance, the Book of Animal Ignorance, Advanced Banter, the Qi Book of the Dead, the Second Book. For £12.99 you get 24 pages.

They are honest enough to have this in the description of their books:

Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge.

Noting that the OED defines ‘paradigm’ as ‘A pattern or model’, one of their definitions of the word ‘model’ is ‘Something which accurately resembles or represents something else’, and therefore isn’t quite what one might be expected to think it was.

Hephaestus Books, when I looked just now, gives 168,251 results for books on Amazon, with prices up to £43.99. What do the people who have given their time and talent freely to Wikipedia think of their work getting used in this way? What are Amazon thinking of in selling this stuff? (Well, profit, obviously.) And what to the buyers think when they get their book? You can guess what are authors’ attitudes to their book titles being used to sell collections of free-to-read articles: Robin Hobb, C J Cherryh, and Jerry Pournelle for three are not happy, and if you enter ‘Hephaestus Books’ into a search engine there’s an awful lot of complaining going on. And I must point out that it’s not only Amazon who are selling them, they’re all over the place.

Even more astonishingly, there appears to be some sort of circularity appearing, as I discovered when I looked up Andrea Solari on Wikipedia. One of the references in the bibliography is Milanese Painters (2011) by Hepaestus Books, and according to the description of this book on Amazon it says, yes, of course: ‘…this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles…’. So it would appear that a Wikipedia article is using as its source a book which contains the article from Wikipedia that is using the book…

Hephaestus is quite a good name for their books, actually. Admittedly he was a god and a smith, but more importantly, he was a bit lame.

Time Team & Francis Pryor – In the Long Run

It is pleasing to see that a new series of Time Team is coming to Channel 4, starting on Sunday (22 January) at 1800. Let’s hope that it is kept scheduled at the same time for the whole series instead of being moved around, which makes it hard to know when it’s next going to be on.

The first episode has them delving on and near the island of Gateholm (‘Goat Island’ from the Old Scandinavian), which is right down in the far southwest of Pembrokeshire, in the small group of islands which also includes Skomer & Skokholm (more Norse names).

See the intrepid archaeologists accessing the island by zipwire! Francis Pryor, archaeologist and author, has written an amusing account of this in his new blog, In the Long Run: archaeology, rural life and the lessons of history. The intent is for the blog to be about ‘archaeology, gardening, farming and rural life, books, broadcasting, history and the occasional intemperate rant’ which sounds good to me.

Meet Your Brain: Bruce Hood’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures were started by Michael Faraday in 1825, and have been broadcast on television since 1966. The lecturer that year was Eric Laithwaite, and I was in the audience on a trip from my school (this was before my fascination with science was temporarily blighted by poor teaching at my secondary school). There’s often a loop of clips from the old lectures, including the Laithwaite one, so I’m possibly visible there in the audience. I’m hoping that it will eventually be added to the new RI video channel.

It did go through a broadcasting decline, moving from the BBC to Channel 4, then to Channel 5 for a while, it’s been back with the BBC for a couple of years – although the number of lectures has been reduced from 5 to 3 and it’s broadcast on BBC4, so the channel size (by audience) has gone down with each move.

The lectures have have been given by an illustrious range of scientists, some of the best in their fields, and recent years have seen Marcus du Sautoy, Mark Miodownik, and Christopher Bishop; going a little further back were Ian Stewart, Frank Close, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, George Porter, Frank Whittle, William Lawrence Bragg, William Henry Bragg, John Tyndall, and Michael Faraday. The titles of the early lectures were short and to the point: ‘Electricity’, ‘Chemistry’, ‘Geology’, etc; soon they became more specific: ‘The First Principles of Franklinic Electricity’, ‘The Distinctive Properties of the Common Metals’, and more famously, ‘The Chemical History of a Candle’; they covered on topics which we now know are valid, ‘Waves and Ripples in Water, Air and Aether’; but since the hiatus of 1939-1942 the titles have become a little more snappy and interesting: ‘The Engineer in Wonderland’, ‘Gulliver’s Laws: The Physics of Large and Small’, ‘The Num8er Mysteries’, ‘Size Matters’, and this year’s, ‘Meet Your Brain’, delivered by Bruce Hood (@profbrucehood, #xmaslecture).

Getting there’s always a bit of a rush – my daughter finishes school at 3.15 & the tickets say that if you arrive after 5.30 entry will be refused. On arrival the queue wends its way through the bar, downstairs, back along the width of the building through the basement museum, back up the stairs and then up more stairs to the first floor where the children get to sit in the body of the theatre while us adults have to hoof it up two more flights to the gallery.

Once everyone was seated, Matt Parker, standup mathematician, gave  his usual warm up (he did better when it was on C4 or C5 as he had the breaks to perform in too), and then there was a rather lengthy brouhaha.

On Monday during the recording of the first lecture there had been a technical hitch involving a demonstration using the audience (representing a brain) and a switched network of light rope representing dendrites. The idea was to rerecord the segment, hoping nobody noticed that the audience had changed. The likelihood of a cable or rope tangling or knotting increases proportionately with the length of the cable up to a point, and this thing was much longer than a headphones cable, joined to nodes, and very tangled and knotted indeed.

Some people have the knack of presenting to children in an uncondescending and natural way, and Bruce Hood, this year’s lecturer, certainly does. He took a Q&A with the audience while the disentanglement was taking place, and the questions were just as intelligent as those after a Friday Evening Discourse (he shied away from answering ‘What is Schrödinger’s Cat’ as he is not a physicist).

After about what seemed to be half an hour the cable got disentangled, but then one of the switches didn’t work, so Hood, who by this time seemed to have become a little irritated by it all, said he wanted to abandon the idea and just get on with the lecture, Who’s In Charge Here, Anyway?

This went particularly well, involving a one-man band, a dancing dog, a group of jugglers, and a ‘memory man’. His routine involved one group of the audience (including my daughter) each being given a numbered playing card while they were in the queue, upon which they had to write their name and date of birth. They were then sat in the theatre in the number order. The memory man then not only showed he had memorised which names and birth dates were on which card, he had memorised their seating order.

I’m looking forward to watching the other two lectures on television (they’re on BBC4 on the 27^th, 28^th & 29^th December at 8pm), and a DVD will presumably be  available next year as usual. The BBC did teachers’ notes for last year’s lectures, so presumably they will be available again for this year’s.

And then back home via Victoria Station, delayed departures, and what seemed like the slowest train I’ve every travelled home on.

Brian Cox and his Quantum Universe at the Royal Institution

I’ve just got home from the Royal Institution where the BBC were filming a lecture by Brian Cox on the quantum universe. Apart from the BBC cameras, the most obvious difference from a usual lecture were the members of the audience, some of whom had paid a lot for a meal and were allowed to sit in the main auditorium, some had taken advantage of a free ticket just to the talk, and some were there because they were famous. Now, some were scientists, like Jim Al-Khalili (who would, I imagine know enough about quantum theory already), and I think I saw Mark Miodownik in the audience; but most were just there as they were famous. I’m not very good on celebrities, or even most people who are famous because they are talented, and of this celebrated audience I could recognise David Baddiel, Marcus Brigstocke, Charlie Brooker, Andy Hamilton, Charlie Higson, Philip Schofield (I know him from his time with Gordon the Gopher), and someone told me Al Murray was there too.

Us plebs were in the gallery (apart from those who were used to fill the seats downstairs), so there was quite an area of audience I couldn’t see, in which there were undoubtedly many more famous people I either would, or would probably would not, have recognised.

Brian Cox is a very good communicator, indeed his Why does e=mc²?, written with Jeff Forshaw, is the only thing I’ve read or seen that actually explained to me that very thing, and he’s as personable and pleasant in real life as he appears to be on television. I found this talk very enjoyable, even although it didn’t present anything that was novel to me.

On occasions he would invite someone (famous) from the audience to help, not always very successfully: Sarah Millican appeared rather obtuse, I don’t know whether being slow-witted is part of her persona, but her time on stage was a bit of a waste of time. Jonathan Ross’s blundering equally added little to the imparting of information about Planck’s Constant or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The trick of the questioning layman (e.g. Tony Robinson in Time Team) is that the layman needs to know enough to be able to ask intelligent questions and respond in an intelligent way.

What worked well was a practical demonstration of the standing wave atomic model which involved joining Jim Al-Khalili and Simon Pegg (an actor, a well-known search engine informs me) together with a very long spring; setting fire to James May was quite fun, too.

Not many people could keep an audience entertained with explanation of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, but Brian Cox did tonight. It’s part of the promotion for the new book he’s written with Jeff Forshaw, The Quantum Universe: everything that can happen does happen, and I would like to see the pair of them give a more traditional talk at the RI, as they did for the previous book – Jeff is also a very interesting speaker. One thing about the books, they’re not as light and fluffy as the television programmes; they are very much as accessible, but do require a bit more mental effort.

I’ve today (2 December) been informed that the programme, tastefully entitled A Night With the Stars, will be broadcast on 18 December 2011 on BBC2 and BBC HD at 2100. And today (18 December) a clip of Simon Pegg and Jim Al-Khalili demonstrating standing waves appeared. The whole programme will be available on the BBC iPlayer for a week after the initial broadcast.

Francis Pryor’s The Birth of Modern Britain: A Journey into Britain’s Archaeological Past: 1550 to the Present

Back in 2003 Britain BC, the first volume of Francis Pryor‘s ‘archaeological history’ of Britain appeared, with Britain AD close on its heels; then a couple of years later Britain in the Middle Ages was published. I’ve eventually just got round to reading the fourth in the series, The Birth of Modern Britain, which was published, after a gap of five years, in February this year.

Unlike the first three volumes, which were arranged chronologically, the chapters in this book are thematic. This does make the book slightly less coherent that the others, but there is much to be said for this approach. As FP says in the Introduction, there are so many different fields which have such a variety of things going on in them simultaneously and all at such a pace, that keeping all the strings untangled in a linear narrative while maintaining a lucid flow was an unequal struggle which he abandoned.

I agree with him in having no truck with ‘Revolutions’ (as in Industrial or Agrarian), as revolutions should involve suddenness: these ‘revolutions’ were continuations of trends, occurring over hundreds of years, although there were events of moment, some of which must have been revolutionary to those living through them.

Another concept for which he has no time is that of the ‘Great Man’ of history, he who is the sole progenitor of some pivotal invention; one could write very long lists of those who previously developed the technologies that these ‘Great Men’ improved.

Telford is obviously one of Pryor’s heroes, deservedly so. His engineering of the Holyhead road, still followed over much of its length by the A5, is a marvel, particularly in the mountains of north Wales. It’s even more of an impressive (and interesting) drive if one has read Thomas Telford’s Holyhead Road: the A5 in north Wales (Council for British Archaeology Research Report 135). But even Telford, accomplished self-aggrandizer, as well as the suppressor of others’ contributions and achievements that he was, stood on the shoulders of giants (as well as many others of less great stature). [see Charles Hadfield’s Thomas Telford’s Temptation: Telford & William Jessop’s Reputation]

The book’s anecdotal style belies its erudition; it’s remarkably easy to read, managing to impart an awful lot of information in a most enjoyable fashion. I imagine that some might not like the personal anecdotes with which the book is littered, although I think it makes it more enjoyable.

Nor will some appreciate the author’s somewhat opinionated views (it so happens that I agree with most of his opinions, so I don’t mind at all), but his feelings are obviously passionate: he cares.

The book perhaps should have been called ‘A journey into Britain’s Archaeological Past 1550 almost to the Present’: I would have liked more treatment of the twentieth century, although it does get a fairer crack of the whip in his Making of the British Landscape.

It would be nice if I had several months free to work my way through the books referred to in the endnotes, I have read some of them but there are an awful lot referred to that I would like to read.

Francis presented two short television series based on Britain BC and Britain AD, and although it was nice to see his cameo appearance in the recent Neil Oliver remake on the BBC, I wish Channel 4 (or the BBC) would commission programmes based on the last two in the series, as well as something based on The Making of the British Landscape.

If you’re wanting to get an overview of life in Britain throughout history, and prehistory, without the king, queens and treaties, you could do much worse than read the four books in this set, particularly if you also read the excellent Landscape.

The Cambridge Murders and The Crossing Places : two stories set in East Anglia

I was in conversation with my brother-in-law the other day and, among many other things, we talked of Glyn Daniel. I knew of him as an archaeologist and author of books of popular archaeology (e.g. The First Civilisations and Megalith Builders of Western Europe) and editor of Antiquity, whereas Francis knew him, and mentioned that he had written two detective novels – The Cambridge Murders and Welcome Death. The former was originally published under the pseudonym Dilwyn Rees, although subsequent reprints and his second book were published under his own name (is there an antonym for pseudonym, and has it an adjective that is the equivalent of pseudonymous?).

This struck a vague chord in my memory, and a day or two later I had a rummage and discovered that I owned a copy of The Cambridge Murders, although had never read it. Once the decision to rectify this omission was made I enjoyed the book. It’s a typical detective story of its age (published in 1945 but set just prior to World War II), is well-written with a compelling plot.

Dr Daniel obviously believed in “write about what you know”, so the story is set in Cambridge and its environs, and he features himself in the book as the protagonist, Sir Richard Cherrington, a lecturer in archaeology at Fisher College.

There’s a murder in the aforesaid (fictional) Fisher College, Cambridge, all the usual eccentric academics, and a little annotated plan to help elucidate some of the arcane collegiate customs. I did decide (correctly) early on who the murderer (probably) was, but half the fun of reading a book like this is the intricacies of the plot, the well-crafted language, and the period setting; it is also somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I’m sure Glyn Daniel saw it as a bit of light relief from his more academic writing.

And how much did people routinely drink in those days, anyway? I’ve wondered this before. Permanently paralytic posh people, as they seemed to start before lunch and continue, on and off, until bedtime: “I see you are a man of taste, Superintendent,” said Sir Richard. “It is, as you rightly appreciated, a time only for beer. It is a little too early for sherry, and one’s palate should never be spoiled before dinner with the rougher and more violent drinks made with whisky and gin and other spirits.”; “A glass of wine, gentlemen? Sherry? Madeira? Or, if you prefer, my man can bring you some draught beer up from the cellar?”; “Have a glass of sherry. Bond seems rather a long time in announcing lunch.”; “Nothing, thank you. This is the one hour of the day when no drink of any kind is possible. I mean the latest post-luncheon tipplings are over by three o’clock, and no civilised person will drink tea before four o’clock” – although, when pressed he has ‘Number 1 Ale slightly mulled with some spice and a light lacing of spirits. Very good for the cold Fen winds.’

At one point Detective-Superintendent Robertson-Macdonald, having lunched earlier in the day with the Chief Constable – ‘a pleasant social lunch, with a lot to drink and no mention was made of the case throughout’ – decides he can bear it no longer and decides to ‘drive out from Cambridge to the Yellow Barn and have a jolly evening away from the case: lots of drink, good food, perhaps some dancing.’ Then he drives back to Cambridge through the cold night.

I’ve ordered a copy of Welcome Death, the second of the two books featuring Sir Richard Cherrington, and hope that it is as entertaining as the first.

During the aforementioned brother-in-law conversation another book was mentioned to me: The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths (this also sounded familiar until the next day I realised I was thinking of the excellent At the Crossing Places by Kevin Crossley-Holland, both are about liminal places in their own ways). I decided to give it a try, although I must admit I don’t enjoy a great deal of modern detective fiction, often finding it gratuitously unpleasant, tediously formulaic and if in a series boringly repetitive, or just not very well written, and sometimes all of the above. It’s Griffiths’ first novel, and I was pleasantly surprised as it was very well crafted for a first novel; she really does know how to tell a story, I found it progressively harder to put down, near the end walking round the house reading it. Although it finished rather earlier than I expected as there is a chapter of her next novel at the end which is designed to fill up space and disappoint those who assume the book they’ve bought is filled with the current story as one might expect.

The story’s told from the viewpoint of Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist, nearly forty, slightly overweight, a cat-lover with relationship problems, living in a lonely part of the Norfolk coast. The police, investigating the disappearances of two young girls, one ten years ago, the other recent, ask her to help when they find a child’s bones. They turn out to be ancient, but, of course, Ruth becomes entangled in a web of intrigue and red herrings, finding her own life threatened. There are some very good twists and turns, and although I did decide who the criminal was early on (and was right) there were plenty of things thrown in to make me doubt it.

Having more than a passing interest in archaeology I did find her explanations of archaeological minutiae to Harry Nelson (the policeman) a little irritating (could he really be that intelligent yet so ignorant?), but they were short and easily skimmed through. The locus is the site of a fictionalised version of Seahenge, she does give credit to Francis Pryor for his ‘marvellous book’, upon which she has obviously drawn heavily.

More unfortunately, Elly Griffiths didn’t “write about what you know” when one gets down to practical archaeology. This is Ruth digging the first set of (Iron Age) bones: ‘This time her trowel grates against metal. Still working slowly and meticulously, Ruth reaches down and pulls the object free from the mud.’ The ‘object’ is a torque. Normal archaeological technique for something like that would be to excavate the block of earth it’s in and excavate it in the lab, rather than wrenching it from the ground. Later on she digs up another in similar fashion; a further bony discovery turns out to be another ancient skeleton (upsettingly and rather fortuitously found in the back garden of the house of one of the missing children), which she excavates single-handed: ‘An hour later, Ruth has bagged up the bones and sent them to the university lab for dating.’

Notwithstanding this slight irritant, this is a book worth reading, and I’ll read more by her, I was particularly taken by her sense of place. Series detectives have to be particularly special to maintain my interest for more than two or three books, so it’ll be interesting to see whether these characters develop enough to hold my interest. Elly Griffiths is a very promising crime writer.

It’s interesting, and many others have written about why so many (and often the more gothic of) detective novels are set in East Anglia. For example: Gladys Mitchell, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Ruth Rendell, Margery Allingham, P D James, Alan Hunter – all have set novels in the region to a greater or lesser extent, some with more success in the descriptive department than others. The list is more extensive if you include the flatter bits of Lincolnshire as being in East Anglia rather than Holland.

Anyone looking back through this blog would notice that it has been more than a little moribund for quite a while, but I guess blogs are supposed to reflect the life and activities of the person writing the blog, so there you are, and I hope it’s going to be a little more active from now on.

P.S. Update 12 October: I’ve now read Welcome Death, and although it was quite enjoyable, it wasn’t anywhere near as good as The Cambridge Murders. In the first book Cherrington is an incompetent amateur sleuth who bumbles, but in the second he’s morphed into a genuine amateur detective. The action has moved from Cambridge to south Wales (Glyn Daniel was born in Barry and started his university education at Cardiff, so he knows the area), the book is much more pedestrian than the first, and far less memorable. The last page of Welcome Death has a lead-in to a third novel with  Cherrington being invited to investigate a murder in France by his friend from the Sûreté, but there were no more detective novels.

Cornwall and Port Sunlight Part Two (which is not about Cornwall or Port Sunlight at all, really)

Notwithstanding the many attractions of staying in Port Sunlight, we did go further afield. The Clwydian Range is an area I have never been to, and it’s a much underrated part of Wales. The scenery here inspired much of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry, underground there are a number of caves and passageways in the limestone, the longest known cave system is over a mile long.

Geologically interesting, this area’s rocks and fossils were studied round the turn of the C20 by pioneer geologists, dating the rocks using graptolites (they were pioneers both in that geology was still working things out, and also that they were women); Charles Darwin visited the area as an assistant to Adam Sedgwick who was mapping the strata of the area. Silurian mudstones with limestone outcrops, which give some spectactular scenery, for example at the Loggerheads Country Park; this is an old lead and zinc mining area, the name here having arisen from a Victorian dispute over the area’s mineral rights which lasted for several decades. The path through the woods along the river valley is called The Leete (i.e. ‘leat’), passing a giant wheelpit which once housed a 40-foot waterwheel to pump water from the Glan Alyn Mine. This is karst country, and a short way uphill the River Alyn’s bed becomes dry, so presumably the 3-mile leat, built to supply power to dewater the mine, was puddled or similar. I’m sure it worked efficiently as it was the product of one of my historical heroes, John Taylor, a nineteenth-century mining entrepreneur and engineer, who was also responsible for the Tavistock Canal in Devon (back in the Tamar and Tavy Valleys). He lived at Coed Du House, where his friend Felix Mendelssohn visited him, writing several works inspired by the countryside thereabouts, including The Rivulet and Son and Stranger. The return path follows the edge of the wooded area, with views across farmland towards further hills, and then across the top of the limestone cliffs before descending to the  ‘tea garden’ by the river. Originally bought and developed by the Crosville Bus Company in 1926, it was a favourite destination for charabanc excursions from Liverpool, currently the home of Caffi Florence, which provided excellent tea and cakes.

Our slightly longer walk was from the car park in Bwlch Penbarras to Moel Famau, but I must admit I hadn’t anticipated the path being so wide and surfaced – the map was a bit redundant as there was a 2-metre wide route carved across the hill, leading to the Jubilee Tower on the summit of Moel Famau. (The pretty patterns  are due to heather management.) The tower was built in 1810 for George III’s Jubilee, but they had trouble raising enough money so it was built from rubble masonry rather than ashlar, and it never was finished. The rubble construction probably contributed to the tower’s collapse after a prolonged and severe storm; the base was consolidated in the 1960s as a viewpoint. It was a relatively clear day, and so Cadair Idris and the Snowdon massif were visible to the west; eastwards the view was across to the Dee Estuary, the Wirral, and Merseyside, but unfortunately as this view is across the flat part of Flintshire towards the Cheshire Plain, the astonishingly large and ugly cement factory at Padeswood dominates the view in a particularly displeasing way. It would have looked much better if they had built it in a big hole, or upside down, or not at all.

There’s a string of Iron Age hillforts along the Clwydian Range at quite regular spacing, which probably related to tribal boundaries – each area having a share of the more fertile Vale of Clwyd to the west and the less fertile uplands for summer grazing. The medieval parishes may well respect these boundaries. Moel y Gaer is, unusually for a hillfort, on a spur and overlooked from the main ridge of the range, looking like a tonsure.

Our return journey took us past Loggerheads and Caffi Florence, so we revisited the tea garden; then it was back to Port Sunlight via the less built-up central part of the Wirral, which still has some of the feel of rural antiquity, it has grown organically and gradually rather than been hurriedly built with no regard to the landscape. Driving along the New Chester Road (A41) it’s hard to imagine that Sir Gawain had problems in the wilderness of the Wirral (although the poet had to alliterate) as he searched for the Green Knight, but this relatively undeveloped part of the area is still farmland and even has the odd bit of thatch.

Speke Hall was another day’s outing. It’s amazing that it’s still standing, as it has Liverpool John Lennon Airport on three sides, and it’s a little surreal turning from a road that is typically ugly airport-edge development into the drive of a Tudor manor house with a Victorian interior (William Morris wallpapers included).

The train service from Port Sunlight was excellent, and so we used it to go to Chester, fulfilling a long-held ambition of mine to walk the circuit of the walls, as well as a general look round the town. Another day we took the train to Birkenhead, where I had a look round Hamilton Square (“the most Grade I listed buildings in one place in England after Trafalgar Square” as I heard and read several times) which has Birkenhead Town Hall – which the local council has up for sale (although with a new Labour administration I’m not sure what’s going to happen there). I also took a return visit to Birkenhead Park, which was the first publicly funded civic park, designed by Joseph Paxton, and the template for the design of Central Park in New York; in addition it has the recent addition of a particularly ugly visitor centre. We also had a ride on the Mersey ferry.

I was sad to leave Port Sunlight. To make our holiday suitably rectangular we drove home to Surrey via Leeds, where we picked my daughter up as she had finished university for the summer, spending the afternoon at the Abbey House Museum.

P.S. Regarding the Second World War pillboxes I mentioned in part one, I’ve since discovered that the collection of WWII defences in that area are of national importance – there’s an interesting report here.

The Penny Dreadfuls Present: Revolution

I’ve enjoyed The Penny Dreadfuls’ previous radio outings: The Brothers Faversham and More Brothers Faversham, and so was pleased to have tickets to watch the recording of their latest venture, Revolution, on the 15th June. The downside was, as always, the fact that having a ticket doesn’t guarantee getting in, which means that taking a book is essential. This gives you something to do when you arrive outside the BBC Radio Theatre early to get in the queue, in which you have to stand for some time (45 minutes or so) until the doors open; the queue then inches forward as it makes its way through the airport-style security; and then one has to hang around in the holding room for an hour or so, although I am impressed at the reasonableness of the prices at the snack bar run by Aramark.

Come the appointed time everyone files down the corridors and into the Radio Theatre, and then, when everyone is seated, there’s another wait of half an hour or so. This is frustrating, as I would like to wander round and have a closer look at the Art Deco bas-reliefs on the lower walls.

This has been the same for everything I have been to at the BBC, and when it has been a very popular show quite a lot of the latter part of the queue has been turned away. To be fair to the BBC it’s also the same with recordings of TV and radio programmes being made by independent producers, but I’m sure there must be a better method of ensuring a full audience other than disappointing (in some cases) an awful lot of people.

Be that as it may, I hadn’t really taken much notice of the details of what I was going to see, and had assumed that it was the recording of an episode of a new series by the Penny Dreadfuls; it turned out, however, to be an hour-long Saturday Play for BBC Radio 4. After the execution of her father, Louis XVI, his 16-year-old daughter Marie-Thérèse was held in solitary confinement in the Temple Tower, not knowing what had happened to the rest of her family. During this period she had a visit from Robespierre, and, although nothing is know of what was said, this play recreates their conversation, and events of the Terror, with jokes.

What I also had no idea of was that the part of Robespierre was played by Richard E Grant, who seemed to enjoy every minute of it, frequently to be seen laughing at others’ lines; Sally Hawkins played Marie-Thérèse.

The play that was broadcast this afternoon was pretty much what we heard, a few lines were rerecorded at the end, as well as some assorted crowd noise and a ‘Hurrah!’ from the audience, but the play is practically as live. And it’s very funny. Although I would imagine it helps to have a rough idea of what happened during the French Revolution, it’s certainly not essential. It’s on the BBC iPlayer for a week, so hurry up and listen.

Cornwall and Port Sunlight

Mary Martin held her biennial art exhibition recently, from 29 May to 5 June, in its usual location, St Dominic village hall. I first went to an exhibition of hers about 20 years ago, by chance driving past on the last day. In those days (pre-children) we had a fair bit of disposable income, but unfortunately, as it was the last day, all the paintings were sold.

I’ve subsequently admired her work (in particular the very large painting which is on the wall of the barn at Cotehele), but it was only two years ago that I was able to find out about her exhibition in advance, so was able to go, this time on the first day. Lots of the paintings were sold then, too, but we have had one on our living room wall for the last two years.

This year, Virginia Spiers was kind enough to send an invitation to the private view on Saturday 28 May. Unfortunately I had already booked a holiday that week staying at Port Sunlight on the Wirral, but with some persuasion of family members I arranged to go down to Cornwall on the Friday night to attend the exhibition on the following morning. The paintings were sublime. I have a preference for the Cornish ones myself, but that’s because I think Mary captures the beauty of the Tamar Valley so well, and it’s an area I’m very fond of.

As a bonus, we now have to go back in a month or so to collect the picture we bought, and the fact we bought one helps justify our travelling from Surrey to Cheshire via Cornwall. We fortified our souls for the motorway journey to the Wirral by wandering round Cotehele Quay, garden, and Gallery, as well as having lunch at the Edgcumbe Arms

Port Sunlight is a wonderful place too. Driving up the New Chester Road I told my daughter that we were very nearly there, and her face fell, but turning off that main road into Port Sunlight is a little like passing through the back of the wardrobe, or stepping out of the shack when the tornado has passed. From the sort of drab, faceless twentieth-century ribbon development found on any arterial road in any conurbation, to late nineteenth/early twentieth century garden village, Nearly all the buildings are Grade II listed, although I was very disappointed with the Lutyens houses (disappointing on two levels – not as good as most of the other buildings in the village, and not anywhere near as good as anything else of his I’ve seen). Lever employed a number of the best architects of the day to design blocks of housing, and the effect is very pleasing, with no two stretches of buildings being exactly the same. The houses had bathrooms and gardens, and there were large areas of allotments for vegetable growing. It’s true to its ‘Garden Village’ label, as well, with vast areas of greenery and flowers.

There are things of historical interest in the surrounding area, too. Bromborough Pool has a model village, built for the workers of Price’s Patent Candle Company half a century before Port Sunlight, small but with its own school and church, and now looking a little forlorn among the retail and light industrial parks. Between Port Sunlight and Bromborough Pool, the bridge over the River Dibbins has World War II pillboxes. Driving through I had seen the two at either side of the southern end of the bridge, but it would appear that there’s one at the northern end too.

The Lady Lever Art Gallery is a nationally important gallery; the current exhibition is The Finishing Touch: women’s accessories, 1830-1940. The gallery has some excellent Pre-Raphaelite works, including, for example, The Blessed Damozel by Dante Gabriel Rosetti.

What’s astonishing is that this was all from the pocket of one man – William Hesketh Lever, later Viscount Leverhulme, and, not only did he build this company village, he also was a benefactor elsewhere, including his home town of Bolton. When he retired he bought the Isle of Lewis in Scotland.

The house we stayed in was wonderful, more nondescript than most in the village, but faultlessly appointed, and next-door-but-one to the museum; we spent two days just looking round the village at the houses, sculptures, war memorial, and gardens, and going to the gallery and museum. We also bought some Sunlight soap, and sampled the tearooms which are located in the old post office, opposite the station.

A Guide to Port Sunlight by Edward Hubbard and Michael Shippobottom  is an architectural guide and history, but also has a couple of chapters designed to use while walking round the village making it a true guide.

To be continued…

Brian Aldiss, John Clute, Michael Moorcock and Norman Spinrad at the British Library

The OED says: New Wave, n. and adj. Forms: also with lower-case initials. Etymology: < NEW adj. + WAVE n.  2 b. With the. A loose movement in science fiction writing from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, characterized by an experimental approach to narrative structures and language and an emphasis on nuanced social, moral, or psychological conflict rather than on technological concerns. Now hist.

They were a disparate bunch, and I’m not sure whether it was the familiarity of anyone specific, or the general unconventional (or Conventional) appearance of science fiction fans, but a number of them looked vaguely familiar. Someone was explaining to somebody else that a third party wasn’t there as Stonehenge had taken priority; a number of those present looked as though they spiritually belonged their too. There were some younger people around, but on the whole it was, depressingly, a predominantly old and male audience.

The theme of the evening was the Sixties ‘new wave’, and in particular, New Worlds magazine. On the stage last night were Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, John Clute, Norman Spinrad, and Roz Kaveney, the chair.

As a discussion it did seem a little lacking in direction, however, and when Kaveney did attempt to steer it somewhere it wasn’t back on course (as it didn’t appear to have a course); but there were some interesting moments. In the Q&A an audience member announced they had come over from Arizona to attend – it certainly wasn’t worth doing that.

Moorcock explained that it was his intention to make science fiction more literate, and to create a new literature out of it which was popular as well as good. He facilitated the publishing of otherwise previously rejected stories – once he had published it, other publishers saw it as publishable. Spinrad explained than an example was his Bug Jack Barron, which SF publishers said wasn’t SF, and mainstream publishers wouldn’t publish because it was: Doubleday said they would publish it if he took out all the sex and politics. John Clute said that New Worlds’ strength lay in its policy of ‘you do what you will’, and the witness of your peers, although it wasn’t recalled as a cosy clique. Moorcock remembered it as acrimonious, even leading to fisticuffs, people being ‘at daggers drawn’: their commonality was that noone else would publish their work, for example Disch’s Camp Concentration and Moorcock’s own Jerry Cornelius stories. John Clute pointed out that several American ‘new wave’ writers (e.g. Disch, Sladek) came to the UK to popularity, but never were or have been particularly successful in the US.

There was some discussion about why women were not more represented, and I think it was Spinrad who said it was a bit like a boys’ club – Aldiss suggested that at that time most of them had been through National Service, which coloured their outlook. Moorcock certainly has championed women writers in the past, and there was a joint encomium to Joanna Russ, and to a lesser extent, Doris Lessing (Aldiss asked the others, ‘Have any of you had an opera¹ based on your work?’, to which Moorcock retorted ‘No, but would a concept album² count?’).

There was discussion, too, about the damage genre does to fiction – Hugo Gernsback is blamed for inventing the name ‘scientifiction’, which was rapidly changed by the fans to ‘science fiction’, and thence ‘scifi’ (which I find particularly abominable), and SF – Moorcock used the term ‘speculative fiction’ for a while, but dislikes the idea of genres at all.

Aldiss had been told by a group of academic women that they liked reading SF, not for the science, but for the sense of dislocation and disorientation that it gave them, and that made a big impression upon him.

Brian Aldiss always seems a cheerful fellow, I’ve only spoken to him once, in a hotel in Brighton in 1979, when he inadvertently bought me a pint (so inadvertently I don’t think he knew at the time he’d done it), so it was interesting to have an insight into his state of mind when he wrote Greybeard. He had just had an unpleasant marriage breakup, had lost contact with his children, and was living in a destitute state in one room.

He talked about his forthcoming novel, called Finches of War. It’s set on a Mars that has been colonised by (mainly female) humans, but because of the lower gravity all the pregnancies end in stillbirth. Five years before Aldiss was born (so presumably in 1920) his mother had a pregnancy which ended in a stillbirth, and this event resonated through the family’s life – and is obviously still doing so today.

Norman Spinrad was asked about his Iron Dream, he talked about its origin and then other novels which deal with the Holocaust and Nazism – Norman Mailer’s Castle in the Forest and Moorcock’s Pyat sequence

The panel were asked which novels of the period they would recommend, and the list included (I think they’re mostly here) Mythago Wood (BA); The Atrocity Exhibition, Report on Probability A (MM); Camp Concentration, The Müller-Fokker Effect (JC); Barefoot in the Head, the Jerry Cornelius tetralogy, Camp Concentration again, A Clockwork Orange, and Riders of the Purple Wage (NS),

At the end they were asked which of their own works they thought the best. Aldiss said Hellconia; Moorcock Mother London, or the Cornelius books; Spinrad He Walked Among Us; Clute has only written one novel, Appleseed, so his choice was easy. Moorcock pointed out that the proper answer would be ‘whichever lasts’.

At the end, Moorcock leapt to his feet and was out the door with a surprising sprightliness. While I was in the squeeze to get out the door someone behind suggested to his companion than he had been rushing out to the lavatory – but no, he had nipped out before more than a handful of the audience had made their way out and was seated at the signing table already addressing a queue.

This event was part of the British Library’s free exhibition, Out of This World: Science Fiction, but not as you know it, which runs until 25 September. There are a few events connected to  the exhibition, the podcast subscription URL is http://www.bl.uk/whatson/podcasts/podcast122307.xml.

¹ Philip Glass. ² Hawkwind.