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Monday, June 27, 2011

The Saga Continues!

I'm delighted to be able to confirm that Old Street will be publishing the next three 'journals of Matthew Quinton'! The third book, The Blast That Tears The Skies - set against the twin backdrops of the battle of Lowestoft and the great plague of 1665 - will be published next year; I'm currently revising it, when not distracted by Wimbledon or the urge to read yet more of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I'm only just catching up with. The fourth book, The Lion of Midnight, is set early in 1666. Most of the action takes place in Sweden, then at the height of its power as one of the largest and most feared empires in Europe; as previously mentioned in this blog, I had a very enjoyable time in Sweden earlier in the year,  carrying out some really productive research in Kalmar and Gothenburg. I've already started writing Lion and will be getting back to it full time after completing the revisions of Blast. The fifth book will centre on the Four Days' Battle of 1666, which as its name implies was by some distance the greatest battle of the entire sailing navy era, while the sixth will culminate in one of the most famous events in British history - the Great Fire of London.

Thanks to Ben Yarde-Buller of Old Street for his faith in the series, and to my agent Peter Buckman for all his hard work in bringing about this outcome. I'm really looking forward to taking the series forward, and to placing Matthew and his friends at the heart of some of the most dramatic events of the seventeenth century!  

Friday, June 10, 2011

Lord High Incompetence

Great news about the Duke of Edinburgh being made Lord High Admiral - I'm looking forward to the imminent restoration of various other aspects of the 17th century navy, such as the Navy Board, generals-at-sea and scurvy. However, coverage of the story reveals just how shockingly ignorant much of our media is about naval history; and if the media can't get it right, is there any wonder why the general public is so woefully navy-blind? (See my last post.) Take, for instance, this apparently risible piece of reportage from the Daily Telegraph, surely the one national paper that ought to be able to get this sort of story right. Entirely honorary and delegated to commissioners after 1628? Tell that to the Duke of York, who commanded fleets in battle as Lord High Admiral in 1665 and 1672, to the various other individuals who held the office prior to 1709, and to King William IV, who held it, as Duke of Clarence, in 1827-8. But let's dig a little deeper. Like so much modern reporting, the Telegraph piece is simply a rehash of the Palace's own press release - a bad rehash, too, as it omits the important qualifying comment about powers being passed to and from the Board. But overall, the basic error lies within the press release, which is where the idiocy about the position becoming 'entirely honorary' originates. So if the serried ranks of flunkies and spin doctors around the royal family can't get it right, what chance does an overworked reporter have, and then what chance, in turn, does poor old Joe Public have? 

Monday, June 6, 2011

Dragged kicking and screaming into the Eighteenth Century

After setting it up a couple of years ago but never quite taking the plunge, I've started using my Twitter account. Hopefully it'll be a good way to interact with readers, and my initial intention is to use it as something of a running commentary on the process of writing - especially as I'm about to get under way properly on the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight. But it's clearly an interesting time to be getting more au fait with the twitterverse. While I have absolutely no intention of discussing the nocturnal activities of ageing unshaven nonentities with hyperactive libidos who happen to get paid vast amounts for kicking a ball for 90 minutes on Saturdays, it'll be good to get some first hand knowledge of the pros and cons of something which seems capable of bringing down governments and slaughtering some of the sacred cows of the British legal system!

Meanwhile, it's Seafarers Awareness Week, one of the most important campaigns attempting to counteract the rampant 'sea blindness' in modern Britain, and View from the Lair is happy to do its bit for the cause. Their website carries the results of a survey which suggests that a quarter of children think Captain Jack Sparrow is the country's most famous seaman. I'm probably more relaxed about this than some of my colleagues: the fact that 75% of children presumably named a real seaman, despite the best efforts of the National Curriculum in schools to pretend that the country never had a naval and maritime history, actually strikes me as quite encouraging, especially in the light of the many far more dire surveys of the state of historical knowledge among young people. (Here's a particularly cracking example from a few years ago.) Moreover, the sea has probably never had so much exposure on TV (e.g. the new series of Coast following hard on the heels of Britain's Secret Seas), the National Maritime Museum is the country's 6th most visited museum and Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is in the top 15 of most visited historic sites, and if the population really is so 'sea blind', how did Turner's Fighting Temeraire get to be voted the country's favourite painting? I reckon the reality is that the country isn't so much 'sea blind' as 'navy blind'. That's due in part to ignorant politicians - of all persuasions - whose thinking about defence extends no further than having enough soldiers who can be sent out to invade and get killed in assorted deserts; but a lot of it also has to be the fault of the navy itself, thanks to years of complacency, incompetent leadership and utterly crass PR. Come to think of it, those might be themes to return to on Twitter...