Margaret

• “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World” William Dalrymple
  The later reign of Empress Wu where she made Buddhism the Chinese state religion and the Indian influence on China was at its peak. The spread of Indian culture in the other direction – again by sea trade, this time to south east Asia. Initially Buddhism again, including another way of spreading into China & Japan via these sea routes past Java & Sumatra.

Podcasts

• The Rest is Politics US
  More on the Iran war, plus elections in Texas. More, of course, on the war in Iran, plus a bit on the sacking of Kirsti Noem. The war in Iran, again.
• The Rest is Politics
  More on the Iran war, focusing quite a lot on the reaction in the West and particularly by Keir Starmer (quite the argument between Rory & Alastair). Gorton & Denton by-election. More on the war in Iran, a lot about the way that the US seems to’ve done less scenario planning etc than Iran despite the US doing this as a choice.
• Empire
  The finale of their 1857 Indian Uprising series, the fate of Lucknow (not good, described by one historian as “urbicide”, the destruction/killing of a city). Two episodes on the Iranian revolution of 1979 with a compare & contrast with the protests in January (recorded in January, I’m late to get to this, so it is very much before the current war).
• The Rest is Science
  A Q&A episode (one question was about how small would a hamster have to be if it was to be dense enough to be a blackhole – 1 trillionth the size of a proton but it would be so unstable that it would immediate explode with a force of multiple Hiroshimas). An episode about data & science in sport, and whether that destroys all enjoyment of the sport – citing things like the way F1 car designs basically made the whole thing a foregone conclusion as once you were in front no-one could overtake.
• The Bunker
  The whole Greenland thing, recorded just post Davos (I’m only a month behind with the general episodes of The Bunker, but this felt like it came from a different year so much has happened since then). The Weekly Wrap up (obviously the war in Iran was a lot of it, but also the new rules for refugees in the UK). Start the Week (which was all about the war in Iran). January’s mad opinion column round up (I hadn’t noticed these were topical, some of the more entertaining backpedaling about Trump around about the Greenland stuff at Davos, some of the weirder takes on the Beckham drama). An episode on money laundering and how it has essentially won.
• The History of China
  A letter from the Chinese to Queen Victoria just before the Opium War telling her to make sure no-one came to sell opium in China (no evidence the letter got there). The continuing rattling of sabres after Napier’s untimely death, and the final cultural misunderstanding on the part of China that goes past the point of no return (essentially the Chinese mental model of the universe means they can only see the British traders as being akin to Mongolians raiding the northern borders, rather than seeing that they come from another state).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Confucius in the Zhuangzi (the Daoist text), mostly being presented as rule bound and unaware of the Dao.
• Oh God What Now
  The Iran War & the Gorton & Denton by-election, plus a bit at the end about the ex-pats in Dubai who are now finding it less of a “safe-haven” than it once was. Labour’s newest immigration policies & how they’re counterproductive, plus how we create monsters from our discomfort with people/things which exist between our neat little categories.
• The History of England
  The rebuilding of London after the fire, more piecemeal than initially desired (in large part because of cost and how long it would take), and how coal was the key to the rebuild and to how London could be so large – it let England escape the photosynthesis trap, no need to turn large amounts of land over to trees for fuel and building material when you could use coal to fire bricks and heat your home.
• Journey Through Time
  The very immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, where the Soviet secrecy makes things worse both in terms of the people who died from being near the reactor and in terms of the effects on the rest of Europe (as they didn’t let anyone know what was going on).
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Bill Browder (who I think I’ve heard interviewed on another podcast), who went from making money in the Russia of the 90s/00s to campaigning for sanctions against Russia to hurt the oligarchs (& Putin) after the death of a lawyer working for him.
• The History of Egypt
  The life of Nefertari, in as much as we know anything about it.
• In Our Time
  The Roman Arena – a trot through the history of the Roman gladiatorial (etc) games, from funerary games in the early Republic to a way that the Emperor demonstrated his power to the people in the later Empire.
• Talk 90s to Me
  Disney villains of the 90s, with a theme of how queer coded they are.
• The History of Byzantium
  The immediate aftermath of the Ottomans taking Constantinople, and who got out and who did not.

TV

• The Age of Uncertainty
  What makes a good leader, and why democracy works, and how education is part of the key to the whole thing. This hit quite differently now, you feel Galbraith would not approve of the current situation in the US. One of his essential points is that the big weakness of a democracy is that it all falls apart if people cease to think that the government is theirs, and so pushing power out further towards the people (in the US with primaries that actually matter, and mass participation in elections) is key to making people as a whole feel like they chose the government they have.
• Newcastle v. Man U (2-1, despite being a man down for the whole second half)
• Digging for Britain
  The southwest of England & Wales this episode – some bits in Cornwall (including signs of tin processing on St Michael’s Mount), some bits in Wales. A bit of a “things aren’t always what they look like before you start” theme too (like a clearly Iron Age structure being full of later Roman coins). And some experimental archaeology showing what happens when you put different quantities of tin in your bronze (too much makes it very brittle).
• Newcastle v. Man City (1-3, so they’re out of the FA Cup)
• The Great Philosophers
  Episode on Gottlob Frege & Bertrand Russell, who moved philosophy from being about psychology to being about logic. I only really knew about Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica before, via Hofstader’s “Gödel Escher Bach”.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Did some end of season tidying up of our previous characters. Also ran a Mythic Prankster dungeon & got 5 mythics each, so souped some of them up and had a go at some Pits – up to Tier 69, which is the furthest we’ve got, I think.

Talks

• “Henry Salt and his first collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities” Marie Vandenbeusch & John Taylor
  Henry Salt collected Egyptian antiquities while he was the British consul in Egypt, and subsequently sold them to museums – his first collection was sold to the British Museum and arrived there in 1821. It includes a lot of well known pieces in the Egyptian collection there but arrived before the administrative side of the museum was well set up so the only documentation is a list of 128 objects or groups of objects that Salt provided. This talk was about how they have been tracking down which items were on the list, and are publishing the document with annotations to tell you which ones are identified.

Music

• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat
• Starlight Express
• Now Yearbook 74
• Burning Shed – Sampler Three

• “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World” William Dalrymple
  
  Buddhism is particularly associated with merchants in its early days, in contrast to Hinduism where you lose caste if you indulge in trade. This means it’s carried on trade routes, and this bit of the book talks quite a bit about ancient trade between India & the Mediterranean, not just with Egypt during the Roman Period, but also with Mesopotamia much earlier c. 2500 BCE.

• Qarabag FK v. Newcastle (1-6), playoffs in Champions League


• Digging for Britain
  
  The northeast of England plus the southeast of Scotland. Quite a lot around the Roman era, including a Pictish settlement and what’s probably a Roman whetstone factory in Sunderland. There was also a bit on Gloucester Museum solving its cataloguing & storage problem by getting volunteers in to help.


• Man City v. Newcastle (2-1)


• The Great Philosophers
  
  An episode on Husserl, Heidegger & Modern Existentialists, which mostly concentrated on Heidegger. Husserl was cast as rather arrogantly thinking he was the culmination of all that Descartes had started, then Heidegger pushes back against Husserl and that whole branch of philosophy. His basic idea is that you can’t think of us each as subjects that interact essentially from a distance with objects that may or may not constitute a real world, but instead we are out there in the real world and that our attention is often not consciously directed at any object so that’s not an answer to the questions of how our consciousness works.

• Oh God What Now
  
  A guest episode looking at the question of if we’re ready for a war with Russia (not really), and a normal panel show looking at could Farage do what Trump has done & also talking about a documentary that’s just aired about Tony Blair (I’ve recorded it but we haven’t watched it). The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (and how the victims of Epstein are still being elided), and the upcoming Gorton & Denton by-election.


• The Rest is Politics
  
  Talking about Rubio & Starmer’s speeches from the Munich conference (their consensus was that Rubio’s message was the same as Vance’s last year but masked it more with flattery). A bit of a rant about how Farage gets away with everything, the Thai elections & the Bangladesh elections, more on the Munich conference. The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (without Rory). Trump’s tariffs, more on the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor with Rory this time, the proposed SEND reforms.


• The Bunker
  
  Weekly wrap up (mostly about the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.) Start the Week. How Russia (and Putin) ended up how they are now when it looked like it might be so different in the 1990s. Pete Hegseth and the US military.


• The Rest is Politics US
  
  The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in the context of US domestic politics, the mid-terms. The Supreme Court declaring the tariffs invalid, recorded before Trump put them back on again, and very optimistic about this being the beginning of the end of Trump.


• Talk 90s to Me
  
  Britney Spears (only in the context of her first hit really, and her career prior to that).


• The History of England
  
  Guest/interview episode, covering c. 1000 years of English history very briskly through the lens of what various factors that meant that things like the Industrial Revolution & the Enlightenment happened here, and the better bits of modernity (prosperity, the welfare state).


• Origin Story
  
  A Patreon only Q&A episode, mostly jumping off from the season on Socialism that they’ve just wrapped up.


• Empire
  
  Another episode (fifth, I think) of their series on the Indian Uprising of 1857, this time covering the story of Lakshmibai who was ruler of one of the states that the East India Company tried to absorb at about this time and ended up leading part of the rebellion practically despite her best efforts to remain loyal. The sixth episode in this series, about the Siege of Delhi.


• The Rest is Science
  
  Randomness, chaos, disorder, the creation of meaning, and the origins of the universe and consciousness (for the latter essentially the idea is that we have evolved to create meaning from what we observe as a way of surviving and this is why we generate a sense of self, and if the universe had inherent meaning we wouldn’t’ve needed to evolve that ability).


• Journey Through Time
  
  Wrapping up their series on the Spanish Civil War, and looking at how it didn’t end up with any reconciliation after it ended, then after Franco dies there is a codified “forgetting” which is only now beginning to unravel. Also framing it as having something to teach us in the modern day about when & how to intervene as fascism takes hold.

• Made in Egypt
  
  At the Fitzwilliam Museum. Looking at ancient Egyptian objects through the lens of how they were made. So they were organised by material (stone, pottery, faience etc), and the materials were organised to some degree by production method (pottery, faience, glass all need fire; linen, baskets, papyrus were all plant fibres sort of woven). I’d seen quite a few of the objects before (even the loans) but it was an interestingly different way to look at the them. I also particularly liked the way they used Nina M. Davis watercolour paintings of the reliefs from the tomb of Rekhmire to tie the whole thing visually together – these scenes show craftsmen at work, and they had appropriate bits projected onto the walls near the different sections with some of them animated.

• Art Brut live at Cambridge Corn Exchange
  
  Support for Maxïmo Park, I thought I only knew one of their tracks but I think I actually knew two. They were quite fun as the opening act but I still don’t think I need an album.


• Maxïmo Park live at Cambridge Corn Exchange
  
  This was the 20th anniversary of their first album, A Certain Trigger, so that was what they were touring. Unlike PRR’s similarly themed show they didn’t play it all in order, instead mixing the songs in with stuff from their other albums. A good gig, they always put on a very high energy show and it’s a lot of fun to watch. We were right at the front again – this time because the audience for Maxïmo Park gigs always seem to arrive comically late, so we got there just after doors should’ve opened and then bought merch & put stuff in the cloakroom and still made it to the barriers at the front.


• Various “Now 12”
  

• “New Discoveries from the City of the Snake Goddess” Nicky Nielsen
  
  Taking us through the preliminary results from the 2024 excavations at Tell Nabasha. There isn’t much of the archaeology left due to modern building, but the two trenches he talked about tell us about two different periods – tower houses during the Late Period (with food production & cereal processing sites) and Ptolemaic occupation of what had previously (still was?) the temple site, which ended with a catastrophic fire.

• Diablo IV
  
  It’s been 2 weeks since we played, so a bit of reminding ourselves how these characters worked with a NM dungeon, then a handful of Pits. Mostly at Tier 65, but we did do a Tier 66 at the end so I do now have the credit for one after the disconn incident two weeks ago.

• “I Am a Strange Loop” Douglas Hofstadter
  Finished today. It’s about consciousness and what it is, and I enjoyed reading it. His central argument is that consciousness, our sense of “I”, is an emergent property of the brain and is essentially an illusion, a stable pattern of perception that arises from how our minds work but doesn’t “really exist”. It’s a product of a particular perspective – the one we usually use when thinking about ourselves and other people (and the world in general), where we engage only on the level of concepts and symbols. But underneath those concepts and symbols of the mind are the firings of neurons and when you describe a brain at that level the “I” vanishes. He totally rejects dualism, the idea that there’s something “extra” that’s non-physical and makes a conscious being conscious. Instead he’s saying that as a mind develops into a more and more complex system that models its perceptions of the world with more & more rich & sophisticated concepts then one of the things it models is also itself and its workings. And this feedback loop of self-modelling is what generates a stable pattern that feels like it is the self.
• “His Face is the Sun” Michelle Jabès Corpora
  A bit of a change of pace. YA secondary world fantasy in an analogue of ancient Egypt (New Kingdom in feel thus far). I’ve barely read any of it, but I did like that I recognised which myth the prologue was a retelling of, and I’m a bit unnecessarily narked that the map on the endpapers turns Upper Egypt into Low Khetara and Lower Egypt into High Khetara.

Podcasts

• The History of English
  The nautical terms that entered the general English language during the 1620s (plus the history of England in that decade).
• Empire
  The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, a pioneering artistic photographer of the 19th Century. The start of a series on the First Indian War of Independence (also known as the Indian Mutiny), setting up the context of 1857 and the triggering event of sepoys forced to bite bullets coated in grease that was rumoured to be pork & beef fat.
• Journey Through Time
  The last of the series on A Christmas Carol, on how it changed the world and brought Christmas back into fashion. Start of a series on the Spanish Civil War and how it was an important prelude to the Second World War, this episode covered in high level terms the political situation in Spain in the run up, and the political situation in Europe in the run up.
• The Rest is Politics
  Mark Carney’s speech at Davos as a jumping off point for talking about the state of the world, Starmer preventing Burnhum from standing for election. Minnesota, Suella Braverman’s defection, the new centre right movement Prosper, the problem of technology enabled child sex abuse & what could be done about it.
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An interview with Samir Puri, talking about how the world is changing from a unipolar world focused on the Transatlantic region to a multipolar world focused on the Indopacific region (with minimal reference to Trump because he is not the only reason things are changing).
• The Rest is Science
  Modelling crowds using fluid dynamics, non-standard dice & non-standard shapes of standard dice (suffered a bit for me only listening rather than watching, first episode where that’s really been the case). Magnetism, what is it, how the Earth is a magnet, how robins seem to see the magnetic field (as an actual visual thing).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Animal stories in the Zhuangzi and how they look at the world through other perspectives (and a compare & contrast with the Confucian dismissal of everything not human as not important).
• The Rest is Politics US
  An interview with the Prime Minister of Norway about Nato, Greenland, Trump. The further release of the Epstein files, what the outlook for the 2026 midterms is.
• Oh God What Now
  The Burnhum debacle, the Braverman defection, how media censorship works in our modern age, the middle class spending squeeze. A single issue guest episode about what’s going wrong with UK universities.
• The History of England
  1665-1666, the plague and the continuing war with the Dutch.
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  Interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.
• Talk ’90s to Me
  Pulp Fiction.
• Origin Story
  Q&A episode for after their season on Socialism.
• The Bunker
  A look at how UK domestic politics sit and what Labour needs to do to turn things around (catching up, in world political terms this was post Venezuela but before the height of the Greenland stuff around Davos), Weekly Wrap Up, Start the Week, What Will Elon Musk Ruin Next? (which is actually about the AI hype cycle)
• The History of Byzantium
  This podcast has finished the chronological run, and now the episodes are sort of wrap up/overview episodes – this one covers 5 people who were influential in the East Roman Empire who didn’t come up as much in the political historical narrative.

TV

• The Age of Uncertainty
  This episode was a bit of an odd historical artifact – a look at the Cold War from the perspective of someone still inside it, first aired in 1977 and containing a lot of his reminiscences of being involved in the US administration. His analysis was that the Cold War had moved from a religious moral crusade to a pair of bureaucracies whose status & prestige were entirely down to reacting to the perceived threats from each other and creating ever more weapons. A trap that kept the military capability ratcheting up as each reacted to what it thought the other was doing (and often creating the thing they thought they were reacting to).
• PSG v. Newcastle (1-1, so they’re in the playoffs for the Champions League rather than going straight through to the next phase)
• Digging for Britain Season 13
  Scotland & the North West of England, the archaeology of Glen Coe (digging up the houses where the massacre occurred), Roman burials near Penrith (rescue archaeology before the M6 is improved), Roman bathhouse & temple in Carlisle, Somali “village” in Bradford (c. 1904, pretty appalling, these people were an exhibit essentially like they were in a zoo), and a 1970s skate park in Scotland somewhere I’ve forgotten (that was weird to see archaeology being done on something younger than me (it opened in 1978) and I’m also not sure why it was being done).
• Liverpool v. Newcastle (3-1)
• The Great Philosophers
  This episode was unexpectedly entertaining (the others have been informative rather than entertaining), as Bryan Magee started off in his introduction by explaining that he himself had written the best recent book on Schopenhauer, but he could hardly interview himself so he had invited Frederick Copleston who had written one of the other books. Which set the tone for the rest of it, it was quite a spiky conversation and they clearly had significant disagreements on how to interpret Schopenhauer and his ideas.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Up to a Tier 65 Pit but we failed that, plus ticked off all the Andariels and all the Azmodans. Did not do so well with an Infernal Horde on Torment IV, but did have a good run around in a Helltide.

Talks

• “Looking up! Uncovering histories of Egyptology on a journey through Paris” Angela Stienne
  A trot through various bits of Paris that have Egyptological connections, some obvious (the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre) and some less so (a house where the first director of the Louvre lived etc). She’s got a book out (in French) that covers more of this.
• “Animal cult in Tuna el Gebel: the animal necropolis and the priest settlements in Ptolemaic times” Mélanie Flossmann-Schütze
  A look at the development over time of the animal necropolis at Tuna el-Gebel, linking the various phases of building/burials with the phases of building at nearby Hermopolis Magna. And a discussion of the settlements nearby where the priests & other cult workers lived in 5 storey tower houses.

• “I Am a Strange Loop” Douglas Hofstadter
  
  Delving into the paradoxes that Gödel demonstrated exist within mathematics, despite Bertrand Russell’s best attempts to develop a formal system that eliminated them, which is relevant to Hofstadter’s broader point because they are strange loops. And then turning back to link this in to the discussion on levels of abstraction, and to explore how our sense of “I” arises from how our brains work without having a structure that is clearly where the “I” resides.

• The Rest is Politics US
  
  The whole let’s invade places thing, the ICE thing, Trump flipping the bird at a factory worker, will the Republican party ever return to its pre-Trump conservative roots, more focus on Greenland, is there a developing split between Joe Rogan & Trump (they think not really, it’s about tactics). Katty Kay was away for two episodes, and the guests were both ex-Republicans so there were two episodes of despair at what has been done to their party.


• Empire
  
  V. S. Naipul, who I knew nothing about before, Heinrich Hoffman (who photographed Hitler), Karsh (who photographed Churchill amongst others)


• Journey Through Time
  
  More on Black GIs in Britain during WW2 (where apparently one semi-official strategy was to try & persuade the British to be more racist, so as not to upset the white GIs), includes actual gunfights between parts of the US army in English villages and cities.


• The Rest is Science
  
  Binary, error correction in barcodes & QR codes, what planet would you like to live on if not earth; are we made of stardust, cosmic rays; drawing ellipses, planetary motion, which famous scientists (alive or dead) would you invite to a dinner party.


• Starship Alexandria
  
  The Royle Family, Greenwing, Invincible, Black Sails, The Thick of It, Arcane, The Leftovers, The Good Place, Avatar: The Last Airbender (animation), Blake’s 7


• The History of Egypt
  
  The colossal statues of Ramesses II (including the one that inspired Shelley).


• The History of Philosophy
  
  Two 17th Century CE resurrections of the idea of atomism as a break from Aristotelian ideas of how the universe was constructed (and pushing back against Decartes too).


• The Bunker
  
  Charles James Fox (a late 18th Century populist politician with some parallels to Farage or Trump but with a nicer attitude), Weekly Wrap Up, how & why the last 25 years have been full of chaos in British politics, Tommy Robinson in the context of his pivot to Christian nationalism, Start the Week, the Chinese biotech/biomedical boom.


• The Rest is Politics Leading
  
  John Swinney.


• The Rest is Politics
  
  Right wing attack on Rory Stewart, Minnesota, not visiting the US.


• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  Iran, and how it isn’t necessarily about to fall apart (it’s not a binary).


• Oh God What Now
  
  How the Tories keep defecting to Reform (entertainingly dropped just after Jenrick defected but they’d recorded it before Badenoch sacked him), corruption in the UK political establishment; another episode which was supposed to be entirely about leaders of the Labour party, but in light of events it was half about Jenrick’s defection.


• The History of China
  
  How China is primed to decline during the 19th Century. Which mostly boils down to being too successful to adapt easily, including in producing people who are highly enough educated for the bureaucracy in numbers that exceed the available jobs (which leads to corruption and dissatisfaction).


• Talk 90s to Me
  
  Stay Another Day, and East 17 in general (I had no idea this song was actually about the writer’s brother dying).


• Literature & History
  
  The Rashidun Caliphate (the current season of the podcast is early Islamic literature and he’s leaning heavily into the history angle at the moment).


• The History of Byzantium
  To mark the 1000th anniversary of the death of Basil II an episode about evidence about his sexuality.


• In Our Time: On Liberty
  
  First one hosted by the new presenter, Misha Glenny, which was promisingly had the same feel as the Melvyn Bragg ones (tho obviously not entirely the same). About John Stuart Mills, and the essay On Liberty that he & his wife Harriet Taylor Mills wrote in the mid-19th Century.


• More Jam Tomorrow
  
  Changing attitudes about women wearing trousers (it only became illegal to force women to wear a skirt to work in 2010 – well, you still can but you have to force everyone you employ to wear a skirt).


• The History of Philosophy in China
  
  About the differences between the Mohist & Daoist approaches to language. Interesting juxtaposition with the book I’m reading – the Mohists try to do something akin to Bertrand Russell’s systematisation of mathematics but to language, whereas the Daoists are more comfortable with the paradoxes & fluidity of categories.

• Newcastle v. Man City (Carabao Cup, 0-2)
  


• episode 4 of Guitar Heroes at the BBC
  A selection of music performances from the BBC, themed around having good guitarists (tho sometimes rather tenuously). This episode was nearly all from the 70s, so there was quite a lot of “what on earth is he wearing‽”.


• episode 6 of The Age of Uncertainty
  
  The Rise and Fall of Money: what money is, why we use it, how it moves from metal coins to bank deposits with the addition of paper money, how it all goes wrong when everyone realises the bank doesn’t have enough money to give everyone what they “have” in their deposits, and how the central banks attempt to control that.


• episode 4 of The War Between the Land and the Sea
  
  We’d dragged our heels on getting back to this despite ep 3 having ended on a cliff-hanger last time, but were sucked back into enjoying it. I do think it likely won’t bear much prolonged thought, it’s something to enjoy on a surface level.


• episode 2 of Valley of the Kings: Secret Tomb Revealed
  
  Good series overall, the archaeology of KV11 was interesting, but a bit padded (particularly the segment stuck in about Howard Carter half-inching stuff from KV62, which didn’t seem to link in to the overall programme anything more than tangentially – there was a bit of oooh could Carter have hidden stuff in KV11, but that was resolved really quickly as “no.”).

• Yard Act “The Overload”

• Diablo IV
  
  Did a Tier 60 Pit so we’ve attained Rank VI of the Season Journey, also ticked off killing Bartuc in the Infernal Hordes and did a bunch of Chaos Rifts so now we’ve ticked off that chunk of the Season Journey too. Some stuff on the way to Rank VII looks vaguely plausible, and we maybe have enough time to get to a Tier 75 Pit to finish up that rank.

Books

Listening

Games

Watching

Books

Fiction: still reading Neal Stephenson's "Reamde", and will be for a while yet - I think I'm only about a third of the way through. Still enjoying it, still not sure I know where the story is going yet, the introduction of complicating factors to the plot is still continuing.

Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - finished off the chapter on urban life and started the one on the institutional Church (as opposed to religion which is the next chapter). Read about bishops, and was surprised to discover it was to large extent a meritocracy. Eventual bishops rose through the ranks in court administration (generally) before promotion to a see, most had a university education and over this period more & more had higher degrees. Generally educated in law rather than theology, except during Henry VI's reign when theologians were more promoted.

Maps: 800-200BCE - waves of empires in the Middle East (the Persians come & go, Alexander ditto). China fragments, and then re-coalesces (via the conquest of the First Emperor). India also comes together as an almost single unit briefly under Ashoka. Iron working spreads from niche tech to in use across Eurasia. And several of the great religions/philosophies are founded - Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism.

Listening

Podcasts: ep 2-28 of Renaissance English History podcast. Somewhat patchy to start off with, but it feels like she's beginning to hit her stride (and the dates on the episodes are getting closer together). It does feel like the most amateur of the podcasts I've listened to so far but still interesting.

Sunday podcast: ep 5 & 6 of Our Man in the Middle East - more Jerusalem/Israel in the 90s, the assassination of their Prime Minister which also killed the peace process.

Music: while running I've listened Prince, Scissor Sisters, Roxette and an 80s compilation.

Games

Diablo - bumped up the difficulty level a notch, and died loads as we're still adjusting to that ;)

Watching

ep 4 of From Russia to Iran - Armenia & finally Iran. This last episode felt a little padded, partly because there were big jumps in distance so they felt we needed more orientation. A good series, and a part of the world I knew nothing about before.

ep 2 of Reginald D. Hunter's Songs of the South - Alabama and Georgia (where he was born but left). Delved rather more into the racial tensions of the South along with the music (Confederate flags at Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts for instance), but somehow remained upbeat in tone.

Seven Days in Summer: Countdown to Partition - more about Partition. This focused on the absolute clusterfuck of the handover & division process. Perhaps the violence would've happened anyway, but I don't think the British Government of the time helped the situation one bit (like, some dude who'd never been to India before was flown in to draw the boundaries between India & Pakistan and the line wasn't even finalised till after the handover so people were in limbo & relying on rumour).

ep 3 of The Sweet Makers - our intrepid confectioners were pretending to be Victorians, and were perhaps a little more competent with this level of tech than the older tech. Fun series, but not as high quality as other living history type documentaries we've watched.

ep 1 of The World's Busiest Cities - Dan Snow, Anita Rani & Ade Adepitan visiting some of the busiest cities. This episode was Hong Kong, which has a massive gulf between the winners of capitalism and the losers (people living in cubicles no bigger than their beds, Filipino domestic servants whose days off are spent camped out in public spaces because they have no place of their own).

Books

Fiction: started "Girl Reading", Katie Ward. A series of linked vignettes each centred on a girl or woman being painted/photographed reading. I probably wouldn't've ever picked this up if the author wasn't a friend (I don't read much literary fiction), which would've been a shame as I'm enjoying it. Reminding me a bit of Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life" as I think there's some similarity of themes.

Non-fiction: still reading Gerald Harriss's "Shaping the Nation: England 1360-1461" - this week a bit about the governance of towns, plus the merchants and craftsmen.

Poets: Seamus Heaney (1939-) - as with Ted Hughes, I liked these but have a feeling there were deeper points I was missing.

And that finishes the poets, I've worked my way through the whole of The Oxford Book of English Verse over the last 18 months or so at a rate of two poems a day (ish). Some day I'll repeat the process, I'm sure. This time I found several poets I rather liked, and some it turns out I knew bits of their work without knowing it. Next book I'm working my way through in this fashion is rather different: "The New Atlas of World History: Global Events At a Glance", John Haywood. I'll be doing a map+timeline a day or so.

Maps: 8mya-100,000ya - early hominids, the beginnings of H. sapiens up to just before the appearance of anatomically modern humans. Did you know use of fire to cook almost certainly pre-dates H. sapiens by at least 100,000 years?

Listening

Podcasts: ep B19-B36 of The Ancient World podcast - the descendants of Mark Anthony & Cleopatra continue, we're now up to the Severan dynasty of Roman Emperors, and Septimius Severus's wife is one of the descendants.

Sunday podcast: an IOT about Louis Pasteur, which we were underwhelmed by. One expert clearly didn't cope well with the format, one kept going off on tangents (mostly it seemed when he was scared of the question), the other one was OK tho. Overall failed to ignite interest in the subject.

Music: while running I've listened to The Monkees, and a metal compilation called Corrosion.

Games

Diablo 3 - there's a new season, and we picked up the new DLC too, so we made new characters (J's playing the new Necromancer, I've got a Monk) and are blatting our way through the first chapter of the season goals.

Watching

ep 3 of Metalworks! - this time about Blacksmiths. Oddly distinct from the others in the series as there was no presenter, it also seemed a bit more incoherent and unable to work out what it wanted to tell us about (blacksmiths as artisans crafting fine hand-made wrought ironwork? Cast iron as the new wonder material that built the industrial revolution?). The series overall was a bit odd, but quite enjoyable.

ep 3 of Japan: Earth's Enchanted Islands - still full of woo, still pretty. Not the best nature series we've seen, I really don't get on with the "this other culture lives in such harmony with nature unlike us" nonsense that the narrative was peddling.

ep 1 of Secrets of Silicon Valley - how the tech being created in Silicon Valley is changing society, and not necessarily in a good way for everybody, and how there's little thought being put into how to ameliorate or work around the potential disruption. I think I bought what the guy was selling more than J did, but we both agreed this his proposed solution (slow down, don't introduce this tech) isn't viable and flings the baby out with the bathwater.

ep 2 of The Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World - pretty depressing, tho not as bad as it could've been, considering. The aftermath of the Summer of Love, as it all went sour. Also how it shaped a lot of modern society as bits of the culture went mainstream. Juxtaposed interestingly with the Silicon Valley programme, you could see how the "we're going to change the world for the better!" ethos of the bright young things of both eras were linked.