Dru, Steinbeck and the Book of Deer

If the UK and the EU don't want to be walked all over, sidelined and even invaded by Russia, we and they had better pull our fingers out, come to terms with raw and unvarnished reality, prepare, rearm and immediately and unequivocally back Ukraine with everything we've got. Britain's civilian population hasn't been directly involved in a military conflict since World War Two. We've forgotten every hard lesson that six year conflict taught us. We've run down the armed forces catastrophically , let NATO fall into disrepair (possibly the greatest mistake my own generation has made) and kidded ourselves that democracy was permanently in the ascendancy. That communism/fascism and authoritarianism was finished.  The Triumph of the West by J. M. Roberts and a belief in the end of history popularised by Francis Fukuyama, founded upon the idea that fascism and communism had been defeated, epitomised this incredible naivety. To explain why I'm talking like this, I...

"This splendid little book." (colophon, Book of Deer) "One of the principal antiquities of Scotland." (Third Statistical Account of Scotland, 1951-1992) The Book of Deer, the keystone around which I constructed The Legend of John Macnab (second sequel to John Buchan’s John Macnab ) in 2015, is a 9 th or 10 th century gospel illuminated manuscript containing the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as well as the Apostle’s Creed. It is also a Celtic work of art. In addition, it has a land grant given by David I to the clerics of Deer and the earliest known examples of Scottish Gaelic annotations. These tell the story of Columba’s legendary journey from Iona to Aberdour (now in Buchan) in the 6 th century to found the Monastery of Deer, later succeeded by the Cistercian Abbey of Deer. The Book, composed of eighty-six folios and measuring about six inches by four in its new 1963 binding, is surprisingly compact. It’s bordered with knotwork and illuminated with d...

Every time I try reluctantly to accept that my Buffy -related saga's time has come and gone ( that's the lost story arc, Dear Miss Landau and the Dru Quartet ), something else seems to happen to make sure it stays dead and buried (a bit like a fledgling vampire, really) rather than - oh, I don't know - revitalising a faded piece of intellectual property in a new and unexpected manner, bringing jobs and employment to at least one small part of what's left of Hollywood and giving the fans what they may actually want. This time, it's ESTA. ESTA stands for electronic system of travel authorisation and is the means by which myself and others from forty-two countries worldwide are able to visit the States for ninety days without a visa. The Trump administration in, I think, its latest paroxysm of racism and intolerance intends to make the amount of hoops we have to go through to get the ESTA visa waiver increasingly intricate and probably impossible completely and corre...