Despite the scepticism about vast swathes of the Blogosphere that I expressed in my very first post, I do find a number of blogs particularly useful and try to check on them whenever I can (although pressure of time means that this usually isn't as often as I'd like). There are some superb blogs on my main area of interest, mid- to late-17th century history and especially naval history. Jim Bender's vast labour of love on the Anglo-Dutch wars was a tremendous resource when I was writing Pepys's Navy; it's simply crammed with fascinating detail that it's often impossible to find elsewhere. The impressive Wars of Louis Quatorze does a similar job for the military history of the period. I discovered The Gentleman Administrator's blog quite recently, and like both his quirky approach and insights into some of the less familiar history and literature of the Restoration period. Not really a blog, The Diary of Samuel Pepys developed a brilliantly simple idea - putting the diary online - and expanded it into the best forum about Pepys, his life and times that can be found online. Back to more conventional blogs about naval history, and the Dutch blog Warships Research covers a remarkably diverse range of topics, again often presenting very little known material. Wearing my Naval Dockyards Society hat, I'm also impressed by James Daly's relatively new blog which focuses on Portsmouth but also ranges into many other aspects of history. I also try to check up from time to time on two lively and usually very well informed forums, Sailing Navies 1650-1850 (which covers the literature as well as the history) and The World Naval Ships Forums, which take a similarly broad brush approach to more modern naval matters.
When it comes to my rather more recent career as a writer of fiction, I'm still very much feeling my way into the potential of the Blogosphere. For example, I've yet to make a serious effort to track down the blogs of other authors working in the genre, or those of some of the authors who have particularly influenced me - but now that Blood of Kings has gone to the publisher, with the remaining edits on Mountain of Gold hopefully to be completed shortly, hunting down such resources is high up the 'to do' list for March. However, I recently came across Booksmith's remarkably wide range of online book reviews, and although his tastes are rather more catholic than mine, he's already having an alarming effect on the length of my reading list!
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Scotichronicon
In Edinburgh to complete the very last pieces of research for Blood of Kings, which goes off to the publisher at the end of the week. As ever, I can't fault the National Archives and the National Library of Scotland - invariably friendly, helpful staff, quite unlike the offhand jobsworths one finds so often in the 'great' English repositories, and excellent service, with documents still being brought to one's seat at the former. The city itself always manages to turn up a surprise or two, and on this trip it's been stumbling across the first day (or, more accurately, night) of shooting on the new John Landis film, Burke and Hare, which has a veritable 'who's who' of a cast including Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis in the title roles, along with the likes of Sir Christopher Lee, Tim Curry and Bill Bailey. Unfortunately I didn't see any of them as [a] I didn't know which film was being shot until I saw the details in this morning's paper, [b] I was more intent on finding somewhere to eat. The erstwhile car park at Edinburgh Castle also has an interesting artist's impression of the spur fortification built during the Marian civil war of 1567-73, recently discovered when the area for the military tattoo was being revamped; unfortunately the trench itself was covered over long before I got here and seems to be well on the way to reverting to a car park again.
Wherever I go, I try to read as many local newspapers as possible to get a 'snapshot' of an area and its concerns. It's interesting how these concerns are often similar, regardless of where one goes. Above all, people might be disillusioned with national governments in London, Holyrood, Cardiff or Stormont, but these feelings are as nothing compared to the vitriol directed against local councils. The citizens of Edinburgh have a particularly large cross to bear in the shape of an astonishingly silly and expensive tram system, which seems to be intended primarily to rip up some of the city's principal thoroughfares for as long as possible. How the enlightened city fathers who created the beautiful eighteenth century new town must be spinning in their graves... Unfortunately, though, Edinburgh is by no means the only place to suffer: local government in Britain sometimes seems to be a refuge for the mediocre, the incompetent and the venal, regardless of their political persuasions. Perhaps this is because of the sheer number of brickbats (yes, this one included) that get thrown in their direction, which is hardly likely to engender a sense of public duty. I know I'm wronging many able and highly conscientious councillors and council employees, but the simply crass policies inflicted on virtually every community that I know pretty well suggests that they are in a minority. Just be thankful that very few places have embarked on schemes that are quite as expensive or mismanaged as the Edinburgh tram system...
Wherever I go, I try to read as many local newspapers as possible to get a 'snapshot' of an area and its concerns. It's interesting how these concerns are often similar, regardless of where one goes. Above all, people might be disillusioned with national governments in London, Holyrood, Cardiff or Stormont, but these feelings are as nothing compared to the vitriol directed against local councils. The citizens of Edinburgh have a particularly large cross to bear in the shape of an astonishingly silly and expensive tram system, which seems to be intended primarily to rip up some of the city's principal thoroughfares for as long as possible. How the enlightened city fathers who created the beautiful eighteenth century new town must be spinning in their graves... Unfortunately, though, Edinburgh is by no means the only place to suffer: local government in Britain sometimes seems to be a refuge for the mediocre, the incompetent and the venal, regardless of their political persuasions. Perhaps this is because of the sheer number of brickbats (yes, this one included) that get thrown in their direction, which is hardly likely to engender a sense of public duty. I know I'm wronging many able and highly conscientious councillors and council employees, but the simply crass policies inflicted on virtually every community that I know pretty well suggests that they are in a minority. Just be thankful that very few places have embarked on schemes that are quite as expensive or mismanaged as the Edinburgh tram system...
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Dumbing Down the Past?
They say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and in one sense, there’s no such thing as a bad History programme on TV. Any History on TV is to be welcomed with open arms, if only for the role it can play in remedying the frequently shocking treatment of the subject in our schools (a topic for another day) and the woeful ignorance displayed by the general public (and if you think that’s a bit harsh, watch any daytime quiz show). There are several entire channels devoted to ‘History’, or at least, to those very limited areas of History that production companies think will draw an audience; hence the endless refighting of World War II. It’s easy to assume that the output on these channels will be far less worthy than anything that manages to find airtime on the major terrestrial channels, but in fact the opposite is true. Many of the programmes on the digital channels are made on a comparative shoestring, and fill up their airtime with ‘talking heads’ who are often well qualified (and conveniently cheap) academics. As a result it’s often possible to find real analysis and original ideas on such programmes, delivered by real experts in their fields. The same is true of much of the output of BBC and ITV regional stations, who produce some superb historical programmes. Thus in terms of the broadcasting of History, quantity can equal quality, and often does.
Now contrast that with the situation on the networked terrestrial channels, particularly the BBC. Convinced that only big names and sensationalised, ‘accessible’ scripts will attract viewers, right-on metrocentric production teams install a ‘household name’ such as Messrs Ferguson, Snow, Starkey and Schama, the Jonathan Rosses of broadcast History, and get them to pontificate on anything under the sun, no matter how far it strays from their actual area of expertise. Add the obligatory incessant background music, pretentious photography and flashy editing that permits no more than five minutes on any one topic in case a bored audience switches en masse to MTV or Dave, and you have the modern documentary. This leads to beautifully made but desperately superficial programmes such as Dan Snow’s recent ‘Empire of the Seas’, allegedly a history of the Royal Navy. Despite being eternally grateful to the BBC for broadcasting any naval history at all, I could fill several websites by listing all the deficiencies of this series. For example, a viewer from another planet might assume from it that there had been no such thing as a navy before about 1560, that the 1690s was a period of naval defeat ended only by the creation of the Bank of England (thereby omitting the battles of Barfleur / La Hogue in 1692, which effectively drove the French fleet into port for the rest of the war), and that the navy was responsible for creating the slave trade, rather than being responsible for ending it. Neil Oliver’s recent ‘History of Scotland’ was a more impressive effort, despite Oliver’s presentational style frequently resembling an over-excited puppy. Oliver had more programmes allocated to him than Snow, and although many in the historical establishment in Scotland have criticised his concentration on kings and clans rather than on more politically correct social history, at least Oliver was able to create the sort of coherent narrative that Snow lacked – and was more accurate on matters of detail to boot. Ultimately, a good historical documentary should be based on research as solid as that which goes into a respectable historical book, and above all it should place respect for the facts above superficial audience-pleasing gimmicks. Neil Oliver’s series and much of the output found on the digital channels succeed on those criteria; regrettably, ‘Empire of the Seas’ doesn’t.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Size Isn't Everything
There’s currently much debate about whether or not to continue with the hugely expensive project to build two new 65,000 ton aircraft carriers. These ships, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, will be by far the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy. Even if the project isn’t cancelled outright – and if it isn’t, it’ll only be because of prohibitive penalty clauses, not the navy’s blatantly childish attempt to give them names that would make cancellation politically embarrassing – then it’s been suggested that one could be completed as a commando carrier (despite being far too big and hi-spec for that role) or else sold to India, whose navy is expanding almost as rapidly as that of its former imperial overlord is contracting.
Now, I’m no expert on modern naval matters, although my interest in naval history began as a young ‘warship spotter’ during the 1960s and 1970s. But it seems to me that there are several issues here, and several interesting historical parallels. The very fact that the carriers were ordered at all, or haven’t been cancelled already, can surely be attributed in part to the employment that they’ll provide in Labour strongholds or marginal seats; and, as the saying goes, it’s shurely shome coincidence that final assembly on them is due to take place at Rosyth, immediately adjacent to the constituency of a certain G Brown, MP. No matter how much ministers seek to deny this, there are plenty of precedents – Labour did exactly the same in 1979 when it ordered the Batch 3 Type 42 destroyers in the immediate run-up to a general election, much good that it did former Sub-Lieutenant Jim Callaghan, and many warship orders in the 1920s and 1930s were placed partly to provide employment in desperately depressed shipyard towns.
However, the most senior officers of the Senior Service also seem to be suffering from a very severe case of gigantism. Not only do we have the carrier project, we also have the Type 45 destroyers, so expensive that only six of them will be built, and the Astute-class submarines – only four of which have been ordered so far, primarily because they're ‘more complex than the space shuttle’. Even leaving aside the vexed issues of Trident submarines and the appropriateness or otherwise of the UK’s pretensions to global status, there’s clearly something wrong-headed about the current Royal Navy's priorities, and many others have already commentated on its serious weaknesses vis-a-vis any escalation of the current dispute in the Falklands. Perhaps the explanation is simple enough. Like your present blogger, the most senior officers of the Royal Navy are all children of the 1950s; they entered the service in the 1960s and the 1970s. Therefore it would hardly be surprising if they still retained something of a Cold War mindset – a more charitable interpretation of their enthusiasm for a few huge, expensive warships than suggesting that they might also be driven by inter-service macho posturing. Other former imperial powers, notably France and the Netherlands, have accepted the need for some smaller, less sophisticated vessels that can protect their maritime resources as well as ‘showing the flag’ in their remaining overseas possessions; after all, as many others have said, even the most sophisticated and flexible warship in the world can only be in one place at once. Even the mighty United States Navy, the ultimate repository of naval gigantism, is building smaller, multi-purpose ‘Littoral Combat Ships’. But the Royal Navy still seems to be haunted by the ghost of Jacky Fisher, who scrapped most of the colonial gunboats in the first decade of the twentieth century on the grounds that only big and expensive mattered. Perhaps the other relevant ghost at this particular banquet is the spectre of King Charles I, who launched the Sovereign of the Seas in 1637: a vast, cripplingly expensive warship, completely inappropriate to the actual strategic needs of the country at the time. Sounds familiar? Perhaps some of those responsible for the aircraft carrier project had better hope that history doesn’t repeat itself, because the financial and political ramifications of building such a huge ship ultimately cost Charles his head.
Now, I’m no expert on modern naval matters, although my interest in naval history began as a young ‘warship spotter’ during the 1960s and 1970s. But it seems to me that there are several issues here, and several interesting historical parallels. The very fact that the carriers were ordered at all, or haven’t been cancelled already, can surely be attributed in part to the employment that they’ll provide in Labour strongholds or marginal seats; and, as the saying goes, it’s shurely shome coincidence that final assembly on them is due to take place at Rosyth, immediately adjacent to the constituency of a certain G Brown, MP. No matter how much ministers seek to deny this, there are plenty of precedents – Labour did exactly the same in 1979 when it ordered the Batch 3 Type 42 destroyers in the immediate run-up to a general election, much good that it did former Sub-Lieutenant Jim Callaghan, and many warship orders in the 1920s and 1930s were placed partly to provide employment in desperately depressed shipyard towns.
However, the most senior officers of the Senior Service also seem to be suffering from a very severe case of gigantism. Not only do we have the carrier project, we also have the Type 45 destroyers, so expensive that only six of them will be built, and the Astute-class submarines – only four of which have been ordered so far, primarily because they're ‘more complex than the space shuttle’. Even leaving aside the vexed issues of Trident submarines and the appropriateness or otherwise of the UK’s pretensions to global status, there’s clearly something wrong-headed about the current Royal Navy's priorities, and many others have already commentated on its serious weaknesses vis-a-vis any escalation of the current dispute in the Falklands. Perhaps the explanation is simple enough. Like your present blogger, the most senior officers of the Royal Navy are all children of the 1950s; they entered the service in the 1960s and the 1970s. Therefore it would hardly be surprising if they still retained something of a Cold War mindset – a more charitable interpretation of their enthusiasm for a few huge, expensive warships than suggesting that they might also be driven by inter-service macho posturing. Other former imperial powers, notably France and the Netherlands, have accepted the need for some smaller, less sophisticated vessels that can protect their maritime resources as well as ‘showing the flag’ in their remaining overseas possessions; after all, as many others have said, even the most sophisticated and flexible warship in the world can only be in one place at once. Even the mighty United States Navy, the ultimate repository of naval gigantism, is building smaller, multi-purpose ‘Littoral Combat Ships’. But the Royal Navy still seems to be haunted by the ghost of Jacky Fisher, who scrapped most of the colonial gunboats in the first decade of the twentieth century on the grounds that only big and expensive mattered. Perhaps the other relevant ghost at this particular banquet is the spectre of King Charles I, who launched the Sovereign of the Seas in 1637: a vast, cripplingly expensive warship, completely inappropriate to the actual strategic needs of the country at the time. Sounds familiar? Perhaps some of those responsible for the aircraft carrier project had better hope that history doesn’t repeat itself, because the financial and political ramifications of building such a huge ship ultimately cost Charles his head.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Athos to Aberystwyth
My recent stay in Dubai gave me a chance to enjoy one book that had been on my 'to read' list for months and another that was a chance discovery at the excellent bookshop in Dubai Mall. The former is Malcolm Pryce's 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth', the third in his series of surreal novels set in the Cardiganshire town that I know very well of old. I've also read the first two, and must admit that my internal jury is still out. The concept is simply brilliant - this is an Aberystwyth that exists in a slightly unsettling parallel universe, more noir than any Sidney Greenstreet movie, and set in a Wales scarred by a 1960s Vietnam-like war in Patagonia. Some of Pryce's comic touches and plot devices are sheer genius, perhaps especially so if one knows his setting: his description of the difficulties of gaining access to the National Library of Wales will strike a particularly rib-tickling chord with any reader at that august institution. I also loved his play on Rambo / Rimbaud, although I'd advise Stallone to stick to the former and avoid the latter. But I often find Pryce's vision a little too bleak, and the paperback edition of 'Unbearable Lightness' is undermined by his own publisher's provision of one of the most outrageous plot spoilers I've seen in recent times. Number four in the series, 'Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth', is also on my shelves and rising slowly to the top of the 'to read' list, so perhaps the internal jury will finally return a verdict then.
The chance discovery was Arturo Perez-Reverte's 'The Dumas Club'. I'm a fan of Perez-Reverte's 'Captain Alatriste' series (indeed, it's been a big influence on my own series of 'Quinton Journals') and recently enjoyed the excellent film version, 'Alatriste' starring Viggo Mortensen - a classic case of a seemingly improbable casting that actually works brilliantly. As with Pryce, the plot of 'The Dumas Club' provides a kind of parallel universe, in this case one where the characters of 'The Three Musketeers' seem to take over a group of disparate individuals in a plot that intricately interweaves Richelieu's France with diabolism and the theft of rare books. The loving descriptions of sixteenth and seventeenth century texts that pervade 'The Dumas Club' make the book a bibliophile's delight, although the ending seemed a little flat. Overall, though, it's whetted my appetite for the next Alatriste novel, 'The Man in the Yellow Doublet'; and yes, that's on the 'to read' list too.
The chance discovery was Arturo Perez-Reverte's 'The Dumas Club'. I'm a fan of Perez-Reverte's 'Captain Alatriste' series (indeed, it's been a big influence on my own series of 'Quinton Journals') and recently enjoyed the excellent film version, 'Alatriste' starring Viggo Mortensen - a classic case of a seemingly improbable casting that actually works brilliantly. As with Pryce, the plot of 'The Dumas Club' provides a kind of parallel universe, in this case one where the characters of 'The Three Musketeers' seem to take over a group of disparate individuals in a plot that intricately interweaves Richelieu's France with diabolism and the theft of rare books. The loving descriptions of sixteenth and seventeenth century texts that pervade 'The Dumas Club' make the book a bibliophile's delight, although the ending seemed a little flat. Overall, though, it's whetted my appetite for the next Alatriste novel, 'The Man in the Yellow Doublet'; and yes, that's on the 'to read' list too.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
...or, Confessions of a Reluctant Blogger
It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that I've been dragged kicking and screaming into the blogosphere, but it wouldn't be far short. Until now, I've looked on blogging as a suspiciously self-indulgent activity that also leads to a huge amount of unsourced, prejudiced or simply wrong information getting onto the Internet. BUT...I've finally been persuaded that a blog might be a useful adjunct to my writing, e.g. as a way of promoting my books and, much more importantly, as a means of communicating with my readers and a wider audience. I hope that in a very small way my blog might also give me an opportunity to challenge some of the absurdities about History and related matters that regularly crop up on the Web. I taught History for the best part of 30 years, so in some senses the blog - like my books - will be a natural development from teaching. As far as possible, I always tried to make my lessons interesting, informative and fun (cue comments from ex-students who were bored stiff, no doubt), not always adhering to the strict confines of the curriculum, so I hope to do the same with this blog. The discipline of History - and as I'm fast coming to realise, the writing of fiction as well - seems to be treated too often as a matter of deadly seriousness by many of its practitioners and acolytes, leading to pretentiousness and pomposity on a grand scale. I'll try my best to provide a corrective to those tendencies and to some of the dafter myths that are circulating unchallenged in cyberspace.
Two brief examples to begin with, both of which fall within my alleged area of expertise. Quite a few bloggers seem to want to claim Samuel Pepys as one of their own, in other words as an early proto-blogger - some, indeed, explicitly compare themselves to Pepys. (I won't denigrate them directly by linking to specific examples, but set up a Google Alert for 'Pepys' and you'll find them quickly enough.) Let's leave aside the fact that Pepys was witty, self-aware, perceptive, literate and deeply interested in the world around him, qualities that seem to be absent in many of his would-be successors. More importantly, blogging is all about publishing one's thoughts and deeds to the widest audience possible. What Pepys did was the exact opposite of that. Encoding his diary in shorthand, and then doubly encoding the more intimate passages in an invented hybrid of several European languages, ensured that it would have been almost impossible for any contemporary (particularly his wife) to access his musings. True, he provided a key by which future generations could eventually unlock the code; Pepys had as broad a streak of vanity as many bloggers, but he was determined that only posterity would read his words; and blogs, including this one, by definition aren't written for posterity. So can we please drop the Pepys / blogger comparisons? Secondly, for many months now a story has been doing the rounds of the Internet. It goes something like this: to overcome sailors' superstitions about Fridays, during the 19th century the Royal Navy deliberately build a warship called HMS Friday, launched it on a Friday, sent it to sea on a Friday, etc etc ad nauseam, ending (of course) with the punchline that it set off on its maiden voyage and was never seen again. Sorry, surfers. I've spent far too many days in UK naval archives looking at the original sources that would contain such a story if it was true, and far too many inches of shelf space in my Lair are taken up by the key reference books listing all the ships of the Royal Navy for the last five centuries or so. In a nutshell, then: it didn't happen, it's a complete fiction, it's simply untrue. The person who originally put this story online should be ashamed of themselves; this is probably the most extreme sanction I can advocate for him or her, as in certain quarters hanging people from lampposts or putting them against a wall and shooting them is not necessarily looked upon as politically correct.
Finally, most of the posts in this blog will probably be about matters like these, and hopefully will be considerably shorter. But as an increasingly grumpy fiftysomething, I'm not going to guarantee that I won't occasionally (and, yes, hypocritically) launch into one of the self-indulgent digressions that turned me off blogging for so long. I promise that there won't be much politics (and certainly no overt party politics on one side or any other) and there'll be even less religion. There'll be no crackpot conspiracy theories, unless it's in order to debunk them. There'll be no endless detail about what I did on holiday. But I might sometimes stray into some of life's other important matters, such as the state of Welsh rugby, the decline of the pub and the quest for the perfect toasted cheese sandwich. Who knows?
Two brief examples to begin with, both of which fall within my alleged area of expertise. Quite a few bloggers seem to want to claim Samuel Pepys as one of their own, in other words as an early proto-blogger - some, indeed, explicitly compare themselves to Pepys. (I won't denigrate them directly by linking to specific examples, but set up a Google Alert for 'Pepys' and you'll find them quickly enough.) Let's leave aside the fact that Pepys was witty, self-aware, perceptive, literate and deeply interested in the world around him, qualities that seem to be absent in many of his would-be successors. More importantly, blogging is all about publishing one's thoughts and deeds to the widest audience possible. What Pepys did was the exact opposite of that. Encoding his diary in shorthand, and then doubly encoding the more intimate passages in an invented hybrid of several European languages, ensured that it would have been almost impossible for any contemporary (particularly his wife) to access his musings. True, he provided a key by which future generations could eventually unlock the code; Pepys had as broad a streak of vanity as many bloggers, but he was determined that only posterity would read his words; and blogs, including this one, by definition aren't written for posterity. So can we please drop the Pepys / blogger comparisons? Secondly, for many months now a story has been doing the rounds of the Internet. It goes something like this: to overcome sailors' superstitions about Fridays, during the 19th century the Royal Navy deliberately build a warship called HMS Friday, launched it on a Friday, sent it to sea on a Friday, etc etc ad nauseam, ending (of course) with the punchline that it set off on its maiden voyage and was never seen again. Sorry, surfers. I've spent far too many days in UK naval archives looking at the original sources that would contain such a story if it was true, and far too many inches of shelf space in my Lair are taken up by the key reference books listing all the ships of the Royal Navy for the last five centuries or so. In a nutshell, then: it didn't happen, it's a complete fiction, it's simply untrue. The person who originally put this story online should be ashamed of themselves; this is probably the most extreme sanction I can advocate for him or her, as in certain quarters hanging people from lampposts or putting them against a wall and shooting them is not necessarily looked upon as politically correct.
Finally, most of the posts in this blog will probably be about matters like these, and hopefully will be considerably shorter. But as an increasingly grumpy fiftysomething, I'm not going to guarantee that I won't occasionally (and, yes, hypocritically) launch into one of the self-indulgent digressions that turned me off blogging for so long. I promise that there won't be much politics (and certainly no overt party politics on one side or any other) and there'll be even less religion. There'll be no crackpot conspiracy theories, unless it's in order to debunk them. There'll be no endless detail about what I did on holiday. But I might sometimes stray into some of life's other important matters, such as the state of Welsh rugby, the decline of the pub and the quest for the perfect toasted cheese sandwich. Who knows?
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