Category: Reviews

Supercargo – Thornton McCamish

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Supercargo is a penetrating and wickedly funny study of a way of life and travel that refuses to die.

That’s what it says on the back cover anyway, I can only assume that whichever marketing person wrote that had had a very generous liquid lunch beforehand and probably hadn’t read the book. There is very little that is actually very funny or even mildly amusing about this book, instead McCamish seems to spend most of his time moaning about how bad the journeys he makes are and the lack of the romance of foreign ports. I did make it to the end to see if it improved but it was a struggle where I abandoned the book several times, which is a pity as up until now I have loved the books from the now defunct Lonely Planet Journeys series.

There are actually three journeys described in the book, the first being a bit of a cheat bearing in mind the books subject as it starts with a flight from London and then uses normal passenger ferries on the western Mediterranean Sea to travel from the south of France to Tunisia and then onto Italy where he bounces around the coast, rather than the cargo vessels implied in the title. The second trip again starts with a flight but does at least use a cargo ship but is also in the Mediterranean although in its eastern side from Italy to Greece then Lebanon, Syria and Turkey before returning to Italy. Nowadays Lebanon and Syria suggest a little danger but this was the year 2000, four years after I visited both countries and they were perfectly safe if a little infuriating when trying to get documentation stamped for onward trips. It should be noted, for those people unfamiliar with the concept, that it used to be quite common for cargo ships to carry passengers and they had cabins of varying quality specifically to do this, with the passengers normally eating with the officers. I remember advertisements for travelling on the ‘banana boats’ across the Atlantic and was very tempted but these were fast ships with luxury offerings and were beyond my means. McCamish was therefore travelling on the very tail end of what was a ‘normal’ way to get around before widespread commercial air travel and the reduction in cargo crew sizes with the corresponding shrinking of superstructure meaning passenger cabins are rarely even included in a modern cargo ship.

I was therefore looking forward to a description of a now largely vanished means of travelling around the world, although it is still possible see here, and to find only the third trip to involve any sort of real distance and that one he missed two possible posts to catch, only eventually reaching the ship at the Canary Islands after flying from the bottom of Italy. This journey consisted of travel on two ships, one down the west coast of Africa to Cape Town with no stops, the second took him along the east African coast to India from Mauritius (which he got to by plane) via Madagascar, Tanzania, Zanzibar and Kenya. This last trip had a captain that really didn’t like the idea of passengers, or possibly this passenger in particular, and frankly I was pretty fed up of McCamish by now and his descriptions of miserable travelling conditions at sea interrupted by brothels and bars on land. I’m sure there is a great book out there about travelling on cargo vessels but this isn’t it. At the end McCamish admits whilst preparing to leave India “Then I would board my plane for the last leg of a sea journey which must have set the record for air miles covered by someone writing about the sea.”

Hairan – Daoid Sarhandi-Williams, Ali Sobati and others (Ed)

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This book was inspired by the killing of Mahsa Amini by the Morality Police in Iran apparently for not having her hair properly covered by her hijab. This murder in 2022 added further outrage to a movement that was already existing in the country known as Woman Life Freedom which opposes the oppression of women not only in Iran but neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan. I have featured works both from and about Iran several times in the past and when I spotted this book in a shop last month I was inevitably drawn to it, I especially like the title combining the provocative word hair, which for women must at all times be hidden in public, with the name of the country.

The book is much more than simply a collection of poems, most of which were especially written for this collection, as there is also a very informative introduction which covers the history of female poets in Iran going back to the days of the Persian empire. This introduction also includes brief remarks about several of the poems in the collection, setting them in context. There are also thirteen black and white photographs of Iranian women from the back showing their hair, with clearly no identifying information in order to protect them from the regime and several political posters supporting the Woman Life Freedom movement. One thing the editors were surprised by was the refusal by any of the poets included to use a pseudonym or be credited anonymously especially bearing in mind the topics covered.

The poems are powerful in their imagery and in sorrow and outrage at the treatment of women and sometimes men who support them. If a poem needs more explanation for those of us that don’t live in Iran and therefore haven’t been exposed to names, places or events referred to there are useful notes after the poem. Several poems refer to Ferdosi’s epic Shahnameh, which I briefly covered in 2018 as the story is a classic in Persian culture and familiar to most Iranians. Whilst reading I was noting any poems that I thought I could pick out in this review as I particularly enjoyed them and ended up with twelve of the seventy six which is clearly too many to list but emphasises how strong this collection is. However I particularly want to mention “This Place” written by Atefeh Chararmahalian during her 71 days incarcerated in the infamous Evin prison in Tehran along with “You’d Said” by Fanous Bahadorvand and “freedominance” by Leila Sadeghi which are both explicit tributes to Mahsa Amini as is the poem I have chosen to represent all the others:

The three young women included in the dedication are Mahsa Amini (aged 22 when killed in police custody), Nika Shakarami (aged just 16 when abducted by the security forces and killed sometime during the next ten days, who know what happened to her during that time) and Hananeh Kia (aged 23 when shot by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard near a protest whilst walking back from the dentist, she was due to get married just two weeks later). Nika’s body was never returned to her family and she was instead secretly buried by the security forces forty kilometres away presumably to avoid her funeral becoming a flash point for more protests.

The book is published by Scotland Street Press, who I must admit I hadn’t heard of before purchasing this collection, but looking at their online catalogue they seem to have quite a few titles that are very interesting, so I don’t think this will be the last book of theirs to make it to my library. I’ll finish with a couple of the images of Iranian women’s hair from the book including one very bravely out in the street without a hijab.

The Mirror of Ink – Jorge Luis Borges

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2005 was Penguin Books seventieth anniversary and to mark the occasion they published seventy books at £1.50 each which were largely extracts from other works in their vast back catalogue as is this one although this is collated from several collections of short stories. With Borges though, as he is mainly a writer of short stories, you ended up with seven complete works in the book and as an introduction to his literary output this book is excellent. The art of writing a short story is extremely difficult as in a short space you must not only have a beginning, a middle, and an end but also express an idea or indeed several which will leave the reader satisfied and in all seven of these Borges has proved himself well able to meet those aims. Knowing that he was Argentinian I was expecting South American themes but instead the first two ‘The Mirror of Ink’ and ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ are set in the Middle East, the third ‘The Library of Babel’ could frankly be anywhere and everywhere. The fourth ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ is in Ireland, ‘The Witness’ is probably medieval England, ‘Ragnarok’ could also be anywhere, whilst the final story ‘Blue Tigers’ is based in rural India. A linking theme, if there is one, is the somewhat mystical and fantastic ideas behind all of these stories, that and the definite quality of the prose. I hadn’t read any of Jorge Luis Borges before this slim volume and indeed this is the only book of his work that I possess but I definitely need to read more.

Sadly Borges suffered from fading eyesight for many years and became blind at the end of the 1950’s however he continued to write, dictating stories initially to his mother who took on the role of his secretary until her death. The last two stories in this book were written after his blindness and there is certainly no diminution of the power of his writing. I just want to pick out a couple of the stories that I particularly enjoyed:

‘The Library of Babel’ is an exploration of the concepts of infinity in that the library described contains all possible books that are exactly 410 pages long with a fixed format of forty lines per page and eighty characters per line where a character is one of twenty two letters of the alphabet, a full stop, a comma or a space and all combinations of these appear at least once in one of the infinite series of books stored in the apparently infinite number of replicating hexagonal galleries that make up the library. The concept of a library that because it has all combinations of the twenty five characters and therefore contains books of apparently complete nonsense but must also due to randomness have every book that could possibly exist expressing every theme and also arguing both for and against every idea is beguiling. The impossibility of ever finding a specific work is also clearly spelled out along with some of the oddities of infinite series in that a revolution in the past had destroyed countless volumes but that this didn’t matter because books survived elsewhere in the library which differed from the vandalised editions by as little as a punctuation mark somewhere within them.

‘Blue Tigers’ also drew me in with a weird mathematical theme, the tigers are not flesh and blood but a collection of odd blue disks that the narrator finds on top of the plateau of a sacred hill. These discs are uncountable, initially he thought he had around ten of them but when examining them found far more. Sometimes there would be as little as three but holding these few and then letting them fall could reveal hundreds. The narrator spends nights trying to find a pattern to the ever increasing, and decreasing, quantities without any success and eventually, to save his sanity, he gives them to a blind beggar who seems to understand in someway that he is the fitting custodian.

Naturally the four mathematical operations – adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing – were impossible. The stones resisted arithmetic as they did the calculation of probability. Forty disks, divided, might become nine, those nine in turn divided might yield three hundred. I do not know how much they weighed, I did not has recourse to a scale, but I’m sure their weight was constant, and light. Their colour was always the same blue.

As 2005 was the seventieth anniversary it is clear that this year (2025) is the ninetieth and again Penguin have marked their birthday with a set of books, this time ninety of them at £5.99 each, some of which will be featured in this blog as the year goes on. The actual anniversary is the end of July so I am dedicating my August theme this year to the first four Penguin titles, which I will be reading in their first Penguin editions something I don’t do often due to the fragility of these ninety year old paperbacks.

Tarzan at the Earth’s Core – Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Inspired by last week’s book and author Michael Moorcock’s evident liking in that volume of the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, along with my recent purchase of my first book by that author the intriguingly titled Tarzan at the Earth’s Core I just had to take it off the shelf and give it a go. I’ll come to why I bought the book at the end of this blog, it wan’t because of any particular interest in Burroughs or indeed Tarzan though.

I knew Burroughs had created Tarzan along with the science fiction works featuring John Carter of Mars but that was as far as my knowledge of him went. It turns out Burroughs was rather more prolific than I had imagined and amongst his vast output there were twenty six Tarzan titles of which this is the thirteenth and he also wrote seven books about Pellucidar, his name for a land hidden inside a hollow Earth and this crossover book is the fourth of those. Unlike Jules Verne’s ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ or Bruce Carter’s ‘The Perilous Descent’ Burroughs has his Earth interior concave on an interior surface of the Earth five hundred miles below the surface we know with a central sun so it is always noon regardless of where you are. He does however have it populated by dinosaurs and primitive man like Verne does.

It was odd starting with Tarzan thirteen as the character is nothing like the one I remember watching as a child in films on television played by Johnny Weissmuller forever swinging through the trees and having little to do with civilisation. The Tarzan in this book is just as happy back in England as Lord Greystoke as he is in the jungle he grew up in, indeed when he sets off on the adventure he is sharply dressed in a suit and tie. The book however starts with Tarzan in the jungle coming across an expedition which was actually designed to find him and try to persuade him to join the plan to rescue the Emperor of Pellucidar from the hands of the Korsars, first though he has to have Pellucidar explained to him which is useful for those of us reading about this series of books for the first time. Needless to say he does go and brings along ten of the native warriors who regard him as chief and these along with numerous engineers and other staff set off on a huge experimental airship nine hundred feet (275 metres) long to fly to the north pole and find the entrance to Pellucidar. The hole is so large that they fly the airship down to Pellucidar and land to reconnoitre and the next morning Tarzan is seen leaving the ship dressed as he would normally be in the jungle and heading for the nearest trees.

This is of course where the whole plan starts to go wrong. Tarzan feels at home in the trees, so much so that he isn’t paying full attention to his surroundings, steps into a trap and is captured by a group of gorilla people. After a couple of days the crew of the airship are concerned that he hasn’t returned and a search party is organised consisting of officers from the ship and the native people Tarzan brought with him, these however get caught up in a ambush by sabre tooth tigers on the various prey species in the jungle. After the massacre has finished all the crew and native people appear to be OK but are now no longer together and they cannot find their way back to the ship due to the un-moving sun which ruins their sense of direction. Eventually those left at the ship, after a period of several more days decide to use the light aircraft they brought with them to search for the others but this ends up crashing so stranding yet another member of the party. The book tells the stories of the various groups as they survive and search for each other and the airship with the help and hindrance of various Pellucidar inhabitants and is a great adventure story if you allow for the errors regarding the prehistoric animals they meet. Unfortunately this searching for each other takes up so much of the book that the final denouement of the rescue of the Emperor is a bit of a rushed let down. That said I enjoyed the book, not enough to search out any more Tarzan or Pellucidar books, but it was a pretty good if rather dated read.

So why did I buy the book? Well it is all the fault of Jules Burt and an Instagram post of his where he talked about the difficult to find Methuen Sixpence’s, a very short lived attempt at being a competitor to Penguin Books, and that he had bought a complete run of the thirty seven titles from the Eric Gadd collection. This meant he had some spares which I then bought off him as I only had one example in my collection. Now I have enough to justify trying to complete the set myself even though I know they are rare due to poor quality wartime paper, they were published between 1939 and 1941, and not many of each title being printed in the first place. This explains the somewhat tatty condition of this example but frankly getting them in any condition is tricky.

Wizardry and Wild Romance – Michael Moorcock

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Michael Moorcock is a highly respected fantasy author, probably best known for his epic ‘Tales of the Eternal Champion’ which comprises 6,583 pages in the consolidated fourteen volume UK collection shown below from my own collection. Oddly due to copyright issues the UK set is missing two volumes which were only available in the USA whilst the fifteen volume USA set is missing one volume that was only available in the UK. As the design of the sets is very different I’ve elected not to seek out the two USA volumes and to stick with the UK set.

This book however is not part of one of his fantasy series but rather consists of six essays exploring the origins and development of epic fantasy, praising authors he likes and denigrating those that he doesn’t. A warning to fans of JRR Tolkien he doesn’t regard the Lord of the Rings as a serious piece of adult fantasy, the main clue is that the essay largely concentrating on this work is called Epic Pooh, but let’s get to that later on..

In the introduction Moorcock attempts to define his subject, tracing it’s sources back to Icelandic sagas, the Arthurian legends, Gilgamesh etc and the influences these had on the Romantic poets and Victorian novel writers such as Walter Scott and then leaping forward to HP Lovecraft. Personally I find both Scott and Lovecraft largely impenetrable, Moorcock also doesn’t rate Lovecraft describing him as “that somewhat inadequate describer of the indescribable”. The first essay is called Origins and as the title implies looks at the early days of epic fantasy. For me this was the least successful of the pieces in the book, largely because the authors and works he picks to illustrate his study are either ones I have never heard of let alone read, and from the descriptions they aren’t likely to be going on my reading list either. So whilst it added to my knowledge of the very early days of fantasy, we are talking the 1500’s to 1700’s here it largely felt as an exercise telling me what to avoid although the development of the Gothic novel was quite interesting.

However after this rather flat start the book improved dramatically as it started to deal with fantasy as I would more normally regard it. This is split into separate sections, looking first at fantasy landscapes and making the very reasonable point that if you don’t believe the lands that the characters inhabit you are far less likely to believe the stories they are involved in. Badly described geography can be a serious impediment to a readers enjoyment. Moorcock quotes extensively throughout the book picking good and bad examples of prose to illustrate his points. Having established the importance of somewhere for the heroes and villains to exist in he then moves onto character development looking at heroes and heroines in particular. The fourth essay deals with wit and humour, this is not just comedic fantasy or parodies but also introducing wit in the characters dialogue, an eternally dour character is probably going to be unlikable. It was at this point that I realised just how old this book is (1987) as he praises Terry Pratchett and says that Mort, the fourth Discworld novel had recently come out. This means that a lot of the ‘comic’ fantasy that has appeared in the last four decades are all after Moorcock wrote this work.

Now we get to ‘Epic Pooh’, Moorcock’s dissection not only of the works of Tolkien but also the Narnia books of CS Lewis and others of their ilk. I think I should start with a quote:

The sort of prose most often identified with “high” fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby, it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles, it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft {here in the book is a quote from Winnie the Pooh} It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful… The humour is often unconscious because, as with Tolkien, the authors take words seriously but without pleasure.

To be fair Moorcock does accept that at times Tolkien rises above his usual standard but quickly falls back in his failure to really explore the emotional background of his characters and almost completely ignores the character of Sauron seeing him simply as a force for evil with little explanation. But at least he is better then Lewis and here I have to totally agree with Moorcock. I find the Narnia books completely unreadable, and always have, mainly due to the ramming of the Christian message down the throats of its readers at every opportunity Lewis can find. It was only when I read this essay that I realised that I last read Lord of the Rings in my late teens so probably at the age that would most appreciate the work and before I read anything much better. I won’t go on, I do however suggest reading this book if you can find it as its been out of print for years.

A comprehensive, but witty survey… the perfect gift for any Tolkien fan you want to annoy

review in Time Out magazine

One fun bit to the book is the apparent source of the title, which is given at the start of the book as a line of poetry by a poet called Wheldrake in his poem The Elvish Rune from 1877.

And you love take my right hand,
Come from the faerie folks’ last dance:
And we’ll sleep and dream of Elfland,
Her wizardry and wild romance.

In fact Ernest Wheldrake was a creation of Moorcock’s and is regularly quoted by one of the characters in the novel ‘The End of all Songs’ which is the third part of ‘The Dancers at the Edge of Time’ the seventh compendium volume of The Eternal Champion series shown above. So the ‘inspiration’ for the title was a piece of poetry written for the book. This by the way is the only appearance of Moorcock’s own work in this volume, he deliberately avoids self reference.

Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck

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Towards the end of his life Steinbeck felt the need for one last adventure, this was 1960 and he would die of heart failure in 1968 aged just 66. His wife had long been concerned about his health and his heart condition, brought on by his heavy smoking had flared up several times in the preceding years and she was worried about his plans to travel right round the country in a converted camper van with his standard poodle, Charley, as theoretically his only companion. But Steinbeck wanted to reconnect with America, as he says at the beginning of the book:

The plan was to drive up from New York into Maine and explore the back roads of that sparsely populated state before heading along the Canadian border and into Canada by Niagara Falls, before coming back into the USA and travelling up through Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota then along the northernmost border to the coast, trying to stay off interstate freeways as much as possible. The first stumbling block was going into Canada with Charley, the Canadians were fine but, as is still the case, the USA border patrol were not, so Canada was dropped from the route. The less busy roads were also too slow so freeways appear more and more as the journey went on, but those kept him away from the people he wanted to talk to to see how their lives were changing so a sort of compromise was decided on where open countryside was driven through as often as practical.

The book when it came out in 1962 was a hit although it soon became clear that although Steinbeck had genuinely driven around the USA the text was less a travelogue than a carefully created artifice. That’s not to denigrate the book or the stories it tells, which are funny and at times distressing and provide considerable insights into how America had changed over the decades since Steinbeck had left his native California for the east coast and New York State. But it should be taken into consideration that Steinbeck was a great novelist, he was to win the Nobel prize for Literature just after this book came out, and probably couldn’t resist moving stories around and inventing dialogue to make his point. Also the actual trip was considerably more luxurious, and less lonely, than made out in the book, of the seventy five days he was away from home he spent forty five in hotels with his wife, Elaine, and on more than half of the remaining thirty days he either stayed in motels or trailer parks or parked the camper van at the home of friends. Steinbeck’s son, also called John, said that his father invented almost all of the dialogue whilst writing the book but frankly I don’t care, it’s a fun read and you do learn a lot about America on the turn of the 1950’s into the 1960’s.

It is a very uneven travelogue anyway, by page 160 of the Folio Society edition I have we are in Seattle having left New York State and travelled along the US/Canadian border, so just one side of the rough rectangle planned for the journey. On that basis we should be looking at a four or five hundred page epic but instead it is only 241 pages in total, so over two thirds of the mileage is covered in a quarter of the pages and the detail in the first three quarters is lost in the remainder. That said I actually think the last quarter is the most important, as we have Steinbeck returning to search for his roots in California and finding that they are irretrievably lost. Cannery Row has been gentrified and he barely recognises the places of his childhood. Charley is also confused but that is mainly down to the visit to the giant redwoods which are so huge that he doesn’t seem to see them as trees and finds a small bush to mark instead.

But it is pretty well the last section that is the most important of this ‘almost’ documentary and drives home Steinbeck’s dislike of some of what he found on his journey when he goes to New Orleans in search of ‘the Cheerleaders’. These frankly repellent middle aged white women gathered each day to scream abuse at six or seven year old children going or leaving school who just happened to be a different colour than they were. Steinbeck was appalled by them and the crowds they pulled together which meant the children needed police support just to go to school.

I’m going to leave it there.

Vietnam! Vietnam! – Felix Greene

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This post is being published on the 29th April 2025, the day before the fiftieth anniversary of the surrender of South Vietnam and the ending of the Vietnam war, the Vietnamese by the way refer to it as the American war. The choice of this book amongst several that I have on the conflict was pretty well certain as over half the book consists of photojournalism and the balance a series of essays detailing in chronological order what led up to the war and the first ten years of the fighting. Even though Greene was a British journalist the book was first published in 1965 in America, with still eight more years of American involvement and beyond that two years of the slow push down the country by the North until they finally prevailed. That this book was written roughly half way through the war would have horrified its author who, at least partly, hoped that exposing just what was going on might have hurried the end. My copy is the 1967 British paperback edition by Penguin Books.

By going back to the French Indochina colonies pre WWII and taking the story of how America came to be fighting there the twenty two essays that make up the second half of the book largely follow a historical progression. So how did America get into this mess? Well it turns out that when the French were kicked out by the invading Japanese during WWII they were determined to regain control of their colonies just as the Vietnamese, along with the populations of Cambodia and Laos for that matter, saw an opportunity to gain independence at the end of the war. There was a short lived declaration of independence for all of Vietnam but the French did re-invade in 1946, however they needed American assistance, which was forthcoming as part of the anti-communist sentiment in American politics through the 1950’s and this led to them supporting the extremely unpopular puppet president Diem with ever increasing military power initially in the guise of ‘advisers’ and ‘trainers’. The French eventually gave up and left leaving the Americans, who by then were financing roughly three quarters of the military push and supplying arms despite the Geneva accords of 1954 which said that foreign forces should not be in Vietnam and there should be elections within two years leading to reunification of Vietnam. America and France, despite being signatories to these agreements had no intention of allowing them to happen.

Picture by Kyoichi Sawada – United Photo Industries (UPI)

And so we ended up with America fighting the Vietnamese under the guise of preventing North Vietnam gaining control of the south but in fact the National Liberation Front, known outside of the country as the Vietcong, set up in 1960 was entirely composed of people from the south who wanted the foreign forces out of their country and the weapons they used were almost entirely from deserters from the American backed Vietnamese troops.

I have been selective in which photos to use from the book as a lot of them are far more shocking than the example of American torture shown above and include the famous picture of the monk, Thich Quang Duc, sitting and burning in the road as he set fire to himself in protest at the ongoing conflict in June 1963. In truth the photographs are far more telling than the essays, especially when juxtaposed with quotes which clearly don’t match the images such as the destroyed houses below.

Photo by Felix Greene

There are clearly books that look back on the war with the benefit of hindsight which I could have reviewed but I was drawn to this work written during the middle of the conflict. It may not be the most dispassionate summary of what was going on but Greene was trying to make sense of what he witnessed whilst reporting and for that it is a fascinating book.

Top photo by Bob Ibrahim UPI, bottom photo un-credited UPI

I travelled the length of Vietnam in 2007-8 and was lucky to have three very different guides which could provide alternate viewpoints. Starting in the south the guide was an older gentleman who had lived through the defeat of the south a a civilian and could talk about the pulling out of the American forces and the advance of the troops from the north leading to the surrender. In central Vietnam our guide was an ex Vietcong fighter who still walked with a limp from a war injury sustained in Hue, whilst the north was explained by a man in his early twenties who had never known anything other than a unified country. I doubt it is possible to have such an interesting selection of guides nowadays fifty years on from the end of the conflict and I’m glad I went when I did.

Selected Works – Cicero

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Cicero was a prominent statesman, lawyer and orator at a time of great turbulence in the Roman empire. Born in 106BC and elected one of the two consuls in 63BC, he was at his prime when Julius Caesar became dictator following his invasion on 49BC, and whilst not one of the group that ultimately assassinated Caesar in 44BC it was generally known that he supported them. He is one of the most prominent men of letters of his time with over eight hundred existing examples and many of his speeches were published. We don’t by any means have everything he wrote but what we have is still a substantial body of work. This book starts with his opening speech in the prosecution of Gaius Verres for mismanagement during his time as Governor of Sicily. the Roman legal system at the time expected a very long speech, normally over a day, in such matters but Cicero gave a ‘shortened’ version (still 23 pages long) as he was concerned that with various public holidays coming up the trial could be postponed for months. It’s a good introduction to Cicero’s style as are the selection of twenty three letters that follow which include one from Caesar.

It is in the third section that we really see Cicero in full flow in the second of his fourteen speeches mainly given in the Senate against Anthony, although this particular speech was never delivered there, being published instead. This massive fifty three page speech established Cicero as a major opponent to Anthony, who had seized control of Rome following the death of Caesar. The series of speeches were known as the Philippic’s after Demosthenes’s denunciations of Philip II of Macedon and were so powerful that Cicero eventually convinced the Senate to declare Anthony an enemy of the state as Cicero attempted to gather support for Anthony’s son, Octavian, to stand against his father. The section below is just a small part of the second Philippic against Antony but gives a feeling of the enmity between the two men:

For what was left of Rome, Antony, owed its final annihilation to yourself. In your home everything had a price; and a truly sordid series of deals it was. Laws you passed, laws you caused to be put through to your interests, had never even been formally proposed. You admit this yourself. You were an auger, yet you never took the auspices. You were a consul, yet you blocked the legal right of other officials to exercise the veto. Your armed escort was shocking. You are a drink-sodden, sex-ridden wreck. Never a day passes in that ill-reputed house of yours without orgies of the most repulsive kind.

The book concludes with two of Cicero’s best known works, the third part of ‘On Duties’ and all of ‘On Old Age’. ‘On Duties III’ consists of eleven sections where Cicero endeavours to explain the preference for actions seen as right as opposed to ones which are simply advantageous and why an action which may appear advantageous but cannot be seen as right is never the correct thing to do. This book, along with the first two parts is addressed to Cicero’s son Marcus who was then in Athens and is a guide to moral behaviour. ‘On Old Age’ is a lot more fun to read, it is written as an imagined conversation between Cato the Elder, who was 84 at the time it is set in 150BC, with Scipio Aemilianus, then 35, and Gaius Laelius, also in his thirties. Cato expounds on the advantages of old age and a reconciliation to the fact that death cannot be far away, in Cato’s case the following year.

Cicero was murdered in 43BC aged sixty three as he was attempting to escape the wrath of Anthony, now reconciled with Octavian, and his head and hands, specifically requested by Anthony as punishment for writing the Philippics, were nailed to the Rostra in the Forum Romanum.

The translation is by noted classicist Michael Grant, Professor of Humanity at the University of Edinburgh and was the first of several translations, mainly of Cicero, that he undertook for both Penguin Books and the Folio Society. This has been the first time that I’ve read Cicero although I can’t imagine it will be the last, there are several Penguin Classics that cover more of his writings and The Folio Society have recently published a massive single volume 664 page collection.

Professor Branestawm’s Treasure Hunt – Norman Hunter

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And now for some nostalgia, I first read this book along with the first book in the series ‘The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm’ when I was in Primary school aged about seven or eight years old. I never actually owned a copy of either book, simply reading the ones in the school library, but the other day I came across this copy, dated 1966, which is the same as the version I first read all those years ago at the end of the sixties. I had to have it and see if childhood memories of loving the books were anywhere near as good as with Elleston Trevor’s ‘Where’s Wumpus’. Sadly the adult me found the book a bit of a curate’s egg (good in parts) and some parts have not dated very well, but when it was good it was great fun.

For those unfamiliar with the absent minded professor and inventor of crackpot inventions Branestawm would be partly great fun to meet but also a complete danger to anyone around him as his inventions not only invariably go wrong but also quite frequently do so in catastrophic ways, often explosively. His jacket is fastened by safety pins, having lost its buttons many years ago, and he wears five pairs of spectacles, one set is specifically for looking for the other four whenever he loses them, which is frequently. His housekeeper, Mrs Flittersnoop, is often to be found residing at her sister Aggie’s house when the professor’s home has been rendered uninhabitable by one disaster or another. In this book one of the stories concerns the house burning down, amazingly not caused by one of Branestawm’s inventions but not helped by him trying to put the fire out by trying to smother the fire with a rug, which promptly caught fire, adding to the conflagration, and then throwing alcohol on the flames which of course made everything worse. This leads to him trying to invent automatic fire alarms which prove to be so sensitive that even the mayor’s cigar sets them off and the professor ultimately having to move in with Mrs Flittersnoop’s sister as well because so little of the house is still standing. Other regular characters are Colonel Dedshott of the Catapult Cavaliers who is always to be found in full regimental dress uniform complete with jangling medals, Mr Chintzbitz the owner of the furniture shop and Doctor Mumpzanmeasle, these names giving a hint of Hunter’s love of word play, which can sometimes get in the way of readability as you try to work out just what you have actually read.

‘The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm’ was first published in 1933, whilst ‘Professor Branestawm’s Treasure Hunt’ originally came out in 1937, there then was a long hiatus before book three was released in 1970, with a further eleven being written between 1972 and 1983. I suspect the reprinting of the first two books by Puffin in 1947 and 1966 respectively and especially the subsequent 1969 television adaption did a lot to revive the character and prompt Norman Hunter to write more. I’ve never read any more than the first two and indeed didn’t even know they existed until I came to research this blog. Norman Hunter was born in 1899 and died, aged 95 in 1995

English Folk Songs – Ralph Vaughan Williams and A L Lloyd

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Continuing the bucolic countryside and doomed love themes from last week’s ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ I was drawn to this book of English folk songs, which was Vaughan Williams’ last book as sadly he died just before it was published. Ralph Vaughan Williams was of course one of the great English composers of the first half of the twentieth century, he died in 1958, and was heavily inspired by English folk songs although he also wrote nine symphonies and four concertos along with his numerous song cycles and choral works. He qualified as a Doctor of Music from Cambridge University and it is as Doctor Vaughan Williams that A L Lloyd refers to him in his ‘Note on the Presentation of the Tunes’ at the start of this book. The selection of songs is quite widespread, although biased toward tunes gathered in the south of England as that was where Vaughan Williams lived so it was easier for him to travel round collecting material in that part of the country although there are a small number from the north. Vaughan Williams was inspired to start collecting English folk songs by contemporaries such as Cecil Sharp and the collections he made helped to preserve a rapidly dying art form as well as influencing his own work.

If I have one criticism of this book it is not in the choice of songs, which provide a spectrum of styles but in the structure of the book itself with the songs in the first part and the accompanying text in the second half which means that you need two bookmarks to keep track of where you are as you continually skip to and fro to read the context and history of the song you have just read. I would have much preferred the descriptions to be interleaved with the music as that would have been far simpler to read.

Before the couple of examples I have chosen, I must explain that the copy I have has a very tight spine and to avoid splitting it I have been forced to hold it open as much as I dared but that has led to somewhat distorted photos of the pages.

Although listed as collected from Somerset, the earliest versions of this song are known from Newcastle Upon Tyne, so the opposite end of the country, and these date back to the late seventeenth century. The lyrics included are a mix of at least three versions into a harmonious whole presumably by Vaughan Williams when collating this book.

The Green Bed follows a theme common with other songs of the period of a sailor who arriving at lodging he has used before claims to have lost all his money in a disaster and is turned away but when he shows that actually he has plenty of money all of a sudden beer and bed are available and the landlady is quite happy to include her daughter in the bed. However the sailor spurns the offer as it is clear that both of them are only interested in the money he has. Again the example comes from the south of England but versions of this song are also known from Warwickshire, in the English Midlands and therefore a long way from the sea.

I really enjoyed this exploration of English folk song and I have various other collections of traditional music which would also be worth exploring at a later date.