Category Archives: Arts & Media

Television, film, music, paintings, poetry, photographs, theatre.

Public Domain Day 2026

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It’s that time of year again. Here’s a look at some of the stuff which has just gone out of copyright in the United Kingdom (and other countries with a copyright term of author’s life plus 70 years) are novelists Ruby M. Ayres, Beatrice Chase, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, Constance Holme, Clemence Housman, Roger Mais and Thomas Mann (though in the latter’s case this only applies to his original writings in German, not to subsequent translations by other people); composers Alfredo Cuscinà, Isaak Dunayevsky, George Enescu, Arthur Honegger, Jaime Ovalle, James P. Johnson and Francesco Balilla Pratella; and scientists Albert Einstein and Sir Alexander Fleming; all of whom died in the year 1955.

As usual in recent years, the most intriguing load comes from works made in the United States in the year 1930, expiring under the term of publication plus 95 years. These include the first Betty Boop film Dizzy Dishes, the first Three Stooges film Soup to Nuts and the first major John Wayne film The Big Trail. There are also some works originating outside the United States in that year which now are public domain there but not here, such as Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s film Juno and the Paycock, which will remain under copyright in Britain and most of Europe until 2053. There is also a film adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, which was made in the United States but adapted from a book first published in Germany, whose author lived until 1970.

Conversely, there are some American works first published after 1930 by authors who died in 1955, which thus are public domain here but not in their home country. Most prominent of these is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936).

There is a further category of works which were already public domain in their home countries but are now entering it in the United States, such Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow by Piet Mondrian of the Netherlands (d. 1944) and Animal Friendship by Paul Klee of Switzerland (d. 1940).

We still have one more year to wait for the expiry of A. A. Milne’s copyright, and ten years for that of Sir Winston Churchill!

Review: Sodor — Reading Between the Lines by Christopher Awdry (2005)

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As we reach the end of the Railway Series’s 80th anniversary year, I take a look at this companion book put out by Christopher Awdry in 2005 as part of the franchise’s Diamond Jubilee. That of course means the book itself has now had its own 20th anniversary, and indeed last month an updated edition went out in celebration of that occasion. I have yet to read it, though, so my review here is only concerned with the original version. “Between the Lines” can be considered the literary equivalent of “behind the scenes” for the book recounts in brief the origin of the franchise, answers some frequently-asked questions, goes through each of the stories and prominent characters clarifying their details in the RWS canon as well as their real-life inspirations. It also includes some commentary by the author about the Sudrian endeavour as a whole. This book represents the second attempt at such a publication; the first was in 1987 when Wilbert Awdry wrote The Island of Sodor — Its People, History and Railways. Christopher wrote this book because PH&R was becoming scarce and the publishers would not agree to another print run, as well as to take account of new material in the series itself since then†.

The introduction recounts the well-told tale (by his own admission) of Christopher being confined to bed with measles in 1942 and his father making up railway stories to entertain him, then getting involved with his own model railway, then being encouraged to turn the stories into proper books, then publishers’ requests for multiple sequels until a substantial corpus had been produced. Once said corpus had established itself, questions about lore and continuity were inevitable, from Wilbert’s own children and from the paying audience. He therefore set about creating a detailed fictional world in which his stories could take place. He took the name Sodor from the Diocese of Sodor and Man, drawing the island itself as an expansion of the the isle of Walney. Over time he and his brother George undertook a project of serious research into history, geography, geology and etymology to flesh out an authentic and plausible setting for the stories. Comparisons to Tolkien and the “sub-creation” of Arda are obvious, though mercifully Awdry’s legendarium is much more manageable in volume and scope‡. The main difference, of course, is that rather than fading millennia into distant past, the history of Sodor continues into the present day.

The biographies of the major characters (both mammal and metal) are generally written from a diagetic perspective, though often leaning quite heavily on the fourth wall (“Percy defies certain identification, and it sometimes appears that he was put together by using any appropriate parts that came to hand…”) and other times walking through it (“[Sir Topham Hatt] is, in fact, based on no-one in particular.”).

Four important figures in Sodor’s railway operations are established as hereditary identities: The “Fat Controller” of the North Western Railway represents three generations of the Hatt baronets, the present of whom was born in 1941; ownership of the Skarloey Railway is by two Sir Handel Browns (also baronets) with a third in waiting; the “Thin Controller” of said railway is a post given to the Sam family and even then foreman “Mr Mugh” is really father Ivo and son David. A noted exception is Francis Duncan⸸, the “Small Controller” of the Arlesdale Railway, who is said to be a lifelong bachelor planning to retire soon with no successor named.

The recap of all the stories notes where on the island they were meant to take place (sometimes highlighting improbabilities such as Toby being at Wellsworth goods yard in Dirty Objects) and the incidents on which they were based: Thomas Goes Fishing derives from a story about a Glasgow & South Western driver putting fish in his engine’s tank “to keep the water clean”; Percy’s Predicament from an accident at Swanley Junction in 1876; Smokescreen from a real wedding disaster on the Bluebell Railway.

Though most of the book is an earnest retelling of the facts (err… fictions) there are occasions where Christopher veers into satire and polemic: On the matter of electrification he says “since a change of locomotive would be necessary there anyway — or at least until the route from Carnforth to Barrow is electrified (“Fat chance!” do I hear you say?) — The Fat Controller has shelved the plan.”; on the disuse of the nickname “Fat Controller”, in Canada and the United States, “I cannot feel that down at grass roots the PC movement on this point, even over there, is really as strong as it must have been made out to be.”.

There are many points in the book where the author is surprisingly candid about his frustrations with both the book publishers and the television studios:

  • “despite their classic status many of these books have been out of print for up to 10 years, a scandalous situation… the publishers, as you will read here, decided to change direction. The author is greatly saddened…” (inside cover)
  • “we are thus forced to conclude that responsibility for the perceived lack of sales that I have been told about by the publisher must rest with their own sales methodology.” (p2)
  • “some bizarre TV stories… elaborate dockside cranage at a port which has nothing like the amount of business to warrant it… for one who had made such a point of authenticity… such flights of fancy left a bitter taste.” (p4)
  • “the publishers — Egmont Children’s Books — have claimed that falling sales make them commercially unviable. But if they aren’t there for people to buy in the first place no one can possibly know how viable they are, can they?” (p26)
  • “The fact that the feature film Thomas and the Magic Railroad used the Isle of Man for locations was based, I suspect, more on tax breaks than because of any historical significance” (p30)
  • [The name “Fat Controller” was dropped] “purely for “politically correct” reasons. In my view it is a great pity that Britt Allcroft was co-erced by the Americans into using the character’s proper name in order to sell her TV product over there.” (p31)
  • “though when HIT Entertainment took over the rights in 2002 it was suggested that a return to original authorship was their policy nothing has so far (as at February 2005) happened.” (p31)
  • “The story… gradually became watered down between fears of fright to readers from the publishers… until it became a shadow of its former self. A pity” (p65)
  • “a last-minute publisher’s unilateral decision altered it [the book title] — it wouldn’t have been so galling had they not owed me t the annual sales conference to talk about it beforehand.” (p68)

The whole of the epilogue “Thomas:  A Crown Worth Fighting For” is a heartfelt plea for the new rights holders not to let the books disappear from print or the quality of the TV series continue to decline.

As I said at the beginning of this review, I am reading the book with the benefit of two decades’ hindsight. This means that some of the open ends in the original have since been closed: On pages 32-3 Christopher considers that his own son Richard may one day take over the series, but says “I do not propose to hang a millstone that he may not want around his neck, and I certainly don’t take it for granted that he will carry on.”. It emerged earlier this year that Richard, now aged 45, has indeed taken over as “lore keeper” of the franchise and is giving lectures on the present state of the island, though whether he intends to write any more books is yet to be seen. On page 71 he hints that there are two new RWS books to come. He ultimately managed to get Thomas and Victoria published in 2007, followed by Thomas and his Friends in 2011. More concerning are the comments on page 72 about “the quality of the stories emanating from the Gullane company over the last few years”. He is presumably referring to seasons 5-7 (when Allcroft stopped adapting his stories) and 8 (when HIT imposed a new format). He had no idea of what was to come with the early CGI seasons, “Big World, Big Adventures!” and “All Engines Go”.

While Reading Between the Lines is not a particularly famous work among the general public, its audience, however niche, appreciates its existence greatly. Though there are some embarrassing proofreading errors (such as missing out The Twin Engines from the recap section, then giving the next book the wrong date) and ⸸inconsistencies with PH&R (such as calling the Small Controller Francis instead of Fergus), on the whole is is considered an authoritative, faithful and canonical testament to the wondrous world the Awdry clan created, and which continues to captivate so many of us to this day.

Finally, it is worth remembering that today marks one year since the death of Britt Allcroft. Despite the occasional controversial creative decisions she made (some of which are detailed above) she remains an invaluable figure in Sudrian history in her own right.

Footnotes

†Of course, that also then happened to RBtL itself, which is precisely why the new edition has had to be released. I was fortunate to be able to access digital copies of both books (although the scan of this one was quite crude) through the Internet Archive.

‡I was able to read this book, and PH&R, from my computer screen in a few days each and I’m fairly confident about . By contrast, I started reading my physical copies of The History of Middle-earth before this summer started. They felt like the sort of books best enjoyed by daylight when sitting in the orchard, which has become challenging in the winter months but I persevere. Even now I’m only at page 270 of Volume II and I still don’t entirely know my Eldalië from my Edain.

Documentary Déjà Vu

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Last month was the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton & Darlington railway, the world’s first public railway to use steam locomotives. There have been quite a few commemorative events for this. The BBC has taken the opportunity to rerun a collection of some of their railway-related documentaries (not that they don’t have at least a handful of these at normal times anyway), which I have been watching on iPlayer over the last week or so.

When you watch a lot of documentaries about the same topic (e.g. railways, World War 2, the royal family, past general elections), especially if created by the same company, you will quickly notice a lot of repetition in what you’re being shown: You’ll notice the same stock film clips, the same talking points in the narration, the same talking heads being interviewed, the same background music being used. To some extent this is inevitable as, of course, they are all talking about the same event. Sometimes, however, the the resemblance is so specific as to be jarring.

Among the aforementioned documentaries were Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails, a standalone production, and The Last Days of Steam, an episode from series 8 of Timeshift. Both were originally aired in October 2008, the former on 2nd and the latter on 16th. When discussing the decline of the railways and the widespread adoption of the private motorcar, both show the same clip of a youngish couple in a red Austin-Healey roadster (registration 699 DON) driving on a motorway.

In Hislop’s documentary the clip starts at 39:19, accompanied by Terry Gourish, historian at LSE, saying

Well from the mid fifties things began to change. There was no fuel rationing affecting private motoring, road transport began to get a great impetus from new road-building, culminating in the first motorway, the M1, in 1959…

whereas in Timeshift‘s, it occurs at 41;30 as Jonathan Glancey, author of John Betjeman on Trains, says

The car from the mid-1950s was, apart from anything else, and beyond a means of transport, a consumer dream. It was something you could own. You can’t own a railway. A railway takes you where the railway goes. A care takes you, theoretically, where you want to go.

That the same clip should occur at almost exactly the same time in two documentaries produced by the same broadcaster a mere fortnight apart feels like a slight failure of quality control.

Some years ago I discovered the Railway Mania podcast series. Unfortunately that series has wound down a little recently, with just one new episode in almost a year. In its place I’ve recently turned to the Green Signals show, co-presented by Richard Bowker (former Chairman of the Strategic Rail Authority) and Nigel Harris, former editor of RAIL magazine. It’s a bit like the ex-politicians’ podcasts that have proliferated over recent years (e.g. Political Currency with Osborne & Balls) but more focused on industrial news.

Moving away from real railways, commemorations of the 80th anniversary year of The Railway Series continue. Today Historic England unveiled a blue plaque at 30 Rodborough Avenue in Stroud to mark that Wilbert Awdry had long ago lived there. The ceremony was attended by a group of his descendants. I was a little disappointed that so much of the news coverage identified him as the creator of Thomas the Tank Engine rather than of The Railway Series, including some incorrectly implying that the character debuted in 1945 rather than 1946. I also see that the display included a cardboard cut-out of the All Engines Go! version of Thomas himself, even though that series has been cancelled now and was generally disliked by most of the Awdry fandom. In some of the news videos a band outside can also be heard playing the Allcroft-era theme by O’Donnell & Campbell.

I also recently discovered that Thomas & Friends itself has an official 80th anniversary podcast. This is also includes many sound clips from the TV series. Curiously, the copyright notice credits the podcast to Gullane (Thomas) Ltd, showing that this company at least nominally still exists within the Mattel empire.

The Inbetweeners: A Potential Revival

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Even here I’ve managed to squeeze heraldry in. The shield of Rudge Park Comprehensive School is about as generic and uninspiring as you’d expect, but at least it conforms to the rules of heraldry unlike so many in real life. The blazon is most likely “Azure on a bend Argent three oak trees of the field”.

The Inbetweeners is a televisual franchise that can be considered, if not actually dead, then at least dormant, in as much as it’s been eleven years since the release of the second film and fifteen years since the end of the TV series. Neither the audience nor, it seems, the cast and crew, can entirely move on and yesterday there was an announcement that the four lead actors had signed up to a revival. Most of the news articles I could find were behind paywalls and those few which were readable still didn’t betray much in the way of detail despite about what form this new instalment would take. Presumably nothing of substance has been decided yet. From fans and commentators there is excitement, but also a lot of dread.

My academic cohort were a few years behind that of the character, and I think we discovered the program en mass around 2011-12* — after the series proper had ended but before we reached sixth-form ourselves. While the jokes (and indeed the catchphrases) circulated widely, I’m not sure it was ever regarded as more than fiction. Nobody saw it as a reflection of their own lives at the time, much less an aspiration for the future. A lot of cultural histories of this period refer to The Inbetweeners as the way sixth-form really worked for most people in Britain, in opposition to the fantasy version presented by Skins**, but curiously I don’t remember anyone at my school talking about Skins at all. As to whether it’s representative now, I’m obviously too old to say (and likely wasn’t qualified even back then), but I remember these articles from the end of the last decade noting how hard the format had proven to recapture.

Even so, we know we are in for some kind of comeback, and the scepticism of the long-time fans is well-founded as bringing back a property like this after such a long time always runs the risk of sullying rather than enhancing its reputation. Even this series’ own tenth anniversary special in 2018 was widely regarded as a damp squib. The problem most critical to a story of this kind is the age of the characters: Dawson Casting is routine for productions like this and right from the start the leads played characters a few years younger than themselves*** without straining credibility. Now, however, if you tried to pick up remotely close to where the second film left off they’d be about twice as old as the people they portrayed, and even with digital de-ageing it would be hard to pull off, with the added complication that the setting itself would have to be more than a decade in the past rather than contemporary^. Clearly, if the cast are to unite onscreen again, it would need to be in a “Where Are They Now?” sort of way, catching up with them at about age 35. This is tricky, as inevitably their situation in life will be very different, and that tends to cause existential problems for what is formally called situational comedy. Of course, other genres can also have this problem in their own ways, so here I will briefly change tack.

Dr Philippa Gregory has written a great many novels about English royal history, including a long string of them about the Plantagenets and Tudors. Starz has adapted some of these into TV series: The White Queen in 2013^^, The White Princess in 2017 and The Spanish Princess in 2019-20. TWQ covered the life of Elizabeth Woodville from 1461 to 1485, TWP followed her daughter Elizabeth of York until 1499. Gregory said that these parts of English history were underserved in mainstream fiction beyond Shakespeare, which may be correct. Season 1 of TSP was about the life of Catherine of Aragon from 1501-1509. This part could still qualify since Catherine’s time with Henry in their youth before their marriage broke down is also frequently neglected. When it was announced that TSP would get a second season, fans on their forums wondered just how long Starz intended to string this out, noting that the story couldn’t go much further before becoming a rehash of Showtime’s series The Tudors or myriad other productions including Gregory’s own The Other Boleyn Girl.

When it comes to this proposed revival, the comparison of which to be most wary is, of course, Peep Show, that other Channel 4 cult classic of the noughties. The exact diagetic timeline of that series is not always consistent, but the final episode has Jeremy turning 40 and the first series seems to have them both just shy of 30. The Inbetweeners, if renewed now, would land around the middle of this range. What’s more, a lot of the story ideas floated for the new script — whether by ordinary fans or by people connected with the franchise, feel very PS-esque: I saw musings about quirky flatshares, wedding disasters, failed partnerships and juxtaposed career outcomes. As I mentioned in last month’s post, PS had to end once the main characters got too old for the situation to continue, and any revival now would need to radically change its approach to adjust to the times. There might well need to be a new setting, and the characters to be written in a new way. This would also be the case for The Inbetweeners, and indeed more so given the even greater time gap both absolute and proportionate. It would not be possible to write the characters as the same personalities we remember from 2010, nearly half their lives ago. For sure, you could make arrested development an explicit feature of the story (as it also was on PS, and which would be entirely expected for at least two of the main four) but even then it would come off with a different tone.

My intention here is not to come of as overly pessimistic: I know from Futurama and Red Dwarf that an old franchise can be successfully brought back many times across several decades. It is eminently possible to get an interesting story out of a late sequel, albeit one which will need to be quite distinct from what was written the first time around and with the high risk that a large proportion of the audience will feel disgust at the outcome rather than delight. There is life here still, just not necessarily as we used to know it.

NOTES

*As the whole series ran to only eighteen episodes it was quite easy to finish the whole run on 4OD in a few days.
**I refer readers to this video essay by Stuart “Stubagful” Hardy, in particular where he says “I never got to live a life like the kids on Skins. Most of my teenage years consisted of being made to sit in a series of rooms with adults glowering at me… alright, a drama based on my teenage years probably wouldn’t have exactly made for a compelling piece of television but, in my defence, that was real! You people want real, don’t you.“ and, while it’s actually reviewing a completely different Channel 4 program, Charlie Brooker’s famous line in this Guardian article: “The biggest teenage taboo is being strait-laced. It’s easy to tell a researcher you went to a house party that turned into an orgy. It’s less easy to say you like eating toast and watching QI.”
***The four lead actors were born 1982-87 whereas the characters would have been born 1991-92 in order to start sixth-form in 2008.
^The second film already has this problem, being set in 2010-11 but made in 2014.
^^Co-production with the BBC.

The Queen’s Austen Faux Pas

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The Queen’s Reading Room has just had its annual festival at Chatsworth House. In this video as shown on the ITN royal family YouTube channel, she makes a speech about Jane Austen (who turns 250 this year), a segment of which I will now quote:

We are provided with this magnificent backdrop that was her inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, and who can forget the infamous scene of Mr Darcy emerging from the lake in the BBC version?

There have been quite a few BBC adaptations, but of course she is referring to the 1995 version where Darcy is played by Colin Firth. I have not yet gotten around to reading the book or watching any of its adaptations, but immediately this line pinged something in my head. I was sure I’d read somewhere, many years ago, that this is an example of the Mandela Effect — that the infamous scene that none can forget was never actually in the episode!

Happily I didn’t need to go through the entire series on iPlayer because the Lake Scene is the subject of multiple YouTube videos, including at least two by the BBC itself.

Sure enough, we see him jumping in, then him swimming beneath the surface, then cut to Bennet in Pemberley’s garden, then to Darcy walking along the grassy hills still damp. The actual moment of his emergence from the water is not included.

Just three months ago there was a YouGov article describes this as a prime example of collective false memory: Their study showed 49% remembered the scene happening even though it didn’t. The televisual non-event is so famous that there was even a giant fibreglass statue of Firth erected in Hyde Park in 2013.

I wonder if anyone at Clarence House had to check Her Majesty’s speech in advance of the event. This is the sort of thing which should have been caught and corrected before it went public.

Review: Mitchell & Webb Are Not Helping

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Almost ten years since the end of Peep Show and just over fifteen since the end of That Mitchell & Webb Look, the duo have returned for another series on Channel 4. A side effect of watching old material over and over again is that it can cause one’s mental cache of another person’s appearance to be skewed many years into the past, leading to surprise when a more up-to-date view is encountered. While I am familiar with David Mitchell’s recent appearance from, among other things, Ludwig (which incidentally should also be returning soon) I had not seen Robert Webb in anything new for a while and so his gaunt visage shook me a little.

It may seem glib for me to point this out, but the leads’ age is an important theme throughout a lot of the sketches: Whereas Peep Show ended with Jeremy turning forty and That Look had a sketch about how they couldn’t be cutting-edge forever, this series picks up with both men in their fifties and a lot of the jokes are about them suffering aches and pains or reminiscing about references alien to their younger co-workers. One of the few recurring sketches is even called Middle-Aged Man Island and consists of them talking about World War II, lightbulbs, Christmas decorations etc.

I’m sure that fans of Mitchell & Webb’s earlier work would have been delighted to know that a new series was happening at all, albeit cautious in their expectations of its quality. Those who were hoping for a whole-hearted revival of That Look will probably be disappointed here. The writing in this one has nowhere near the sharpness of the earlier material and often feels ill-suited to the duo’s strengths. Another of the recurring skits is Sweary Aussie Drama, about an Australian family fighting over the ownership of their enormous farm, with the big joke being that none of them can get through the simplest sentence without a shower of expletives. This could work in isolation as a decent satire, except that so much of the rest of the series’s own writing also tends that way, as well as relying on puerile blue humour in lieu of clever ideas or, indeed, good line delivery. Some of the sketches, particularly one about a workshop for dead relatives’ antiques, felt more like something from Tracey Ullman’s Show a few years back. I can’t see many scenes, or even lines or screenshots, from this production establishing lasting cultural fame the way the older ones have.

The main thing that the scripts are missing is direct interaction between the two leads: We rarely get scenes of David & Rob talking one-on-one, instead this is much more of an ensemble piece where the troupe just happens to include two members who were once in a double act. That could have been pulled off if the supporting cast from That Look or Peep Show could be carried over, but Bachman, Burdess, Evans, Fitzmourice, Hadland, Howick, Joseph, King, Neary, Suttie and Winkleman are nowhere to be seen. Olivia Colman at least manages to return, although only for one sketch and with curiously little attention drawn to her presence. In their place we have Kiell Smith-Bynoe (of Ghosts fame), Krystal Evans, Stevie Martin and Lara Ricote. I can’t criticise any of their performances individually but they don’t have the same familiar chemistry with the two leads that their predecessors would have done.

Overall I would say that Not Helping is passable but not spectacular, and I wouldn’t chose a second series of this over a Peep Show revival, or even more Back. Frankly, it’s just not Numberwang!

Review: Captain James Cook by Richard Hough

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The paperback edition of this book was first published in 1995 and sold for £6.99. I picked up my copy in 2024 for £1. It follows the conventional format for a biography, beginning with the circumstances of the subject’s birth and running all the way to the aftermath of his death. That Cook has a tragic death relatively young is probably to Hough’s advantage as it prevents the book becoming overlong.

Cook is among Britain’s most celebrated sailors and explorers. This biography covers the whole of his maritime career, particularly his three Pacific voyages. Cook makes multiple visits to New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii and the Society Islands. He gets close to both the North and South Poles. A lot of the book is dedicated to Cook’s interactions with the Maoris and the many Polynesian tribes. There is a recurrent schizophrenia in the stories of these encounters – one minute the islanders will be treating Cook and his crew like gods, the next they will be plundering his vessels for anything not nailed down (and often even stealing the nails themselves). This reaches its apotheosis at Kealakekua Bay in 1779: On his first visit in January Cook is hailed as Orono, God of the Season of Abundance, and is showered with lavish praise, but when he returns in February the mood is of cold hostility and it is not long before a war breaks out which leads to his own gruesome death. Cook’s own personality charts a more linear decline from a civil, optimistic attitude on his original voyage to a cruel, irrational and vindictive one by the end. Partly this is the result of the great many infuriating setbacks suffered on that trip but there is also an analysis by a twentieth-century surgeon reckoning that Cook picked up an intestinal infection which impaired his brain function.

This book highlights how much of the world prior to Cook was still uncharted: As well as looking for new navigational passages (such as around the Arctic), Cook is also sent on a mission to prove or disprove the existence of Terra Australis Incognita, a much-fabled supercontinent in the Southern hemisphere that would have linked Australia together with Antarctica. There are also references to other scientific advances at the time, such as Cook’s own dietary and sanitary innovations to combat scurvy or the excursion to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus.

The accounts of events aboard His Majesty’s Ships Adventure, Discovery and Resolution are pieced together from those diaries and letters that survived to be archived. These include Cook’s own logs, but also those of his contemporaries Joseph Banks, William Bligh, Charles Clerke, John Gore and a host of others. As is usual with these kinds of works, we get first-hand accounts of the action and occasionally the dialogue, but the thoughts and feelings of these men can only be speculation, save the rare occasions when they speak them outright. At this period real-time communication was impossible over long distances and letters could travel no faster than the mariners themselves, so the Admiralty back in Britain would not have any meaningful understanding of what happened on these voyages until the ships completed their return journey (if they ever did at all) and gave accounts retrospectively. This also meant that sailors would be cut off from events at home for months or even years at a time. In the final chapter Hough says that James & Elizabeth Cook, having married in 1762, only spent an aggregate of four years together before his death in 1779. Most of his children rarely if ever got to see their father either. After Cook’s death, Clerke became Captain and he penned the letter back to London explaining as much. It did not arrive until 1780, by which point Clerke himself had died too and it was Gore who held command by the time the survivors got home.

I bought this book principally for my father and we read it together in short bursts over the course of a year. I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in sailing, but the story is probably easier to follow and remember when taken at a faster pace.

New Channels Discovered

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I mentioned some years ago the phenomenon of YouTube channels carrying old episodes of TV series that probably wouldn’t be broadcast anymore.

Clarkson-era Top Gear is probably not such a series, but recently I discovered that thirteen months ago the channel Top Gear Classic was launched, carrying compressed clips of the various challenges the three presenters undertook from 2002 to 2015. The name is a little confusing as I would have thought that “Classic” in this context should refer to the 1977-2001 broadcasts. Many of the clips on this new channel are the same that were already uploaded to the main Top Gear channel, and indeed the BBC Studios channel, many years ago. The most obvious difference now is the much higher video quality. Given how many amateur fan channels have sprung up with compilations from this time, and subsequently The Grand Tour, it would have been a great loss for the BBC not to get in on the act themselves I suppose.

Another new find is the channel Rails, Roads & Runways, launched in January this year by ITV Studios and containing, as you may expect, episodes of rather old documentary series about trains, cars and aeroplanes.

Mid-Year Reading Round-up

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Having already posted some months ago a long list of all the books I’ve recently acquired, I suppose at some point I should say something about the experience of actually reading them. Here, then, are some mini-reviews of the publications I’ve finished during the period of January-June 2025, in no particular order.

The First Four Georges by Sir J. H. Plumb

Already reviewed in a different post.

The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins

Although he is primarily famous for The God Delusion and maybe secondarily for The Selfish Gene, the professor himself generally regards this one as his true magnum opus. I’m not sure how famous Dawkins already was back in 1982, but this book feels as if written in his capacity as a biologist rather than as a public intellectual and activist. It is a much more academic work than his more famous ones and, having not been taught biology for just over a decade, I cannot claim full comprehension of the more terminologically-dense parts, but these aren’t really necessary for understanding the main thesis. Dawkins does not present new facts so much as a new way of interpreting facts we already possess: Normally the conception of evolution and natural selection is that they take place on the level of the individual organism, the family, the society and even the entire species. Dawkins instead looks at it in terms of the alleles of genes competing indirectly against each other with the organisms serving merely as a convenient – and disposable – host. The title of the book refers to Dawkins’s other big point that alleles affect the physical and behavioural characteristics of a species, which in turn affect the environment those species inhabit, as well as the ways in which other species evolve in response, so the phenotype of an allele in one species can be regarded as including the features observed in another species. The author also brings up a great many case studies of evolutionary adaptation and competition, including counter-intuitive examples such as between males and females of the same species, or even between parent and child! Of great interest here are his analyses of why some creatures are capable of adapting to “win” an evolutionary war while others are not. A theme which runs through the book as well is the difficulty of finding the vocabulary to comprehend these complex natural phenomena without slipping into metaphor and personification, which feels in some way prescient given the author’s later writings about religion.

The Final Curtsey by Margaret Rhodes

As with Lady Boothroyd’s autobiography, the early sections of this book felt a lot like reading my own grandmother’s childhood recollections, although from the opposite end of the class spectrum. Rhodes gives her account of her aristocratic early life, her experience of living through the war and her career as a courtier to the royal family. One thing that confused me a little was her choice of names for Britain’s senior mother and daughter after 1952 – the reigning sovereign is “The Queen” whereas George VI’s widow is “Queen Elizabeth”. Often I would get a long way into a paragraph before working out which one Rhodes meant. Despite being published in 2012, just four years before she died, Rhodes mentions a distinctly old-fashioned approach to writing. To modern eyes she appears curiously unfazed by the historical weight of her experiences, taking it in her stride that she dined nightly with the heiress presumptive while the bombs were falling, got roped into organising a faraway dynastic wedding, smuggled prisoners out of a country undergoing a violent coup and even watched a man drop dead in front of her. While the overall tone may seem a little twee at times it’s definitely worth the read and packs a lot into relatively few pages. The final days of the Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother are especially important for the record.

The Gathering Storm by Sir Winston Churchill

This is a very long book, and that’s only the first in a six-volume set amounting to more than three thousand pages in total. Churchill has written a great many well-renowned history books, but here it is a history in which he was a major protagonist so it also doubles as a memoir of sorts. The length here is justified as he writes in great detail about a multiplicity of topics, taking the reader step-by-step from the conclusion of WWI to the outbreak of WWII, with the volume ending at the point when he became Prime Minister. It’s astonishing to realise that he completed this enormous tome while he was serving as Leader of the Opposition, a feat of intellectual multitasking which feels impossible today. Given that Churchill’s reputation speaks for itself it almost feels redundant to comment further except to say that I am on the lookout for Volume 2, though given the backlog of books already accumulated it could take a while to get there.

The Glamour Boys by Sir Chris Bryant

Yet another World War II history, and also written by a sitting MP. Bryant’s behind-the-scenes account of the parliamentary machinations leading up to the war is in many ways complementary to Churchill’s own. The focus here is on the alternative, underground world that the “boys” were forced to inhabit, noting the parallels between their nonconformism, adamant against the mainstream of the time, on both personal and political levels. This book presents a major setback for anyone attempting a historical rehabilitation of Neville Chamberlain – his reputation before was of optimistic (or perhaps delusional) naivety rather than malevolence, but here he comes off as cruel and wicked in his attempts to suppress his glamorous detractors with an underhanded smear campaign. The only downside to this book is its length – at 448 pages it’s a rather weighty tome and it sometimes feels as if Bryant was padding it out to look more imposing on the shelves. Some critics have said he indulges too much in the lurid descriptions of the rebels’ relationships in the early part of the book, but I think the real waffle comes nearer the end, once the war has already gotten going, when the defining goal of the story has been completed and everything thereafter feels a bit more like generic wartime biography divorced from the specialist subject matter.

The King’s Painter by Franny Moyle

Going a bit further back this time takes us to the Tudor era. This is a biography of the portrait artist Hans Holbein the Younger, best remembered for his imposing image of Henry VIII. The biography covers the full length of Holbein’s life and career, with detailed analyses of his major works and the artistic innovations they represented. Not having studied the history of art (or art itself) much before I cannot fairly judge the quality of Moyle’s commentary here, except to note that she brought up verisimilitude so often it almost felt like a tic. Aside from the art itself, a lot of the book was dedicated to the religious and political upheavals in continental Europe which alternately expanded and restricted Holbein’s professional opportunities.

The Roman War Machine by John Peddie

Returning to the war theme but backing up even further to the ancient world, this is a book on the military structure and logistics of the Roman Empire. In some ways this felt like a throwback to my GCSE Latin course, in others like a memory of and educational field trip I might have done in primary school. This book is in English, of course, save for the heavy use of Latin military jargon. Peddie writes in detail, and with diagrams, about the ranks, formations, equipment and resources sustaining Rome’s military operations. Even here we cannot avoid World War II, for Peddie makes repeated comparisons to campaigns in the twentieth century to show the historical resilience of the Roman legacy.

The Penguin Guide to the Railways of Britain by Edgar Jones

This book was published in 1981 so a lot of the guidance here is obviously out of date now. On this note I would particularly highlight some lines from pages 36-38: “The Advanced Passenger Train represents the latest development in electric rail transport.”, “It is possible that a diesel-powered version of the APT will be developed for use on non-electrified lines.” and “At this moment 60 per cent of trains are diesel-powered. With the progressive introduction of the HST – the most advanced diesel-electric in the world – it is fair to say that this form of power has reached its apogee in Britain. Since electricity holds the key to the future, when these expresses become obsolete it is probable that the diesel, like steam, will disappear.”. The first fifty pages tell the history of locomotion in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth, including the evolution (with diagrams) of different types of rail vehicles. The next three hundred pages take the reader around the country, region by region, explaining all the routes can be taken and all the stations that can be visited. The writing, though concise and eloquent, can be a little dry and it was difficult to keep up the momentum towards the end. From the way it’s structured, it less resembles a conventional reading book than the railway version of Burke’s and Debrett’s, so perhaps one is better off treating it that way instead of trying to finish it in a linear fashion.

Classical Literary Criticism by T. S. Dorsch

It is a little strange to realise that not only has literature itself been around for thousands of years but that literary criticism has been too. Even though the source texts may be as old as the fourth century BC and the translations into English were done in 1965, a lot of the prose still feels contemporary to one familiar with book and film reviews both amateur and professional. Indeed, a lot of the talking points would not have been out of place in a modern day “reviewtainment” video essay. There are multiple chapters on individual narrative devices, as well a the structures and purposes of different types of plays and comments on stories already performed in the writers’ memories. Most impressively, there are multiple instances when one of the writers goes into detailed analyses of the subtleties of another writer’s word choices and sentence structure. All of this, of course, has to be translated from Greek and Latin into English with the nuances intact. There are even times when one of them criticises another critic’s literary criticism, such as when (p65) Aristotle notes that “Ariphades ridiculed the tragedies for using expressions that no one would use in ordinary speech… these raise the diction above the level of the commonplace, but Ariphades failed to see this”. The introductory note by the editor explains who the sources – Aristotle, Horace and Longinus – actually were. The former belonged in the fourth century BC while the latter two belonged in the first. The gap between them is greater than between Shakespeare and Wilde, yet to us know they seem interchangeable, a good reminder of how long the ancient Greek and Roman eras really were.

Shadow State by Luke Harding

The book was just over three hundred page but I devoured it very rapidly. It tells of how the Russian Federation went from the collapse of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev to the emergence of Putin’s regime in which the military, business, the mafia and the President’s personal interests are all effectively merged into one and how this level of corruption affects not just Russia itself but also the other nations with which Russia interferes. The stories told are the ones you’d expect – Hillary Clinton’s emails, the Salisbury poisoning, and Brexit. There is some poetry in the timing: The book was published in 2020 as Trump was heading to the election he would lose. I bought it from Red Cross on 28th August 2024, as he was heading to the election which would see him restored. This also of course means that Putin’s ongoing war against Ukraine cannot be included, though there is much about the events leading up to it and Zelensky (suited and beardless) makes several appearances. The hero of the tale is Eliot Higgins, a journalist who created the Bellingcat online information exchange that allowed amateurs to monitor and scrutinise world events remotely. Harding resists the temptation to grant Russia an Orwellian omniscience, noting instead that Putin’s schemes often backfired or fell flat, that he only turned to online subterfuge because he lacked the funds for traditional spycraft, that many of his apparent successes – including Trump – were coincidence or blind luck and that the quality of Russian operatives had declined since Soviet times. The story of Salisbury assassins Chepiga and Mishkin, in particular, plays out as something of a farce. Nonetheless the death and destruction they caused is very real and, at time of writing, the threat feels as pressing as ever.

The Ricardian Century by John Saunders

This may be the newest book I’ve ever picked up from a charity shop, as I found it at RSPCA in February and the copyright notice said 2025. The book was in pristine condition and I worked very hard to keep it that way, although despite my best efforts a few bits of the corner flaked off before I’d finished it. This is the official history of the Richard III Society from its foundation in 1924 (as the Fellowship of the White Boar) to its centenary celebrations in 2024. The book is the product of a print-on-demand service rather than an established publisher and at times looks, to paraphrase Mark Corrigan, like a printout rather than a book. The cover design is especially poor: On the rear is a small square photograph of Saunders, in low resolution and squinting a bit, clearly cropped from a larger group shot, while the front has an equally-fuzzy raster of a depiction of the Society’s coat of arms from which not all of the white space has been cut out of the background. Aesthetic issues aside the contents are engaging enough, giving the reader a detailed look at all the twist and turns of both Ricardianism as a movement and the Society as an organisation. What fascinates me is that by all logic the Society ought to be a dissident fringe group. Though clearly there has been a shift in public attitudes to Richard III over the centuries (and certainly in this millennium) towards acquitting him of history’s more outlandish charges, the consensus among historians is still that he was the most likely perpetrator of the regicide of his nephews. Furthermore, as Ricardianism asserts that “the wrong side won” at Bosworth in 1485, and that sad side includes the current royal family, it is tantamount to asserting (much like the Jacobites) that the entire royal line thereafter to the present day must be illegitimate. Despite this the Society has been accepted by the wider academic community as a legitimate scholarly institution (even if they still ultimately disagree with its conclusions) and has even been accepted by the royal establishment with Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester serving as Patron for more than half of his and its lifetime and the College of Arms hosting the book’s launch. George Awdry, Wilbert’s brother, is also mentioned a few times. One thing that really stuck out at me was the revelation (p93-4) that the Society was not formally incorporated as a legal entity until 2019, which made me wonder how they’d acquired a grant of arms in 1988, among other things.

The Railway Series at 80

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Illustration of “Edward, Gordon and Henry” by William Middleton

Five years ago, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of The Three Railway Engines I came up with a poem based on Tolkien’s work adapted to be about the engines on Sodor.

Today is the eightieth anniversary of said book. I have pondered calling it 3-E Day, but doubt that would catch on. I would like to turn to verse again. This time, instead of adapting another poem, I have thought about what an anthem for the island might be. Truth be told, I don’t think The Island Song really works diagetically – it is too obviously written to be about a children’s television series. Instead here is something simpler: A variation on the royal hymn.

While the first verse of God Save The King! is almost universal across the realms and territories of the Commonwealth, there have often been custom extra verses with lyrics specific to the locality, albeit with many of the same core concepts (and indeed rhymes) cropping up in more than one place. This is my submission for the Sudrian stanza:

Our island is to me,
Homestead and sanctuary,
By Britain’s shore.
Bless this enchanted isle,
That years may ne’er defile.
Grant all Thy children smile,
For evermore!