An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – The Boundless Sea

After getting bogged down in Dante (see this blog 29 March 2021), I decided to take a break and head for the open sea with David Abulafia.

Should one judge a book by its cover? This one quotes Peter Frankopan in The Sunday Times as saying the contents are "breathtaking"; Dominic Sandbrook, also from The Sunday Times: "dazzling"; and Simon Sebag Montefiore in The Daily Telegraph: "intense and thrilling".

All of which leads me to wonder if any of them have read it from the beginning...

Admittedly, I'm only 200 pages in – and it may get a bit livelier in the next 700 pages – but to me it feels like sitting in a history lesson where so many facts are being fired off at you that you're torn between trying to catch every word... and nodding off.

It may be about the story of humans and their vast watery planet – but it feels, well, so far rather dry...

Death On Mars

Sometimes some space is a good thing… now the hoo-ha over David Bowie has died down a little, maybe it's possible to reflect a bit more clearly.
Neil McCormick from The Daily Telegraph may well have reflected quite a bit after his review of 'Blackstar' which drew the conclusion: "It suggests that, like a modern day Lazarus of pop, Bowie is well and truly back from beyond."
Kitty Empire, who got it similarly wrong, used the whole of a piece in The Observer this weekend to make her excuses in full.
'Blackstar', with the advantage of hindsight, is so obviously a grim farewell to mortality, but few people knew what was coming, so it's not entirely surprising that they got it so wrong.
My own feelings about – and memories of – Bowie are fairly straightforward. I loved 'Hunky Dory' and I loved the fact that you couldn't go into my local bar in the early 1970s without 'Life On Mars' blasting out of the jukebox – the perfect soundtrack for that time.
 I never liked the 'Ziggy Stardust' and 'Aladdin Sane' albums that much. 'Young Americans' was a wonderful return to form. And I'm afraid, for me, that's just about it.
I only saw him once on stage – with Queen – and he was truly remarkable. Bowie was a great musician, and a great performer with great presence – and  a great appetite for sex, drugs and rock 'n roll, and maybe he willingly paid the price for that. 
Now he's gone, 'Life On Mars' still says it all, I reckon.