Byzantium

San Vitale, Ravenna: The Emperor Justinian and his Court (c. 547 CE)

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

- W. B. Yeats, "Byzantium" (1932)

Rise of Empires: Ottoman: The Fall of Constantinople (2020)

Every now and then you run across a genuinely exciting documentary series on Netflix. One such was "Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan" (2021), a dramatic and informative - albeit blood-soaked - account of the unification of Japan by various warring daimyō (or clan-lords) over the period from 1551 to 1616.

Another was "Rise of Empires: Ottoman." The first series of this Turkish docudrama told the story of the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453. The second - even more gripping, if somewhat gruesome - instalment of six episodes outlined the bloody conflict between Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror and his childhood companion Vlad the Impaler, culminating in the 1462 Ottoman invasion of Wallachia.

If you want to know who a bit more about Vlad than the fact that he was the original for Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, this is the place to go. Trigger Alert: if anything, he was even more terrifying in the flesh than in fiction ...

Steven Runciman: The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965)

Steven Runciman. The Fall of Constantinople 1453. 1965. Cambridge University Press. London: Readers Union Ltd., 1966.

The other day I picked up a copy of Steven Runciman's classic account of the siege, The Fall of Constantinople. Sir Steven Runciman (1903-2000), one of the strangest people ever to adorn the profession of history, specialised in the subject of the Eastern Roman empire before and after the era of the Crusades, as you'll discover if you look into the pages of his biography, Outlandish Knight:

Minoo Dinshaw: Outlandish Knight (2017)

Minoo Dinshaw. Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman. 2016. Penguin Books. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2017.

His magnum opus, the three-volume History of the Crusades (1951-54), remains the most elegant and lapidary account of the period despite the seventy years that have passed since its appearance.

Steven Runciman: The History of the Crusades (3 vols: 1951-54)

Steven Runciman. A History of the Crusades. 3 vols. 1951-54. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

• The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1951)
• The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100-1187 (1952)
• The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades (1954)

Admittedly, it has its rivals. Notably, a spirited single-volume account of the first three Crusades by the almost equally eccentric and glamorous Russian-French novelist-historian Zoë Oldenbourg.

Zoë Oldenbourg (1916–2002)

Zoë Oldenbourg. The Crusades. 1965. Trans. Anne Carter. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 1966.

The question remains: what is it about Byzantium? Why does it arouse such intense passions in people even now, nearly six centuries after its fall?

I suppose it might be because it still remains a bit of an unknown quantity for most readers. Rightly or wrongly, we all have some kind of mental image of the Romans and their Empire (slaves, togas, the forum, the legions, SPQR).

We also have certain select vignettes of the Ancient Greeks: Socrates and Plato arguing in the agora at Athens, swift Greek triremes defeating the Persian fleet at Salamis - even, perhaps, the last stand of the 300 at Thermopylae ...

Tell them in Sparta, passer-by
That here, obedient to their will, we lie.

- Simonides of Ceos

Or perhaps you prefer Lord Byron?

The mountains look on Marathon —
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

- "The Isles of Greece"

Joshua Reynolds: Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

Edward Gibbon. The History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire. 1776-88. Ed. Betty Radice & Felipé Fernández-Armesto. 8 vols. London: Folio Society, 1983-90.

• The Turn of the Tide (1983)
• Constantine and the Roman Empire (1984)
• The Revival and Collapse of Paganism (1985)
• The End of the Western Empire (1986)
• Justinian and the Roman Law (1987)
• Mohammed and the Rise of the Arabs (1988)
• The Normans in Italy and the Crusades (1989)
• The Fall of Constantinople and the Papacy in Rome (1990)

But what about Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire? It doesn't help that the most celebrated historian to have written on the subject, Edward Gibbon, had an intense prejudice against the Byzantines, and seized every possible chance to disparage them in his epic, immensely influential history of the long decline of Rome and its empire.

Nor has anything comparable been written in their defence. W. B. Yeats adored them, of course. I quoted above from his great poem "Byzantium", but there's also the earlier "Sailing to Byzantium" (1927) to consider:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Lady Ottoline Morrell: Yeats at Garsington (1930)
[l-to-r: Walter de la Mare, Georgie Yeats, W. B. Yeats, unknown]

Yeats was, admittedly, a bit of a weirdo. He spent much of his youth studying magic with the self-appointed Magi of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but it was the spirit messages he received at a series of séances with his newly married wife Georgie Hyde-Lees on their honeymoon which inspired him to construct a whole theory of history based on repeating cycles (or "gyres").

This led him to the conclusion that medieval Byzantium was the apex of all human cultures, and - presumably - to his (alleged) desire to spend eternity as a golden clockwork bird on a tree-branch.

These ideas also led him to write great, resonant poems, such as "The Second Coming" ("what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"). Beyond that, though, it's hard to say to what degree he actually believed in his theories, despite the immense detail devoted to the subject in his prose work A Vision (1925 / 1937).

Clara Molden: John Julius Norwich (1929-2018)

John Julius Norwich. A History of Byzantium. 3 vols. 1988-1995. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990-1996.

• The Early Centuries (1988)
• The Apogee (1991)
• The Decline and Fall (1995)

It wasn't, in fact, until the last decades of the twentieth century that Byzantium received anything like the historical treatment it deserved. Popular historian John Julius Norwich decided to bite the bullet and try to produce a three-volume history to stand alongside Runciman's earlier work on the Crusades.

Did it redress the balance? Not really, no. Norwich is no Runciman. But he's a very accessible writer, who's written illuminating books about Venice, the Norman conquest of Sicily, and a variety of other Mediterranean events and personages. His history of Byzantium (also available in abridged form in a single volume) is a fine addition to the bibliography of the subject.

Robert Graves: Count Belisarius (1938)

Robert Graves. Count Belisarius. 1938. London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1962.

Which is, of course, immense. In fact, so many books touch on various aspects of Imperial Byzantium's thousand-year history, that it can be hard to know where to begin.

If in doubt, start off with an historical novel can be good advice on such occasions. After the immense success of I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935), maverick English poet Robert Graves attempted to repeat the trick with a book about the great Byzantine general Belisarius (500–565).

Just as the Claudius books were largely based on the surviving writings of Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus, so this new one was inspired by Procopius's History of Justinian's Wars and Secret History.

Procopius: The Secret History (1966)

Procopius. Works. Trans. H. B. Dewing, with Glanville Downey. 7 vols. 1914-1940. Loeb Classics. London: William Heinemann / Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1978 & 1979.

• History of the Wars, Books I & II. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1914 (1979)
• History of the Wars, Books III & IV. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1916 (1979)
• History of the Wars, Books V & VI. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1919 (1968)
• History of the Wars, Books VI.16-VII.35. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1924 (1979)
• History of the Wars, Books VII.36-VIII. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1928 (1978)
• The Anecdota or Secret History. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1935 (1969)
• Buildings / General Index to Procopius. Trans. H. B. Dewing, with Glanville Downey. 1940 (1971)

Procopius is unique among Classical historians in that as well as writing a long, tediously official history of Justinian's wars in Persia and Italy, he also left behind a scurrilous volume of scandalous gossip about the Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora - allegedly a circus performer and even prostitute before she became an Empress - the Secret History.

Graves takes full advantage of this material, and compiles a spirited yarn about the virtuous Belisarius, betrayed by his own wife Antonina as well as the corrupt Imperial couple who employed him to clean up their mistakes for so long.

Is Procopius's backstairs gossip all true? Who knows? Perhaps not the stuff about Justinian transforming into a hairy demon when he thought he was unobserved - but a lot of the rest sounds uncomfortably plausible. However, some contemporary historians have advanced a rather different reading of the Secret History:

... it has been argued that Procopius prepared the Secret History as an exaggerated document out of fear that a conspiracy might overthrow Justinian's regime, which — as a kind of court historian — might be reckoned to include him. The unpublished manuscript would then have been a kind of insurance, which could be offered to the new ruler as a way to avoid execution or exile after the coup. If this hypothesis were correct, the Secret History would not be proof that Procopius hated Justinian or Theodora.

- Wikipedia: Procopius

Speaking for myself, that sounds to me like one of those perverse hypotheses historians like dreaming up to avoid the obvious conclusions already sanctioned by other scholars - a bit like the one about how the poet Ovid just pretended to have been banished to the Black Sea by the Emperor Augustus, but instead just sat in his house at Rome and wrote poems about being in exile.

In other words, given the tone of his invective, the chances that the author of the Secret History actually admired Justinian and Theodora are about as likely - in my humble opinion - as the possibility that Q-Anon was actually right about Pizzagate, and Donald Trump really was divinely ordained to combat demon worship in Washington D.C.

John Masefield: Basilissa: A Tale of the Empress Theodora (1938)

John Masefield. Byzantine Trilogy. London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1940-47.

• Basilissa: A Tale of the Empress Theodora (1940)
• Conquer: A Tale of the Nika Rebellion in Byzantium (1941)
• Badon Parchments (1947)

Mind you, Justinian and Theodora do have their admirers. British Poet Laureate John Masefield, in his two historical novels Basilissa and Conquer, portrayed the Empress Theodora as a kind of distant cousin of Wallis Simpson - a potential breath of fresh air for a moribund court and royal family. She can do little wrong in his eyes (though Justinian does come across as a bit of a wimp).

The final volume in his trilogy (and the last novel he ever wrote), Badon Parchments, presents the story of King Arthur's victory over the Saxons at Mons Badonicus through the eyes of some official Byzantine observers, sent by the authorities of the Eastern Empire to observe, and - if possible - encourage this new manifestation of Roman fighting spirit.

William Rosen: Justinian's Flea (2006)

William Rosen. Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire and The Birth of Europe. 2006. London: Pimlico, 2008.

A no less absorbing, and considerably more accurate picture of the Byzantine Empire at its apogee under Justinian, is given by William Rosen's account of one of the very worst outbreaks of plague ever to afflict the human race - and its possible influence on both the rise of Islam and of an independent Europe.

Isaac Asimov: Constantinople: The Forgotten Empire (1970)

Isaac Asimov. Constantinople: The Forgotten Empire. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970.

However, if that sounds like a bit of a fun bypass, you could do worse than check out either SF writer Isaac Asimov's focussed and informative short history of the "Forgotten Empire", or - for a more recent view - Aussie Radio personality Richard Fidler's travel book Ghost Empire.

Fidler attempts to recount certain picturesque events from the history of Byzantium in a series of rather stilted dialogues with his young son. It's a surprisingly successful formula, and gives a good basis for further reading - just like its even more beguiling follow-up Saga Land (2017), about the wondrous world of the Icelandic Sagas.

Richard Fidler: Ghost Empire (2016)

Richard Fidler. Ghost Empire. 2016. ABC Books. Sydney: HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Ltd., 2017.

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David Talbot Rice: Byzantine Art (1968)

1. John Julius Norwich (1929-2018)
2. Zoë Oldenbourg (1916–2002)
3. Steven Runciman (1903-2000)
4. Byzantine Historians
5. History & Travel

---

Books I own are marked in bold:

John Julius Norwich (1929-2018)

John Julius Norwich
[John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich]
(1929–2018)

1. [with Reresby Sitwell] Mount Athos (1966)
2. The Normans in the South, 1016–1130 [aka 'The Other Conquest'] (1967)
   • Included in: The Normans in Sicily: The Normans in the South, 1016-1130 & The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130-1194. 1967 & 1970. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
3. Sahara (1968)
4. The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130–1194 (1970)
   • Included in: The Normans in Sicily: The Normans in the South, 1016-1130 & The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130-1194. 1967 & 1970. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
5. Great Architecture of the World (1975)
6. Venice: The Rise to Empire (1977)
   • Included in: A History of Venice. 1977 & 1981. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
7. Venice: The Greatness and Fall (1981)
   • Included in: A History of Venice. 1977 & 1981. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
8. A History of Venice (1982)
   • A History of Venice. 1977 & 1981. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
9. [with Suomi La Valle] Hashish (1984)
10. The Architecture of Southern England (1985)
11. Fifty Years of Glyndebourne (1985)
12. A Taste for Travel (1985)
13. Byzantium: The Early Centuries (1988)
    • Byzantium: The Early Centuries. 1988. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990.
14. The Normans in Sicily (1992)
    • The Normans in Sicily: The Normans in the South, 1016-1130 & The Kingdom in the Sun, 1130-1194. 1967 & 1970. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
15. Byzantium; vol. 2: The Apogee (1992)
    • Byzantium: The Apogee. 1991. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.
16. Byzantium; vol. 3: The Decline and Fall (1995)
    • Byzantium: The Decline and Fall. 1995. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.
17. A Short History of Byzantium (1997)
18. [with Quentin Blake] The Twelve Days of Christmas (1998)
19. Shakespeare's Kings: the Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337–1485 (2000)
20. Paradise of Cities, Venice and its Nineteenth-century Visitors (2003)
    • Paradise of Cities: Nineteenth-century Venice Seen through Foreign Eyes. London: Viking, 2003.
21. The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (2006)
    • The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean. 2006. London: Vintage Books, 2007.
22. Trying to Please [autobiography] (2008)
23. The Popes: A History [aka 'Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy'] (2011)
24. A History of England in 100 Places: From Stonehenge to the Gherkin (2012)
25. Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History (2015)
26. Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe (2016)
    • Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsessions that Forged Modern Europe. London: John Murray (Publishers), 2016.
27. France: A History: from Gaul to de Gaulle [aka 'A History of France'] (2018)

Edited:


28. Christmas Crackers: Being Ten Commonplace Selections 1970-1979 (1980)
29. Britain's Heritage (1983)
30. The Italian World: History, Art and the Genius of a People (1983)
31. More Christmas Crackers, 1980-1989 (1990)
32. Oxford Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Art (1990)
33. Venice: a Traveller's Companion (1990)
34. Still More Christmas Crackers, 1990-1999 (2000)
35. Treasures of Britain (2002)
36. The Duff Cooper Diaries (2006)
37. The Great Cities in History (2009)
38. The Big Bang: Christmas Crackers, 2000–2009 (2010)
39. Darling Monster: The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to Her Son John Julius Norwich (2013)
40. [with Quentin Blake] The Illustrated Christmas Cracker (2013)
41. Cities That Shaped the Ancient World (2014)
42. A Christmas Cracker: being a Commonplace Selection (2018)

•

Zoë Oldenbourg

Zoë Oldenbourg
[Зоя Сергеевна Ольденбург]
(1916–2002)

Fiction:


1. Argile et cendres (1946)
   • The World is Not Enough. 1946. Trans. Willard A. Trask. 1948. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
2. La Pierre angulaire (1953)
   • The Cornerstone. 1953. Trans. Edward Hyams. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1954.
3. Réveillés de la vie (1956)
   • The Awakened. Trans. Edward Hyams (1957)
4. Les Irréductibles (1958)
   • The Chains of Love. 1958. Trans. Michael Bullock. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1959.
5. Les Brûlés (1960)
   • Destiny of Fire. 1960. Trans. Peter Green. 1961. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
6. Les Cités charnelles, ou L'Histoire de Roger de Montbrun (1961)
   • Cities of the Flesh, or The Story of Roger de Montbrun. Trans. Anne Carter (1962)
7. La Joie des pauvres (1970)
   • The Heirs of the Kingdom. 1970. Trans. Anne Carter. 1971. Fontana Books. London: Wm. Collins., 1974.
8. La Joie-souffrance (1980)
9. Le Procès du rêve (1982)
10. Les Amours égarées (1987)
11. Déguisements [short stories] (1989)

Non-fiction:


12. Le Bûcher de Montségur, 16 mars 1244 (1959)
    • Massacre at Montségur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade. 1959. Trans. Peter Green. 1961. Phoenix Giant. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1998.
13. Les Croisades (1965)
    • The Crusades. 1965. Trans. Anne Carter. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 1966.
14. Catherine de Russie (1966)
    • Catherine the Great. 1966. Trans. Anne Carter. Preface by Arthur Calder-Marshall. Women Who Made History. Geneva: Heron Books, 1968.
15. Saint Bernard (1970)
16. L'Épopée des cathédrales (1972)
17. Que vous a donc fait Israël ? (1974)
18. Visages d'un autoportrait (1977)
19. Que nous est Hécube ?, ou Un plaidoyer pour l'humain (1984)

Plays:


20. L'Évêque et la vieille dame, ou La Belle-mère de Peytavi Borsier, pièce en dix tableaux et un prologue (1983)
21. Aliénor, pièce en quatre tableaux (1992)

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Sir Steven Runciman (1903-2000)

Steven Runciman
[Sir James Cochran Stevenson Runciman]
(1903-2000)

1. The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus and His Reign: A Study of Tenth-Century Byzantium (1929)
2. A History of the First Bulgarian Empire (1930)
3. Byzantine Civilization (1933)
4. The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (1947)
5. A History of the Crusades, Volume One (1951)
   • A History of the Crusades. Vol. 1: The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. 1951. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
6. A History of the Crusades, Volume Two (1952)
   • A History of the Crusades. Vol. 2: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, 1100-1187. 1952. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
7. A History of the Crusades, Volume Three (1954)
   • A History of the Crusades. Vol. 3: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades. 1954. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
8. The Eastern Schism (1955)
   • The Eastern Schism: a Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches during the 11th and 12th Centuries. 1955. Panther History. London: Panther, 1970.
9. The Sicilian Vespers (1958)
   • The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century. 1958. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.
10. The White Rajahs: A History of Sarawak from 1841 to 1946 (1960)
11. The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965)
    • The Fall of Constantinople 1453. 1965. Cambridge University Press. London: Readers Union Ltd., 1966.
12. The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence (1968)
13. The Last Byzantine Renaissance (1970)
14. Orthodox Churches and the Secular State (1971)
15. Byzantine Style and Civilization (1975)
16. The Byzantine Theocracy: The Weil Lectures, Cincinnati (1977)
17. Mistra: Byzantine Capital of the Peloponnese (1980)
18. The First Crusade (1980)
19. A Traveller's Alphabet: Partial Memoirs (1991) ISBN 9780500015049

Secondary:


20. Dinshaw, Minoo. Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman. 2016. Penguin Books. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2017.

•

Anna Komnene (1083-1153 CE)

Byzantine Historians

Anna Komnēnē [Comnena] (1083–1153)


1. The Alexiad. Trans. E. R. A. Sewter. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.

Procopius of Caesarea (c.500–c.565)


2. Works. Trans. H. B. Dewing, with Glanville Downey. 7 vols. 1914-1940. Loeb Classics. London: William Heinemann / Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1978 & 1979.
   1. History of the Wars, Books I & II. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1914 (1979)
   2. History of the Wars, Books III & IV. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1916 (1979)
   3. History of the Wars, Books V & VI. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1919 (1968)
   4. History of the Wars, Books VI.16-VII.35. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1924 (1979)
   5. History of the Wars, Books VII.36-VIII. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1928 (1978)
   6. The Anecdota or Secret History. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 1935 (1969)
   7. Buildings / General Index to Procopius. Trans. H. B. Dewing, with Glanville Downey. 1940 (1971)
3. The Secret History. Trans. G. A. Williamson. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
4. The Secret History. c.550 CE. Trans. G. A. Williamson. 1966. Introduction by Philip Ziegler. London: The Folio Society, 1990.

Michael Psellos / Psellus (c.1017/18-c.1078)


5. Fourteen Byzantine Rulers: The Chronographia of Michael Psellus. Trans. E. R. A. Sewter. 1953. Penguin Classics. 1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

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The Sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders (1204)

History & Travel

1. Asimov, Isaac. Constantinople: The Forgotten Empire. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970.
2. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Age of Constantine the Great. 1852. Rev. ed. 1880. Trans. Moses Hadas. 1949. A Vintage Book V-393. New York: Random House, 1967.
3. Byron, Robert. The Station. Athos: Treasures and Men. 1928. Introduction by Christopher Sykes. A Phoenix Press Paperback. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2000.
4. Byron, Robert. The Road to Oxiana. 1937. Introduction by Bruce Chatwin. London: Picador, 1981.
5. Dalrymple, William. From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium. 1997. Flamingo. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998.
6. Fidler, Richard. Ghost Empire. 2016. ABC Books. Sydney: HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Ltd., 2017.
7. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire. 1776-88; 1910. Ed. Betty Radice & Felipé Fernández-Armesto. 8 vols. London: Folio Society, 1983-90.
   1. The Turn of the Tide. Ed. & with an introduction by Betty Radice (1983)
   2. Constantine and the Roman Empire. Ed. & with an introduction by Betty Radice (1984)
   3. The Revival and Collapse of Paganism. Ed. & with an introduction by Betty Radice (1985)
   4. The End of the Western Empire. Ed. & with an introduction by Betty Radice (1986)
   5. Justinian and the Roman Law. Ed. & with an introduction by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1987)
   6. Mohammed and the Rise of the Arabs. Ed. & with an introduction by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1988)
   7. The Normans in Italy and the Crusades. Ed. & with an introduction by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1989)
   8. The Fall of Constantinople and the Papacy in Rome. Ed. & with an introduction by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1990)
8. Hodgkin, Thomas. The Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire. ['Italy and her Invaders,' 1880-1899]. Introduced by Peter Heather. 8 vols. London: The Folio Society, 2000-3.
   1. The Visigothic Invasion. 1880. rev. ed. 1892 (2000)
   2. The Huns and the Vandals. 1880. rev. ed. 1892 (2000)
   3. The Ostrogoths, 476-535. 1885. rev. ed. 1896 (2001)
   4. The Imperial Restoration, 535-553. 1885. rev. ed. 1896 (2001)
   5. The Lombard Invasion, 553-600. 1895 (2002)
   6. The Lombard Kingdom, 600-744. 1895 (2002)
   7. The Frankish Invasion, 744-774. 1899 (2003)
   8. The Frankish Empire. 1899 (2003)
9. Hallam, Elizabeth, ed. Chronicles of the Crusades: Eye-Witness Accounts of the Wars Between Christianity and Islam. 1989. Godalming, Surrey: CLB International, 1997.
10. Hill, Rosalind, ed. Gesta Francorum et Aliorum Hierosolimitanorum. Nelson’s Medieval Texts. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962.
11. Joinville & Villehardouin. Chronicles of the Crusades: The Conquest of Constantinople / The Life of Saint Louis. Trans. M. R. B. Shaw. 1963. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
12. Rice, David Talbot. Byzantine Art. 1935. A Pelican Book. 1954. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
13. Rosen, William. Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire and The Birth of Europe. 2006. London: Pimlico, 2008.
14. Wilmot-Buxton, E. M. The Story of the Crusades. 1910. Told Through the Ages. 1912. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1927.

San Vitale, Ravenna: The Empress Theodora (c.540s CE)

•

Memories of Don Smith

D. I. B. Smith (1934-2023)
[photograph courtesy of Caitlin Smith]

i. m. Emeritus Professor Donal Ian Brice Smith
(4/2/1934 - 27/9/2023)

I don't think I ever had a conversation with Don Smith which didn't end in some interesting book recommendation - or else a new insight into a long-beloved classic. He was the first Academic I ever met who seemed to be driven solely by a love for books and reading in general. "Great stuff!" he would intone, as he leafed through another shabby-looking prize from the second-hand bookshops downtown.

I was somewhat in awe of him to start with - and for quite a long time after that. I had, for some unaccountable reason, decided in the early 1980s that it was up to me to reclaim from oblivion the long-neglected novels of British Poet Laureate John Masefield by composing a Master's thesis about them.

Constance Babington Smith: John Masefield: A Life (1978)

"How many novels did he actually write?" asked one of the prospective supervisors I approached. "Twenty-three," I replied. "And how many of them have you read?" "Twenty-three." [1] Strangely enough, that particular prospect discovered he had urgent duties elsewhere and could not accept a new research student at that time ...

Don - or 'Professor Smith', as I continued to address him till long after I had ceased to be his student - actually was far too busy to take me on. He was, after all, Head of Department at the time. But when I went to see him about it, he said that he would do it - but only if nobody else was able to.

Which left me with the somewhat invidious task of visiting each and every one of the Academics in the of the University of Auckland English Department who might conceivably be interested in such a project. It was certainly very educational to sample the variety of excuses they came up with - from the straight 'no' to the 'maybe some other time' to the 'perhaps if you changed it to ... [something quite unrelated].'

But no, I was - no doubt foolishly - quite determined, so I eventually made my way back to Don's door, and to his somewhat reluctant oversight ...

How did he approach it? He sat there and talked, while I took notes. His talk ranged over many subjects, some relevant and others perhaps not quite so relevant. At the time I recall he was reading the work of Anglo-Irish writer Shane Leslie - who was pretty obscure even by my standards - as well as working on some of the lesser known novels of Ezra Pound's early mentor (and Joseph Conrad's collaborator) Ford Madox Ford.

Was any of this relevant to Masefield? Well, in a curious way, as it turned out, yes. The interface between the 'commercial' and the 'literary' faces of Edwardian literature fitted rather nicely into studying the work of a poet, Masefield, who was publishing at the same time as Eliot and Pound, but inhabited a world almost literally invisible to their admirers. Ford was a good example of the same phenomenon, though in a rather different way.

Andrew Marvell: The Rehearsal Transpros'd, ed. D. I. B. Smith (1971)

Don's original field of specialisation had been seventeenth century literature. He'd published an edition of Andrew Marvell's satirical prose work The Rehearsal Transpros'd in the Oxford English Texts series. When I asked him about this, he said, "Well, it got me this job." What he seemed to like most, though, was exploring the more offbeat byways of Anglo-Irish literature - not to mention New Zealand writers such as Robin Hyde: far less well-known then than she is now.

Robin Hyde: Passport to Hell, ed. D. I. B. Smith (1986)

The more I heard from him, the more I liked it. I'd been trained in my undergraduate career to admire such extreme Modernists as Eliot and Joyce, and this (still) makes perfect sense to me. On the other hand, there was a rich penumbra of weirdos such as Chesterton and de la Mare, whom I liked just as much, but whom I'd been encouraged to dismiss as dead ends in the grand obstacle race of literary innovation.

Don wasn't interested in any of that survival-of-the-fittest nonsense. Is it enjoyable? was his central criterion for a book. Yes, he was certainly interested in the finesse and skill behind particular pieces of writing, but he still seemed to steer instinctively towards the anecdotal and - above all - towards enthusiasm in his approach to what he read.

I resolved to do likewise, and so, much later, when I in my turn became an English Academic with my own graduate students, I tried to give them as much as possible of the same formula: Read the book, not - till much later - the secondary literature about it. If you don't like it, acknowledge the fact - but then try and work out why.

It is, I suppose, an approach designed to produce readers, not students or teachers of literature. But then, if you don't actually get a kick out of the stuff you read, you probably shouldn't be teaching the subject in the first place.

That was the first - and probably the most important - of my many, many debts to Don.

Most prominent among the others would have to be the innumerable letters of recommendation he wrote for me while I was undertaking my long and arduous quest for an actual job in the fields of Academia. Once again, I've tried to follow his good example when asked to do the same thing for my ex-students.

But then I could never have got that far in the first place if I hadn't got a scholarship to study overseas, and I doubt very much that that would have happened without his powerful advocacy.

Roger Elwood, ed.: The Many Worlds of Andre Norton (1974)

What else? Well, after he retired, I visited him a few times at his wonderful house in Mission Bay, and admired the cupboard where he kept his very extensive collection of Sci-fi and Fantasy literature. That was another subject on which we saw eye to eye (for the most part). He had what seemed to me an inexplicable enthusiasm for Andre Norton, whereas I was more attuned to Philip K. Dick and Samuel R. Delany, but there was generally some new fantasy epic he'd been reading which I ended up making a mental note to get hold of as soon as I could.

He made all them sound like so much fun - though he did stray into heresy on one occasion, I recall, by claiming to prefer Tad Williams to J. R. R. Tolkien as a writer of epic fantasy. This was, as I solemnly informed him, a little like preferring some latter-day SF luminary to Arthur C. Clarke - if they're able to see further, it's because they're standing on giant shoulders ...

Kendrick Smithyman: Campana to Montale, ed. Jack Ross (2004)

He knew I was passionate about the poetry of our Auckland University colleague Kendrick Smithyman, and since Don and I could both read Italian, he lent me the typescript of some versions the monolingual Smithyman had concocted of certain modern Italian poets through the medium of other people's translations.

That, too, was a precious gift. I ended up editing and publishing the entire collection, which still seems to me - like Pound's Cathay - to prove that the end result of a process of translation counts for far more than the way that a writer actually gets there. Kendrick's versions from Italian have a supple ease and charm which far better linguists than he have tried in vain to achieve - and, in the process, he found in the poet Salvatore Quasimodo a virtual alter ego.

Kendrick Smithyman: Campana to Montale, ed. Jack Ross & Marco Sonzogni (2010)

I was also presumptuous enough to ask Don to launch my first novel, Nights with Giordano Bruno, which he did with great style and panache. I remember he compared it to Mario Praz's famous critical book The Romantic Agony, which is, I'm sure, far more credit than it deserved. It was characteristic of his ready wit as well as his charity, though.

Another of my favourite memories of him is the time he hunted me down at my student lodgings in Edinburgh and took me out to dinner at a local tratteria called Pinocchio's. It was wonderful to see him en famille, with his wife Jill and daughter Caitlin, and - as I recall - a great deal of red wine was drunk and pasta eaten in the course of the evening!

As Stephen King's writer hero says of his friend in the movie Stand by Me: "I'll miss him forever." That's certainly true. I'd love to have another of those wonderful, unexpected conversations where Don Smith turned all my prejudices and presuppositions on their heads. But in another, realer sense he's not dead - he'll never be dead.

I can hear him now saying "Great stuff" and reading out another passage from his latest essay, where he juxtaposes a quote from Ford Madox Ford about his latest drivelly historical romance The Young Lovell with another precisely contemporary set of Fordian instructions on how to be absolutely modern to his errant young protégé Ezra Pound ... [2]

---

Notes:

1. You can find them all listed here, at https://madbookcollection.blogspot.com/2009/04/acquisitions-86-john-masefield.html - if you're curious.

2. Arthur Rimbaud, "Il faut être absolument moderne." Une Saison en enfer (1873). Pound said of Ford Madox Ford in his 1939 obituary:

[H]e felt the errors of contemporary style to the point of rolling (physically, and if you look at it as mere snob, ridiculously) on the floor of his temporary quarters in Giessen when my third volume displayed me trapped, fly-papered, gummed and strapped down in a jejune provincial effort to learn ... the stilted language that then passed for 'good English' ...
And that roll saved me two years, perhaps more. It sent me back to my own proper effort, namely, toward using the living tongue ... though none of us has found a more natural language than Ford did.

Don, Caitlin, & Jill Smith
[photograph courtesy of Caitlin Smith]

•

The Great Storm

RNZ: Cyclone Gabrielle closes in on Aotearoa (11/2/2023)

As we start to settle into - hopefully - the cleanup and recovery from the floods and other ravages of Cyclone Gabrielle here in the North Island, it got me to thinking about some of the great storms of literature.

Flooding in Mairangi Bay
[photography: Bronwyn Lloyd (27/1/2023)]

Joseph Conrad's Typhoon, yes, most people have heard of that, but there are some other equally impressive ones which may be less familiar.

There's Daniel Defoe's pioneering piece of journalism recording the progress of the great storm of 1703, for instance - or the shipwreck at Yarmouth in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. John Masefield and Richard Hughes are two seafaring authors who appear to have set out deliberately to challenge Conrad at his own game.

And then, to mention a couple of more recent examples, there's British Sci-fi writer John Christopher's The Long Voyage, an intense and poetic narrative of a ship lost at sea; not to mention (to bring things full circle) the evocation of the UK's great storm of 1987 - which I remember well - at the end of A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance.

Wolfgang Petersen, dir. The Perfect Storm (2000)

Sebastian Junger. The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea. 1997. London: Fourth Estate, 1998.

•

Daniel Defoe: The Storm (1704)

Daniel Defoe:
The Storm
(1704)

Daniel Defoe. The Storm. 1704. Ed. Richard Hamblyn. London: Allen Lane, 2003.

Daniel Defoe was certainly a man for firsts: the first major English novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719); the first substantive non-fiction novel, or 'faction': Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720); and the first 'substantial piece of modern journalism', The Storm, his blow-by-blow account of the great storm of 1703, compiled from numerous eye-witness accounts.

The Great Storm of 1703

It was, as he described it, "The Greatest, the Longest in Duration, the widest in Extent, of all the Tempests and Storms that History gives any Account of since the Beginning of Time. ... No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it unless by one in the extremity of it."

Most People expected the Fall of their Houses. ... Whatever the Danger was within doors, 'twas worse without; the Bricks, Tiles, and Stones, from the Tops of the Houses, flew with such force, and so thick in the Streets, that no one thought fit to venture out, tho' their Houses were near demolish'd within.

- Daniel Defoe, The Storm. 1704. The Novels and miscellaneous works of Daniel Defoe. 6 vols. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855. vol. 5: 260-421.

Defoe's book may, unfortunately, have been a bit ahead of its time, given its poor sales, but it remains a lively read, and certainly anticipates the skill with which he would blend factual details with fiction in later works such as the classic Journal of the Plague Year (1722).

Daniel Defoe: The Storm: An Essay (2005)

•

Phiz: Frontispiece to David Copperfield (scanned by Philip V. Allingham)

Charles Dickens:
David Copperfield
(1850)

Charles Dickens. The Personal History of David Copperfield. 1850. Ed. Trevor Blount. Penguin Classics. 1966. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

Here are Charles Dickens's original notes for the 18th monthly part of his most personal and, indeed, largely autobiographical novel David Copperfield, serialised from May 1849 to November 1850 by his London publishers Bradbury & Evans:

Ham and Steerforth. Steerforth in a sinking ship
in a great storm off Yarmouth Roads. Ham goes
off in a life boat, - or with a rope around his waist? -
through the surf. Both Bodies washed ashore together?
No.
a mighty wind.

- John Butt & Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work. 1957. London & New York: Methuen & Co., 1982: 168.

The co-authors of Dickens at Work, the first book to give close attention to the 'notes-to-self' number plans which have survived for some (not all) of his novels, comment thus on his preparations for the portrayal of the great Yarmouth storm:

No scene in the book was given such careful presentation as the storm scene. ... The labour involved ... is conveyed in a letter to Forster of 15 September: 'I have been tremendously at work these two days', he writes; 'eight hours at a stretch yesterday, and six hours and a half today, with the Ham and Steerforth chapter, which has completely knocked me over'. Two days later he told Wills that the 'most powerful effect in all the Story is still on the Anvil'. Thus the writing of this chapter occupied at least four days. [170]

Fred Barnard: The Storm (1872)

Portraying this scene adequately seems to have been a bit too much for the matter-of-fact Phiz, his usual illustrator, so it wasn't till Fred Barnard provided some new pictures for Chapter LV, "Tempest," in the posthumous Household Edition of David Copperfield, that any real attempt was made to show Ham Peggotty preparing to swim out to the wreck in an effort to save the unfortunate souls left aboard.

It certainly seems preferable to Harry Furniss's later version, below, of the 'the last parting' between David and Steerforth - "he was lying easily with his head upon his arm": the one detail Dickens marked "To remember" in the number plan for this chapter.

Harry Furniss: The End of Steerforth (1910)

•

Joseph Conrad: Typhoon and Other Stories (1903)

Joseph Conrad:
Typhoon
(1903)

Joseph Conrad. Typhoon and Other Stories. 1903. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

Joseph Conrad's great novel Lord Jim (1900) hinges on an emergency at sea: not a storm, but a collision between a pilgrim ship bound to Mecca and some kind of floating debris, possibly an entire submerged ship floating just below the surface of the water.

The main character Jim's failure to measure up to the disaster dictates, inexorably, the rest of the tragic action of the story.

Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim (1900)

One can't help feeling, though, that Conrad may have thought that he'd missed a trick by not including, in Lord Jim, the sheer unbridled energy of a Pacific typhoon (the same thing as a hurricane, essentially, except that different names are used for these storms in the Atlantic and the Pacific).

"Typhoon" is not exactly a light-hearted work: it portrays a state of things so far beyond the normal expectation of what might happen, even at sea, that it can literally drive people insane. Nevertheless, it's true to say that it showcases Conrad's trademark irony rather more centrally than Lord Jim.

Just as Jim's romantic illusions about life are the crucial factor that destroys him, so Captain MacWhirr's complete lack of imagination is the thing that saves him and his crew from the immeasurable devastation of the storm. MacWhirr understands objectively that his ship might sink, but he cannot really see it in his mind's eye.

It therefore never occurs to him to do anything but continue with the normal business of the voyage. And so, bizarrely, he and most of the others are saved.

Joseph Conrad: Typhoon and Other Stories (1903)

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John Masefield: Victorious Troy (1935)

John Masefield:
Victorious Troy
(1935)

John Masefield. Victorious Troy, or The Hurrying Angel. 1935. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1935.

A Long time ago I wrote a Masters' thesis about the novels of English Poet Laureate John Masefield - or, rather, his early novels: he wrote 23 of them in all.

Victorious Troy is one of the later ones, and one of the few to be focussed entirely on the sea.

John Masefield: The Bird of Dawning (1933)

The first of his purely 'seafaring' novels, The Bird of Dawning:

... is the remarkable story of a crew and the principal hero, Cruiser Trewsbury, between shipwreck and triumph. When their clipper, participant of the annual tea race from China to London, sinks on its home journey, Cruiser takes command of the only boat which escapes the disaster. A gruelling journey of 700 miles across the Atlantic in an open boat awaits the small crew. The discovery, soon to be made, that they have an insufficient quantity of both water and food on board, dashes all hopes. Passing ships which fail to spot the shipwrecked and sharks greedily approaching the boat contribute to the picture of doom. By remarkable circumstances, however, they discover a ship, one of the other tea clippers, drifting on the sea with its crew gone. With the crew back in the race for the coveted price of being the first tea clipper of the season to dock in London ...

The book includes a marvellous set-piece passage describing the effects of a single great wave on a ship at sea. Perhaps it was this that persuaded Masefield to go the whole hog and devote an entire novel to the description of a great storm.

Victorious Troy, published two years later, is:

... Set during the grain race of 1922. ... The ship from which the novel gets its title is struck by a cyclone in the South Pacific and it is Dick Pomfret, the senior apprentice, who valiantly saves the vessel.

- Philip W. Errington, John Masefield: The "Great Auk" of English Literature. A Bibliography. London: The British Library / New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2004: 420.

It's certainly far more detailed than "Typhoon", but lacks the latter's focus and psychological acuity. As an unabashed adventure story and rattling good yarn, though, it's well worth reading by those addicted to the likes of C. S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian.

John Masefield: Victorious Troy (1935)

•

Richard Hughes: In Hazard (1938)

Richard Hughes:
In Hazard
(1938)

Richard Hughes. In Hazard. 1938. London: Chatto & Windus, 1948.

In 1932 the Phemius, a Holt Line steamship, was caught in a hurricane for six days. Hoping that his captain’s report could be turned into something, the chairman of the shipping line sent a copy to Masefield and then to Hughes, whose first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, had been set at sea. In 1938 Hughes used the incident as the basis for In Hazard, his second novel.

- Richard Hughes, "Securing the Hatches". Lapham's Quarterly (1929)

Once again, this is a case of an author who'd had great success with one description of a storm or a shipwreck, deciding to extend the trope into a complete work of fiction.

Richard Hughes: A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)

The account of a hurricane at the beginning of A High Wind in Jamaica is justly famous: impossible to forget, in fact. The rest of the novel takes a completely different tack into the psychology of young children left up to their own devices - in a manner somewhat prophetic of Golding's Lord of the Flies - and is also very successful in its own way, but the novel as a whole does seem to separate into these two disparate parts.

In Hazard is not so famous. In fact, the only reason I've actually read it is because I happened to pick up a battered second-hand paperback copy when I was in my teens. It's been damned with descriptions such as "allegorical of the Second World War" or "limited in its range", but I suspect the most of these comments come from people unfamiliar with it.

It may be because I've read it so many times that I practically know it by heart, but it still seems to me a staggeringly good novel. The storm it describes is apocalyptic, seemingly incredible, and yet - based entirely on an actual event, as the quote above records.

It is by far my favourite book among the very few that Richard Hughes gave us. He, too, seems to me a severely underrated writer, who definitely deserves resurrection. There's a good biography by Richard Perceval Graves, published in 1994.

Richard Hughes: In Hazard (1998)

•

John Christopher: The Long Voyage (1960)

John Christopher:
The Long Voyage
(1960)

John Christopher. The Long Voyage. 1960. London: Sphere Books, 1986.

Before he became the beloved author of such YA classics as the Tripod books and The Prince in Waiting trilogy, "John Christopher" (whose real name was Samuel Youd) was mainly known for a series of grim survival stories, some SF, some not, more or less in the mode of John Wyndham and the early J. G. Ballard.

John Christopher: The World in Winter (1962)

The World in Winter and The Death of Grass are probably the best known of these. Both are uncompromisingly pessimistic, and (indeed) would fit more comfortably into contemporary lists of post-apocalyptic literature than they did into the literary landscape of the 1950s and 60s.

He was by no means a one-note writer, however, and The Long Voyage (known in the US as The White Voyage) is probably my favourite among all of his books.

It depicts a long struggle for survival by a few passengers and crew left on a derelict ship in the North Sea as it drifts ever northwards towards the Arctic Circle. The Shackleton-like spirit displayed by the Captain and (to a lesser extent) by his First Mate is balanced by the careful character depiction of the less heroic others.

It's hard to describe why the result seems imbued with such precision and truth. It's one of those rare novels I always feel like rereading the moment I finish it. It has a curious depressing charm which I can only compare to Philip Larkin's equally bleak A Girl in Winter, a dark background against which the few moments of epiphany shine out with surprising depth.

John Christopher: The White Voyage (1960)

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A. S. Byatt: Possession (1990)

A. S. Byatt:
Possession
(1990)

A. S. Byatt. Possession: A Romance. 1990. London: Vintage, 1991.

The Great Storm of 1987 is one of the worst recorded weather events in British history, claiming 18 lives in the UK and uprooting 15 million trees. ...
During a lunchtime weather broadcast, in a moment which proved pivotal to the public's perception of the coming storm, the BBC's Michael Fish made an offhand comment which was misunderstood to mean there was no hurricane coming.
The storm then hit in the early hours before dawn with a ferocity which no one had been prepared for, ripping through the country from the west near Cornwall and advancing with every hour ...

In the late 1980s I was living in the UK, as I worked on my Doctoral thesis at the University of Edinburgh. I didn't have much access to news, as the television room in my local Halls of Residence seemed to be perpetually occupied by darts fans who resented any attempt to change the channel. But even I was aware of the great storm of 1987.

Though it mostly affected the south of England rather than Scotland, where I was based, I can still remember those images of whole forests of downed trees. For a dendrophile such as myself, the sight was particularly devastating.

The Great Storm of 1987 (2022)

Years later, when I read the sensation of the season, A. S. Byatt's Booker-Prize winning novel Possession, I was very impressed by the way in which she managed to weave the great storm into her preposterously entertaining tale of two nineteenth-century poets' hidden affair, and the nefarious attempts by various scholars to steal all the details for their own devious purposes - a dastardly scheme foiled finally by our two present-day heroes.

The novel has been described as "historiographic metafiction", and it gave rise to a whole slew of - mostly less succcessful - imitations. There was, however, a wonderful serendipity in reading it in 1990 as an obscure graduate student, like Roland Michell in the novel, and to feel the part-fictional, part-truthful events rhyming one by one with my own lofty fantasies of Academic success.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Byatt was influenced by David Copperfield in her decision to set the denouement of her novel during a great storm. But then, who wasn't she influenced by? Her novel may seem less unusual now, thirty years on, given it's been so often emulated, but it remains a wonderful yarn, and certainly one I would recommend to anyone who's not yet encountered it.

At all costs ignore the horribly bad movie adaptation, though.

A. S. Byatt: Possession (1990)

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@MonteChristoNZ/via REUTERS: Auckland Floods (31-1-2023)

So will what we've just experienced here in New Zealand go down in history as the great storm (or storms) of 2023? It seems very probable. It's hard to avoid the thought that both the weather forecasters and the civil defence authorities were to blame in not reacting more quickly to the events of Frday 27th January, but they certainly tried to make up for the deficiency in their warnings about Cyclone Gabrielle.

No doubt there are many more lessons for the future to be learnt from all this. For the moment, though, our concentration has to be on starting to repair as much as possible of the damage that's been done. And to mourn for the dead.

Brett Phibbs: Colwill Road, Massey (5/2/2023)