My fiction addiction

I’ve given up on Goodreads, the website (now owned by Amazon, I understand) that lets you tell people which books you’ve been reading, and what you think of them. Not only is the site counter-intuitive (or maybe it’s just me), but there’s a patronising whiff of the school report about its updates: ‘Martin made progress with Cousin Bette’, indeed. On the other hand, what’s the point of reading a book if you can’t share the experience with your friends?  So today I’m writing a post about my recent reading.

I'll begin with a confession. Until a few months ago, my reading of fiction had fallen away and in the past year or two there have been very few novels leavening my diet of historical works and biographies. This, despite having not one but two degrees in English Literature: but then, as a student, my primary passion was always for poetry rather than prose. There was a brief Mauriac obsession last summer, after our visit to Bordeaux, but my most memorable reading experiences of late have been John Guy’s book on Thomas Becket, Amanda Vickery on the lives of eighteenth-century women, and James McPherson on the American Civil War. If asked to justify my focus on non-fiction, I would have argued that the best historical writing encompasses many of the characteristics of good novels: engrossing narrative, compelling characters, stylish prose.

But I began to think I was missing something, and so this summer my novel reading revived. It’s one more thing that I can credit the late Norman Geras with. As I wrote in my appreciation of him the other week, I never ceased to be impressed by his appetite for fiction and his insightful writing on his favourite novelists, from Jane Austen to Anne Tyler. When we visited him earlier this year, Norm described his daily novel-reading habits and quizzed me about my own preference for non-fiction, so that I began to feel rather embarrassed by my abstention from fiction.

Spurred into action, I took from the shelf a novel that I’d been meaning to finish for ages: Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise. If you look back at my Normblog profile, you’ll see that I claimed to be reading this as long ago as 2007, but in fact I never got beyond the first few pages. Returning to the book, I was immediately captivated by Nemirovsky’s account of refugees fleeing occupied Paris – made even more compelling by the author’s personal experience of her subject-matter, and by the knowledge that very soon after writing it, she would herself become a victim of Nazi terror.

Having realised what I was missing by excluding fiction from my imaginative diet, I went on to fulfill a long-overdue promise to myself, to re-read Dostoievsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I’d seen that there was a new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, that supposedly captured the dynamism of the original Russian better than the Penguin version by Constance Garnett that I’d read many years ago. (I should add that my return to Dostoievsky was partly prompted by my renewed interest in religion: Karamazov was the book that inspired the actor Martin Sheen to return to Catholicism, and it’s surely one of the great Christian novels.) The new translation turned out to be every bit as lively and engaging as its was reputed to be, capturing the humour as well as the pathos of this greatest of Russian writers.

This doorstop of a novel book-ended, so to speak, my summer: I read about half before we went away on holiday and the other half when we returned. In between, I spent two weeks lying beside a Portuguese pool, but whereas normally I would have packed mostly non-fiction, this time I threw in a scattering of novels. On the long train journey south through France and Spain, I’d been reading a book about the little-known wartime hero Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux who was responsible for helping hundreds of Jews and others escape from occupied France. Then, on arrival in Portugal, I followed this with something I’d really been looking forward to: Neill Lochery’s account of wartime Lisbon, which included a fascinating collection of photographs of the city and the celebrities and spies who took refuge there. Unfortunately, the photos turned out to be the best thing about this badly-written and poorly-edited volume. Nevertheless, there was a connection between these two non-fiction appetisers and the first novel I read on holiday - Joseph Roth’s Radetsky March, set in the closing years of the Austro-Hungarian empire – since Otto von Hapbsurg had been one of those helped by de Sousa Mendes to escape to Portugal. I shall certainly be reading more by Roth. Then it was on to a non-fiction book with an Austrian theme: Alexander Waugh’s House of Wittgenstein, which I bought because of my interest in Ludwig’s philosophy, though he turned out to be just one member of a fascinatingly eccentric family, none more so than his brother Paul, an accomplished one-armed concert pianist.

Norm Geras’ influence was apparent in my next novel choice (he’d recommended it on his blog): John Williams’ reissued Stoner. My absorption in this slim volume was reflected in the fact that I read it in virtually one poolside sitting. However, I should add that I found the story of this obscure, disappointed mid-western teacher unrelievedly depressing, lacking any hint of possible redemption.

My ‘big read’ of the holiday was Os Maias – The Maias – by the nineteenth century Portuguese novelist Eca de Queiros. One of my New Year’s resolutions had been to improve my knowledge of Portuguese to the extent that I’d be able to be read something by this author, or perhaps by Pessoa or Saramago, in the original, by the time we went on holiday. However, this went the way of most of my resolutions, and I ended up, once again, opting for a new English translation. I’d bought the Carcanet edition following our first visit to Lisbon seven years ago, when we’d stayed in a small hotel that had been the model for the family home in de Queiros’ novel, but had never quite got around to reading it. Then I read that Margaret Jull Costa, whose renderings of Saramago and of Spanish authors such as Javier Marias I had long admired, had produced a new translation. I wasn’t disappointed: the novel is compendious, rollicking, moving, a great nineteenth-century realist novel, with some Dickensian touches but without any Dickensian caricatures or sentimentality. I thoroughly recommend it.

De Queiros was influenced by the great French realists, and especially by Balzac, another embarrassing gap in my reading, so on my return I plucked Cousin Bette from the shelf and jumped into the middle of the ‘Comedie Humaine’ cycle. The experience was rewarding, but it didn’t really whet my appetite for more by the same author, not just yet anyway. However, I was now feeling inspired to plug other shameful gaps in my literary knowledge, and at the same time wanting to stick with the nineteenth century for a little longer, so this autumn I turned back to the English classics. From Balzac I went on to Dickens, rapidly consuming The Old Curiosity Shop – sentimental and maudlin at times, but still compelling – and Oliver Twist – apprentice work for the far superior David Copperfield, but a lively youthful narrative all the same. Then from George Eliot's oeuvre I selected Adam Bede, which I’d never read, and found completely absorbing, not least because of my identification with its Methodist theme, and at the moment I’m rather plodding my way through The Mill on the Floss.

Another novel I’d never got round to reading was Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which starts very engagingly, but then kind of loses its way. What critics describe as a fascinating double narrative replete with fluid identities, I thought was a flawed and poorly structured piece of work, in which personal biography was never quite fully transformed into imaginative literature. But the highlight of my autumn reading so far has been Vanity Fair, another unforgivable omission from my literary knowledge. There were many similarities with The Maias - another thoroughly engaging, inventive and light-filled imaginative experience.

So, after a dry period with no novel-reading at all, I’ve now become reliant on my regular fiction fix and have to have a novel in progress all the time. (This doesn't mean I've stopped reading history books: I'm part-way through Hugh Thomas' classic account of the Spanish Civil War and am just finishing Mark Kishlansky's Penguin history of seventeenth-century Britain.) Now, I’m planning my December reading schedule. Nothing is set in stone yet, but I definitely want to be reading Dickens at Christmas. Christmas Carol would be too obvious but should I re-read Great Expectations or Bleak House, or seek out the unread Pickwick Papers or Our Mutual Friend?

Watch this space for updates. And please feel free share your own recommendations, or your opinions of any of the books mentioned here.

Boa viagem

Will be in this part of the world for a couple of weeks, with limited internet access, so the blog will be in recess until mid-August.

Impressions of LA

We arrived home from our half-term trip to Los Angeles yesterday afternoon. Here are some hastily-composed impressions, and a round-up of some of the things we did.

Our first impression of LA, coming in from the airport along the freeway last Saturday afternoon, was of an endless, repetitive, low-rise sprawl, spread out along grid lines, and made up of fast-food joints, small stores, malls, and rather-down-at heel tracts of housing. From time to time this sprawl would be interrupted, quite suddenly, by something very different - like the long avenues of palm trees and neat lawns of Beverly Hills, the bawdy glitz of Hollywood, or the shiny towers of Downtown. Seen from a hotel window, the place seemed vast and difficult to grasp.

On Sunday morning we went out to Santa Monica, arriving at the iconic pier just as the sun broke through, bathing even the tacky rides and concession stands in cheerful light. In one direction, white surf broke on the golden sands stretching northwards to Malibu. In the other direction, where we walked, were Angelenos enjoying games of beach volleyball, doing yoga, setting up picnics. We strolled in the sunshine, dodging the cyclists and skateboarders, until we reached the clutter of craft stalls and eccentric entertainers that is Venice Beach, a place that reminds you of the tackier and less glamorous side of the hippy era. Then it was on to the Third Street Promenade, uncannily like Lincoln Road in Miami, for shopping and lunch. Later, on the way back to the hotel, we stopped outside the Beverly Wilshire and walked up Rodeo Drive, with its glassy shrines to conspicuous consumption. The Art Deco of buildings like the Beverly Hills City Hall was rather more interesting.

Monday dawned wet and gloomy, but by the time we headed out it had become another light-filled LA day. This was our Hollywood day, beginning with an excellent guided tour of the Kodak Theatre, home of the Academy Awards, followed by the predictable photos in front of the Hollywood sign. Then it was time to inspect the stars along the Walk of Fame and the historic handprints outside the Chinese Theater.

Most of Tuesday was taken up with our tour of the Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank. It's difficult to pick out highlights, but I was particularly fascinated by the mid-western town, where the same buildings have served multiple purposes in different films and programmes over the years. We looked around a wood-framed 'house', for example, which appeared in East of Eden and The Shootist, but (much more significantly for our offspring) also served as the home of Ross and Monica Geller's parents in Friends. The tour included a visit to the set of Two and a Half Men, which was 'resting' this week: just as well, as its star, Charlie Sheen, was busy smashing up his hotel room in Manhattan. We'd tried and failed to get tickets to The Ellen Show, and were frustrated to learn that Michelle Obama and Jill Biden were appearing that day - we saw the massive extra security as we went past the sound stage. They were in LA to lend their support to Barbara Boxer's campaign in the upcoming mid-terms. We thought at first it might be Jimmy Carter, who was in town to promote his new book: they were giving out tickets to his appearance on Bill Maher's show on Hollywood Boulevard.

On Wednesday, before our flight home, we visited The Grove, shopping mall to the rich and famous, where we saw a TV chat show being filmed, stocked up on US political and historical books at Barnes & Noble, and got our daughter's iPhone fixed by a nice tech guy at the Apple Store.

Regular readers will know my penchant for, indeed my skill at, spotting celebrities when we're on holiday. So who did we see in LA? Well, that might have been Jimmy Smits going into a restaurant in Santa Monica, but it was definitely Robert Downey Jr and Zach Galifianiakis walking through the lobby of our hotel, where they were promoting their new movie, Due Date. They walked right past that English actor who was in Love Actually - you know, the one who takes the photos at his best friend's wedding, when he's secretly in love with the bride, what's his name - Andrew Lincoln. But best of all was finding ourselves having breakfast at the next table to Colombian politician and former hostage Ingrid Betancourt (whom I wrote about here), who I'm pleased to say was enjoying the kind of breakfast that must have seemed like a distant dream during her six years of captivity in the jungle.

By the time we left, our initial wariness of LA had turned into something like easy familiarity, even excitement at its radiant light and hectic energy. A final recommendation: my literary accompaniment for the trip was David Thomson's anecdotal, out-of-left-field but completely compelling history of Hollywood, and by extension of Los Angeles, The Whole Equation.

Footnote

Turns out Andrew Lincoln was probably in town to promote the new TV series The Walking Dead in which he has a starring role (there's an interview in today's Sunday Times).

I'd be safe and warm...

The sky may not be grey but all the leaves will soon be brown, and it certainly feels like a winter's day out there. Time for some California dreamin', in honour of our imminent trip to Los Angeles, which will mean things are quiet around here for a week or so.

Love the crazy bath-dancing on this Sixties TV show:

What we did (and who we saw) on our holidays

As promised, then, a brief account of our trip to Portugal. We were staying in the hills a few miles from Lisbon, within easy reach of the city, and of Sintra and Cascais. Much of the time was spent, as is our custom, sitting in the sun and working through a pile of books, but we made a few forays out to explore our surroundings.

Sintra (see photo in last post) was the retreat of Portuguese monarchs, and home to a number of wealthy eccentrics, who’ve left their mark in the architecture and landscape. For me, the charm of the place was somewhat undermined by the large number of crumbling, neglected buildings, and by the tourist coaches cramming the narrow streets and squares. However, we enjoyed our visit to the Palacio Nacional, and found refuge from the crowds in the Loja do Vinho, right on the main square, where the young maitre d' allowed us to sample a range of fine ports with our coffee. And on the way back to the railway station, we came across the Fabrica das Verdadeiras Quijadas da Sapa, which makes some of the finest cakes in the region.

The seaside town of Cascais was another scene of faded glory, its fine villas now overwhelmed by English pubs, tourist shops and badly-planned overdevelopment. We walked along the seafront, past beaches thronged with Lisboetas on day trips, to the equally faded resort of Estoril, once the playground of European royalty and apparently the inspiration for Casino Royale.

There was no disappointment of any kind, though, in our two train trips to Lisbon, the first from Sintra, through the multi-racial working-class suburbs of the city to Rossio station, the second from Cascais, overlooking the sea and the Tagus estuary, to Cais do Sodre. As we had 'done' Lisbon pretty intensively four years ago, we felt under no pressure to rush around the sights, but instead strolled about, soaking up the endless charm of one of my favourite cities. On our first sortie, we wandered through the Baixa to the vast Praca do Comercio, taking coffee at the Café Martinho da Arcada, Fernando Pessoa’s regular haunt, before shopping in the Chiado and having lunch at a theatre restaurant, in the very square where the great man was born. On our second visit, we climbed up the Rua do Alecrim, stopping briefly for coffee at a cool bar with free wifi, then wandered through the alleys of the Bairro Alto, before descending for lunch at the excellent, book- lined Café no Chiado, which we first visited back in 2006.

During our stay, the Portuguese media were dominated by news of forest fires throughout the country, due to the unusually high temperatures. We had a close call of our own last Saturday, when the hillside opposite us burst into flame and thick smoke billowed across the valley, until the local bombeiros and a water-spraying helicopter finally extinguished the fire.

It was on the same day that we bumped, almost literally, into a member of the British Cabinet. I have a habit of coming across celebrities when we're on our travels: previous sightings include Nancy Pelosi taking tea in San Francisco, Shami Chakrabati in Tuscany, and the Archbishop of Canterbury at Land's End. This time it was none other than Michel Gove, on holiday with his wife and children. Watching Mr Gove en famille and in vacation mode, it was quite difficult to maintain my one-dimensional image of him as school-wrecker and right-wing ideologue. And googling him on our return hasn't helped: he is, after all, a member of the Henry Jackson Society, opponent of Section 28, admirer of Tony Blair, and author of Celsius 7/7. If this were America, he'd probably be a centrist or conservative Democrat. Anyway, close encounters with politicians certainly play havoc with one's prejudices and preconceptions.

Since this is not one of those gossipy political blogs, and I'm not an MP-stalking Twitterer, I'll reveal no more. Except to let slip that Gove's holiday reading included Robert Wilson's A Small Death in Lisbon. I recognised this instantly, as I'd packed a copy of my own for the holiday. Wilson's lurid murder mystery jumps back and forth between the 1940s and the present, linking Nazi gold, the Salazar dictatorship and contemporary Lisbon (incidentally, can anyone recommend a good book - in English - on the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974?).

While we were away, I also read Jose Saramago's Balthasar and Blimunda, a compelling and often very funny romp through eighteenth century Portugal, which takes swipes at monarchy and religion and includes elements of Marquezian fantasy. I also enjoyed Philip Graham's brief memoir of his year in Lisbon, which started life as a series of blog posts, and is reminiscent of the writings of Adam Gopnik. And I almost finished Jenny Uglow's splendid The Lunar Men, her engrossing narrative of the overlapping lives of 18th century inventors and innovators such as Erasmus Darwin, James Watt and Joseph Priestley.

That's the holidays done with, then. Time to catch up on what I've missed in the blogosphere during my absence.

Re-entry

(Sintra, near Lisbon: view from the Palacio Nacional)

I'm back, but rather travel-weary and preoccupied with matters domestic, so taking time to work myself up to a post about our time in Portugal. But I'll get there: just watch this space.

Lusolinks

Our imminent departure for a couple of weeks' holiday not far from Lisbon provides me with an excuse to link to some of my past scribblings on things Portuguese:

On Lisbon and Portuguese literary and musical culture

On Lisbon and Portuguese / Cape Verdean / Brazilian music

On a neglected Portuguese hero

On music again, specifically the saudade of Cesaria Evora and Mariza

On my feeble attempts to learn Portuguese

On the death of Jose Saramago.

As they say over there: Adeus, até logo.

A brief interlude, and some links

A brief interlude between absences (we're back from Cornwall, but off again on our travels at the end of this week, and away for half of August).

Just time to thank Bob for all the links/recommendations, and to make a couple of my own. Bob, who obviously has a very long memory, holds me to a promise I made more than a year ago, to return to Roger Scruton's piece on secularism, irony and forgiveness. I shall certainly do so, when I have a little more time. In the meantime, I'm grateful to Bob for providing links to commentary by others, specifically to posts by Ben Gidley, Kenan Malik and Francis Sedgemore, all of which I recommend.

Scruton's original article is accompanied by one of my favourite paintings, Rembrandt's 'The Return of the Prodigal Son' (above), on which Henri Nouwen's book of the same name, perhaps the only 'spiritual' book to have left any kind of impression on me in recent years, is an extended and endlessly surprising meditation.

Somewhere on the Cornish coast...

...is where we'll be next week, so expect even less frequent postings than usual. However, I'm hoping to send the occasional tweet from my 'phone, reception permitting.

In the meantime, this video put out by the Porthminster Beach Cafe (where we plan to idle away a good few hours in the coming days) might give you some idea of why we like this corner of St. Ives so much. The upbeat soundtrack's a bit annoying: the laid-back samba on the cafe's own website is much more in keeping with the spirit of the place.

Techy interlude

Forgive the tweet-like brevity of the last post. I was standing in the crowded Apple store in South Beach, holding one of the dozen or so iPads they have for customers to play around with, while a queue of would-be early adopters waited eagerly at my shoulder. Now we’re home (looks like we re-entered British airspace just in time), I can elaborate…

Thanks to Apple’s splendidly open policy of allowing customers free access to their networked machines, and as a result of our teenage offspring’s visceral need for daily access to Twitter, I had several sessions getting acquainted with Mr. Jobs’ latest toy. The verdict? Well, it’s every bit as attractive and easy to handle as I thought it would be. If you’ve used an iPhone, then it’s just like moving up to a larger version, with the same intuitive touch technology and ease of movement between applications.

My main interest was in the one application that you can’t get on your phone: iBooks. It’s stunning. You touch a virtual book to take it from the shelf, then flick through the pages just like a real book. You can change the font, look up words, and see illustrations in glorious colour. Damn: just when I’d got myself a Kindle, along comes the iPad and makes it look like MS-DOS compared to Windows. All the more annoying, then, that iBooks probably won’t be available on the UK version of the iPad, which won’t be in the shops until late May.

Incidentally, we resorted to the Apple store for our daily dose of the internet because the wifi charges in our hotel were so exorbitant. And just before we went away, there was a spate of stories about people using their smartphones abroad and being hit with shocking bills, so I’d turned off data roaming on my iPhone. I wonder, though, why service providers in the UK (like O2 and Orange) can’t come to some kind of reciprocal arrangement with overseas providers (like AT&T), as they do for calls and texts? The assumption seems to be that emailing and looking stuff up on the Web is a peripheral luxury which you should be prepared to forego when you’re abroad. Surely this is no longer the case, and most people would be prepared to pay a small additional fee, as they do for international calls, in order to check their messages and read local restaurant reviews, etc, while they’re on holiday?

(Note to regular readers: this techy stuff is just a temporary aberration and the usual coverage of politics, culture and so on will resume as soon as I get over my jet-lag...)

Soon you'll be OK

Posting will be even more sparse than usual over the next week or so, as we're off to warmer climes, hoping to lay the ghosts of a difficult year.

I'll leave you with this from The Polyphonic Spree, which seems kind of appropriate as we head off for some solar therapy.

Happy Easter / Passover / Spring to you all.

(Incidentally, the person who posted the original clip describes it as 'the happiest video on Youtube', but that's not quite true. That would be this.)

Lusolinguistica

I've been brushing up my rusty and extremely rudimentary Portuguese, in anticipation of a visit this summer. My dedication to the task wavers, as I swing back and forth between fascination with and aversion from this most unfamiliar of European Romance languages. I keep myself motivated by the dream that one day I might be able to make sense of the volume of Pessoa's poetry that I bought when we were in Lisbon a few years ago (until then, I shall continue to rely on Richard Zenith's excellent translations) - or, failing that, at least order a drink without making a fool of myself.

Someone once described Portuguese as sounding like Spanish spoken by Sean Connery. Not only is this insulting to the Portuguese, who deeply resent such comparisons with their former colonisers, but also completely misleading. In fact, spoken Portuguese sounds nothing like Spanish. There's a closer aural resemblance with Russian, particularly in the way 'l' is pronounced, and in the ubiquitous 'sh' sounds. Not to mention the echoes of French, especially in the frequent nasal vowels ('bon', 'mim'). Then there are the dipthongs, such as 'ao' and 'oes', which are uniquely Portuguese and for which it's difficult to find equivalents in other languages. Finally, after years of learning to unflatten my southern English 'a' when trying to speak French, German or Italian, it's disarming to come across a European language in which (for example) the words 'para' and 'banca' sound like they're being spoken by a Cockney rather than by a Scot.

I started off with the BBC's lively little Talk Portuguese book and CD: all chirpy voices and annoying jingles, but it leaves you with a good grasp of the basics. I've now moved on to Teach Yourself Portuguese, which pleases me by interspersing the dialogues with grammatical explanations: something that BBC language courses, in hock to a spurious pedagogic pseudo-progressivism, seem to have spurned (as I argued here, this kind of withholding of the academic tools of the trade is actually patronising rather than empowering).

I only have two criticisms of the Teach Yourself course. One is the execrable quality of the CD (at least on the version I own), which seems to have been recorded in a cupboard and which features actors with less-than-crystal-clear enunciation (grasping spoken Portuguese, with all those 'shushy' consonants and swallowed vowels, is difficult enough for beginners). The other is the decision to teach European and Brazilian Portuguese together, which is as misguided as the BBC's attempt to combine European and Latin American Spanish in its Suenos course. The pronunciation and even the vocabulary used in Portugual and Brazil are often very different, and listening to the CD it can be difficult to make out which country the speaker comes from, and therefore which form would be appropriate in which location.

The compensation for all of these frustrations is being able to understand just a little of what my favourite Portuguese and Cape Verdean artists are singing about. Here's Mayra Andrade, providing the perfect accompaniment to a sunny spring afternoon:

Last posting day for Christmas

Time to sign off for a few days, with a couple of pictorial reminders of places we've visited during the year. First, Val d'Orcia in Tuscany, where we spent two weeks in the summer: this picture was taken from Pienza at Christmas time. And second, the west wing of the White House, which we saw during our trip to Washington in October, blanketed in snow last week. Happy holidays.

Four days in DC: final reflections

I've just been re-reading my posts about last week's trip to Washington, and I was disappointed to find them overly descriptive and stripped of my usual reflective asides about politics, history, culture, etc. Partly, I think this is because I was (and to some extent still am) jet-lagged and exhausted after a rather draining week.

But it's also because I was wary of making broad generalisations based on a few days' experience of a strange city in another country. However, I can't end my account of our stay without sharing a few of the thoughts that occurred to me while we there. So here goes.

Once again, I was impressed during our time in DC by the easygoing patriotism of Americans. Whether it was the habit of raising impressive monuments to their elected representatives, or the mingling of the Stars and Stripes with flags supporting the troops at the Marine Corps Marathon, this sense of an unforced, shared pride in the nation offered a jarring contrast with the apologetic and guilty nationalism of the British - and made me, for one, rather jealous.

Going along with this, Americans' continuing and largely unabashed faith in the democratic process, and general lack of cynicism about politics, was also much in evidence - whether in the reverential tones of tour guides at the Capitol, or the intense and mostly serious debates about health care reform and Afghanistan on TV (no, we didn't watch Fox while we were there). Americans themselves may not agree with this assessment - but they should come over here and spend a week imbibing the tired and cynical treatment of political issues in most of the British media.

As always, we found America and Americans extremely welcoming - from the guards at immigration through hotel reception staff to waiters, shop assistants and people we met as we moved about the city. On one ride on the DC Circulator Bus, an elderly black man looked up from his Sudoku puzzle to see us struggling with our map, and spent the rest of the journey explaining to us the best way to approach the Capitol, and what we could expect to see en route.

Which brings me to my final comment. It's only when you leave the mostly white enclave of Georgetown (but see this article), and especially when you ride the bus routes, that you realise how much of an African-American city Washington is. You only have to linger a while in the cafe at the downtown branch of Borders on a Sunday afternoon, watching a young black mother helping her son with his homework, or older black men poring over volumes on history and politics, to realise who makes up the true majority of this city's population, once all the interns and lobbyists have gone home to the suburbs. Maybe on our next visit, with the monuments and memorials now under our belts, we'll explore the black and civil rights heritage of the District.

Four days in DC: Part 3

On Tuesday we'd planned to visit Arlington National Cemetery, walking across the bridge that symbolically links the Lincoln Memorial with the former home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. But we woke to a blanket of mist and drizzle that forced us to reconsider.

After some desultory wandering around Georgetown - which meant, however, that we got to see some of the smart houses on 'N' Street, including Jackie Kennedy's former residence - we hopped on the Circulator Bus and returned to the Mall for a visit to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Then, en route back to the bus stop, we found ourselves outside the recently re-opened Ford's Theatre, site of Lincoln's assassination, where you can see an exhibition about the great man, as well as the box where he was shot. Across the road is the Petersen House, where we saw the room in which Lincoln passed away. For H. and me, having recently read Doris Kearns Goodwin's brilliant book, this was one of the highlights of our stay in Washington.

Our final morning in Washington saw a return to glorious autumn weather, as we took a final stroll down 'M' Street to Barnes and Noble, where H. bought Jon Meacham's biography of Andrew Jackson and I came away with Joseph Ellis' book on Jefferson. We then turned down towards the waterfront and came across the new Washington Harbour development, with its stunning views along the Potomac (including the Watergate, as seen below), before heading back to the hotel to catch our lift to the airport.

All too quickly, we were back at Dulles and our brief but enormously stimulating visit to Washington DC was at an end.

Four days in DC: Part 2

Our second day in Washington - last Monday - was just as bright and inviting as our first. We caught the DC Circulator bus all the way across town from Georgetown to Union Station - itself a white gleaming monument to rival any of its illustrious neighbours - and then wound our way around the Senate offices towards the Capitol.

Impossible, as we approached the east front, not to think of George Bush making his final forlorn departure from this very forecourt by helicopter last January. After a quick trip across the road to take a peek at the Supreme Court building, we entered the new underground visitor centre at the Capitol and booked ourselves on a tour of the Rotunda and the statuary hall. We lurked in the background as our excellent guide, Camissa, asked people which states they were from, and told how the vindictive British burned down the original Capitol building.

She managed to secure us tickets to the House gallery, so we handed over our belongings at security and followed the signs through a maze of offices - we saw the corridor leading to Nancy Pelosi's office, and passed by Eric Cantor's room, glimpsing the young interns and staffers hunched over their screens - to the empty chamber (the next instalment of the interminable health care debate wouldn't begin for another hour), where we lingered respectfully for a few minutes.

Then it was out on to the west front, to try to reconstruct in our imaginations the scene of Obama's inauguration earlier this year, before heading for Pennsylvania Avenue.

We found our way to the glass-fronted Newseum, where we visited their impressive collection of original newspaper front pages dating back to the Revolutionary era, saw the burnt and twisted antenna from the top of the World Trade Center, and peeped into the studio used by George Stephanopoulos for his weekly roundtable discussions on ABC (the bigger studio, used by MSNBC's Chris Matthews for Hardball, was curtained off).

Crossing the road, we found our way to the National Archives, for a glimpse of the Bill of Rights, Constitution and Declaration of Independence, which were surprisingly faded and difficult to read - much more so than the far older Magna Carta (one of the four originals, apparently) that they have on display. From there, we took another turn past the White House before walking back to Georgetown.

Four days in DC: Part 1

We arrived back early on Thursday morning from our trip to Washington DC. On the flight over last Saturday, I watched two films with a DC setting, one silly and tedious - Night at the Museum 2 - and one more serious and engaging - State of Play, with its coy references to All the President's Men (the bad guys had an office in the Watergate building, and there was a key scene in an underground car park).

We touched down at a wet Dulles International Airport on Saturday afternoon, then had a half hour ride through the autumnal north Virginia countryside to our hotel in Georgetown, arriving via the Thomas Jefferson Bridge and getting our first, simultaneous glimpses of the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial to the right, and the Watergate and Kennedy Center to our left. On Saturday night we ate at Papa Razzi, a cavernous and popular Italian restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue, almost nodding off over the pasta, as we tried to forget that, as far as our bodies were concerned, it was three o'oclock the next morning.

On a beautifully clear Sunday morning we woke to the sound of the first runners in the Marine Corps Marathon being cheered past our window. After breakfast we plunged into the crowds lining Wisconsin Avenue, enjoying the sounds of local band the Melonheads who were playing alongside the route.

Most of the main roads were closed, so we had to walk into downtown DC. We eventually caught up with the marathon as it snaked around the National Mall, and had to fight our away across the onrush of runners in order to get to the great white birthday cake of the Lincoln Memorial.

It was a perfect morning for sightseeing, with a clear blue sky, bright sunshine and the leaves of the trees a riot of reds and yellows, as we sat on the steps and thought of the crowds that gathered here for momentous moments in recent history, such as King's speech and the Obama inauguration. In short order we then took in the stark, simple Vietnam memorial, where we saw people 'brass rubbing' their relatives' names, the World War 2 memorial, and the Washington Monument, before a long walk around the Tidal Basin to the Jefferson Memorial.

In the afternoon we walked up 14th street, past government buildings, for a break in the Borders cafe (where the free Wi-Fi enabled our teenage offspring to tweet from their iPods), before our first encounter with the White House. We failed to catch a glimpse of the first family from the north side, and realised when we went around to the South Lawn, and were allowed to get up close to the fence, that the slightly relaxed security arrangements probably meant they weren't at home. But we did catch a glimpse of Michelle's vegetable garden. Somehow we had enough energy left, after this long day of sightseeing, to walk back up Pennsylvania Avenue to Georgetown, for a spot of shopping on 'M' Street.

Beltway bound

Apologies for light posting lately: things have been rather hectic here at Margins Manor. And the scarcity of postings is about to get worse. We're off to Washington DC at the weekend for a spot of half-term sightseeing. Just our luck that our first day there will coincide with this event (but perhaps the President will emerge to cheer them on).

It's hard to believe that our last visit to the city was three presidents ago. This time we'll be staying in Georgetown, so you never know, we might run into a couple of the locals on M Street. Unfortunately, we haven't yet discovered any political events happening during our stay to match the star-studded panel discussion we attended in San Francisco a year ago. So if you live in the DC area and know of any lectures, seminars, book-signings next week that might appeal to a couple of visiting political obsessives, please let me know.

I will (of course) be providing a full account of our travels on our return at the end of next week.

Hunks and monks

On Monday the ‘Faith’ section of the Times website carried a feature on Mexican hunk and Hollywood star Eduardo Verastegui, who ‘chose to sacrifice a glittering film career after rediscovering his Catholic faith.’ It seems the actor whose ‘brooding looks and aquamarine eyes’ once ‘attracted thousands of (invariably screaming) female fans’ decided to give it all up after an encounter with an English language coach who was a committed Catholic.

The moment of truth came, apparently, when the coach asked if Verastegui believed his body was ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit’. When the actor said 'yes', the coach challenged him with 'why are you living in a way that breaks the Commandments and offends God?' Tears and confession followed. (Incidentally you can take a peek at the pre-conversion Eduardo displaying his 'temple' to the world here.)

We’re told that Verastegui is now a changed man:

Today, the 35-year-old actor is a daily Mass-goer, committed to abstaining from sex before marriage, who flies to Darfur to help the starving, provides financial help for women considering abortions and organises house-building missions in Mexico.

All very worthy, I'm sure. But what the Times article omits to tell us, for some reason, is that the re-born Verastegui has also become a prominent campaigner in support of plans to outlaw gay marriage in California. Now, the perfectly-formed Verastegui is welcome to his new-found traditionalist views on sex and marriage, but he has no business seeking to impose them on others, and as a recent immigrant (from Mexico, of all places) he should have greater respect for the long-established separation of church and state in his adopted country.

I came across the piece on Verastegui shortly after reading the very different thoughts of another Catholic convert (and political conservative), Eve Tushnet, who happens to be gay. In an article wonderfully entitled 'Romoeroticism', Eve writes about same sex friendships in traditional religious cultures, and describes the sensual attraction of Catholicism for some gay Victorian religious seekers. She also draws on Catholic author Alan Bray's classic study of same-sex friendships in England from the Middle Ages to the 19th century.

Reading Tushnet reminded me of the visit we made, while in Tuscany the other week, to the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, in whose great cloister is displayed a series of beautiful frescoes depicting the life of St. Benedict, by Giovanni Antonio Batsi - better known as Il Sodoma. Commentators differ on whether his nickname is a corruption of a family name, or a reflection of his sexual preferences. Many of the paintings certainly have an erotic charge, including the depiction of a beautiful young man at the right-hand edge of this fresco.

One of Sodoma's panels at Monte Oliveto shows two monks in bed together (interestingly, this is the only fresco missing from the abbey's website). The official interpretation is that this was a way of keeping warm on winter nights, while unofficially it's well known that many same-sex couples entered monasteries together as a way of pursuing their relationship away from the public gaze.

There's evidence, then, that the Catholic Church has, at times in its history, found ways of tolerating and even (Alan Bray argues) blessing and celebrating faithful same-sex relationships. Someone should tell Eduardo Verastegui.

To Italy and back

We arrived back from Italy on Sunday night, after two gloriously hot weeks renewing our acquaintance with our favourite valley in southern Tuscany. The highlights of our stay included sampling Brunello at an ancient vineyard outside Montalcino, and hearing white-cowled monks singing Gregorian chant at the beautiful Romanesque abbey of Sant'Antimo (see above).

Besides the excellent food and wine, the usual volume of holiday reading was consumed. After reading Arthur Herman's eye-opening book on the Scottish Enlightenment (which neatly brought together my interest in my Scottish family history and my fascination with the late 18th century) in St. Ives, I started off in Italy with David McCullough's 1776: Britain and America at War (who would have thought military history could be so gripping?), moved on to Iris Origo's autobiographical memoir (we visited her house and gardens during our stay), took an enjoyable diversion through Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon (every bit as witty and touching as his New York collection), then made a quick dash through Sarah Wise's The Italian Boy (in this case the link was with my early 19th century London ancestors), before launching into Doris Kearns Goodwin's monumental Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, in which I'm still absorbed. (It's an Obama favourite, of course. I notice, by the way, that he's taken another McCollough volume - on John Adams - to Martha's Vineyard. Fat chance he'll get to do any historical reading with his health care reforms being assailed from both left and right.)

Now it's back to work - and to blogging, once I've caught up with what I've been missing while I've been away.