It includes a one-page Stasis Cube by me, this time based on a photograph of David Tennant and Catherine Tate on the roof of the old International Press Centre in Shoe Lane, London, on Thursday 6 July 2006 for recording of that year's Christmas special, The Runaway Bride.
I also get a mention in the editorial because of something I've written for the Doctor Who Yearbook 2025, which is out next week...
Me and the Dr are fine. Well, not fine - we're both suffering physical ailments at the moment. But yesterday we took a day off together and drove up to Haworth, home of the Brontes (including Emily). We met up with one of my old school friends, had lunch in the pub where Branwell Bronte went boozing, and I bought some stocking-filler bits and bobs for Lady Vader - the beloved daughter who wouldn't even exist but for the loss of her elder sister.
That loss still hurts and haunts us. This time of year is always difficult. Last week, I thought I was okay and then wasn't. But I've found that the best way to think of the anniversary is as a place: a fixed position in Earth's orbit round the Sun every 365 and a bit days. The Earth is constantly moving, so for all we come back to the same place each year, we're always passing through and will soon be somewhere else...
The more time passes, too, the more that what lingers is the extraordinary kindness we were shown. I remain in awe of the staff at the neonatal ward at St George's Hospital in Tooting - whose brilliant work you can support with donations. There's the woman I never even met but think of all the time. I asked the medical staff where the knitted caps came from that so perfectly fitted our Emily. They told me they were knitted by a woman patient, up on the terminal ward. I wasn't allowed to go see her but sent her a note in which I could not nearly begin to express our gratitude.
Then there were the family and friends who helped us through it all, at the time we were in hospital and in the weeks and months that followed. There was nothing anyone could do to help and yet so many people did.
They're who I wrote that post for on the day she died. And what I didn't say then but will say now is: thank you.
“There are a dozen clever deceptions in the book, twice as many as most writers would have given us.”
I’ve seen some criticism that The Widow of Bath is too complicated, or its protagonists too unlikeable, or that it’s too funny (when, it is implied, murder is a serious business). But I found it fun and then compelling; the last third held me utterly gripped.
We start with Hugh Everton, dining in a down-at-heel seaside hotel — we’re never told where, only that it’s not Bournemouth (p. 25). He is caustic with the Italian waiter about the meagre fare. Then, by chance, in walks Jan Deverill, who has history with Hugh but hasn’t seen him in years.
Jan’s uncle, Gregory Bath, is with her. He’s a respected judge and married to the much younger Lucy, who also has history with Hugh (we learn later that she’s why Hugh and Jan split). Lucy arrives in the company of some other men, one of whom Hugh is certain he recognises — they had some rough dealings previously. Yet he is told he’s got this wrong; this isn’t the same man.
Though Hugh is caustic with everyone, he’s invited back to the Bath residence for more drinks and is the last person to speak to Gregory Bath before the judge is shot dead. But by the time the police arrive, the body has disappeared…
The novel is narrated in the third person from Hugh’s perspective, so really it’s he who observes that this situation is,
“the reverse of the sealed room murder” (p. 47).
Then, when questioned by Inspector Leigh of the local police about the late Judge Bath’s beloved dog, heard outside the house just before the gunshot, Hugh responds,
“He did bark in the night” (p. 50).
This is, of course, a reference to the Sherlock Holmes adventure The Adventure of Silver Blaze (1892), but it's striking that these two references to staple of the crime genre follow in such quick succession. It’s as if the author is offering her credentials: this, she’s saying, will be a reversal or twist on the classic model of a murder mystery.
Agatha Christie did something similar in creating Hercule Poirot; on page 11 of his debut adventure, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), she compares Poirot to Sherlock Holmes and so indicates to the reader that this will be the same kind of story. It’s not just that Poirot is a similar kind of detective (with his own individual quirks) but also the “rules” of the story are the same as in the best of Holmes, allowing the reader a fair chance to crack the case ahead of the detective.
Ronald Knox famously codified these rules in an introduction to The Best Detective Stories of the Year 1928 (1929), in what is sometimes known as his “10 commandments” of detective fiction, or the detection decalogue. The Widow of Bath doesn’t break any of these, as such, but I think it comes pretty close.
Hugh doesn’t light on any clues that are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader. Yet on several occasions, some new fact or revelation means more to him that it does to us — for example, it relates to his rough treatment with the man he recognises at the beginning of the book, or it’s something he remembers reading about in the papers. It’s not quite playing the game, which I think is why I think aficionados of crime might object.
But I also think this stuff makes the novel more than just a game. What starts as a cosy crime caper riffing on a version of the locked room becomes something a bit stranger and richer.
It’s an odd mix of ingredients. The austere, respectable judge and his young, flighty wife are rather stock characters. There’s a rather Dickensian father, so obsessed with a legal case and his old, out-of-date papers that he neglects his daughter. And then there’s stuff that feels very contemporary.
The plot reminded me of Ian Fleming’s Moonraker, published two years later, which also involves a group of people who are hiding in plain sight. Like Nevil Shute’s The Far Country — from the year before this — there’s an unease about the post-war settlement. Here, Inspector Porthouse notes that, unlike everyone else, criminals are able to save money, in what feels like side-eye at the post-war Labour government:
“They don’t get it all taken off them as tax” (p. 201)
Rather than things being settled by the end of the war, the world continues in chaos, with Hugh listing multiple competing tensions:
“Even now there were plenty of people on the run in Europe. Communists were chasing capitalists; dictators hounding democrats; socialists hunting fascists. People on top everywhere were persecuting the people who had fallen to the bottom; the old scores were a short list compared to the new scores; the secret police were, as usual, being secret only up to a point; their intentions were frequently public and alarming; the results then achieved gave only slender assurance to the law-abiding. The mass activity of armies was restricted; the private efforts of generals, and even, sometimes of corporals, were disastrously free.” (p. 176)
For all this is going on “in Europe”, some of it reaches this quiet seaside town — if only the people there will take the trouble to notice. Early on, Judge Bath is shocked by Hugh’s lack of morality when presented with evidence of a crime. The judge sees things simply:
“And I also advise you that it is the duty of every citizen to expose and so help to destroy evil.” (p. 31).
It seems odd to hear this case being made with no reference to Hugh having recently been demobbed — we presume — from battling Nazis. Notably, there’s little sense of what the various characters did during the war. But I think this is all informed by something else: the author’s time in Spain during the civil war, and her efforts to campaign in London to raise money to battle the fascists. There’s something a little like Casablanca (1942) here: an amoral man hidden away in a coastal resort who encounters an old flame and discovers a cause he will fight for.
I wondered at first if Hugh’s experience of war explained his caustic nature; he;’s a sort of bitter Bertie Wooster. “If you go on like this I’ll have to hit you,” Hugh says to the the grieving widow Lucy (p. 42). He then tells her to think of something cheerful such as what she’ll wear to the murder trial, before adding that this is all a “kind of verbal anti-hysteria slap, containing no malice.”
To some extent, this is a defensive response following his previous rough treatment. We learn that while previously involved with Lucy, Hugh got caught up in a scam that saw him disgraced at work, he was then pushed into the Seine and nearly drowned, before ending up in prison. But this caustic stuff is also familiar from the other Margot Bennett novels I’ve read. As I said of her The Long Way Back (1955), sexual attraction seems to make people more caustic with each other and sex is bound up with the threat of violence.
Despite Hugh’s instincts to protect himself and not get involved in this mystery, he is drawn into investigating the crime. He generally blunders around and at one point it looks as though he has thwarted years of painstaking police work. The inspector duly explodes,
“God spare me from amateurs” (p. 202).
It’s a fun twist on the form to suggest that the amateur detective has in fact hampered the investigation. Yet on the same page it’s suggested that perhaps the police had no idea about the scheme Hugh has uncovered but are pretending otherwise. We’re not sure who to believe.
Things take a more serious turn when Hugh realises that someone else is at risk. There’s palpable horror when it seems Hugh has endangered them. Another character dies and their body also disappears — and the story really picks up. By the end, Hugh has taken on the moral imperative that he dismissed at the start of the novel: he is determined to catch the criminals and see them brought to justice.
We then get twist after twist, pop-pop-pop. I correctly guessed one villain — I’m not sure it’s much of a surprise. But then it turns out that the death of Gregory Bath is not quite what people have assumed. Hugh gets a happy ending but then there’s a coda in which we learn the cost to someone of this cosy caper.
This is a bleak note to end on, again with some ambiguity about exactly what this person will now do. It’s unsettling and lingers in the memory; it is highly effective.
Margot Bennett adapted her novel for television, broadcast by the BBC over six weeks from 1 June to 6 July 1959, with a preview written by Bennett published in Radio Times. John Justin played Hugh, with his real-life wife Barbara Murray as Lucy. Jennifer Wright played Jan (a few months ahead of joining the cast of Garry Halliday in the regular role of Jean Wills). Sadly, the serial doesn’t survive in the archives but it marked a significant shift in Bennett’s career.
She’d previously written a one-off, hour-long TV play, The Sun Divorce, broadcast on 26 January 1956 as part of Associated Rediffusion’s London Playhouse on the relatively new ITV (which launched the previous October), and then wrote 15 episodes of the soap opera Emergency-Ward 10 (1958-59). She also co-wrote two films: The Man Who Liked Funerals and The Crowning Touch (both 1959).
But the adaptation of The Widow of Bath was her first work for the BBC, presumably under the auspices of the head of script department there, Donald Wilson. Over the next few years, she went on to write for a number of major BBC crime and thriller series: The Third Man, Suspense and Maigret.
“It seems that Bennett found screenwriting more lucrative than producing novels at a time when she was also raising a family,” says Martin Edwards (p. 10) in his introduction to the British Library Crime Classics edition of another of her novels, The Man Who Didn’t Fly, originally published in 1955. That book was nominated for the very first Golden Dagger award for best novel of the year, as given by the Crime Writers’ Association. (Until 1960, the Golden Dagger was known as the Crossed Red Herring award).
A later novel, Someone from the Past (1958) won this coveted award and in 1959 Bennett was made a member of the prestigious Detection Club. “She had reached the pinnacle of her profession,” as a crime writer says Edwards, but “astonishingly, she never published another mystery novel, an extreme example of a crime writer going out at the top” (p. 9).
I’m fascinated by all of this: the range of an extraordinary writer, the economics involved, the practicalities, the implicit politics. More to follow when I finish Bennett’s Farewell Crown and Good-bye King (1953).
Often the focus is on hacker Roderick Ho: his personal and home life, the thoughts bubbling away in his head, the way his perspective is completely at odds with what's really going on or what people actually think of him. This works to great effect, at once funny and suspenseful because we understand what he doesn't: that's he's in genuine danger.
Just as we think we know where we are with all this, a leading character is killed in a clumsy, accidental encounter that has major repercussions - a good example of Herron's knack for keeping things surprising and suddenly upping the stakes. As we know from previous novels in the series, no one is safe in these stories and regular characters can be killed abruptly.
That makes the final act especially thrilling, with two regulars out on their own dealing with... well, that would be spoiling things. Herron keeps us on tenterhooks about which, if either of them, are going to survive. And then, in the closing moments of the novel, there's the tantalising suggestion that someone we thought dead in a previous book is still alive and there is more story to come...
It'll be interesting to see how this instalment is adapted for TV, not least because the last TV series ended on something of a cliffhanger about the status of Frank Harkness, the character played by Hugo Weaving. There's little mention of him here but I suspect he'll have more of a role on screen.
Again, I'm in awe of audiobook narrator Sean Barrett bringing so many characters to life. We're never in any doubt who is thinking or speaking. I made a note early on that it is sometimes confusing when we change scenes, or locations, without much pause in narration. Yet as things went on, I began to think that this was highly effective, the plot relentless and the listener required to pay attention. That and the constant guessing game of what's really going on and who is going to survive make this an immersive novel and rewarding to part of.
With Dalek expert Gav Rymill, I’ve written 28 entries on different models of Dalek, charting their evolution from the very first Dalek story in 1963-64 to their more recent full episode, 2022’s Eve of the Daleks. There are some new facts and insights included, such as my outlandish theory about when and why writer Terry Nation decided to make them look the way they do.
Each entry is illustrated with a CG rendering of the particular model by Chris Thompson.
The machine, he is told, is incapable of making mistakes. His only chance to escape the drudgery of his assigned position is to volunteer for a much more dangerous scientific job: joining a survey expedition to the post-apocalyptic ruin of Britain...
The basic idea here is a reversal of recognised convention: African explorers and scientists venturing into Britain, measuring native skull size and sizing up local resources such as coal and precious stones. First published in 1954, and republished by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1957 (the edition I've got here), it's playing with anxieties of the time in which it was written.
Colonialism is just part of that anxious mix. The implication is that British, European and American civilisation has been wiped out by nuclear holocaust. As well as fear of the bomb, there is a fear about Britain's reduced status in the world; here, radiation has led to mutation and British people are now just four feet-tall. Their achievements are all but forgotten, too. The Africans have a mangled idea of the history of these people, who they think were at war with the Romans under Napoleon, and whose heroes included "Crom Well" and "Quix Ot" (p. 17).
The cave-dwelling Britons have no knowledge of or interest in history. They are parochial, timid and superstitious, most of them hostile to strangers or any suggestion of change. When one man suggests a better method of dental practice to save people from going mad with toothache, he is forced out of the community.
Grame and the other African explorers are no less short of foibles. They constantly squabble and fight, scientists governed by ego, desire and prejudice as much as by objectivity and logic. As in Margot Bennett's other, later science-fiction novel, The Furious Masters (1968), sexual attraction seems to make people more caustic with each another and sex is bound up with the threat of violence.
My pal Matthew Sweet explored The Long Way Back and the life of its author in his 2015 documentary for Radio 3, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, and wrote a piece about the novel for Unherd in 2020: "Was the British empire a curse?"; the comments under the latter made me think of the response to the dentist. Matthew calls The Long Way Back Bennett's "masterpiece" and likens it to Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a critique of empire.
In addition, it reminded me of other, latter fiction set in post-apocalyptic Britain, such as The Bed-Sitting Room (1969) and Riddley Walker (1980), in which vestiges of the world we know now survive the nuclear holocaust but lose their sense and meaning. Towards the end of the novel, Grame and the surviving members of his team reach the ruin of a once-great city where, in a vast but partially collapsed building, they find the remains of an inscription in stone.
"'There are figures,' Valya said. 'They look like 1993, but I couldn't be certain.' She took out her notebook, and copied faithfully the letter J, followed by nine or ten blanks. They all tried to discover, by fingering, what the letters might have been, but most of them were no more than a roughness on the stone. On the last line, the indentations grew deeper, and Valya wrote carefully, '—e p—a—e —f —od pas— — — a— —und— — sta— — —ng.'" (pp. 184-5)
This, they deduce by filling in the blanks, once read "The place of god's passage and understanding", on which basis they conclude that the whole city was considered holy. It's a joke, I think, playing on a cliche in archaeology, where a site whose purpose is not known is described as having ritual significance.
But also, this is another reversal. The indentations surely once spelled out a relatively well-known phrase from the Bible, in Paul's letter to the Philippians (chapter 4, verse 7):
"The peace of god passeth all understanding."
They've failed to understand that there is no understanding, seeing certainty where there was none.
The novel ends with the surviving members of the expedition flying home - or, as the novel puts it, "flying into uncertainty", unsure of the reception awaiting them and with a looming threat of war. We finish with one of the Britons they've met, watching them go,
"with his heart rising up, while he dreamed of the future when Britain might raise itself, generation by generation, to become a nation that would conquer the earth." (p. 206)
Again, this dream is ironic because we, the reader, can see what conquest has wrought. Yet there does not seem to be much hope that the characters have learned the same lesson.
Speaking of hope, last night BBC Four showed the 1954 production of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, adapted by Nigel Kneale and directed by Rudolph Cartier. It begins with an introduction from BBC head of drama Michael Barry:
"To me, the most alarming thing in the play is the fact that it has no hope, and as the mortally ill author George Orwell preciously brought his one script south from Glasgow to London, he couldn't find it within him to give hope to the play."
The Long Way Back came out the same year as that TV adaptation. Margot Bennett was, like Orwell, in Spain during the civil war - there's even some suggestion that they knew one another while in Barcelona. I wonder how much their respective sense of humanity, or what Barry calls man's inhumanity to man, was forged there...
I have more reading to do.
The Borthwick Institute for Archives, in York, boasts thousands of precious old documents — including the archives of Frankie Howerd and Sir Alan Ayckbourn — and closely monitors air quality to hold back the ravages of time. I spoke to Gary Brannan, Keeper of Archives and Research Collections.
Reducing falls in care homes with Earzz acoustic monitoring
Dr. Pradyumna Thiruvenkatanathan, Founder and CEO of Earzz, explained to me how intelligent acoustic monitoring can transform the provision of care, with benefits for residents and staff.
Air quality for monsters at Millennium FX
Award-winning prosthetics in TV and film are made using hazardous chemicals. I spoke to Neill Gorton at Millennium FX about the tech employed to keep his staff safe from the creatures they’re building.
Shirah Bamber, Preston’s new Innovation Ambassador
Preston City Council has announced the appointment of Shirah Bamber as its new Innovation Ambassador, tasked with raising the profile of the city as a place for all things tech.
Mapping safe cycle routes across Oxfordshire
Easy-to-use Cyclox mapping software provides safe routes for cyclists across the city of Oxford and the whole of Oxfordshire. The result is more people than ever getting on their bikes. I spoke to Cllr Emily Kerr from Oxford City Council and Robin Tucker, Co-chair of the Coalition for Health Streets and Active Travel (CoHSAT), to learn what was involved.
Beth Smithson is a former occupational therapist in the NHS who now helps to tackle school avoidance and refusal by better understanding our senses.
Flying cars were once a dream of science-fiction but eVTOL air taxis now offer a real prospect of greener, cleaner transport. I spoke to Jeremy Howitt (Future Flight Campaign Lead at the Snowdonia Aerospace Centre), Shazan Siddiqi, (Senior Technology Analyst at IDTechEx) and John Goudie (Founder and CEO of SLiNK-TECH).
Dr Niall Boyce produces a free weekly newsletter that aims to keep us up-to-date on the latest advances in mental health science.
Each year, pupils aged 12-15 from Beech Hall School in Tytherington swim the English Channel. Yes, really! I interviewed headteacher James Allen about the ambitious programme.
Sparta Global kickstarts careers in tech
David Rai, Co-Founder and CEO of Sparta Global, told me how his company has gone about training thousands of people from diverse backgrounds in tech-based skills, and found them new careers.
“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:
Joining host Richard Smith are astronomy writer Giles Sparrow, Rick aka @brickpandorica and me.
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.
“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149)
“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.
“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)
“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)
“little more than another text book, and heavy going at that.” (Robin Turner, “Nuclear penguins and others”, Birmingham Post, 8 August 1964, p. 5.)
“Thought provoking … easily read but thorough” (John Berrie, “Woman’s angle”, Nottingham Evening Post and News, 7 August 1964, p. 10.)
“Everything factual has been checked by scientists whose knowledge is far more than equal to the task” (p. 7).
“She likes variety in writing and is now doing something in Science Fiction,” (p. 1)
“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)
LXXIThe 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.
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.
But perhaps I’m just the latest in a long line to read into this little book what I want to see.
"Collection" may not be the right word for what this is; it's a series of often short chapters exploring different aspects of the physicality and science of fungi, and the ways this is woven into culture and literature as well as the life of the author. There's stuff on what it's like to encounter different fungi in the wild, in the UK and abroad. We cover disease, whether St Anthony's Fire or the fungal infections most likely to affect someone with HIV; we cover cures such as penicillin and LSD-related therapies. There's time for monstrous fungus in fantasy and sci-fi (such as Whiteley's own works, Tade Thompson's Rosewater, John Wyndham's Trouble with Lichen and many others). There's stuff on mushrooms as food and as poison.
These tangible, evocative threads are connected, making up a mycelial network of their own. At one point, Whiteley explains that the mycelial networks of fungi might be best thought of as single bodies, vast and intricate, living half-submerged in the soil. It's this kind of thing that makes the book such fertile ground, all so rich and potent that I kept thinking "This would make the start of a good story..."
One chapter explores fungi as "Saviours" for our real-world problems. Penicillium notatum is the best-known example, discovered in 1928 to kill the bacteria in a series of Petri dishes while Alexander Fleming wasn't looking; over many subsequent years (Whiteley is good at underlining the effort involved), it was then developed into the first antibiotic. A related fungus, Penicillium citrinum, has an effect on cholesterol and led Akira Endo to develop statins, now one of the most commonly taken drugs in the world.
I was particularly taken by examples that may change and shape our future. In 2017, Aspergillus tubingensis was found to be "feeding on polyurethane on a rubbish site at Isamabad" (p. 36). Pestalotiopsis microspora has been identified in the Amazon rainforest doing something similar and may be able to do so without air.
"It could survive deep in the darkness of landfill and steadily work its way through many kinds of plastic, if initial hypotheses turn out to be accurate." (p. 37)
A later chapter, "Stowaways of the Space Age", explores the bacteria and fungal growths identified on spacecraft, the risks they pose to systems and ways they may be affected by exposure to space and radiation. And then there's this, which I dreamt about last night:
"NASA has been investigating the possibility of using mycelia to create living shelters on Mars using melanin-rich fungi to absorb radiation and protect the human inhabitants within. ... They could be constructed, effectively grown, on location, making them easier to transport. They also offer the proposal of easy, organic disposal after use, putting little strain on the alien environment." (p. 121)
It's literally describing alien life and yet that quality of strangeness is something we'd take with us from here. It's all around us, if we'll only look and see.
“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)
“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)
“Every repertory company was allowed to give out two cards a year and the competition for them was understandably fierce.” (p. 7)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“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)
“fondness for ‘Anyone for tennis?’ type plays” (Margery Mason, Peaks and Troughs (2005), p. 32)
“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)
