Books

Well, I have my laptop back, though it cost an arm and a leg. Not that I've actually been up to much the last few days.

Interesting review of China Mieville's Iron Council in the TLS, by Roz Caveney. Short version: good, but he's far too up himself, eg naming someone who makes automatons "Judah Loew" is just too smug. Since this is a fault of which my own efforts have been accused I have some sympathy. On the other hand, frankly I'm not entirely sure that writing an SF novel more than loosely based on the Paris Commune is not inherently smug, but there you go. I haven't read it yet but doubtless will.

In what I presume is merely an odd coincidence, the facing page carries a review by M. John Harrison of a non-genre novel.

In more random book news of potential interest to only a handful of you, I've as yet managed to resist buying Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: a Novel by Susanna Clarke but I keep flipping through it when I see it and it looks rather good.

More interesting, to my mind and I suspect to most of yours, was the long review on the back page by Jeremy Treglown of Cressida Connolly's The Rare and the Beautiful: the lives of the Garmans. The review is currently available without registration or subscription but doubtless will not be so for long, so a few snippets from the lives of these rivals to the Mitford sisters:

First came Mary, [...] who, as soon as she was twenty-one, took herself off with [...] Kathleen (number three), to seek their fortune in London. [...] dark-haired, dark-eyed, beautiful, artistic and wayward. ... married the volatile South African poet Roy Campbell, and had a range of affairs, including with Vita Sackville-West. (“Fancy being cuckolded by a woman!” was C. S. Lewis’s reaction when Campbell told him.) Kathleen, [...] mistress of Jacob Epstein. His wife tried to shoot her but eventually resigned herself to this as to other marital augmentations. When Mrs Epstein died [...], Kathleen, who had four children by Epstein, replaced her.

Number two was Sylvia, who spent most of her life with a woman whom she met as a fellow ambulance driver in the First World War, taking a short break to marry a sailor who had knocked on their door to ask directions. By the standards of her siblings, Sylvia Garman was rather ordinary, so a family legend was concocted that she had been the only girlfriend of T. E. Lawrence....

Fourth was Douglas, handsome man of letters and left-wing activist [...] first wife was to have a fling with his elder sister Mary, [...] himself was among Peggy Guggenheim’s lovers. (He promised to marry her if Edward VIII married Wallis Simpson, but in the event reneged.)

Rosalind, number five, married a Scots Italian called Paolo, [...] ran a garage in Surrey: handy when Epstein needed storage for his work during the Blitz. [...]Mavin, the younger brother, ran away to sea, took over a ranch in Brazil, came home and became a Communist. Around this point in the running order, things start to get a little out of hand, perhaps in part because Walter Garman died in 1923, when his youngest children were fourteen and twelve, and most of the inheritance disappeared during the Depression. Of Ruth, the wild eighth in line, it was said, “If only Ruthie could go into a pub without getting pregnant”. The first of her five, mostly illegitimate, children was brought up to believe that his father was an admiral named Reed. Only when he had grown up did Ruth admit that she had got the idea from a pub called the Admiral Reed.

Number nine, Lorna, also liked a drink. A keen horsewoman prone to spontaneous midnight gallops, she won her steed’s tolerance by buying it pints of Guinness. At the age of fourteen she had seduced a rich friend of Douglas’s, the future publisher Ernest Wishart, whom she married at sixteen. Competition for the title la plus fatale among her sisters could scarcely be stiffer, but Lorna probably wins it by a short head...

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There are many irritating things about Johnnie Vaughn's current adverts for his Capital Radio show. I'm not sure why the one that irritates me most is that the line "and the Jubilee" or whatever is illustrated by him grinning as he swings on the light blue poles of an underground train.

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I've been invited to the launch party for the Oxford DNB, on which I've worn three different hats (two on production-side as different kinds of dogsbody-editorial type, one as contributor of articles on various people they couldn't twist anyone else's arm enough to take). Serious question: does anyone actually know whether "gowns will be worn by members of the university" means sub-fusc? 'Cos I'm not sure I know where my white bow tie is.

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And finally...
Spam is one thing, but I had a naive assumption that junk surface mail was in some way targeted. But whywhywhy does someone at MIT, of all places, think I might be interested in subscribing to Technology Review?