I’m delighted to announce that I have an essay in the forthcoming collection, What Board Games Mean to Me, published by Aconyte, alongside such key figures in modern-day gaming as Sir Ian Livingstone (Warhammer and Fighting Fantasy), Reiner Knizia (too many games to list!) and Leslie Scott (Jenga), as well as fellow wordworker in the dark grimness of the far future, Gav Thorpe. It was an honour to be asked to contribute.
My essay, ‘Learning the Rules’, tells how playing games helped us as a family. It begins:
I was halfway down the road, the crash of the front door slowly dying away behind me, when I realized that, perhaps, it was not just the children who might benefit from learning to play board games. In my – somewhat feeble – defense, I had been on the point of winning Power: The Game (a Diplomacy derivative with added tanks and missiles) when everyone else in the family ganged up on me and destroyed my army. Even so, given that I was one of the adults in the room, my reaction – announcing that I was never going to play with them ever again if they cheated like this and then storming out of the house, slamming the door behind me – was perhaps not likely to make an appearance in any manuals of good parenting.
There’s many more takes on what gaming means, from designers through to players, so if you have ever despaired of finishing Monopoly or come last at Ludo, this is the book for you!
In honour of our new puppy, I’ve been reading Isaac, at bedtime, Dodie Smith’s ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’. The story had been one of my childhood favourites, as shown by my reading to Isaac from my copy printed in 1970, but I had not re-read the book in many years.
And you know what? It is an absolute delight. Beautifully written, perfectly paced, with a brave and intelligent hero (speaking as a father, it’s a blessed relief to finally read a fictional father portrayed as capable and honourable rather than the bumbling idiots we are written as today, even if the dad is a dog), all set against one of the greatest villains ever put upon the page, Cruella de Vil. In fact, Cruella is so completely wicked and without redeeming features, she may be the only evil villain sure to avoid a modern reworking casting her as a misunderstood symbol of female empowerment. No, she is simply Cruella de Vil – and all the better for that too!
So if you want a great bedtime read for you children, I suggest ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’ (and it’s better than the films too).
Historical fiction has been as infected by the grimming of modern tastes as has Hollywood. Where before, in movies, brightly clad heroes strode across a Technicolor landscape, now grey and mud-spattered protagonists creep through kingdoms leached of colour, where people dressed in all colours so long as they were variations of grey and mud. The bizarre fact is, though, that the older Hollywood films and the first historical novels were more accurate: the past was brightly, vividly coloured, and the people who lived in that past lived lives that were as bright and vivid as their houses, churches and clothing.
So it was a great and unexpected joy to read this novella. It’s set in the 19th century in Copenhagen and it is the most joyous and the most wholesome, in the strict sense of the word, story that I have read in years. It’s such a relief to read a book completely untouched by the confected cynicism of this tired and weary age, where everything is permitted and nothing is done. It’s a story of love, human and divine, the love that moves the sun and other stars, the love that brings life and purpose. It’s a story of first love, of boy for girl, and first love, of God for man, for in each that love is always unique and fresh – and not something I expected to see written about in a contemporary novel. So thank you, Theodore Brun, for having the courage to write with such direct and heartfelt simplicity of thought and emotion; so much harder to do than the usual weary tropes of modern writing. Thank you.
The War for the Heart of the World: the Last Crusaders will be the first in a series of novels telling the story of the generation-long struggle for control of the Mediterranean. On one side, the Ottoman Empire under its greatest ruler, Suleiman the Magnificent. On the other, a squabbling group of warring kingdoms, city states and military orders: the Habsburg Empire, straining at the seams under the pressure of the Reformation; La Serenissima, the Republic of Venice, fighting to retain control of its life blood of maritime trade; and the Knights Hospitaller, last order of military monks, searching for a new role in a world where the Age of Discovery has begun.
It is a story of sea battles and spying, of true love and filicide, of science and magic. For this was a time when the old certainties were breaking and a new world was being made. It was a war fought by men such as Gabriele Tadino, the Italian military engineer and Suleiman, the Shadow of God on Earth, who aspired to dominon over the whole world. It was a war fought at sea and on land by Barbary pirates and Albanian spies. It was the last medieval war and the first modern war, a war in which knights in armour manhandled cannons into place and musketeers fired from siege towers.
It was the war that shaped the modern world as it was being born: it was the war for the heart of the world.
My new historical fiction novel, which tells the story of the great siege of Rhodes in 1522, when the Knights Hospitaller faced the full might of the Ottoman Empire, is due out next year.
As revealed yesterday, the hero of my next historical fiction novel is the great Italian military engineer, Gabriele Tadino. In a career of adventures so wild that most of them I had to leave out for fear readers would find them ludicrous, the highlight was his masterminding of the defence of Rhodes in 1522. The siege is the setting for my new historical fiction novel, due out next year.
During the siege, a force of 700 Knights Hospitaller, the last order of crusading military monks, and a few thousand mercenaries and Rhodians faced the full might of the Ottoman Empire. The sultan himself, Suleiman the Magnificent, had arrived on Rhodes in July with an army of over 70,000 men determined to pull this thorn from the side of his empire. During a six-month siege both defenders and attackers were pushed to breaking point. It is an extraordinary story, full of stories of amazing courage and vile treachery, in a time when science and magic contended upon the battlefield for real. I hope you will enjoy it.
This is a painting of the formidable gentleman who is the hero of my new historical fiction novel, which is due out next year. In honour of a remarkable man, and in gratitude to you, my gentle readers, I will send a free copy of the book to the first three people across all platforms to tell me who he is. (I’ve blue lined the title of the painting that gives his name away.)
There wasn’t much about the boy to suggest that he would be the father to the 20th century. Thomas Alva Edison was the seventh child of his parents and the fourth to survive to adulthood. He developed hearing problems when young and, while not totally deaf as an adult, he was very hard of hearing. He wrote, “I have not heard a bird sing since I was 12 years old.” Given his many inventions, it’s surprising that Edison never invented a hearing aid, although he often said he was working on one. But growing up deaf, he realised, had helped him, allowing greater concentration on his work and tuning out the “babble of ordinary conversation”.
Born on 11 Februay 1847 in Milan, Ohio, the young Edison had little schooling and what he had provided little of worth: he learned by reading – he was a lifelong, voracious and omnivorous reader – and doing. One of Edison’s first jobs was selling sweets and newspapers to railway passengers. During his breaks, the young Edison did chemistry experiments in the baggage car.
Telegraphy was the communication breakthrough that, together with the railroad, was opening up the vast expanses of the United States. In 1863, at the age of 16, Edison became an apprentice telegrapher and, naturally for him, started experimenting on improvements and by January 1869 he had done enough to believe that his future lay in being a full-time inventor.
That future lay in New York, which was where Edison moved, working initially on improvements to telegraphy so that it was possible to send four signals down one wire at once. Edison’s work on the quadriplex, as this new system of telegraphy was called, was snapped up for $100,000. There was serious money in these new-fangled inventions.
Unfortunately, Edison’s talents did not stretch to money management, and neither did those of his young bride, 16-year-old Mary Stilwell, so the couple moved away from the financial temptations of the city to Menlo Park, New Jersey, which was then a quiet rural backwater. At Menlo Park Edison built the world’s first research and development laboratory, combining a lab and machine shop.
It was here that Edison earned the soubriquet, ‘The wizard of Menlo Park’, creating many of the inventions that would usher in the modern, technological world. But these were not just the result of Edison: one of his unsung but crucial talents was his ability to bring together and motivate a team of skilled designers, technicians and engineers. In part this was because every member of the team was positively encouraged to note down ideas and bring them to the rest of the team. Good ideas were pursued by all. Edison’s working methods were unlike those that typified most scientific research. Rather than investigating experimentally the predictions of a theory, Edison pursued hunches, interests, anything that caught his fancy, treating every setback as a new avenue towards greater understanding. When some expensive chemicals were left out in sunlight and degraded, rather than bemoan the loss, Edison stopped all his other experiments and had his team investigate the properties of the degraded chemicals. Everything was interesting and, sometimes, useful. As Edison said, “Genius is hard work, stick-to-it-iveness, and common sense.” But the combination of gifts Edison brought together was far from common.
Edison’s research at Menlo Park produced the carbon microphone that made telephones a world wide technology, the basic design continuing in use for the next century; devised a system of electricity distribution that allowed the first widespread use of electric lights; devised the first cinema camera, known as the ‘Kinetograph’; and invented the electric light bulb. The neon-lit, connected, fame-obsessed world of the 21st century has its origin in Edison’s inventions in the second half of the 19th century.
On 9 August 1884, Edison’s wife, Mary, died. She was 29. The couple had three children. Edison remarried two years later, his new bride being 20-year-old Mina Miller. Edison was now 39. He had three more children with his new wife, moving with her to a new home and research complex in West Orange, New Jersey. The new facility saw the development of alkaline batteries, the foundation of the cinema industry and the production of commercial phonographs but, being larger and less intimate, it was not as conducive to the sort of small-team work that was the foundation for Edison’s most remarkable inventions. However Edison, ever the workaholic, continued working there until his 80s.
Thomas Edison died on 18 October 1931 at his home. The world around him was a very different place to that into which he had been born and probably no single man had changed it more than he had.
There are no stories in archaeology. It’s the nature of the science. Rather than a continuous story it produces a series of snapshots through time, like a strobe light illuminating single pages of the past: a series of frozen tableaux stretching into the past.
As a writer writing about archaeology, this lack of stories is a problem I’ve struggled with. But John Henry Phillips confronts the problem head on, and brings two compelling stories into the heart of his new book. In this, he’s helped by this being the archaeology of the relatively recent past: the D-Day landings.
At a D-Day commemoration, Phillips found himself sharing a hotel room with D-Day veteran Patrick Thomas. The two men, a veteran in his 90s and the the 20something archaeologist, struck up a friendship and Phillips, acting from the heart and certainly not the head, vows to find the wreck of the landing craft that Thomas had been crewing, sunk by a mine off the coast of Normandy. Thomas was one of the few survivors. The promise was reckless for a number of reasons. The location of the sinking was not known. There was no reason to believe the boat had survived on the seabed. And, most obviously, Phillips had never done any marine archaeology before; in fact, he had never done any diving before.
The book interweaves the present-day archaeological search with the events leading up to and beyond D-Day. Both men, Philips and Thomas, are young in these accounts. The sailor becomes one of the crew of the landing craft, forging the sorts of bonds that men at war make. The archaeologist faces the burden of Thomas’s hopes, and the final settling of the guilt burdens that men of his generation carried silently after the war. And running as a thread between these stories is the archaeology: the difficult, painstaking and downright dangerous task of marine archaeology.
The three threads make for a thrilling narrative and Phillips emphatically proves that, yes, sometimes archaeology can have a story, particularly if cast into the hands of a masterful storyteller. In a final twist, [spoiler ahead] the book shows dramatically the provisional nature of archaeology and how archaeological dreams can collide with historical reality when the wreck that Phillips has found and dived proves not to have been Thomas’s landing craft after all.
The Search is a book that brings the reader into the heart of archaeology, to that place where it meets people and the lives they lived and died, and illuminates them all.
The date is famous. 17 December 1903. On that Thursday the Wright brothers, Orville then Wilbur, made the first controlled powered flights in a heavier-than-air machine. In all, there were four flights that day, two for each brother. Five people watched history being made. Reports reached the press. And then…nothing happened. Barely any newspapers covered the story and the news faded away. No one could believe a couple of bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, a place as far from the beating heart of things then as it is today, had done what other better known, better educated and better connected people had failed to do. But it was precisely the roots the Wright brothers had in Dayton that made possible their extraordinary achievements. Of these roots, none were more important than their parents.
The Wright family home in Dayton, Ohio.
Milton Wright, father to the clan, was minister then bishop of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ. He fostered in his sons a love of reading and free intellectual inquiry that stemmed from his own interest in debate; if the boys, growing up, were engaged in some important investigation he happily turned a blind eye on them skipping school to concentrate on whatever new device they were constructing. However, it was from their mother, Susan, that the boys inherited their engineering flair: she constructed her own household appliances and made toys for the boys. Susan had met Milton during her studies at the United Brethren college in Hartsville, where she was studying English literature. Thus Wilbur and Orville grew up in a household predicated upon a deep commitment to learning, unshakeable faith (which the brothers also transferred into confidence in their work) and adherence to principles.
Milton and Susan had other children too: twins who died in infancy, two other sons, older than the flying brothers who made lives of their own, and the youngest, Katharine, who would share house, conversation and duties for many years with her famous brothers.
Wilbur Wright, born 16 April 1867, was the elder. In photographs of the pair he is the intense, balding figure with penetrating eyes. Orville Wright, born four years later on 19 August 1871, looks generally more avuncular and wears the thick moustache typical of the era. Despite the difference in age, the pair were inseparable. But separation was in the offing as Wilbur neared graduation from high school. A brilliant student – his test scores were in the 90s for everything – and an outstanding athlete, Wilbur was destined to fly high, educationally speaking: he was set for Yale.
Then, it happened, and everything changed. During an ice hockey match, a hockey stick smashed into Wilbur’s face, knocking out most of his upper front teeth. Wilbur suffered months of pain, followed by bouts of depression and withdrawal. Yale was out of the question. What’s more, their mother, Katharine, was ill with tuberculosis. Wilbur became her carer and, having retreated to the confines of the house, he read and read and read.
Wilbur Wright working in their bicycle workshop in 1897.
For his part, Orville had become fascinated with printing and, while still at school, built his own printing press using a tombstone, a spring from a horse buggy and scrap metal. Milton Wright credited the care Wilbur took of his mother for extending her life far beyond what was thought possible with tuberculosis, but in 1889 Susan Wright died. Wilbur, slowly emerging from his isolation, joined Orville in his printing business. In response to the national bicycle craze, in December 1892 the brothers started repairing bicycles and by 1896 they were building them too. They were assembling the skills they would need for the task that increasingly preoccupied them: flight.
One of the gliders the brothers built to test the principles of flight.
The boys first memory of flight was when their father brought home a toy helicopter, a contraption of wood and rubber bands, that they flew until it broke. But it was the news of the death, in August 1896, of Otto Lilienthal, the pioneer of glider flight, that resparked their interest in flight. In response, Wilbur did what he always did first: he read. Everything. When Orville recovered from a bout of typhoid, he joined his brother in scouring the libraries of Dayton. When these were exhausted, they wrote to the Smithsonian Institution asking for further reading – at the time, the Smithsonian was itself sponsoring expensive research into powered flight.
Wilbur Wright in one of their gliders as it lands leaving skid marks in the sand.
The Wright brothers were by no means the only people investigating flight: there were many inventors and teams working on how to fly. But what would set the brothers apart was the methodical way they broke down the problem and, in doing so, identified the key difficulty before flight could be achieved. The Wright brothers reasoned that there were three requirements for successful flight: a means of generating lift, some way of propelling the craft through the air and a system to direct and control the craft. All the other researchers were looking mainly at the first and second parts of the problem. The Wright brothers realised that it was the third part, the control system, that was least understood and most critical. After all, Otto Lilienthal, with his work on gliders, had demonstrated how wings could produce lift, and the burgeoning automobile industry was developing new, lighter and more powerful engines all the time. The real difficulty was control. This was where the brothers’ experience as cyclists was crucial. A cyclist, turning a corner, leans into the corner. They realised that the most effective way to turn a plane was for it to do the same, that it should bank in the direction it was turning (other researchers envisaged a system like a car, where the vehicle remains level while changing direction).
The first powered flight, piloted by Orville Wright.
Starting with self-made gliders, the Wrights tested out their ideas for controlling a craft in flight, developing the system of three-axis control – roll (lateral motion), pitch (up and down) and yaw (side to side) – that underlies aircraft control systems to this day. Through three years testing at Kitty Hawk on the Atlantic Coast of America – a site chosen for its isolation, helpful winds and soft sand to cushion hard landings – the Wrights brought their craft towards the ideal of powered flight. In December 1903, they were ready. The first attempt, on 14 December, damaged the plane. But at 10:35 on 17 December 1903, Orville Wright took off, flying 120 feet (36m) and staying in the air for 12 seconds. Wilbur had the second go, going further, then Orville outdid him only for Wilbur’s final flight (852 feet in 59 seconds) to eclipse all three previous efforts. They had done it.
Orville flying the Wright Type A Airplane at Ft. Myer, Va. on Sept. 9, 1908
The press completely missed the story. The Dayton newspaper said the flights were so short the news wasn’t worth printing. Never men to court publicity, the Wrights weren’t too bothered. Besides, they wanted to perfect their airplane and they spent the next couple of years doing so. European aviators were sceptical of the rumours they were hearing about the Wright’s plane. All that would change in 1908, when Wilbur Wright began making public demonstration flights in France. All that they had heard about the Wright’s flyer was true – and more. Meanwhile, in America, Orville was demonstrating their plane to the US Army. The brothers, having funded their research out of their own pockets, needed to make money of their momentous invention.
In Europe, the control and distances over which Wilbur piloted his plane caused a sensation.
The demonstration flights put an end to all doubts. The Wrights took off, flew circles and figure-8s, and landed, all while in total control of their planes. The two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, had done it. They had realised mankind’s second oldest dream. We could fly.
