What are you reading now?

[Exonian]

Danube by Claudio Magris

Blood, Tears and Folly by Len Deighton

[Richard Tarleton]

Re-reading John Macnab, by John Buchan, after a long interval. One of the master story-teller's very best. Some entertaining reviews on Amazon, I particularly liked

....what a great paean to the great Scottish countryside this is

and

"Pride and Prejudice" for men

[zoomy]

Ostrovsky's Larissa and the Merchants. I saw it at the Arcola back in June and loved the production.

[Richard Tarleton]

I was intrigued by a preface to my paperback John Macnab by Andrew Greig, new to me, who turns out to be a fine contemporary Scottish writer and poet (and mountaineer). On the strength of that I've just read his "The Return of John Macnab", which is both an affectionate tribute to the original and a much darker late 20th century take on the idea. A great yarn with well-drawn characters, contemporary themes and (pace John Buchan) real women . No spoilers here, but the action takes place in the east Highlands rather than a fictional Wester Ross as in the original, and one of the estates chosen by the would-be poachers is Balmoral.

There was, I learn from Greig's preface, a real-life progenitor for Macnab - Captain James Brander Dunbar, born the same year as Buchan (1875), an upper class ex-Boer War eccentric who successfully wagered that he could poach a stag from Lord Abinger's estate.

[verismissimo]

Oxfordshire's Best Churches by Richard Wheeler. Excellent!
A blogpost by a close friend: http://rogerneill.blogspot.co.uk/

[Petrushka]

An English Affair by Richard Davenport-Hines

About the Profumo scandal in 1963 and sexual attitudes in the late 1950s and 60s generally. It's a wonderfully well written book full of interesting information on the attitudes of the times. Goodness knows how anyone survived, especially women. By turns funny and tragic, it tells a great story. A must read for anyone at all interested in the 1960s (Profumo resigned on my 9th birthday).

[Petrushka]

Now reading The End: Hitler's Germany 1944-1945 by Ian Kershaw.

Superb book, brilliantly written and as engrossing as I like my history books. Highly recommended.

[Beef Oven!]

Now reading The End: Hitler's Germany 1944-1945 by Ian Kershaw.

Superb book, brilliantly written and as engrossing as I like my history books. Highly recommended.

What's it about?

[Richard Tarleton]

The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes - the story of how modern Australia began, as a gulag, with the first transportations in the 1780s. A grim tale brilliantly told - Hughes is a superb writer, the research impeccable. Anyone familiar with his television series on art - The Shock of the New, Goya - will be able to hear his speaking voice as they read his beautifully crafted prose, the characters leap from the page, as does the Australian landscape.

I had very little idea about any of it - I have quite a few relations in Australia (though none descended from convicts) - one indeed lives close to the former prison colony at Port Arthur in Van Diemen's Land, aka Tasmania. Convicts found themselves there for the most trivial offences - in the 18th century there were effectively no prisons in England, and as fewer offences became punishable by hanging and the hulks in the Thames filled up, transportation to a place out of sight and mind seemed a good way of disposing of the country's criminal class (which included anyone condemned for the most petty of offences), not to mention the Irish.

The suffering experienced by both prisoners and those sent to take charge of them, and the way a society and economy started to emerge, are well described, as is the experience of the native population of Australia for whom the arrival of whites was an unmitigated disaster. Moments of comedy - the prisoner trying to escape Port Arthur across the narrow and well guarded neck of land disguised in a kangaroo skin, and nearly being shot by guards who thought he really was a kangaroo - are few. But Hughes writes so well it is hard to put the book down.

[amateur51]

The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes - the story of how modern Australia began, as a gulag, with the first transportations in the 1780s. A grim tale brilliantly told - Hughes is a superb writer, the research impeccable. Anyone familiar with his television series on art - The Shock of the New, Goya - will be able to hear his speaking voice as they read his beautifully crafted prose, the characters leap from the page, as does the Australian landscape.

I had very little idea about any of it - I have quite a few relations in Australia (though none descended from convicts) - one indeed lives close to the former prison colony at Port Arthur in Van Diemen's Land, aka Tasmania. Convicts found themselves there for the most trivial offences - in the 18th century there were effectively no prisons in England, and as fewer offences became punishable by hanging and the hulks in the Thames filled up, transportation to a place out of sight and mind seemed a good way of disposing of the country's criminal class (which included anyone condemned for the most petty of offences), not to mention the Irish.

The suffering experienced by both prisoners and those sent to take charge of them, and the way a society and economy started to emerge, are well described, as is the experience of the native population of Australia for whom the arrival of whites was an unmitigated disaster. Moments of comedy - the prisoner trying to escape Port Arthur across the narrow and well guarded neck of land disguised in a kangaroo skin, and nearly being shot by guards who thought he really was a kangaroo - are few. But Hughes writes so well it is hard to put the book down.

Completely agree RT - I've just started Hughes' memoirs Things I Didn't Know and his speaking voice comes across as you say.

Learning about the experiences of the early settlers makes you wonder why so many Australians are so anti-immigrant.

[Richard Tarleton]

Learning about the experiences of the early settlers makes you wonder why so many Australians are so anti-immigrant.

Racism seems to have been endemic from the start -

In the eyes of the British Government, the status of Australian Aborigines in 1788 was higher than it would be for another 150 years, for they had (in theory) the full legal status and so, in law if not in fact, they were superior to the convicts. The convicts resented this most bitterly. Galled by exile, the lowest of the low, they desperately needed to believe in a class lower than themselves. The Aborigines answered that need. Australian racism began with the convicts, although it did not stay confined to them for long, it was the first Australian trait to percolate upward from the lower class.

(pp 94-5, Ch 2, "The Starvation Years")

[Beef Oven!]

Racism seems to have been endemic from the start -


(pp 94-5, Ch 2, "The Starvation Years")

Yes, white people have a lot to answer for.

[Richard Tarleton]

Yes, white people have a lot to answer for.

Total mutual incomprehension a factor. The immigrants could not get their heads round the idea of

No property, no money or any other visible medium of exchange, no surplus or means of storing it, hence not even the barest rudiment of the idea of capital, no outside trade, no farming, no domestic animals except half wild dingoes, no houses, clothes, property or metal; no division between leisure and labour, only a ceaseless grubbing and chasing for subsistence foods. Certainly the Iora [local tribe at Sydney] failed most of the conventional tests of white Georgian culture.

The last sentence a nice example of RH's coruscating prose.

[vinteuil]

The last sentence a nice example of RH's coruscating prose.

... a pedant writes:

'coruscating' - giving forth intermittent flashes of light, gleaming, glittering, sparkling.

perhaps rather : 'excoriating' - flaying, abrading, stripping off... [?]

[Richard Tarleton]

... a pedant writes:

'coruscating' - giving forth intermittent flashes of light, gleaming, glittering, sparkling.

perhaps rather : 'excoriating' - flaying, abrading, stripping off... [?]

Thanks vints, excoriating is exactly what I meant. Much appreciated