Tag: Reflections

I thought I would complement my look back at the blog posts I wrote last year with a list of my ongoing or planned projects – some of which generate posts here, some of which don’t. The stalled and planned sections of the list aren’t really comprehensive, they’re more the things on my mind at the moment out of the great sea of possibilities.

This blog: Ongoing. First on the list, as it probably takes up most of my project related time. I’ve got a few things left on my to-do list for how the site functions and looks, but mostly I’m at the stage of just keeping on writing.

Read All the Fiction: Ongoing. This has gone slower than I expected, but the only way to speed it up would be to stop reading anything else and that would be a shame.

Chapter by Chapter: Ongoing. I’m not sure if I’ve slowed down my reading of non-fiction too much by doing this, but I’m definitely getting more out of the books I’m reading by doing it this way so I think it works out OK.

Listening to all our music: Ongoing. I’ve known for a while that I’ve completely lost track of what music we own and what we don’t – we have around 27,500 tracks by around 2700 different artists, so there’s a lot of stuff there. And J buys most of it so it’s not like I remember why I chose something from the name of it because I didn’t do the choosing. So I’m listening through in alphabetical order (by artist, and machine alphabetised). I was writing about it on facebook & G+ but I stopped because I was struggling to come up with new things to say, so I figured it must be getting boring. Still listening tho, and I’m up to An in the alphabet so there’s a long way to go yet!

Courses on Future Learn: Ongoing. I occasionally look at Open University courses, wondering about something humanities based as that’s where my interests are these days but they’re pretty expensive for a whim. So I decided I should look for free alternatives and found Future Learn. I signed up for a course on Hamlet that started a couple of weeks ago, and so far it’s been interesting and different. I’ve signed up for another couple of courses (one on more Shakespeare, one on Richard III’s era of English history) that are going to run later in the year. So far so good, but I’m not yet sure if it’s going to end up taking too much of my time away from other things.

Photography: Ongoing. I’ve a huge backlog of photos that need to be processed from various trips, so I feel a little dissatisfied with this. And it would be nice if I could get myself to the point where my blog photo of the week was a photo I’d actually taken that week. I also have some more arty sub-projects under this that haven’t really gone anywhere.

Genealogy: Ongoing. I have been looking into mine & J’s family history off and on for years now – I think I’ve still only scratched the surface of what’s possible to find out, there are whole branches I’ve not even touched. I have a database and also paper copies of most of the info in the database, but I’m not that fond of the machine generated reports from the programme I’m using (Gramps). I either need to learn python and write some “better” reports or I need to figure out a consistent style and then write them myself. But then that takes away from doing the research, so I normally put off thinking about it. The last few months of last year I’d got good at ring fencing some time to work on this each week, but that’s slipped again – I think I need to shake up my to-do lists in general and add projects to defined periods. And I need to do a bit of project planning for this in a written down fashion.

Weather Data: Stalled. I have about 30 years of data that first me & my brother and later my parents have gathered of the weather at my parents’ house. It’s not professional quality data (obviously), and I’m not even sure it’s entirely internally consistent (changing thermometers across the period for instance), but it’s still potentially interesting. I have entered some of it into the computer (a year, perhaps?) and I have a perl script that does some basic analysis and graph generation from the data. Realistically I don’t have time for this right now, but I think the first step needs to be to write up a proper to-do list. I know I need to design the webpages for the output and also think carefully about what analysis I can do and how I should display that. I also need to do the data entry. Data’s not going anywhere tho, so it’s on hold for now.

Embroidery: Stalled, oh so very stalled. I’ve got two pieces of embroidery in an unfinished state and I don’t think I’ve done any sewing in over 5 years. I do enjoy it when I do it, but it’s pretty low down the list of my priorities.

Learning to play the bass: Stalled. We have a bass guitar, we have Rocksmith for the PS3 – I just need to ring fence some time to practice every week (preferably every day but once a week would be a start).

Reading Shakespeare: Planned. I have a copy of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, as published by the RSC, and I’m aware that really I only know the plays that were in our copy of Lambs Tales from Shakespeare that I read as a child. So I know a few plots, and would like to get to know the rest. I have a vague plan of reading through each play and writing a post about each scene or act. This is unlikely to get off the ground in the near future, and would be best left till after I’ve done the Future Learn course on Shakespeare and his world, which will hopefully give me more insight into the plays.

Crusader Kings II Stories: Planned. The game Crusader Kings II is a mix of roleplay and strategy with a medieval history base. I have a plan of one day using a play through of the game to generate the plot for a series of little stories, but have never got round to starting it.

I suspect I’m not using my time optimally at the moment – a sit down with my calendar and my to-do lists and re-shuffling things might help with that. I’m very much a creature of habit, so if I can set up some routines where I get round to doing things on a more regular basis then I’ll get more done of everything.

I’m also half-looking for a project that gives me an excuse to buy a notebook (or two or …), I always lust after the Paper Blanks ones when I go into Waterstones or Smiths because they have such gorgeous covers. The only project with a “lab book” is the genealogy one and that’s both utilitarian and is less than half used, so it’s not providing me with an excuse for a book. But I don’t need any more projects 😉

This is the final part of my roundup of 2013 blog posts – I’ve managed to get it all done before January is over, which feels like a victory of sorts 🙂 There are a few categories on the sidebar that aren’t covered here. Admin is mostly indexes for each month, rather dull and somewhat recursive to index the indexes, so I haven’t. The others had no posts last year, some of which are rather surprising, some of which are not. I’ve played a lot of computer games over the last year, but apparently not written about anything – I should change that this year. We’ve not done any proper long walks with geocaching for ages, so that category is also empty. I also haven’t read any papers, nor have I done anything that fits in the Sport category (which exists to hold the photos of the Tour of Britain that I took in 2012 (post). And Whimsy is a new category this year for a piece of creative writing for the Shakespeare course I’m doing on Future Learn.

Films

As you can tell, I don’t really see many films.

• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
• Star Trek Into Darkness.

Radio

Most Sunday mornings we listen to a radio programme while we eat breakfast, most of these are from the In Our Time series. This covers a wide range of topics, and each episode has 3 experts in the field that’s being discussed sharing lay-person level explanations of the current state of knowledge in the field. They’re pretty much always fascinating. We’ve also listened to a couple of series about current affairs in the Middle East, which provide a historical perspective for the situation.

I’m not sure I can pick a favourite – I’ve just spent a while looking at the list of titles and for pretty much all of them I’ve thought “oh, that one was really good”. An interesting note is that my write up of the one about Japan’s Sakoku period got picked up by a site called OMG Facts so I think it’s been the most read post on my blog.

• Absolute Zero. In Our Time episode about absolute zero, both what it is and the history of the scientists trying to achieve it in the laboratory.
• The Amazons. In Our Time episode about the Amazons of Greek myth.
• Bertrand Russell. In Our Time episode about the life & work of Bertrand Russell.
• The Borgias. In Our Time episode about the Borgia family in Renaissance Italy.
• The Book of Common Prayer. In Our Time episode about the history & contents of the Book of Common Prayer.
• Comets. In Our Time episode about comets.
• The Corn Laws. In Our Time episode about the Corn Laws of the early 19th Century.
• Crystallography. In Our Time episode about x-ray crystallography.
• The Cult of Mithras. In Our Time episode about the Roman cult of Mithras.
• Epicureanism. In Our Time episode about the philosophy of Epicurus.
• Exoplanets. In Our Time episode about planets in other solar systems to our own.
• Galen. In Our Time episode about Galen, the 2nd Century AD Greek physician.
• Gnosticism. In Our Time episode about Gnosticism.
• Ice Ages. In Our Time episode about ice ages.
• Icelandic Sagas. In Our Time episode about Icelandic Sagas.
• Japan’s Sakoku Period. In Our Time episode about the period of Japan’s history where it pursued a policy of isolation from the rest of the world.
• The Mamluks. In Our Time episode about the Mamluks, who were a slave army who ruled Egypt between the 13th & 16th Centuries AD.
• The Making of the Modern Arab World. Four part Radio 4 series about the modern history of the Middle East.
• Le Morte d’Arthur. In Our Time episode about Malory’s version of the Arthurian legend.
• Pascal. In Our Time episode about the life & work of Blaise Pascal.
• Pitt-Rivers. In Our Time episode about Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers, the man whose collection forms the basis of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford.
• The Putney Debates. In Our Time episode about the context of & discussions in the Putney Debates (held in 1647 after the end of the first part of the Civil Wars).
• Queen Zenobia. In Our Time episode about the Palmyran Queen who rebelled against Rome & founded a short-lived empire in the Middle East around 270AD.
• Relativity. In Our Time episode about Einstein’s theories of relativity.
• Romulus and Remus. In Our Time episode about Rome’s founding myth.
• Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. In Our Time episode about the epic Persian poem the Shahnameh.
• South Sea Bubble. In Our Time episode about the South Sea Bubble.
• Turkey: The New Ottomans. A three part series putting modern Turkey in a historical context, and looking at its relationships with the Arab World & the West.
• The Upanishads. In Our Time episode about one of the groups of sacred texts of the Hindu religion.
• The War of 1812. In Our Time episode about the war between Britain & the US which started in 1812.
• Water. In Our Time episode about the chemical nature of water.

Reflections

Reflections is the category where I put articles that aren’t just about one thing, but are instead me reflecting on a group of posts or things. In 2013 that only includes the two posts I wrote about the books I read while I was reading those filed on my bookshelf under A.

• Filed Under A – stats & a retrospective on the books I’ve read so far as part of Read All the Fiction.
• Other Things I Read While Reading the As – stats & a retrospective on the fiction I read during the same time period as the books filed under A on my bookshelf.

Talks

Most of the talks we go to are at the Essex Egyptology Group meetings, so there is a strong Egyptian flavour to this section. There are also a couple of trips organised by the EEG, and one talk from a British Museum Members’ Open Evening (which is the sole non-Egyptian one here). I think my absolute favourite was Diane Johnson’s talk about meteoric iron in Ancient Egypt because it was a subject I knew nothing about before and the electron microscopy of the iron beads was particularly interesting. But they were all interesting talks.

• “The Arts of War: Assyrian Narrative Art” Nigel Tallis. Talk at the British Museum Members’ Open Evening in November 2013.
• August EEG Meeting. The format this month was different – 4 short talks from members (including me).
• EEG Trip to the EES. A group of us from the EEG visited the London office of the EES to see their archives.
• EEG Visit to the Petrie Museum. A trip to the Petrie Museum by members of the EEG where we were given a tour & a talk by Wolfram Grajetzki about Lahun.
• “Egypt’s So-Called First Intermediate Period and the Tomb of Ankhtifi” Glenn Godenho. Talk given at the EEG meeting in March, about the tomb of Ankhtifi & what it tells us about the First Intermediate Period.
• “Farming & Agriculture in the Nile Valley” Victor Blunden. Talk at the EEG meeting in April, about the farming methods of the ancient Egyptians.
• “Freemasonry and Ancient Egypt” Cathie Bryan. Talk at the EEG meeting in October, about the influences of (perceived) Egyptian culture on Freemasonry.
• “The Lion in Ancient Egypt: An Elite Phenomenon?” Lyn Stagg. Talk at the December EEG meeting, about lion symbolism & iconography in pre-dynastic and early dynastic Egypt.
• “Man in a Cretan Cloak: JDS Pendlebury at Amarna” Rosalind Janssen. Talk given at the EEG meeting in February, about the life & death of the archaeologist J. D. S. Pendlebury.
• “Marriage in Ancient Egypt” Lucia Gahlin. Talk at the EEG meeting in July, about marriage in Ancient Egypt.
• “Meteorites in Ancient Egypt” Diane Johnson. Talk given by Diane Johnson at the EEG meeting in September about her work on meteoric iron in Ancient Egyptian objects.
• “Monuments to Amun-Ra ‘King of the Gods’: The Temples of Thebes” George Hart. Talk given by George Hart at the June meeting of the EEG, about Amun-Ra and the various temples in the Theban region.
• “Mummies, Asps and Far Too Much Eye Make-up: Ancient Egypt in the Cinema” John J. Johnston. Talk given at the EEG meeting in May, about films featuring Ancient Egypt.
• “Ritual and Religion in Egyptian Mines and Quarries” Hannah Pethen. Talk given at the EEG meeting in November, about the rituals and mythology that the Ancient Egyptians had surrounding mining.

This part of my roundup of 2013 posts includes categories that involve photos or me going somewhere (and in many cases both).

Concerts

I don’t think we go to as many gigs as we used to – this feels like a short list of “big” concerts or events. Having said that, I think there’s a couple we went to that I haven’t written up – I’m sure we went to some Furry Live events early last year and those are not on the list. Picking a favourite is difficult – the Marillion Weekends are always special for instance and a social event for us too (7 of us in the group who went this year!). But I think that for me the Stone Roses gig has to win out – despite the unpleasantness of big-outdoor-gig crowds – although not a one-off this is only the second time we’ve seen them play and there’s no saying there’ll be another chance. That gig wins out over the Roger Waters one for me, because heathen that I am I’ve never really been that into Pink Floyd – so seeing The Wall live was a cool show but not a special event.

• Fish at the Junction, Cambridge 16/9/2013.
• Marillion Weekend 2013.
• Marillion playing at the Waterside Theatre, Aylesbury, 9/11/2013.
• Roger Waters playing The Wall live at Wembley, 14/9/13.
• Steven Wilson at the Festival Hall, 4/3/2013.
• Steven Wilson at the Royal Albert Hall, 20/10/2013.
• The Stone Roses, Finsbury Park 7/6/2013.

Museums

It’s been a good year for visits to museums and exhibitions! There’s even a few I’ve not written about (yet?) – including the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the London Museum. And a couple in Turin too. It’s processing photos that holds up these posts, and that’s something I need to work on getting better at just sitting down and doing. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but I think the Ice Age Art one might be it – the stuff we saw there was so very old, yet still evocative as art.

• Beyond El Dorado. Exhibition of pre-Hispanic Colombian gold artifacts at the British Museum.
• Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind. Exhibition of European Ice Age artifacts at the British Museum.
• Im Licht von Amarna. Exhibition about Amarna era Egypt at the Neues Museum, Berlin timed to coincide with 100 years since the discovery of the bust of Nefertiti.
• Life & Death in Pompeii & Herculaneum – British Museum exhibition about the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
• Neues Museum, Berlin.
• Thread of Silk and Gold. An exhibition of Meiji era Japanese textiles at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
• Treasures of the Royal Courts: Tudors, Stuarts & the Russian Tsars. An exhibition at the V&A about the English & Russian courts centred round the silverware gifted by England to Russia.
• V&A Museum – a brief visit to some other galleries while I was there for the Treasures of the Royal Courts exhibition.

Photos

The photos of the week that I post are mostly self-consciously chosen to be a bit “arty” and I’ve gradually started to title them with something that isn’t straightforwardly what the subject of the photo is. I can’t really choose a favourite, this is one of the only things on my blog that is my work as opposed to me talking about other people’s work, so they’re all either my babies or horrid (or both) depending on my frame of mind. I will mention that both Gathering and Tattered hit the “Popular” list on 500px on the day they were posted. That means something to me because I don’t do any promotion of my photos on 500px, I just post them and see what happens – so a significant handful of random strangers chanced across those and liked them 🙂

• Ancient Ripples.
• And Did Those Feet ….
• Architectural Details – a series of photos taken in Cambridge.
• Baboon.
• Bracken.
• Brute Force & Ignorance.
• Camera Shy.
• Christmas Gargoyle.
• Climbing.
• Colchester Zoo – a set from the zoo.
• Cool & Minty-Green.
• Delicate.
• Expedition.
• Gathering.
• A Gap in the Clouds.
• Goose.
• Ivory Bracelets.
• Just Hanging About.
• Lampstand.
• Lights.
• Louvre, Day 2 – a batch of photos from our trip to Paris in 2011.
• Lurker.
• Motion.
• Offering.
• Parent & Child.
• Past Glory.
• Peel Here.
• Pharaoh.
• Porcelain Bottles.
• Replica Lion Man Statue – a replica of one of the objects in the Ice Age Art exhibition.
• Royal Power.
• Shabtis.
• Spine.
• Staring Into Eternity.
• Tattered.
• Tiger.
• Toothy Grin.
• Turned to Stone.
• Turin Street At Night.
• Turtle.
• Waiting for the Sun.
• Weather Beaten.
• Wine Cups.

Trip

You’ll spot our Turin trip is missing from this list, the photos are part processed and I need to get on with it! I shan’t rank the two trips that are here, they’re different sorts of thing – one was a holiday and one a day out.

• Berlin – we spent a long weekend in Berlin in March.
• King’s College, Cambridge – we visited for the first time in September 2013.

And this is the final list of TV programmes we watched over the last year. I’ve sorted them into categories, but possibly in many cases this tells you a bit more about the inside of my mind than the programme itself. For instance I put the current affairs programmes like the Panorama programme about North Korea into the same category as travelogues because some of those (like Simon Reeve’s programmes) also have a theme how the world’s fucked up and it’s all our fault. But also in there are some nature programmes (like Wild Arabia) that are much more about the beauty of the world than the problems in it. And some nature programmes belong with science. Oh, and “Fiction & Related” should possibly be called “Doctor Who”…

I don’t think I can pick a favourite or a least favourite of these, it’s far too varied. And some programmes were good to have watched, but not particularly enjoyable (see Depressing Current Affairs as a category). So without further ado, the list:

Depressing Current Affairs & Travelogues

• Australia with Simon Reeve. Simon Reeve travelling around Australia.
• Brazil with Michael Palin. Palin travels round Brazil.
• Dan Snow’s A History of Congo. Depressing look at the last 150 or so years of the history of Congo & how this has left the country in a state.
• A History of Syria with Dan Snow. Documentary about the historical context for the current civil war in Syria.
• Indian Ocean with Simon Reeve. Simon Reeve travels around the coast of the Indian Ocean.
• The Iraq War. Series looking at the events leading up to the Iraq War and the aftermath of the war, with interviews with many key figures.
• Israel: Facing the Future. John Ware visits Israel to talk to the people about the future of the country.
• Panorama: North Korea Undercover. Programme about North Korea, partly filmed inside North Korea itself.
• Tiger: Spy in the Jungle. Nature series about tigers growing up, filmed by cameras carried by elephants.
• TOWN with Nicholas Crane. Nicholas Crane visiting British towns.
• Unreported World: Egypt’s Tomb Raiders. Documentary about the impact the recent political instability in Egypt has had on the people who rely on the tourism industry, and on the antiquities.
• Wild Arabia. Nature show about the wildlife & people living in Arabia.
• Wild Shepherdess with Kate Humble. Series where Kate Humble visits sheep farmers around the world to see what’s the same & what’s different.

Culture & Biography

• Charlie Brooker: How Videogames Changed the World. A retrospective of the last 25 years of computer games, and their impact on our culture.
• Donald Campbell: Speed King. Biography of Donald Campbell, who died in 1967 trying to break the water speed record (for the 8th time).
• The Genius of Marie Curie: The Woman Who Lit Up the World. Programme about the life & work of Marie Curie.
• The Genius of Turner: Painting the Industrial Revolution. A programme about the life & work of J. M. W. Turner.
• Indie Game: The Movie – film length documentary about indie games, following the development of Super Meat Boy and Fez, and talking to the creator of Braid.
• Isaac Newton: The Last Magician. Biography of Isaac Newton.
• Nigel Slater: Life is Sweets. A combination of a history & survey of British sweets with some autobiographical reminiscences from Nigel Slater.
• A Night at the Rijksmuseum. Programme presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon about the re-opening of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
• Secrets of the Arabian Nights. Richard E. Grant talks about the history & stories of the Arabian Nights tales.
• Shakespeare in Italy. Francesco da Mosto talking about Shakespeare’s plays that’re set in Italy.
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Simon Armitage talks about the poem Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, and his translation of it.
• When Coal Was King. Timeshift episode about the culture of coal miners in the 1940s & 50s. Not a full post.

Fiction & Related

• Doctor Who: The Bells of Saint John.
• Doctor Who: The Rings of Akhaten.
• Doctor Who: Cold War.
• Doctor Who: Hide.
• Doctor Who: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.
• Doctor Who: The Crimson Horror.
• Doctor Who: Nightmare in Silver.
• Doctor Who: The Name of the Doctor.
• Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor.
• Doctor Who: The Ultimate Guide. Programme about the 50 year backstory & history of Doctor Who.
• Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor. Announcement of Peter Capaldi being cast to play the next Doctor.
• The Science of Doctor Who – a lecture by Brian Cox about the physics of space time, and the Fermi paradox.

Science

• The Burrowers: Animals Underground. Nature series about the lives of British burrowing animals – rabbits, badgers & water voles – filming them in artificial burrows.
• Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life. David Attenborough talks about Darwin, Darwin’s theory of evolution and Attenborough’s own past.
• David Attenborough’s Rise of the Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates. David Attenborough shows us how the vertebrates evolved from little worms to the diversity of today.
• Guts: The Strange and Mysterious World of the Human Stomach. Programme about the human digestive system presented by Michael Mosley, involving internal cameras amongst other things.
• Horizon: Little Cat Diaries. Short follow-up programme to
• The Secret Life of the Cat.
• Horizon: The Secret Life of the Cat. Programme about investigating the territories & ranges of pet cats using GPS.
• Horizon: What Makes Us Human?. Programme about the differences between humans & chimps, presented by Alice Roberts.
• Ice Age Giants. Alice Roberts talking about the large animals that lived during the ice age, complete with CGI recreations.
• The Joy of Logic – one off programme about the history of logic and maths, and the birth of computer science.
• Metal: How it Works. Series about the history & use of various materials (only the first episode is about metals).
• Prehistoric Autopsy. What we know about the lives & looks of 3 ancestors of modern Homo sapiens.
• Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Meet Your Brain. A series of three children’s lectures from Christmas 2011 about the brain.
• The Wonder of Dogs. Kate Humble, Steve Leonard & Ruth Goodman talk about the history & biology of dogs.
• Wonders of Life. Brian Cox series about life – mostly about the physics & chemistry behind it.

The joke in our household is that if you mention some historical event of, say, the Anglo-Saxons or the Vikings or some such then J will say “oh that’s practically modern!” because he’s used to thinking of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Pharaohs (who stop with the famous Cleopatra) as being the “most recent”. Skews your perspective a bit.

If J’s thing is Ancient Egypt, then mine is Tudor England (spreading outwards round the world from there, and back and forth in time). And the BBC did a Tudor season relatively recently, so there were several programmes to my tastes (although I don’t think we ended up watching all of them). Again I drew the cut-off between Ancient and Modern as the fall of Rome, and some serieses straddle that boundary so have appeared on both lists. I’ve shunted some of the truly modern stuff (like Dan Snow’s recent histories of Syria and the Congo) into the next list as I think of them more as current affairs, somewhat arbitrarily!

This is still a pretty long list – 42 programmes or serieses in all. Picking high and low points is hard – there’s not a stand out “why did we ever watch that” like there was in the ancient history list, but I think the weakest was Janina Ramirez’s programme about the Viking sagas. In part because I expect better from her programmes, and from that subject. Games Britannia also deserves a mention, the one episode we watched was OK but I was left with the impression that the later episodes would’ve had me rolling my eyes somewhat.

Best is incredibly difficult to pick, even picking a shortlist of half a dozen seems difficult! But I think the one I shall pick out specially is The Last Days of Anne Boleyn. It stands out not only because it’s obviously slap bang in the middle of my interests but also because it’s a slightly different format to the standard sort of history programme. It didn’t just present one interpretation and call that the truth, instead there were seven different historians or novelists who talked about four different theories about what actually happened. So we got to see more of the complexity of the issue.

• A303: Highway to the Sun. Tom Fort drives along the A303 & talks about the history of the area.
• Ancient Apocalype. Series about how various ancient civilisations met their doom.
• Archaeology: A Secret History. Richard Miles presenting a series about the history of archaeology.
• The Bridges that Built London with Dan Cruickshank – one off programme telling the history of London’s bridges across the Thames. Interesting, but got a bit woo-woo at times towards the end.
• Chivalry & Betrayal: The Hundred Years War. Programme about the Hundred Years War between England & France, presented by Janina Ramirez.
• The Dark Ages: An Age of Light. Programme about the art of the Early Medieval period, presented by Waldemar Januszczak.
• David Starkey’s Music and Monarchy. David Starkey tells us all about the influence the English monarchy has had on English music starting from Henry V through to the present day.
• Fit to Rule. Series about the British monarchs through the lens of their medical history from Henry VIII to Edward VII, presented by Lucy Worsley.
• Games Britannia. History of games in Britain, we only watched the first episode.
• Henry VII: The Winter King. Programme presented by Thomas Penn about the reign of Henry VII.
• Henry VIII’s Enforcer: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell. Documentary about the life of Thomas Cromwell, presented by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Part of the BBC’s Tudor Court Season.
• Howard Goodall’s Story of Music. History of Western music presented by Howard Goodall.
• A Hundred Years of Us. Aired to coincide with the 2011 census this is a look at how British culture has changed over the last hundred years.
• In Search of Medieval Britain. Alixe Bovey following a medieval map of Britain (link goes to only episode watched in this year).
• John Sergeant on Tracks of Empire. John Sergeant travels across India on the railway, looking at the history of India, the British Empire and the railways.
• King Alfred & the Anglo-Saxons. Series presented by Michael Wood about King Alfred & his successors.
• The King’s War on Witches: Revealed. Rather good Channel 5 documentary about James VI & I’s witchhunts.
• The Last Days of Anne Boleyn. Part of the BBC’s Tudor Court Season, a programme where seven experts discuss what is known and what is conjectured about the fall of Anne Boleyn.
• London: A Tale of Two Cities with Dan Cruickshank. Programme about the development of London in the 17th Century, presented by Dan Cruickshank.
• Lost Kingdoms of South America. The history & archaeology of four cultures in South America.
• The Making of King Arthur. Simon Armitage looking at the development of the King Arthur myth in Norman times.
• Michael Wood on Beowulf. Programme about the epic poem Beowulf, presented by Michael Wood.
• The Most Dangerous Man in Tudor England. Biography of William Tynedale (who translated the Bible into English & was executed for doing it) presented by Melyvn Bragg.
• Nelson’s Caribbean Hell-hole: An Eighteenth Century Navy Graveyard Uncovered. Sam Willis follows an archaeological excavation in Antigua, uncovering 18th Century Navy burials.
• The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors. Series about the history of the Ottoman Empire presented by Rageh Omaar.
• Richard III: The King in the Car Park. Documentary following the excavation & analysis of Richard III’s remains.
• The Road to El Alamein: Churchill’s Desert Campaign. Programme presented by Jonathan Dimbleby about the events leading up to the pivotal World War II battle at El Alamein in late 1942.
• Rome: A History of the Eternal City. History of Rome from the perspective of religion, presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
• The Secret History of Genghis Khan. Programme about what a history written by Genghis Khan’s adopted son tells us about him.
• Secrets of the Arabian Nights. Richard E. Grant talks about the history & stories of the Arabian Nights tales.
• Secrets of the Saxon Gold. Time Team Special about the Staffordshire hoard.
• She Wolves: England’s Early Queens. Series about Queens of England in medieval & Tudor times, presented by Helen Castor.
• The Story of the Jews. Series presented by Simon Schama about the history of the Jews.
• Stories of the Dark Earth: Meet the Ancestors Revisted. Julian Richards returns to digs that were originally filmed for Meet the Ancestors more than a decade ago & sees what new things have been learnt.
• Time Team: The Hollow Way. The Time Team crew excavate a deserted medieval village at Ulnaby, County Durham.
• Treasures of the Louvre. One-off documentary about the history of the Louvre and of France, and a tour of the highlights of the museum’s collection, presented by Andrew Hussey.
• The Tube: An Underground History. Programme made to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the London Underground.
• A Tudor Feast – one-off programme about preparing a Tudor feast using authentic recipes and techniques.
• The Viking Sagas. Rather weak programme on the Viking sagas presented by Janina Ramirez.
• Wartime Farm. What life was like for farmers during World War II, part re-enactment.
• When Coal Was King. Timeshift episode about the culture of coal miners in the 1940s & 50s. Not a full post.
• Why the Industrial Revolution Happened Here. Cut down version of a programme about what made Britain such fertile ground for the Industrial Revolution.

The amount of different TV that we’ve watched over the last year is why I split the roundup of the year into sections – and the non-fiction TV is split into three or so parts (vagueness because I’ve not written them all yet so I don’t know if it’ll stick to the plan!). This gathers together all the “ancient history” serieses or programmes we’ve watched over the year – 30 in all. I’ve drawn the boundary at roughly the fall of Rome, and as you might expect the list includes a lot of programmes about Ancient Egypt (given J’s obsession with the subject). Some programmes & serieses extend beyond that but if they’ve a significant chunk from before the cut off they’ll be in both lists. I’ve included in the list the ones that we watched but I didn’t really write about without links, most posts will have multiple programmes in them so you might have to scroll down and several serieses are split across multiple posts.

Picking a least favourite is easy – there was a dreadful documentary about Akhenaten called Sun Pharaoh where the narrator couldn’t even pronounce the name Akhenaten properly. Picking a favourite is harder! Ancient Egypt – Life and Death in the Valley of the Kings is one possibility, Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time another. And I did like Mary Beard’s Caligula one. There’s also Story of the Jews and Simon Sebag Montefiore’s one about Rome to add to the shortlist. I think I’ll go with the Ancient Egypt one as top. Tho I might change my mind tomorrow!

• 4,000-Year-Old Cold Case: The Body in the Bog. One off programme about the discovery and investigation of a body in an Irish bog. Was a bit Discovery Channel (they Solved The Mystery and Proved The Theory), and a bit unclear how general their idea was but nonetheless interesting.
• A303: Highway to the Sun. Tom Fort drives along the A303 & talks about the history of the area.
• Ancient Apocalype. Series about how various ancient civilisations met their doom.
• Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth. Michael Scott looks at the development of drama in Ancient Greece.
• Ancient Egypt – Life and Death in the Valley of the Kings. Programme about the more ordinary Egyptians – those who lived in the workmen’s village at Deir el-Medina.
• Britain’s Stone Age Tsunami. Time Team special about a tsunami that hit Britain about 8000 years ago.
• Caligula with Mary Beard. Mary Beard tells us what we know about Caligula, and looks at how much of the myth might be true.
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Film about the Chuavet cave paintings.
• Egypt’s Lost Rival. Documentary about the city of Qatna which is in modern day Syra and was contemporaneous with the Second Intermediate Period of Egypt, the programme was both about the history & about the excavation of it.
• Egypt’s Mystery Chamber. Mini-review of programme about KV63.
• The Egyptian Job. Documentary about the robbing of Amenemhat III’s tomb, I wasn’t keen on the framing narrative for the programme (overly fictionalised for my tastes).
• Ice Age Art: A Culture Show Special. One off show presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon linked to the Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum.
• Mothers, Murderers and Mistresses: Empresses of Ancient Rome. Three part series about the lives of powerful women of the Roman Empire, presented by Catharine Edwards.
• Museum Secrets: Cairo Museum. Mini-review of programme about selected objects from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
• The Mystery of Rome’s X Tomb. Programme about a mass grave dating back to the 1st-3rd Centuries AD found in the catacombs of Rome in 2003.
• Nefertiti. Mini-review of old programme about Nefertiti.
• The Other Pompeii: Life & Death in Herculaneum. One-off programme about what we can learn about Roman life from Herculaneum.
• Pompeii: The Mystery of the People Frozen in Time. Margaret Mountford presents a programme about the eruption of Vesuvius and how the people of Pompeii & Herculaneum died.
• Quest for Egypt’s Lost King. Documentary about Akhenaten & Amarna. Sadly took a nose-dive off the plausibility cliff towards the end.
• Ramesses III: The Pharaoh Behind the Myth. Mini-review of programme about the harem conspiracy against Ramesses III.
• Rome: A History of the Eternal City. History of Rome from the perspective of religion, presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
• Rome’s Lost Empire. Using satellite imagery to find previously unknown Roman sites to excavate.
• Secrets of Stonehenge: A Time Team Special. Time Team filmed a (non-Time Team) excavation at Stonehenge & talk about new theories about why & how it was built.
• The Story of the Jews. Series presented by Simon Schama about the history of the Jews.
• Stories of the Dark Earth: Meet the Ancestors Revisted. Julian Richards returns to digs that were originally filmed for Meet the Ancestors more than a decade ago & sees what new things have been learnt.
• Sun Pharaoh. Mini-review of dreadful documentary about Akhenaten.
• Treasures of Ancient Rome. Series about the art & history of Ancient Rome, presented by Alastair Sooke.
• Tutankhamun Conspiracies with Bettany Hughes. Mini-review of unfocussed documentary mostly about Tutankhamun.
• Tutankhamun: The Mystery of the Burnt Mummy. Cut down version of Ultimate Tut.
• Ultimate Tut. Documentary about Tutankhamun, including another theory as to how he died. Presented by Chris Naunton.
• Who Were the Greeks?. Two-part series with Michael Scot giving an overview of Greek civilisation & looking at the truth vs. the myth of what they were like.

The thirteen books filed under A on the shelf weren’t all the fiction I’ve read over the last six months – there were also fourteen books from the library. While I was putting together the stats for the books on the shelf (post) I also looked at these other books.

The books were as follows (links go to posts):

• Isaac Asimov: Foundation
• Kate Atkinson: Life After Life
• Paula Brackston: The Book of Shadows
• Myke Cole: Control Point
• Maurice Druon: The Iron King
• Barbara Hambly: Ran Away
• Deborah Harkness: Shadow of Night
• Hugh Howey: Wool, Shift
• Howard Andrew Jones: The Desert of Souls
• L. E. Modesitt: Flash
• Brandon Sanderson & Robert Jordan: A Memory of Light
• Chuck Wendig: Blackbirds
• Kit Whitfield: In Great Waters

(You can click on the graph for a slightly bigger version where the text is a little easier to read.)

When I started thinking about looking at the stats for what I’ve been reading in posts like these I thought to myself that whilst the books filed under A might have very male-skewed authors “obviously it’ll be 50% or more women for the other books”. Er, no. Fourteen authors, 9 male … still just 36% female. Not much better than the ‘main’ author stats for the As. So that’s rather disappointing. In terms of nationality it’s still a very US dominated list, and only one author was neither UK nor US (Maurice Druon is French and his book was originally in French (I read it in translation)).

Genre-wise they skew towards fantasy and historical novels. Eight books fall into some category of fantasy, seven books are in some way historical (they overlap). Perhaps a reaction against all the early science fiction I was otherwise reading? Certainly nothing deliberate in the choice.

This selection is mostly fairly recent books, probably because I reserved most of them after reading reviews or excerpts. The outliers are the Asimov (reserved because I don’t own book 1 of the Foundation trilogy and it seemed a shame to skip it) and the Druon which was recently reviewed on tor.com because George R. R. Martin has cited it as an influence on his Song of Ice & Fire series. Both of those were published in the 50s.

The mean star rating was 3.6 as compared to 3.1 for the As, with the mode being 4 rather than 3. Again influenced by reading reviews/excerpts before reading the book because I could weed out most things that weren’t going to be to my tastes before reading them*. Not flawlessly tho! The three books that were my least favourite included one I’d read before (the Asimov), one that I read & liked an excerpt from (the Cole) and one I read a very positive review for (the Whitfield). I’d say that the Cole was probably my biggest disappointment, the type of story I thought it was going to tell is a type I particularly like so it was sad not to get it.

*Whereas the stuff on the shelf included a lot of things I bought more than 20 years ago and my tastes have changed.

Those that were my favourites were all liked for different reasons and oddly I’d only recommend them to other people with caveats. A Memory of Light was a very satisfying conclusion to a series I’ve been reading for something like half my life, but you definitely couldn’t start with that one & the series as a whole does get bogged down in the middle so I could understand not wanting to read it all. The Atkinson gets better every time I think about it, and I think it’s got something interesting to say about environment, culture & personality and how those affect your life & your sense of self (both more & less than you’d expect). But I think you’ve got to be happy reading something very non-linear to enjoy the book, and it doesn’t have a plot per se. And lastly the Wendig is a vivid & intense urban fantasy/thriller crossover … but it’s pretty gruesome in places & if you’re easily offended by swear words you’re not going to enjoy it at all.