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

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 Portmeirion (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 it 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 note the manner in which 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 [behind The Prisoner]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 initial idea is less interesting a question than how it then developed into what we saw on screen week after week, 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,

Nor 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 at 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, Arthur 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 still 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 describes the 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. The Persian language was 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) influenced the generations that followed. For example, 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 something 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 derive 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 to 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 Common Prayer (compare the last quatrain I quoted to the famous “dust to dust...”) 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. 

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, making sense of why some production played for just one week in one location and others 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. 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 was 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 actors 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 required. 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.)

For one production in 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 the actors to take 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:

“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?

The Furious Masters, by Margot Bennett

This is a review of a comic science-fiction novel from 1968, sort of John Wyndham done as sitcom. Yet in poking fun at the mores and anxieties of its time, there are things here worth a content warning for sexual violence. 

Characters - male and female - repeatedly joke about rape and when one woman is stripped naked and murdered, it's played for comic effect. I'm not sure how much that's the author satirising misogyny of the period or being steeped in it herself and, given the overall light comic tone, I'm not sure how much that's on purpose. There's a lot going on under the surface.

At 3 am on 16 May, a sonic boom is heard across Yorkshire, trembling windows in Huddersfield and so terrifying the animals at a farm in Highfield-on-Moor that egg production drops by 40%. Two days later, farmer John Holman writes an angry letter to a government department to complain, believing the boom to have been caused by the RAF running exercises. The ministry denies any such exercise has taken place. 

Meanwhile, four precocious students from Oxford - Cressida, Robbie, Sue and David - go hiking across the moor and discover a strange object:

"The main body was a big, squat, metal cuboid, four feet high and over five across. On each side there were three-inch square slots, which on examination appeared to be filled with thick glass. The body was covered by a low pyramid, from which two long cup-ended tentacles projected at different angles. They looked very like aerials. A thick rod rose several feet above the pyramid to support two flat rectangular sheets of metal; one almost parallel to the ground, the other about ten degrees off the perpendicular." (p. 14)

They're soon joined by photographer Henry Brown, who takes atmospheric snaps of Cressida in front of this "spacecraft" and then hurries down to London to sell them to the papers. Soon people are queuing up to see the "Martian" lander, Holman fencing off his land and charging entry. News reporters come by helicopter, the police turn out in force, the local vicar has a moral perspective on all these proceedings, and even the Prime Minister is making pronouncements on TV about what he thinks is going on, based more on what he'd like to think than the evidence on the ground.

In all this frenzy, it takes a while for the students - and the reader - to spot the effects that this lander seems to have on those who get close it. They become more frenzied, angry, violent... The title of the novel refers to the "furious masters of lust and violence" that govern our behaviour.

We get our first clue to what's going on just after Henry photograph Cressida, thrilled by the possibility that these pictures will make him famous. They're also both hot from the walk and the sunny day, and the heat given off by the "spaceship". Henry suddenly changes tack:

"'I wa thinking to hell with fame and what's the hurry [to get to London] and I should pull you down and...' He put his arms around her and rubbed his face against hers. 'And make love to you on this fine bouncy grass.'" (p. 19)

Cressida initially seems keen but then a sheep bleats nearby and ruins the moment. Cressida admits that she likes Henry but thinks they should call the police to inform them about the lander. Henry persists: 

"I should have raped you [but] I'm over-civilised" (p. 20). 

Cressida laughs this off, but it's the first of many casual references to sexual violence. Later, this is linked to sexual liberation - or the lack of it:

"Cressida and Sue ran across the grass to the helicopter.

'Would you have minded being raped?' Sue asked in her shrill, clear voice, as they climbed on board.

'Yes.'

'With your inhibitions, naturally. I would have liked to be raped. It makes a nice change.'

'Being raped by one man is all very well. But I had two after me. And Sabine women aren't in this year.'" (p. 83)

The casual tone of all this is shocking, but surely a conscious choice by the author. In part, it's satirising sexual liberation. It's also not so different with the comments by members of the public from the time responding to the sexual assault depicted in The Forsyte Saga, which are included as extras on the DVD of that serial. But one big element of the novel is competing ideas about the cause of the increasing violence: whether it's something being done to us by the "spaceship" or something inside us all anyway that's been given an excuse to let rip. As Cressida and Sue have this conversation, is it a new or prevailing attitude?

As I said, much of the violence here is played for comic effect. When Cressida rebuffs Henry's advances, he resorts to attacking his own blown-up photographs of her. Another character makes a clumsy attempt to break into the bathroom when she's in there. In both cases, the threat is undercut by the inadequacies of these men. Later, as things get every more frenzied, another woman is stripped naked and murdered in a church as part of a kind of ritual sacrifice, but the vicar and congregation don sunglasses so as not to see anything rude.

A lot of these incidents feel like comic sketches. The novel is often funny and well observed, its targets including the press, police, church and civil service bureaucracy. There are some great one-liners:

"I must say Mars couldn't have chosen a more awkward time for the Minister." (p. 36)

But many of the gags are specifically visual in nature. Margot Bennett has a knack for conjuring vivid, strange images - such as this glimpse of the fauna of another world:

"Could the population of Mars, formerly supposed to consist of small snails, have devised a machine capable of driving human beings mad?" (p. 139)

Often, we "see" the comic events taking place, such as squabbles over who is in charge of a helicopter, or the top secret files raining down from an open window on to people rioting in the street. With its lively characters and set pieces, I could easily see this being dramatised - and perhaps Bennett, a prolific writer for TV, did so too. In fact, one reason I was so keen to read this novel is that it had been suggested to me that it originated in an idea Bennett may have offered Doctor Who. 

Her name is listed in two internal BBC documents, one from 28 February 1964 and one undated but probably from 2 March, with the idea to commission a four-part story from her to cover the potential loss of what ultimately became Planet of Giants. Nothing else is known about what Bennett's story might have involved.

If it was the seed of what became The Furious Masters, I can see why it didn't go any further as a Doctor Who adventure. On 20 February, story editor David Whitaker declined a story by another would-be writer, David Fisher, on the basis that it was set in the 20th century; the production team wanted Doctor Who to visit other times and places. We don't know much about Fisher's The Face of the Fire, other than it involved the effects of a machine discovered under the Wessex Downs. If this didn't meet with approval, the same was surely true of an idea from Bennett about the effects of a machine found on the moors in Yorkshire.

I'm continuing to look into this, and have in sight Bennett's other science fiction novel, The Long Way Back (1955) and her non-fiction The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Atomic Radiation (1964). Note that the latter is from around the time she was mooted for Doctor Who, so perhaps that will provide further clues.

See also:

• Me on The Man Who Didn't Fly, a detective novel by Margot Bennett
• Me on The Victorian Chaise-Longue, a science-fiction novella by Marghanita Laski, another author considered for the first year of Doctor Who
• Buy my biography, David Whitaker in an Exciting Adventure with Television
• Memoirs of the Spacewomen, a 2015 radio documentary about the work of Margot Bennett, Naomi Mitchison and Rose Macaulay, presented by Matthew Sweet and produced by Allegra McIlroy

Doctor Who and the Time-Travelling Almanac, by me

It seems like only a week since my last book was out. But today sees publication of Doctor Who - The Time-Travelling Almanac, billed as the official guide to the Doctor's year. It is written by me and illustrated by brilliant Emma Price.

What is an almanac anyway? Why do we have August? How do the histories of the Beatles and the Doctor overlap?

Where exactly did the Doctor mean to take Romana instead of that beach at the start of The Leisure Hive? What are the tides on Kastarion 3 like?

All this and Dalek horoscopes, banana penguins, the best time of day for Sea Devils to invade and much more... 

HARDBACK

ISBN: 9781785949173

Length: 256 pages

Dimensions: 224mm x 23mm x 143mm

Weight: 355g

Price: £16.99

PAPERBACK

ISBN: 9781473533943

Length: 256 pages

Price: £8.99

Doctor Who and the Left-Handed Hummingbird, by Kate Orman

Someone is meddling with time. That means that when an Aztec warrior ventures into a long abandoned Exxilon spaceship, he isn't instantly killed by the radiation bleeding from its systems. Instead, Huitzilin - his name meaning "southern warrior" and also "left-handed hummingbird" - becomes something like a god. Some 500 years later, the Doctor and his friends arrive in Mexico City in 1994 to find they're late for an adventure and must head back to multiple points in time to catch up...

I've not read The Left-Handed Hummingbird since it was first published in November 1993 - the official publication date was December, but there's a moment in this that I suddenly, madly remembered first reading the night before my driving test so it must have been out the month before. Yet this odd, extraordinary book scored its way into my brain. Reading it again after more than 30 years, it was immediately, vividly familiar, like catching up with an old friend.

Two things surprised me. First, for what I remember as Kate Orman's radical debut, the plot is quite straightforward, even slight. The Doctor and his pals Ace and Bernice are on the trail of "the Blue", ie Huitzilin, which has the power to take people over and make them violent. That includes the Doctor and his friends - all providing Huitzilin with fuel so that he can become corporeal once more. But the more the Doctor is taken over, the more he can see what Huitzilin thinks and feels. And the more Huitzilin becomes corporeal, the more he can be tackled head on...

What makes this so different is the way that it's told, beginning in 1994 - the future, when the book was published - and then dancing back to multiple points in time to piece together the story. Telling a story out of order was a big innovation, perhaps oddly for a long-running series about gadding back and forth in time. And then the novel makes us realise that the pieces don't quite fit because time is in flux and changing. I'm conscious now, as I wasn't at the time, how big an influence this was on my debut novel.

The way it's told includes things we'd never do today. The violence is horrific and vivid, rather than PG or 12A. The Doctor takes magic mushrooms and LSD to communicate with his enemy. One of his companions is a gun-totting solder who kills people with little qualm and reneges on her agreement with the Doctor not to use violence; the other companion kills a man by bashing him with a cooking implement. This book is all set on Earth and yet reading it is a journey to another world.

Secondly, the book is chock-full of references to other Doctor Who, on TV and in print. That's not a criticism - these were books squarely aimed at fans, and I ate up this continuity with greed at the time but was grateful to the entry on this novel in the Cloister Library when trying to remember other books I've not read in more than 30 years. For the most part, you don't need to be able to place these references to enjoy or be caught up in the story. But then there are the exceptions. 

I think the assumed/required knowledge of the reader is 1964 story The Aztecs, which was  readily available to fans at the time of publication having been released on BBC Video on 2 November 1992, and 1974 story Death to the Daleks, released on video July 1987. These  TV stories also inspired two of the best novelisations, too. This kind of thing occupies my head a lot in what I write day to day - how much we can assume fixed points of Doctor Who, the nodes by which we all navigate, as opposed to the obscure stuff that is manna for the dork hardcore (my people). See, for example, what I said about authority as it relates to The Unfolding Text.

But also, amazingly, there are several references to other Doctor Who stories here that the Cloister Library doesn't cover. Perhaps fittingly for a story that plays with chronology and the unfixedness of time, there are the references in this novel to multiple Doctor Who stories from after it was published. When the Doctor is gravely wounded, his friends are asked why they don't rush him to hospital.

"'Because he's from outer crukking space,' spat Bernice. 'A crukking twentieth-century hospital would probably do a crukking brilliant job of killing him.'" (p. 177)

Which, of course, is exactly what happens to kill off this incarnation of the Doctor in the TV movie Doctor Who (1996). Later in the novel, Ace pulls out her gun only to find that the Doctor has swapped it for a potato, years ahead of him pulling the same trick (with a banana) on Captain Jack in The Doctor Dances (2005). Then the TARDIS lands on Abbey Road (p. 201), as it does in The Devil's Chord (2024).

A few other small things occur. Bernice Summerfield, a 26th-century archaeologist of the 20th century, doesn't know what pizza is (p. 71) or how to open tins (p. 73), and doesn't have much to do. When she reveals, at the end, that she doesn't get to do much archaeology while travelling in time and is thinking of leaving the TARDIS, I could well understand why. I doubt I was conscious of all this when I first read the novel; now I'm all too aware of the note from my editors to ensure the regular characters are always well served.

Something very of its time is the frequency with which the author refers to the Doctor as "the Time Lord". Yes, she also refers to Bernice as "the archaeologist" (p. 238) and Cristian as "the Mexican" (p. 259), but there are far more second mentions of the Doctor as Time Lord, which I don't think a Doctor Who novelist would do now. If nothing else, this incarnation of the Doctor, in the crumpled linen suit of the novels, is one of the least assuming Doctors visually, a man we'd fail to notice in a crowd who is yet a near god-like alien in our midst. Referring to him, a lot, as "the Time Lord" is a convention, a fashion, of the time when this novel was written but I think it'a also the wrong cue for what we "see" - as if this unassuming fellow were wearing a big robe and collar.

And then there's the other strong visual elicited by this reread: of me, aged 17, utterly absorbed by this book, this series, this gang of authors I so much wanted to be part of. There's a bit towards the end of the novel where the Doctor handles a powerful book that glows with light. It's been fun to return to this book that shone so brightly in my formative years and has stayed with me so long after. Thank you, Kate.

See also:

• My own, awful first idea for a Doctor Who novel which I submitted in 1994
• Me on the 1992 Doctor Who novel Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

The Voice of the Dolphins, by Leo Szilard

Prompted by Richard Flanagan's Question 7, I sought out this "science-fiction" anthology by the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard (1898-1964). He's an extraordinary figure, the man who conceived and patented the idea of the nuclear chain reaction, inspired by The World Set Free by HG Wells (in which Wells coined the term "atomic bomb"). In 2015, I made a documentary about this, HG and the H-Bomb, where we spoke to Liza Jardine about her memories of "Leo", a good friend of her father's. But I didn't know that Szilard himself wrote sci-fi.

It's a short, quirky collection, comprising the following:

pp. 7-12 "Nightmare for Future Reference" (1938) by American poet Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943), from the Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benét

• Some time in the future, the unknown narrator addresses an 18 year-old who was one of the last to be born before, during the Third World War, the birth rate collapsed. 

pp. 13-68 "The Voice of the Dolphins" (1960)

• Written sometime after 1998 (p. 35), an account of the years 1960-85 and the way intelligent dolphins helped end the nuclear stalemate (for more on which, see below).

pp. 69-79 "My Trial as a War Criminal" (1947), reprinted from The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 17, no. 1, Autumn 1949.

• During the Third World War, a virus kills American children and the country surrenders to Russia, whereupon Szilard, Henry L Stimson, President Truman and James F Byrnes are put on trial for their roles in the Manhattan Project.

pp. 81-94 "The Mark Gable Foundation" (1948)

• In 1960, the narrator is put in suspended animation and woken in 2050, where no one has teeth and women choose to impregnate themselves with the seed of a small number of celebrities. The narrator is now such a celebrity.

pp. 95-100 "Calling All Stars" (1949)

• A radio message from the planet Cybernetica warns of odd readings detected in the atmosphere of the planet Earth, from which the cybernetic people deduce biological inhabitants, evolution and nuclear war - and warn others to be wary.

pp. 101-107 "Report of 'Grand Central Terminal'" (1948), reprinted from The University of Chicago Magazine, June 1952.

• A report by aliens on their exploration of the extinct planet Earth, and their deductions about the life forms that once lived here based on aspects of Grand Central Station, such as the coin-operated toilets.

pp. 108-111 "Kathy and the Bear" (no date)

• The author relates two meals with four year-old Kathy and her mother at a hotel, and the child's conversations with a bear skin hanging there.

pp. 112-126 "The Mined Cities" (no date), reprinted from Bulletin of the American Scientists, December 1961 - vol. XVII, No. 10.

• A conversation between "A" and "B" in 1980, looking back on a convoluted system to avoid nuclear annihilation by having Americans mine a Russia city and be ready to blow it up (and themselves), and vice versa.

The title story seems to have been prompted by real-life John C Lilly claiming, in the year the story was written, that "dolphins might have a language of their own" (p. 15). We learn from Szilard that one of the few recommendations of the President's Science Advisory Committee to bear fruit is "a major joint Russian-American research project having no relevance to the national defense, or to any politically controversial issues" (p. 14). Instead, the Biological Research Institute in Vienna, established in 1963, focused on dolphin intelligence.

The institute quickly established that dolphins are highly intelligent. We learn, from a book published in 1998, that,

"the dolphins, who grasped mathematics, chemistry, physics and biology with ease, found it difficult to comprehend America's social and political system" (p. 35)

With the dolphins' help, the Vienna Institute develops a cheap food that has the side-effect of lowering birth rates and so solves the problem of over-population. From the licence paid on this best-selling food stuff, the institute has the financial backing to reshape the world. We follow the various, complex schemes and politics. Then, with the nuclear threat averted, questions are raised as to whether the dolphins really were intelligent - implying that the American and Russian scientists between them have duped and saved us all.

Within this fun wheeze, Szilard tells a sprawling future history, predicting the revolution in Iran if not the exact date, and poking fun at various subjects, often with the eye of an outsider. With its new-earned wealth,

"The first major investment made by the Vienna Institute was the purchase of television stations in a number of cities all over the world. Thereafter, the television programs of these stations carried no advertising. Since they no longer had to aim their programs at the largest possible audience, there was no longer any need for them to cater to the taste of morons." (p. 18)

I wonder if he had advert-free BBC Television in mind as the saviour of humanity. There are jibes on the way the two-party system in America favours minority rule since a few per cent of voters with some strongly held view on a particular issue can determine which of two candidates wins (p. 33). On the same page, he cites "Szilard's diary, recently published by Simon and Schuster" - that is, some 40 years after this was written - to show he was right all along about allowing China to join the United Nations.

There's something similar when an extended footnote details the way in which an article by Szilard in the February 1960 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was initially misunderstood.

"After his death, Szilard appears to have received some recognition, however, from his Russian colleagues, who names a small crater after him - on the back side of the moon." (p. 28)

Even the way he refers to the far side is a joke. In fact, there is a Szilard crater, named in 1970 and on the near side of the moon.

The playful and mischievous tone continues through much of what follows. In "My Trial as a War Criminal", the Russians develop a virus that predominately kills children. This was never to be used, and only kept in case of emergency. A later, more advanced virus was intended for use in war.

"It would not affect children at all and would kill predominately men between twenty and forty. Owing to the premature outbreak of the war, however, the Russian government found itself forced to use the stocks which it had on hand." (pp. 69-70)

This is grim humour from a man so closely associated with the development of nuclear weapons he then failed to contain, and well understood the bureaucracy involved in unleashing weapons of mass destruction. There's a similar caustic wit as he considers the option of a new life in Russia, having already lived in Hungary, Germany, England and the US. 

"When you are above fifty you are no longer as quick at learning languages. How many years would it take me to get a sufficient command of Russian to be able to turn a phrase and to be slightly malicious without being outright offensive?" (p. 71)

The twist at the end of the tale is that Szilard and his fellows escape the inevitable guilty verdict when the Russians fall victim to their own virus. That's a consistent idea in this book. These weapons are not something we use on other people; whoever unleashes them, we all lose.

The last story, set in 1980, was first published in The Bulletin of the American Scientists in 1961, and includes "B" asking "A" who first thought up the convoluted idea of "mined cities".

"B: Szilard had proposed it in an article published in The Bulletin of the American Scientists in 1961, but the idea may not have been original with him. His proposal was presented in the form of fiction and it was not taken seriously." (p. 120)

The argument then follows, and repeats almost word for word, some of what was covered in "The Voice of the Dolphins" - which Szilard then acknowledges, but says is a complete coincidence.

"A: I read The Voice of the Dolphins when I was ill in the hospital; I remember that it contained many rather crazy prediction, but what they were, I do not recall." (p. 126) 

It's a daft book full of complicated, intricate ways to prevent nuclear annihilation - none of them madder than the real predicament facing the world. I've read and heard a lot about Szilard and his rather odd perspective and humour - he was, says Richard Flanagan, one of the Hungarian scientists known as "the Martians" because they were so odd.

The blurb for this book refers to his "wry sense of humour and a heartfelt fear for the future of mankind". More than anything, there's a playfulness here, following any daft idea to its logical end. But what did Einstein, or President Truman, make of this strange fellow and his extended flights of fancy. I suspect he was exhausting.

Don't Stop the Music, by Justin Lewis

By fun coincidence, I received a copy of this book - recommended to me by various friends since publication last year - two days after happening to meet its author. By another fun coincidence, I've finally read it having just read Question 7 by Richard Flanagan, which explores the idea of the past and present all happening at once. In Don't Stop the Music, the idea is more, I think, that there's an overlapping past.

This is basically a sort of toilet book full of odd bits of pop music history. But the organising principle lifts it into something else. Lewis provides facts for each calendar day of the year, in chronological order. In the very first entry, we learn that on 1 January 1958 Johnny Cash plays his first concert at San Quentin State Prison in California, where future country-and-western singer Merle Haggard is one of the captive audience (the author's pun). On the same day in 1962, the Beatles record five songs for Decca Records, who turn them down. On the same day two years later, the Beatles are at #1 with 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' and the first edition of Top of the Pops is broadcast on the BBC (featuring Dusty Springfield, the Rolling Stones and the Hollies). On the same day in 1990, Florida radio station WKRL plays 'Stairway to Heaven' by Led Zeppelin - and continues to repeat it non-stop for 24 hours.

Note the present tense of all this: these bits of history are still happening now, a sense reinforced by the fact that we can hear the music. In fact, I read this with my phone handy to look up tracks on iTunes - stuff I'd not heard in a while, stuff that was wholly new.

Also, note the range in just this first entry: pop and rock and country, reaching right back to the birth of rock n' roll - and beyond. Other entries bring us up to date, or at least to time of publication. There's also a diversity of entry: some funny, some weird and some poignant.

There's plenty here I didn't know, for example that the launch of Sputnik 2 in October 1957 was timed to coincide with the International Geophysical Year involving 67 different countries. I knew about the IGY from when, more than a decade ago, the Dr worked on a BBC archive project which put old clips and programmes online. One thing she and her team dug out was The Restless Sphere, a programme presented by the Duke of Edinburgh - live - giving an overview of all the work planned. I'd not made the connection between that and the space programme, and I learn from Lewis that the IGY was also commemorated in 1982, in the opening track of Donald Fagen's first solo album after leaving Steely Dan, Fagen looking back to the promise of a future that should have been the then-now.

The book is full of these kinds of connections and juxtapositions. One song or event influences another, or the backing singing of one band then has their own entry as a star. These connections are the point; in the introduction Lewis says the lack of an index is a creative decision as he wanted to ensure the book is "a little more than a dipping-in exercise." What I'd really like instead is a map. 

By another fun coincidence, I've used a similar organising principle for Doctor Who: The Time-Travelling Almanac, which is out next month. My hope there was to conjure a sense of the year as physical journey as we go round and round the Sun, so the anniversary of any particular date is us returning to the same spot. In my book, that then sparks other thoughts and peregrinations, some of them much longer than the entries here. It's a different kind of journey, I think, but starting from a similar place.

Question 7, by Richard Flanagan

Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which was in part based on his father's experience as a prisoner of war in Japan. He's also the author of Death of River Guide (1994), in part based on the author's own experience of a near-fatal accident while out on a kayak.

This new book is non-fiction but revisits the real events behind these two novels, connecting them to - among other things - the history of Flanagan's native Tasmania, the invention of the nuclear bomb and the love life of HG Wells and Rebecca West. It's about the way reality informs fiction and fiction informs reality, and the way the past is present in the now. It's a remarkable, rich and vivid flit through all sorts of bits of history, at once directly, movingly personal and yet about us all.

Flanagan cites in his acknowledgements one key influence: the essay ‘The past is in the present is in the future’ by 18 year-old Sienna Stubbs, which describes her Yolŋu culture's understanding of a fourth tense, beyond past, present and future, in which what was and is and will be are all happening at once. So, all these years later after the real event, Flanagan is still 21 and trapped in his kayak, facing imminent death. And HG is still snogging the teenage Rebecca West. And the bomb is still being dropped on Horoshima.

Some of the history here I've already dug into, having made a Radio 4 documentary about how HG Well's novel The World Set Free, in which he coined the term "atomic bomb", inspired Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard to conceive the chain reaction component that would make such a thing a reality; but the Wells book also made him realise the terrible consequence of such a device used on an urban population. We seem to have worked from several of the same sources, and I'm glad to see that Flanagan, likewise, sees Szilard as both a pivotal and fascinating figure (whereas he makes a single, fleeting appearance in the film Oppenheimer).

Flanagan delves further than we did in our documentary (where we had just 42 minutes, and covered some other ground) to explore the circumstances in which Wells wrote The Wells Set Free and the women he was involved with at the time, as well as pursuing what happened to Szilard and addressing his own efforts to write science-fiction. I've got a copy of Szilard's book on its way and will report back in due course.

So it's a fascinating story being covered here, and yet also beautifully, succinctly told in short bursts that make it difficult to put down when you could just do one more short section. Yet it's also often viscerally shocking, whether detailing the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima or the genocide in Tasmania, or the denouement in which he recounts in detail his experience on the river. Also shocking is his meeting the men who held his father captor, asking one old man to hit slap him in the way he'd slapped the prisoners in his charge. Or there's the racism, sexism and cultural condescension faced while a student at Oxford (p. 231), and then this:

"Meanwhile, the Bullers wandered the Oxford streets, dressed absurdly as themselves or offensively as Nazis and after dinner had the whores in. The Buller B—who would be prime minister wanted me to be his wingman when he ran a second time for Oxford Union president, one more whore. I told him I couldn't stand the Union, that I wasn't a member, and why, in any case, would I bother? B— said when I ran he would help me if I helped him and so I repeated my original answer and B— fif-faf-fuddled because he really had no answer, no one did, he was charming and you couldn't believe a thing he said..." (pp. 233-4)