Book Review: The Cambridge Ancient History, Volume IX: The Roman Republic, 133-44BC
When I expressed curiosity as to the causes of the Roman Civil War, uitlander plucked this off her shelf and said "have a look at this". I certainly feel more informed for having done so: what emerges really is that conflicting points of view had been unsustainable for generations and that time finally ran out on them. The major themes in this volume are the Brothers Gracchus, wars in North Africa and Asia Minor, the Jews, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, the conquest of Gaul, the Civil War, and Cicero. Quite why anyone would have wanted to run the Republic seems beyond me, as there was a fair chance of being assassinated pretty quickly after getting to the top, or of having one's every move thwarted by a senate mostly allergic to change of any sort.

Tags: books, history

Well, they both made me laugh. Perhaps for different reasons.

Tags: news

It's not been a great start to the year chez qatsi. The smashed pot that I replaced has been smashed again by this week's storm; the Canadian paintings exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery had a 2+ hour queue yesterday that we didn't feel like enduring; Borough Market was far too busy to do any useful browsing. I decided to try Sainsbury's instead of Waitrose for a change, and though the general experience inclines me back to Waitrose, I admit that in many cases there is a wider choice of products. Given the sort of week we've had, a wine labelled Morador seemed entirely appropriate. It's a very full-bodied Malbec, apparently not to the taste of the Telegraph's wine correspondent, but it does rather nicely for me.

Tags: wine

Sometimes the TV is an ideal medium for just sitting back and not taking things too seriously. Obviously, Channel 5's Top 10 Carry-on moments last night was not taking things too seriously, but I was pleased to see Carry-On Up The Khyber taking the top spot.

Then I decided to hop over to Endeavour. I didn't expect it to be all that good, and I found the first half hour or so really quite a struggle. The cinematography seemed to have a slight sepia effect, almost as if it was trying to out-drab Tinker, Tailor. Oxford looked far too clean. Even the good cops were bad in the 1960s; the bad cops were even worse. I think I spotted Colin Dexter in a walk-on (by which I actually mean "sit down") part in a beer garden. It picked up as the story developed, and by the end I had quite enjoyed it.

Tags: oxford, tv

2011 was not a good year personally, but in looking through my journal there have been some good things nevertheless.

Best of the year:

• Fiction - The Road Home, by Rose Tremain


• Non-Fiction - Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford (if you file it as non-fiction ... I find it a bit difficult to classify)


• Music - Bernard Haitink and Emanuel Ax's Brahms weekend at the Proms


• Film - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy


• Exhibition - The Doctor Who Experience

No food or drink awards this year: we've eaten well but I don't seem to have recorded anything exceptional.

Other highlights: in Fiction, Twilight Robbery by Frances Hardinge and The Secret Pilgrim by John Le Carré; in non-fiction, Gitta Sereny's book on Albert Speer and Superforce by Paul Davies; in music, the LSO/Gergiev and the Royal Stockholm Phil / Alice Sara Ott / Sakari Oramo Proms; and in exhibitions, the Uffizi and the Galileo museum in Florence.

The outlook for 2012 doesn't seem especially cheerful. Let's hope it turns out better than current expectations.

Tags: books, exhibitions, film, music

Last week's stormy weather claimed a casualty - one of the olive tree pots blew over and smashed. Fortunately I think the plant is mostly intact; I'd just wrapped them up in horticultural fleece for the winter and I think this filled out like a sail in the wind to tip it over. We've had the gutters seen to as well - a couple of places where water was obviously leaking or spilling out have been dealt with. As a result of all this I've spent some time this weekend cleaning the patio; it's not entirely finished but still looks much better.

Tags: garden, house

Book Review: Superforce - The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature, by Paul Davies
This seems as good a day as any to post this review. I first read this book in the 1980s and wondered how much it would have dated. The short answer is, not much. It takes a little while to get going, with the first few chapters laying some basic groundwork, but once he's off, Davies writes clearly and convincingly, especially in the areas of gauge symmetry (including the Higgs), QCD and hidden dimensions, and provides a coherent argument that the idea that the entire universe, including its contents, may be made of nothing more than twists in spacetime. The subject of string theory is relegated to a postscript, not because it is insignificant, but because it was so new at the time the book was written (and some of the ideas in string theory dove-tail very well at a high level into the main part of the book). This is actually a great help, because more recent popular physics books I've written (I'm thinking of Brian Greene and Roger Penrose) do go into string theory in some depth but don't really provide any clarity. Still highly recommended.

Tags: books, news, science

We went to see Hugo today. On the face of it, a story about a young boy living in the walls of a Paris railway station in the 1930s sounds like a plot that should have been given to Jean-Pierre Jeunet rather than Martin Scorsese, although then it would have been in French, and union bye-laws would have required that Audrey Tatou play the part of Isabelle.

I was unaware that some of the characters in the story are real historical figures. This didn't prevent me from enjoying the film; indeed, it allowed me to imagine a somewhat different (though apparently plausible) course of events up to a certain point in the film. It took me quite a while to realise that the Station Inspector was played by Sacha Baron Cohen, though from the outset I was waiting for the character to utter the phrase "Good moaning". It's the first 3D film I have seen. Some of it was effective, but some of it was just distracting, although I suppose it is appropriate to use it in a film that has cinema technology as a core part of its story.

Tags: film

Book Review: The State of Africa - A History of Fifty Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith
Fans of Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana can take some comfort from the fact that there are about two paragraphs on that country in this book of around 700 pages, in which Meredith notes that as a stable multi-party democracy it is very much an exception to the rule of post-independence Africa. For the most part, this is a depressing read. The book begins with Ghanaian independence from Britain, and the hopes for the future, but if the initial impression is of a process of orderly transition of power, within a few chapters we have rapidly moved on to more chaotic changes in French and Belgian colonies, and within a few chapters more we have entered an apparently forever-repeating cycle of coups and corruption, regimes often propped up during the Cold War as proxyies for either side with a blind eye turned to "internal affairs". Meredith is more sympathetic to the stability of the surviving white regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa, though not necessarily to their values, and even Mandela's post-apartheid South Africa is dismissed as ineffectual. In fact, it's difficult to assess whether there is any political bias on the part of the author, because the book is so overwhelmingly critical.

Tags: books, history

Today we went to the Royal Academy's Building the Revolution exhibition. Curiously, the fog was quite dense all the way from Reading as far as about Ealing, whereupon it suddenly cleared, and central London was actually quite sunny at times.

The exhibition - a combination of art from the early Soviet period (up to about 1935) and architectural photos and designs - isn't one of their blockbusters in scale, although many of the buildings on display might well qualify on that measure. Most of the art didn't really do anything for me, but the photos - both from the period and more contemporary (generally from the 1990s) - were much more to my liking. It was noted that many of the examples presented are now in a rather dilapidated state; though it should be said that in other cases, buildings were described as "still in residential use" or "refurbished", so it was by no means a ubiquitous state of decay; indeed, some of the industrial buildings and a sanatorium are still in use as well. The final section of the exhibition is dedicated to Lenin's mausoleum on Red Square.

Tags: exhibitions, london, weather