Simon Guerrier's Blog, page 11

Interviews for Air Quality News, Infotech, Macclesfield Now, Social Care Today

I posted last year a bunch of interviews I conducted for technology news site Infotec. Since then, I've done a load more for Infotec and the other titles published by Spacehouse. Here they are:

Air quality in the archives

The Borthwick Institute for Archives, in York, boasts thousands of precious old documents — including the archives of Frankie Howerd and Sir Alan Ayckbourn — and closely monitors air quality to hold back the ravages of time. I spoke to Gary Brannan, Keeper of Archives and Research Collections. 

Reducing falls in care homes with Earzz acoustic monitoring

Dr. Pradyumna Thiruvenkatanathan, Founder and CEO of Earzz, explained to me how intelligent acoustic monitoring can transform the provision of care, with benefits for residents and staff.

Air quality for monsters at Millennium FX

Award-winning prosthetics in TV and film are made using hazardous chemicals. I spoke to Neill Gorton at Millennium FX about the tech employed to keep his staff safe from the creatures they’re building.

Shirah Bamber, Preston’s new Innovation Ambassador

Preston City Council has announced the appointment of Shirah Bamber as its new Innovation Ambassador, tasked with raising the profile of the city as a place for all things tech.

Mapping safe cycle routes across Oxfordshire

Easy-to-use Cyclox mapping software provides safe routes for cyclists across the city of Oxford and the whole of Oxfordshire. The result is more people than ever getting on their bikes. I spoke to Cllr Emily Kerr from Oxford City Council and Robin Tucker, Co-chair of the Coalition for Health Streets and Active Travel (CoHSAT), to learn what was involved.

Sensory Inclusive Schools

Beth Smithson is a former occupational therapist in the NHS who now helps to tackle school avoidance and refusal by better understanding our senses.

Air taxis in the UK

Flying cars were once a dream of science-fiction but eVTOL air taxis now offer a real prospect of greener, cleaner transport. I spoke to Jeremy Howitt (Future Flight Campaign Lead at the Snowdonia Aerospace Centre), Shazan Siddiqi, (Senior Technology Analyst at IDTechEx) and John Goudie (Founder and CEO of SLiNK-TECH).

Thought Formation newsletter

Dr Niall Boyce produces a free weekly newsletter that aims to keep us up-to-date on the latest advances in mental health science.

Schoolkids swim the Channel

Each year, pupils aged 12-15 from Beech Hall School in Tytherington swim the English Channel. Yes, really! I interviewed headteacher James Allen about the ambitious programme.

Sparta Global kickstarts careers in tech

David Rai, Co-Founder and CEO of Sparta Global, told me how his company has gone about training thousands of people from diverse backgrounds in tech-based skills, and found them new careers.

Central Heating for Cities

Luca Grella, Innovation Programme Delivery Manager at UK Power Networks, told me about the Heatropolis heat network being developed in the Kings Cross area of London to provide heat and power to premises including Google and Nike’s UK HQs, and 2,400 homes.
Keeping children safe online with Ontaro
Ontaro is an online safety app that monitors content, manages screen time and filters websites to ensure children are kept safe — while respecting their privacy. I spoke to director and founder Tony Paskin.
The Exchange shares the reactions of people in social care to lockdown
Helen Slevin (Co-Director of Filament Projects CIC) and Barney Heywood (Co-Artistic Director of Stand + Stare) told me about the touring listening booth that allows us to hear service users and those working in the social care sector speak about their experience of the Covid 19 lockdown.

Karla’s Choice - a John le Carré novel, by Nick Harkaway

“In the early spring of nineteen sixty-three, there was a rumour — unconfirmed and a little scandalous — that George Smiley might almost be happy.” (p. 26)

I was going to ask for this for Christmas and then couldn’t wait: a new le Carré novel despite the author no longer being in the field, and a new adventure for spymaster George Smiley, for all he long ago retired.

Whereas Silverview (2022) was written by le Carré and finished after his death by his son, the novelist Nick Harkaway, this is an entirely new novel by Harkaway. Or rather, it isn’t, because it’s been devised to fit neatly between two of the old classics, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). As well as owlish George Smiley, it features lots of familiar characters from both those books — such as Control, Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam, Bill Haydon, Alec Leamas, Connie Sachs and Ann Smiley — and makes subtle play with the fact we know what is to be befall some of them in events to come.

Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon. People other than Arthur Conan-Doyle were writing Sherlock Holme stories while Doyle was still alive. Kingsley Amis wrote Colonel Sun (1968) four years after the death of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. New stories continue to be written about Bond and Holmes and whoever else, some continuing their adventures into the present day, other working as period pieces, looking back to the time when the original adventures were set. (See, to choose an example entirely at random, Sherlock Holmes and the Great War.)

That’s the big point of difference here: le Carré was grappling with the contemporary world, all gritty, cynical realism. Karla’s Choice is a historical novel, conjured as much from depictions of the previous books on TV and in film. It is a pastiche.

I think it’s a good one: it feels authentic and I suspect would work well if you (re)read the Smiley novels in order, inserting this one into place. The familiar characters are well captured, Harkaway acknowledging in his both author’s note and acknowledgements the debt he owes to the various actors who’ve realised the characters on screen. At the same time, new characters, whose fates we can’t be sure of, are also nicely delineated and feel in-keeping.

In the opening pages, Harkaway accepts that the very idea of a new Smiley novel not written by his dad will be unthinkable to some. He then invites us to see, with him, how well he’s achieved his aim. That’s clever: co-opting us, perhaps even seducing us despite ourselves. We become part of the game.

And that matches the plot. Susanna Gero, a Hungarian refugee with a new life in London working for a literary agent, answers the door of her office to a strange man — who has orders to kill her boss. Susanna’s quick-thinking and brave response leads to attention from the Circus, and soon she’s embroiled in the secret world. George Smiley should not be involved as he recently retired, following the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But he and Susanna find that once ensnared with the ‘grey mistress’ of the service, it is all-but impossible to escape…

As well as authentic, it’s an enjoyable, engaging story — and, in its last section, extremely tense. The period setting with Smiley in his prime works better, I think, than seeing the character living on agelessly into the modern age, almost but not quite giving his view on Brexit, as per le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017). 

But at the same time something is lost in making Smiley a figure from history. There’s no longer that tantalising sense of this all being real and now and incredibly relevant, of le Carré using a fictional spy story to raise the curtain a bit on what's really going on. 

There’s one moment where we come close, an echo of today in this echo of the past. As the stakes get ever higher, Smiley considers what difference it will make to the wider world if he is successful in besting his opposite number, the Russia spymaster known as Karla. 

“Would Moscow abruptly suffer a shortage of brutal and brutalised men, thinking to make good whatever sinkholes were in them by destroying the West? By finally achieving Peter the Great’s ambitions and standing Russia at the pinnacle of the world? Would the Cold War, with all its terrible arsenals and its power to compress and unshaped ordinary lives, come to an end? Would the nuclear demon go back to hell, and the fear of a Russian land invasion sweeping everything before it, not stopping until it reached Normandy and Lagos and Palermo, fade into history because Karla fell to Smiley’s unknightly lance?” (p. 220)

And then, in the end, there is the choice Karla makes that gives the book its title. It is not what Karla does but the thought of how Smiley will need to respond that is what resonates.

See also me on:

Titanium Noir (2023) by Nick HarkawaySilverview (2021) by John le Carré and Nick Harkaway A Legacy of Spies (2017) by John le CarréThe Mission Song (2006) by John le CarréThe Constant Gardener (2005 film version of 2001 novel by John le Carré) The Secret Pilgrim (1990) by John le CarréSmiley’s People (1979) by John le CarréTinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (1974) by John le CarréThe Honourable Schoolboy (1977) by John le CarréThe Looking-Glass War (1965) by John le Carré

Something Who podcast #102 and #103

The latest episodes of Doctor Who podcast Something Who compare 1975 story The Ark in Space with 2010 episode The Beast Below. I thought I knew both adventures pretty well, but the juxtaposition really helps to open up both. You can probably hear the tired old cogs of my brain clacking away... 

Joining host Richard Smith are astronomy writer Giles Sparrow, Rick aka @brickpandorica and me.

Something Who #102: 70s Flare (The Ark in Space)Something Who #103: A Whale of a Time (The Beast Below)Giles was an advisor on my recently published book Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac . Also pertinent to the discussion is the audio version of the first-draft scripts for The Ark in Space, which I produced last year.

George Markstein and the Prisoner, ed. Roger Goodman

George Markstein (1926 — but perhaps 1929 — to 1987) was a journalist and writer, probably best known as script editor of the first 13 episodes of The Prisoner (1967-68). He also appears in the title sequence, as the bald bureaucrat at whom Patrick McGoohan crossly resigns. Ironically, it was Markstein who crossly left the series.

I’ve been interested in Markstein since reading about his falling out with fellow writer David Whitaker when the latter was sent to Moscow in July 1969 on behalf of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain to protest the treatment of Solzhenitsyn. At the guild’s AGM on 31 May the following year, Markstein made a number of claims about what had happened in Moscow, despite not having been there. On at least one point he had to apologise because the source of his claims, writer Lewis Greifer, was there to rebut them. See pp. 333-334 of my book for more.

Greifer also crops up in this slim volume, available to buy from Porteirion (where The Prisoner was filmed), which sketches a fascinating portrait of Markstein — or rather, of what we don’t know about him. 

“It escapes me why GM’s birthdate should have come so contentious in website discussions,” says his friend Sidney Allinson in the introduction (p. 4). “In fact, he was born in 1926” — though no source is given for this fact — “which would make him about 21 years of age in 1947, which was when I knew him. We both worked as reporters with The Southport Guardian newspaper [in Merseyside.] At the time, for reasons best known to himself, he presented himself as being an American, complete with an authentic-sounding accent.”

We can understand why, in the years immediately after the Second World War, a German-born young man would want to hide his real accent and identity. In what follows, we learn Markstein also presented himself as Canadian though it’s thought he was actually born in Berlin and moved to England with his Jewish mother before the outbreak of war. 

In her contribution to this book, “A Cooler Shade of George Markstein” (pp. 10-17) Catherine Nemeth Frumerman says mother and son moved to London in 1935 when George was about nine, adding that he was born Gustav Georg to actress Grete Maria Markstein — who in turn claimed to be the daughter of Albert Einstein. The source for this is apparently Michele Zackheim's Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, which is says here was published by Riverhead Books in 2000. Frumerman says this information may have come from Markstein’s business partner Jacqui Lyons, who is thanked but not directly quoted by Zackheim.

But Ricky Davy in “So Who Was George Markstein?” (pp. 20-52) says Zackheim’s book was published in 1999 and is more sceptical about what is claimed.

“The book is an account of the life [of] a German woman named Grete Markstein, who believed herself to be the daughter of Einstein. Her son, Gustav Georg Markstein, it is claimed, later became George Markstein (via a name change to Herschdoerfer following Greta’s 1935 marriage). Knowledge in the book of this man ends in 1947 in Cheshire, several years after Grete passed away, and no tangible proof is given that George and Georg are the same person, although the tale does have some plausibility.” (p. 22)

Cheshire borders Merseyside, where Allinson worked with Markstein in 1947. So maybe, maybe, he was the same person as Georg. But was he really Einstein's grandson? In fact, Einstein's daughter Lieserl, is thought to have been born in 1902 but to have died the following year. 

This is just one example of competing claims in the book. Central to this is Markstein’s repeated claim to have conceived The Prisoner, based on his knowledge of the real-life Inverlair Lodge, which was from 1941 No. 6 Special Workshop School of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). In contrast, star Patrick McGoohan claimed to have conceived the initial idea as well as to have dictated much of what made it to the screen. 

“Creator of the Whole Fantasy — A Correspondence Between George Markstein & Roger Goodman” (pp. 54-67) details Markstein’s various claims and reproduces several of his letters (and Christmas cards).  “When The Secret Agent Is Whisked Away” (pp. 78-95) is a transcript of Goodman’s interview with Markstein on 19 April 1980 at the ICA in London following a screening of The Prisoner episode Checkmate. Repeatedly, Markstein speaks of television as a collaborative enterprise with no single author  — while reiterating that The Prisoner was his idea. But there is also the way he doesn’t answer some questions, leaving us to fill in the blanks.

“Q: Mr Markstein, you said earlier on that you felt that the concept of the Village was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed at the time, certainly not today. Do you have any evidence of that?

George: Yes.

Q: You do?

George: Yes.

Q: You are not going to elaborate?

George: I cannot. I am not prepared to discuss certain things, because I cannot.” (p. 94)

It’s a very odd interview, Markstein railing variously against computers and CCTV, the “era of experts” and the state of television at the time, but denying that television has any power to influence the thinking of the viewer. “Never have we had less freedom,” he declares at one point (p. 86), on the basis that we must empty our pockets before getting on a plane and that the Mall in London is closed to traffic.

“Is it because it is a Sunday and the Queen wants to sleep late? The Queen isn’t even in London, she is in Windsor. That’s why I'm against technology. You might ask what has the Queen and Buckingham Palace got to do with technology, but it all ties in. I am against progress.” (p. 86)

Dave Barrie’s “Who Is Number One?” (pp. 75-77) sifts such evidence but favours McGoohan as “the driving force from very early on” (p. 77). James Follett’s “There's No Mystery” (p. 97) counters that “Patrick McGoohan was not a story man.” The book ends with a quotation from Joan Drummond McGoohan underlining her late husband's central role — cited here under the title “Who knows?” (p. 98)

To be honest, I think identifying who came up with the idea is less interesting a question than how it then developed into what we saw on screen, and why Markstein and McGoohan were both so proprietorial about this particular series. The idea that it’s down to a single person seems oddly reductive, making it somehow less. 

As for Markstein, we are told that he was and remains a “sphinx”. Having read this book, I think he’s less enigma as unreliable source. 

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation, by Margot Bennett

“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149)

Thursday, 30 July 1964 saw publication of two paperback “Penguin Specials” from Penguin Books both looking at the same subject. At four shillings, Nuclear Disaster by Tom Stonier,

“was based on his 1961 report to the New York Academy of Sciences which dealt with the biological and environmental effects of dropping a 20-megaton bomb on Manhattan”. Geoffrey Goodman, “Obituary — Tom Stonier”, Guardian, 28 June 1999.

Alongside this, at a slightly cheaper three shillings and sixpence, Margot Bennett’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation is, according to the back-cover blurb, a “first reader in the most uncomfortable subject in the world”. 
The title is surely a riff on The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by George Bernard Shaw, first published by Constable & Co in 1928 and republished in 1937 as an inexpensive two-volume paperback — the first Pelican Book — under the revised title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism. 
Of course, that was timely given the ongoing civil war between Republicans and Fascists in Spain, and the growing power of the Nazis in Germany. I’d be surprised if Margot Bennett wasn’t aware of the book, given that in 1937 she was in Spain. It was the year that Margot Mitchell (sometimes known as Margot Miller) married English journalist Richard Bennett while both were working for the Government — that is, Republican — radio station. Bennett, who also worked as a nurse, had been machine-gunned in the legs the previous year and at the time of her engagement had recently broken her arm when the ambulance she was in crashed under shellfire.
There’s nothing very militant in her book on atomic radiation, written 27 years later. “Politics is not the concern of this book,” she tells us in her introduction (p. 10). The focus is instead on the cause and effects fallout,

“addressed more to women than to men [because] the mother is far more intimately concerned with the health of the family than the father. It is the mother who sees that the children have green vegetables and milk, and who nurses then when they have measles.” (p. 11)

This still holds, she says, even if the mother has a career; a woman with no family, “still has a tenderness to children that is different in quality from the feelings of a man.”
It’s not exactly the most feminist stance but this is a politically active woman writing in the mid-1960s for a small-C conservative readership, the emphasis on presenting just the facts rather than on what we should think. The book concludes on a broad political note:

“Science affects us all; so far, overwhelmingly to our advantage. If there are times when we feel this is not so, as members of a democracy we have some kind of duty to find out what is happening.” (p. 154)

But there’s no sense of a particular party or ideology being favoured. We’re left to make up our own minds.
The domestic perspective — the way radiation affects milk and green vegetables, and our children — might imply this is rather lightweight or condescending to the ordinary housewife. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed one contemporary review thought it was, 

“little more than another text book, and heavy going at that.” (Robin Turner, “Nuclear penguins and others”, Birmingham Post, 8 August 1964, p. 5.)

A more generous review found it,

“Thought provoking … easily read but thorough” (John Berrie, “Woman’s angle”, Nottingham Evening Post and News, 7 August 1964, p. 10.)

It’s certainly thorough, covering the ground in detail in just 154 pages (not including appendices, glossary and index). After the introduction, the first three chapters give us a grounding in the physics involved in atomic radiation — “Inside the Atom”, “Neutrons and Nuclear Energy" and “Fission, Fusion, and Fallout”. We then switch to biology for “The Message in Our Cells”.
Chapter 5, “The Subtle Enemy”, then applies the physics to the biology to explain the damage atomic radiation can do to us and to future generations. The next chapter, “The Influential Friend”, puts a counter case, outlining all the beneficial ways atomic radiation can be applied. “Pollution and Protection” addresses what can be done to mitigate potential fallout. Bennett then provides a conclusion, making the case that even statistically “negligible” numbers of people wounded or killed would still be tragic for those concerned.
A lot of this is very technical. Promotion for the book at the time said that Bennett wrote in “plain English” (for example, “For Your Bookshelf”, Halifax Daily Courier and Guardian, 31 July 1964, p. 4). Even so, I found it quite hard going and made slow progress. 
Two things really bring it alive. First, Bennett peppers her book with vivid real-world examples of the way radiation can affect people’s lives. Hauntingly, she details the stages of radiation sickness suffered by early pioneers, from skin rashes and hair loss through anaemia, sterility and useless, deformed fingers to the fatal cancers (pp. 96-97). Or there’s the awful story of the Radium Girls (pp. 100-101). 
I’d be interested to know more about the Russian scientist who claimed to be able to cure the effects of radiation on DNA via a simple pill (p. 114), or about the Scottish boy discovered playing in a “pile of radioactive dust” and the factory making luminous dials that proved so radioactive that the Radiological Protection Service had the whole site buried (both stories p. 146). Frustratingly, there are no notes or bibliography to guide us to more information.
Secondly, throughout the book Bennett uses relatable, often domestic analogies to explain the complex ideas. She likens electrical charges — the way positive and negative attract one another but two positives or two negatives repel — to attraction between people, where a talker will fall for a listener (p. 17). She describes atoms of different elements as being like different breeds of dog (p. 22). Compounds and molecules are likened to marriages (p. 24).
Sometimes those analogies show how far we have come. On page 83, she refers to the cumulative effect of exposure to radiation over “the long days of our lives — 20,000 days if we live to be about sixty”, which doesn’t seem very long at all. (Bennett lived to 68).
But on the whole the effect is to make a complex, technical subject more tangible. The central, political idea here is the responsibility to be better informed: nuclear weapons are devastatingly powerful, but knowledge is also power — one to hold the arms race at bay.
*
Obligatory Doctor Who bit
Since the book was published at the end of July 1964, Bennett must have delivered the manuscript no later than, I’d guess, the end of May. Given the technical detail, it can’t have been a quick book to write. As well as the time taken to research it, a note just ahead of the introduction tells us that, 

“Everything factual has been checked by scientists whose knowledge is far more than equal to the task” (p. 7).

We’re not told who these scientists were or what the editorial process involved, but writing and editing surely took some months, which means work on the book overlapped with Bennett’s conversation(s) with BBC story editor David Whitaker about potentially writing for Doctor Who. As detailed in my post on Bennett’s novel The Furious Masters, that seems to have happened in late February 1964. She was being considered to write a story comprising four 25-minute episodes as a potential replacement for what became  Planet of Giants — but nothing further is known about what her story might have entailed, or whether she even submitted an idea.
I partly read this book in the faint hope of finding some clue as to what she might have discussed with or submitted to Whitaker. The short biography of Bennett on the opening page is suggestive:

“She likes variety in writing and is now doing something in Science Fiction,” (p. 1) 

That “something” may have been The Furious Masters, published four years later. Or Bennett may have completed work on her study of atomic radiation and then turned to Doctor Who, only to discover that she was now too late and Planet of Giants was going ahead after all…
Then there’s one of the allusions she uses. At the end of her introduction, Bennett says that there’s no point wishing that the atom had never been cracked open.

“Man can’t afford to retreat; it is by discovery and invention, from fire and flint axe onwards, that he has survived. The axe is dangerously sharp, and the fire has grown as hot as the sun.” (p. 13)

Unlike most of the analogies she uses, this isn’t contemporary or domestic — it’s making a link between modern technology and the ancient past. 
The first ever Doctor Who story, broadcast 23 November to 14 December 1963, involves a tribe of cave people where authority is dependent on the ability to make fire (I think this owes a debt to The Inheritors by William Golding). “Fire will kill us all in the end,” opines the Old Mother of the tribe.
In the next story, we see something of this prophecy come to pass when the TARDIS materialises in a petrified forest that Barbara initially thinks is the result of a “forest fire”. It turns out that the devastation is the result of a neutron bomb, leaving the ground and atmosphere “polluted with a very high level of fallout”. Beings called Daleks are among the survivors.
I’m not the first to suggest that the Doctor Who production team deliberately juxtaposed the role of fire in the prehistoric tribe and the role of nuclear weapons on this futuristic world as part of a wider ambition to have the time travellers witness key moments of societal change. And it’s exactly the same connection made by Margot Bennett.
Did she and David Whitaker discuss it? And who exactly informed whom?

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

LXXI

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Not all they Tears wash out a Word of it. (p. 92)

Or, to put it another way, you can’t rewrite history — not one line.

In 1859, a reclusive, privately wealthy scholar called Edward Fitzgerald anonymously published 250 copies of a pamphlet containing his translation in English of 75 four-line rhyming poems, a form known as “rubāʿī”, attributed to a Persian poet, Omar Khayyám, in the 11th century. No one paid much attention to this pamphlet until, in 1861, the lawyer and literary scholar Whitley Stokes happened across a stack of copies in a bookstall near Leicester Square, where the original price of five shillings had been reduced to a penny. 

Having bought one, Stokes showed it to his friends, including the poets Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who duly bought their own copies. Swinburne’s account of what then happened (apparently from p. 188, vol 6, of The Swinburne Letters) is quoted in my copy of the Rubáiyát:

“Next day we thought we might get some more for presents among our friends, but the man at the stall asked twopence! Rossetti expostulated with him in terms of such humorously indignant remonstrance as none but he could ever have commanded. We took a few, and left him. In a week or two, if I am not much mistaken, the remaining copies were sold at a guinea.” (p. x)

Word gradually caught on. Fitzgerald produced an expanded, second edition containing 110 of the four-line poems in 1868, and further revised editions, each of 101 of these quatrains, in 1872, 1879 and 1889 — the latter published after Fitzgerald’s death.

By the end of the 19th century, “more than two millions copies have been sold [of the Rubaiyat] in over two hundred editions” (according to a facsimile of the first edition published c. 1900). It became “one of the most admired works of Victorian literature” and “in the first half of the 20th century was arguably the most influential [long poem] in the English language”, according to Melvyn Bragg, introducing a 2014 episode of In Our Time on The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 

Hector Hugh Munro adopted the pen-name "Saki" after the cup-bearer in the Rubaiyat. Various dining clubs were established in honour of Khayyam: writers JM Barrie, Conan-Doyle, Thomas Hardy and AE Housman were all members of one. Housman’s friend, the mathematician John Edensor Littlewood bought a slim, pocket-sized volume containing both the first and forth editions as a present for my great aunt on her 11th birthday in 1938, which is the copy I’ve just read.

In 1961, David Whitaker drew from this book when he wrote the BBC children’s serial Garry Halliday and the Secret of Omar Khayyam, broadcast at Saturday teatimes over seven weeks in early 1962. I’ll dig into that more when I write up my notes for the corresponding entry in my Garry Halliday episode guide. But for now, it’s enough to recognise that this little book was till resonant a hundred years after Whitley Stokes first discovered it on that bookstall. 

But why was this slim book of poems such a massive hit in the late 19th and early 20th century? 

It’s effectively a day in the life; the opening rubāʿī is then start of new day in the early part of the year, the dawn sun touching the Sultan’s Turret in an unnamed Persian town, a cock crowing and — in subsequent quatrains — a group of people waiting eagerly for the tavern to open. The poet wanders this town, enjoying a cup of wine and musing on the nature of existence. 

XLVII

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,

End in the Nothing all Things end in—Yes—

Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what

Thou shalt be—Nothing—Thou shalt not be less.

(First edition, p. 56)

XXIV

Ah, make the most of what ye may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!

(Fourth edition, p, 76)

There was, at the time Fitzgerald published his first edition, a long-standing interest in Persian culture and the wider Orient, not least because of British imperial interests across the east and into India, used by the East India Company in provincial governments and courts until the 1830s. Sir William Jones’s various translations and his A grammar of the Persian language (1771) on the generations that followed. The Jones translation of the 8th century Mu’allaqat inspired Alfred Tennyson to write his Locksley Hall (1835). Tennyson was, in turn, a friend of Edward Fitzgerald.

That context is useful but doesn’t explain the particular appeal of the Rubaiyat. What made this text stand out?

Note that in the two quatrains quoted above there’s no mention of an afterlife. The In Our Time episode on the Rubaiyat and Sadeq Saba in his 2010 documentary The Genius of Omar Khayyam explore this issue of godlessness. Fitzgerald published his first edition in 1859, the same year that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, at a time when there was already much interest in “long time” — ancient, geological history stretching back millions and billions of years, far further than accounted for by a literal reading of the Bible. These ideas were controversial. On In Our Time, the suggestion is made that Fitzgerald couldn’t have published a work of his own (supposed) agnostic, perhaps even atheistic, musings without inviting scandal; Khayyam enabled him to do so at a safe remove. Readers could also engage in such ideas without breaking from the Church.

I can see, too, that there’s an appeal in the world conjured here: a rich culture different from that of the late Victorians, and seemingly more free. The In Our Time episode talks about the wider allure of Orientalism to the late Victorians, notably in the sensuous hedonism of the harem. I don’t think there’s much licentiousness in the Rubaiyat, beyond the idea that the poet says to drink and enjoy wine while we can. But there’s an allure in any different, rich culture in which we can escape and be immersed — like the appeal of Middle Earth or sci-fi or Regency novels. Once entranced, there’s always more to steep yourself in: the history and rules, the minutiae, the power politics in wrangling among other true believers. (The same might be true of the football terrace, too.)

There are often good reasons why someone actively seeks such escape. In Our Time cites Fitzgerald’s close friendship with Professor Edward Byles Cowell; the first edition is in part a translation of the Persian quatrains Cowell found while in Calcutta and sent to Fitzgerald, their correspondence apparently suggestive of how keenly the two men felt their separation. We can read into this, just as readers of the Rubaiyat could read their own hopes and desires into the tantalising world it conjured. It’s a frame in which things are possible that would not be dared outside.

But maybe the appeal isn’t nearly so immersive. This kind of “enjoy life while you can” stuff is not a world away from “live, laugh love”. That such aphorisms here derives from some ancient, eastern scholar confers authenticity and value to what a cynic might otherwise see as greetings-card wisdom. And there’s also something haunting in this voice from what’s now almost a thousand years ago exhorting us to enjoy our existence and live while we can.

In fact, we’re not sure Omar Khayyam really said the things attributed to him. It’s not just that many of the surviving quatrains in Persian give no indication of author, but Fitzgerald took a very free hand in translating the texts he had to hand, reordering and rewording them, grafting in bits that sound like the Book of Resurrection and Shakespeare. That might not resonate so much with us now as it did with late Victorian readers. Moulded in their own language, no wonder they felt that this text out of the long past spoke to them so directly.

The real Omar Khayyam — full name Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīsābūrī — is no less fascinating than this mythic version. 

“Better known for his poetry, it often surprises many to learn that Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) was one of the greatest of all medieval mathematicians,” says Jim Al-Khalili in his book Pathfinders — The Golden Age of Arabic Science (2010). He cites Khayyam’s work on cubic equations in Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra, including “both algebraic and geometric methods for solving them systematically and elegantly, using the method of conical sections (which involves slicing through a cone at different angles to produce different types of curves such as circles, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas)” (p. 122).

I’m familiar with conic sections being used to make sense or orbits, whether those of celestial bodies or the rockets and craft trying to reach them, and wonder how much of Khayyam survives in the mechanics of the space age.

Khayyam was also part of a team that, with cutting-edge technology such as the astrolabe, calculated the length of the year with much greater accuracy than the contemporary Gregorian model; indeed, the Jalali calendar devised by Khayyam and his colleagues was still in use into the 20th century. In addition, Al-Khalili quotes a long passage from one of Khayyam’s other surviving works, more reliably attributed to him than his poetry, extolling the virtues of seeking the truth — and acknowledging that people will mock you for doing so. It’s quoted at length because it expresses a sentiment that Al-Khalili recognises now, the voice of the exasperated scientist ringing down to us through the ages.

I can see why this little book of poetry, written by an influential mathematician, would have appealed to JE Littlewood, and why he chose it as a gift for an 11 year-old. It bears a simple, four-word inscription, “Ann, from Uncle John”, and the date. But what he was giving her was a guide to life, and a frame in which unconventional ideas and conversations are possible. And that was important because, as the inscription shows, he’d not yet admitted what was known within the family: that Ann was his daughter.

But perhaps I’m just the latest in a long line to read into this little book what I want to see. 

The Secret Life of Fungi, by Aliya Whiteley

This handsome little hardback is an arresting read. The strange, tactile quality of Aliya Whiteley's fiction has long entranced me (see posts on Skyward Inn and The Loosening Skin ) and this non-fiction collection is just as oddly, unsettlingly captivating. It's like venturing into the woods with her, to catch a glimpse of something ancient, earthy and alive. An MR James story but real.

"Collection" may not be the right word for what this is; it's a series of often short chapters exploring different aspects of the physicality and science of fungi, and the ways this is woven into culture and literature as well as the life of the author. There's stuff on what it's like to encounter different fungi in the wild, in the UK and abroad. We cover disease, whether St Anthony's Fire or the fungal infections most likely to affect someone with HIV; we cover cures such as penicillin and LSD-related therapies. There's time for monstrous fungus in fantasy and sci-fi (such as Whiteley's own works, Tade Thompson's Rosewater, John Wyndham's Trouble with Lichen and many others). There's stuff on mushrooms as food and as poison.

These tangible, evocative threads are connected, making up a mycelial network of their own. At one point, Whiteley explains that the mycelial networks of fungi might be best thought of as single bodies, vast and intricate, living half-submerged in the soil. It's this kind of thing that makes the book such fertile ground,  all so rich and potent that I kept thinking "This would make the start of a good story..."

One chapter explores fungi as "Saviours" for our real-world problems. Penicillium notatum is the best-known example, discovered in 1928 to kill the bacteria in a series of Petri dishes while Alexander Fleming wasn't looking; over many subsequent years (Whiteley is good at underlining the effort involved), it was then developed into the first antibiotic. A related fungus, Penicillium citrinum, has an effect on cholesterol and led Akira Endo to develop statins, now one of the most commonly taken drugs in the world.

I was particularly taken by examples that may change and shape our future. In 2017, Aspergillus tubingensis was found to be "feeding on polyurethane on a rubbish site at Isamabad" (p. 36). Pestalotiopsis microspora has been identified in the Amazon rainforest doing something similar and may be able to do so without air.

"It could survive deep in the darkness of landfill and steadily work its way through many kinds of plastic, if initial hypotheses turn out to be accurate." (p. 37)

A later chapter, "Stowaways of the Space Age", explores the bacteria and fungal growths identified on spacecraft, the risks they pose to systems and ways they may be affected by exposure to space and radiation. And then there's this, which I dreamt about last night:

"NASA has been investigating the possibility of using mycelia to create living shelters on Mars using melanin-rich fungi to absorb radiation and protect the human inhabitants within. ... They could be constructed, effectively grown, on location, making them easier to transport. They also offer the proposal of easy, organic disposal after use, putting little strain on the alien environment." (p. 121)

It's literally describing alien life and yet that quality of strangeness is something we'd take with us from here. It's all around us, if we'll only look and see.

Spook Street, by Mick Herron

I've been listening to this, the fourth of Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, a little behind the run of the TV version and it's been fascinating to see the differences.

The attention of the security service is taken up with a terrorist bombing in a London shopping centre. River Cartwright, the nominal lead of these adventures, is worried about his elderly grandfather, a retired former spook and legend in the service who is suffering from the early signs of dementia. The "Old Bastard", as he is affectionately known, thinks someone is out to get him and is determined to strike first - which is bad news when River goes to visit...
It's difficult to say more without getting into spoilers. But what I can talk about here is what the TV version changes. A sequence in the book in which a character ends up in the Thames is completely excised - I am assume for being impractical. In the book, someone gets off a train to find the authorities waiting to arrest them; on TV there follows an elaborate chase.
Generally, the changes on TV are to give characters more agency: in the book, one character thinks about doing something with a gun and is then taken by surprise; on TV, they do the thing thought about and then take action in response to the surprise something. Another character doesn't simply retire but finds out how they've been wronged and puts it right. River, meanwhile, puzzles out what's going on rather than being presented with the answer.
I'm not sure the TV version makes such a point of the relationship between River and the character Bertrand, which in the book has a huge impact. But on the whole, I can see how the changes make the TV version more action-packed and visual, people doing things to drive the plot(s) forward.
There are some pretty major revelations here for at least one of the principal characters. Effectively, for the first time in this series, we end on a cliffhanger. It will be interesting to see where things go next, and how much these revelations skew what follows...
See also my posts on the previous books in the series: Slow Horses , Dead Lions and Real Tigers .

Exit Through the Fireplace, by Kate Dunn

First published in 1998, this is an oral history of repertory theatre - which is where the same group of actors star in play after play, usually on stage with one while rehearsing the next. The book is based on interviews with more than 200 actors, directors and stage managers, the youngest of them a 27 year-old David Tennant, here in the company of such luminaries as Lionel Jeffries and Phyllida Law, Harriet Walter and Derek Jacobi.
Names big and small share first-hand experience and also tales they were handed down. At times, this can get a bit repetitive — we get multiple stories about problems with on-set doors and actors having to make entrances or pass props through the fireplace. Quite often, the author summarises what a person is going to say before quoting them saying it. And I suspect that some of these stories have been embellished in the telling, either by the people quoted here or by whoever told them.
It’s not always clear when these stories took place, and I can’t believe that rep was the same in the 1930s and ‘50s and ‘80s. I found myself looking up the birthdates of the people spoken to so that I could put their accounts in chronological context (and work out which were contemporaries of David Whitaker, about whom more in mo…)
There’s also a surprising moment in the plate section, where one photograph from a production of Charley’s Aunt in Buxton in 1952 includes “Prudence Williams (the author’s mother), Gwynn Whitby (the author’s grandmother)” and “Nigel Arkwright (the author’s uncle)” — as well as a very young Nigel Hawthorne. I’d have liked more on this personal connection, the legacy of rep. The photo is followed by two more from productions of Charley’s Aunt, in Ipswich in 1984 and in Bexhill in 1960. Again, I’d have liked more on the choice of plays in rep, the difference between stuff played once and work that ran and ran. 
Even so, this is a treasure trove full of insight and detail. Bits of it are extraordinary. Derek Jacobi recounts having smallpox while in Birmingham (p. 190), considered serious enough that he didn’t have to go on stage, while others with gastric flu soldiered on (buckets kept handily just off-stage). Or there’s the reference to Anthony Oakley, who accidentally killed the actor he was duelling with in a production of Macbeth (p. 187). 
Then there’s the sense of tradition, reaching back in time.

“Elizabeth Counsell … worked in a company with an elderly actor, who told her that as a boy he had been in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream playing one of the Mechanicals. During rehearsals an elderly actor in that company had given him the business associated with his character, which had been handed down over hundreds of years from Will Kempe, the actor who played the comic roles in Shakespeare’s own company.” (p. 70) 

Nicely, this is then followed by Alan Ayckbourn being sceptical about this kind of claim — whether its really credible that such knowledge is passed down intact, and whether its useful anyway. That means we get Counsell’s awe-striking anecdote and also probe at it a bit, too.
A lot of it is very funny, such as the amazing image conjured by Brian Cox’s story about the day of his wedding to Caroline Burt in 1968. He was at Birmingham Rep at the time, appearing as Iago in Othello, alongside a blacked-up Michael Gambon in the title role. The reception was held in the morning and then the groom and other cast members were expected back on stage for their afternoon performance.

“I was the only one who was sober… I was sharing a dressing room with Mike. … He finally got all his clothes on [for the performance] and we were ready and ‘Beginners’ was called, then I looked at Mike and I realised he didn’t have any make-up on. And he was playing Othello! I said, ‘Mike, you haven’t got any make-up on,’ and he looked at his sticks of make-up and said, ‘That’s all right,’ and he gathered up the make-up and held the sticks under the lightbulb until they went soft and then rubbed them all over his face.” (p. 69)

Barbara Leslie married Shaun Sutton in 1948 while they were both in the cast of Jane Eyre — “I was playing Adele, aged eight, and Shaun was playing eighty” (p. 69) — and they held a party after the show, which then went on all night. Two weeks later, says Leslie, another colleague in the same company, Joan Sanderson, married Gregory Moseley and they held a party in the middle of the day, before taking to the stage for a performance of You Can’t Take It With You in which “half the cast were drunk”. One older actress was so incapable that a 17 year-old assistant stage manager (ASM) had to be quickly aged up by dousing her in talcum powder so she could take over.
Philip Voss recalls that “there was a lot of drinking in those days”, and in a production of Death of a Salesman at Colchester, a drunk ASM played the wrong sound effect cue at the dramatic climax — instead of a car crash, the audience heard wedding bells (p. 26).
Even without wedding-related shenanigans, there’s a constant feeling of chaos: missed lines, missed entrances and corpsing on stage, on top of all the privations. It’s sometimes difficult to keep track of the paltry rates of pay because the stories are grouped together by theme rather than chronologically, meaning that two actors citing their appallingly low salaries give wildly different figures. 
But we get a vivid sense of the poverty from descriptions of changing rooms (sometimes just one room for all the actors, a curtain to divide the women from the men), accommodation and toilets. Friendly landladies would come into an actors’ room in the morning while they were still in bed to light the coal fire there. Dirk Bogarde, we’re told, started his career as a “pot boy” at the Q Theatre in Hammersmith, sweeping the stage, washing up tea cups and cleaning toilets (p. 8).
In piecing together these stories, we get an evocative history of rep, full of textures and feeling. I was surprised to learn that rep isn’t some ancient tradition going back centuries but a particularly 20th century phenomenon. Dunn explains that the term “repertory theatre” was coined during the 1904-07 season at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where John Vedrenne and Hartley Granville-Barker “emphasised the importance of the play, rather than individual actors” (p. 2). The first repertory company begun by Annie Horniman in 1908, at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. This book, published in 1998, sees rep as now passing from history — or perhaps even already gone.
There are lots of tidbits, too, on the mechanics of rep. It explains, for example, the role of rep in getting past the Catch-22 situation facing new actors: you could only get a professional job if you had an Equity card, but could only get an Equity card if you had a professional job.

“Every repertory company was allowed to give out two cards a year and the competition for them was understandably fierce.” (p. 7)

I knew that actor in rep had to provide their own costumes and make-up but didn’t realise there were set terms. Dunn quotes from the Standard Esher Contract:

“All character and special costumes and wigs shall be provided by the Manager. No Artist shall be required to provide any costume that could not ordinarily be used by him in his private capacity. A male Artist receiving a weekly salary of £8 or less shall not be required to provide more than two ordinary walking suits and one evening suit.” (p. 130)

A dress call held after morning rehearsal on Friday allowed everyone to see what each other was wearing for the new play opening on Monday, with adjustments then made if actors clashed with one another or the set (p. 131). Most actresses took sewing machines with them (p. 132). But a wide range of skills were expected.
The entry-level job was as assistant stage manager, or acting/ASM, where novice actors got small roles on stage but also did anything else needing doing. The idea was that they’d get a broad education on the workings of theatre — the lights in the “flies”, the logistics of building and dressing a set, and all the unexpected, weird stuff. Liza Goddard learned to reupholster sofas and chairs — “I can still do that” (p. 29). ASMs had to find furniture, decor and ornamentation for the sets, often by going begging round the local shops and houses (p. 28); they also had to provide (and cook) any food eaten on stage (p. 29). 
Then there were the sound effects to be played in live. Alec McCowen recalls traditional means, such as peas on a drum to convey rain, and electrical sticks for lightning (p. 26). Phyllida Law was put in charge of a panotrope gramophone and accompanying 78 rpm records.

“I marked these records, would you believe it, with tailor’s chalk, so I knew where to put the needle on to start the supposedly atmospheric music.” (p. 25)

(Not mentioned, but something I’ve been looking at in my wider research, is the records especially pressed for stage productions, with whatever sound effects an individual play needed. The Bishop Sound Company, later Bishop Sound & Electrical Company, in London was a pioneer of this — and the British Library holds a collection of Bishop Sound recordings. The same kind of technology was employed on old television, such as in the early years years of Doctor Who, with “grams” played in live to the studio recordings.)
For one production Oldham, ASM Bernard Cribbins had to source a goat to appear on stage, which he’d bring in each day on the bus.

“The driver used to make me go upstairs [with it]. I’d ask for one and a goat to Rose Bank, which was near the theatre.” (p. 31)

Cribbins also says that he didn’t get days off, as he was required to help on Sundays with striking the set of one production and putting up the next one (p. 32). He doesn’t have quite the nostalgic wistfulness of his contemporaries: “they weren’t good old days when you think about it, it was bloody hard work.” (pp. 33-34) 
For all the hard graft, the toil and sweat, there’s a vivid sense here of the formality of this bygone age: Jennie Goossens says leading men in a company were always addressed by their surname (p. 57). There’s the respectability, too. At Colchester, according to Philip Voss, producer “Bob Digby insisted that we behave well. We weren’t allowed to hold hands in the street” (p. 57).
I’d already read something of the sort in a biography of Yootha Joyce:

“Whatever their background, Harry Hanson was known to pressure his actors to always appear glamorous, on and off stage. This filtered through to the other associated Harry Hanson companies.” (Paul Curran, Dear Yootha... (2014), p. 28)

That was reflected in the kind of material Hanson’s companies staged. Margery Mason, who worked with Hanson for 10 years, recalled his,

“fondness for 'Anyone for tennis?' type plays" (Margery Mason, Peaks and Troughs (2005), p. 32)

These memories were of interest to me as I traced David Whitaker’s life and career, because Whitaker made his professional debut as an actor/ASM with Harry Hanson’s Court Players at the Prince’s Theatre in Bradford in 1951, and over the next three years had stints with Hanson’s companies at the Hippodrome in Keighley, the Theatre Royal in Leeds, the Hippodrome in Stockton-on-Tees and the Lyceum in Sheffield. (For more details of his time in Bradford and Leeds, see the free postscript to my biography of David Whitaker; for more on his stage work more generally, see David’s Whitaker’s listing on Theatricalia.)
Harry Hanson (1895-1972) founded his first Court Players repertory company in Hastings in 1932, and soon had companies all over the UK, from Sheffield to Penge. In Exit Through the Fireplace, Peggy Mount — who was 13 years older than Whitaker — says she also started out as an ASM in “Leeds, which was Harry Hanson’s top company” (p. 189), suggesting that when Whitaker moved from ASM at Bradford to juvenile lead at Leeds, it was a significant step up.

[Above: "A definite step up the ladder" - profile of David Whitaker from an unknown newspaper with no date, though his last known performance at Bradford was on 8 March 1952 and he was at Leeds by 21 April; he turned 24 on 18 April that year.] Mount says that Harry Hanson, “was a little, short, fat man and he had three wigs” — and actors learned to be on their guard if it was the blond one, as it meant Hanson was in a bad mood (p. 55). Others testify to Hanson’s temper; Paul Daneman calls him “a bit of an ogre and he had a stranglehold on rep” while Beryl Cooke says he’d sack actors who weren’t “DLP” or dead letter perfect (p. 54).
But Vilma Hollingberry says Hanson was “a marvellous man”, with a “waspish sense of humour and he cared tremendously about the standard of work” (p. 54). She reports, too, that her time with a Hanson company involved two performances a night of the same play, but the afternoon one would be shorter, with cuts made to allow for a longer tea break between shows. In the second performance, all the cut bits would be reinserted (p. 191). Given the punishing schedule and pressures of weekly rep anyway, this seems something like magic, or something bound to fail. It wouldn’t have helped dispel the air of chaos backstage.
Carmen Silvera also speaks of Hanson’s eye for detail on stage.

“One was that flowers on stage must be right for the season in which the play was set and that every night they must be wrapped up in tissue paper and put in their boxes. All the lampshades that were used on set had to be covered in tissue paper every night, so that when we rehearsed on stage in the morning no dust would get on them and they would not be dirtied. Everything was protected so that his sets always looked good.” (p. 129)

One last intriguing thing. There’s a story from one “MC Hart” (p. 12), who we’re told “started his career with Butlin’s rep and went on to become a television director; among his credits are Waugh on Crime” (p. 260). But the latter seems to refer to a six-episode run of episodes of Thirty-Minute Theatre from 1970-71, half of them directed by Tristan de Vere Cole and the other half by Philip Dudley. Could this be Michael Hart, the director of 1969 Doctor Who story The Space Pirates and of episodes of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle , and brother of Tony?

Doctor Who Magazine #609

The latest issue of the official Doctor Who Magazine is out now, and very excitingly comes with an exclusive Target novelisation of the 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks, written by Frazer Hine with Mike Tucker and Steve Cole as his companions. In fact, it's a novelisation of the 1968 repeat of that story. Another quite good book about The Evil of the Daleks is also available. 

My contribution this issue is the latest Script to Screen feature, this time focused on the Villengard ambulance seen in Boom. I spoke to production designer Phil Sims, art director Rhys Ifan, prop maker Stuart Heath from BGI Supplies and the ambulance herself, actress Susan Twist.
The new issue also includes Richard Unwin's review of my book, Doctor Who - The Time-Travelling Almanac, which he calls, 

"a perfect gift for curious minds, young and old alike."

So he can live - for now.