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The Romans - Different Times, Different Women
Reviews of two books both dealing with a woman living in a turbulent period in Rome’s history.
‘Fulvia’, by Jane Draycott, 2025
Jane Draycott is an academic with a bee in her bonnet! Determined to rehabilitate or restore the reputation of this important Roman matriarch, the author gives us an exhaustive (and often exhausting) account, not only of Fulvia’s eventful life, but also of the whole of Roman life and intrigue during the chaotic period when Rome was violently transitioning from a republic to a dictatorship.
Fulvia was born in 80 BCE and died in 40 BCE of some sort of infection, exacerbated by stress. One of her most successful sons had just died in battle and she had recently heard that her third husband, Mark Anthony, had fathered twins with Cleopatra, his latest mistress.
Although the contemporary writing and subsequent reports, ballads and stories that include Fulvia are quite plentiful, they are overwhelmingly derogatory, consisting of what we now might call ‘slut-shaming’, and comments on her lack of feminine virtues. However, it is clear from Draycott’s researches that such methods were not untypical. Influential Roman women would support their husbands by campaigning on their behalf and even going with them to foreign countries, if not actually to fight. Each of Fulvia’s husbands were important figures and her sons even more so.
The book is hard going. The names are really annoying: each Roman usually had three names, one of which included their father’s name. They quite often changed one of the names to reflect their status or even added a fourth to celebrate something important they had done. The history itself is terribly complicated. Families divided not only along class lines but also into categories depending whether the patriarch was a would-be emperor or was fighting to support the Republic and the Senate.
Most histories and dramatisations of that period sideline or miss out Fulvia altogether, despite the fact that Mark Antony owed his rise to power (and subsequent downfall) to her. Shakespeare’s. ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ for example - not to mention ‘Up Pompeii’ or ‘Carry on Cleo’!
‘La Romana’ (‘Woman of Rome’) by Alberto Moravia, 1947
In contrast to ‘Fulvia’, the protagonist of Moravia’s novel, Adriana, is just one of the many millions of impoverished and marginalised women of the years immediately following WW2. This was another of Rome and Italy’s most turbulent periods, in this case the transition from the dictatorship of Mussolini and the Nazis, to a republic.
And another difficult read! Moravia’ themes include modern sexuality, social alienation and existentialism. He explains in a foreword that whilst an uneducated young woman like Adriana would not have the vocabulary or the ability to articulate her thoughts and ideas so clearly, nevertheless her feelings and observations are real and genuine. I agree: her sense of what is going on and the way she reacts seem remarkably real*1.
At the age of 15, when the story begins, Adriana lives with her mother in Rome. Her mother, who is embittered that her husband is gone*2 and she, a poor seamstress, is left to raise the girl on her own. Her one dream, since Adriana is extremely beautiful, is that her daughter will induce a rich man to fall in love with her and marry her. To this end, she is not averse to, well, pimping her out if necessary; certainly taking every opportunity to push her towards men with money. As it turns out, Adriana finds she enjoys sex and, since she is often given money by these men, she decides she can make a more money by doing this explicitly full time.
She does meet influential men who fall in love with her but they are not interested in marriage, they only want a mistress. She does learn from this experience that she can also use them for her own ends. She meets people of her own age who become friends; she meets fascists and antifascists and even a murderer who falls in love with her. Eventually she, herself, falls desperately in love with a young student. He is a writer and an anti-fascist campaigner, but he turns out to be a nightmare! The way that Adriana describes him to us, he has all the hallmarks of an alcoholic and a manic depressive*3.
It is a very impressive novel that captures the spirit of the times. Moravia was an established author by this time. Several of his novels have been turned into films including, most notably, ‘The conformist’ which was published in the same year as La Romana, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1970.
*1. This seems an unusually feminist piece of writing for a man of this time. Only a small number of Moravia’s books are still available to buy.
*2. I can’t remember whether he dies in the war or abandons her for someone else. Her bitterness and cynicism, though, is part of her character as well.
*3. I won’t tell you the ending: it will only make you more depressed.
Chris Shaw 26.12.2025
My best read of the year 2024 was "Strange Sally Diamond" by by Liz Nugent.
It's quite a dark read, It begins with Sally unclear why she has created such a fuss. She did exactly what her father told her, and put him out with the rubbish when he died.
What unfolds is the story of a reclusive young woman who learns to live in the world for the first time. Her story is linked to a childhood she barely remembers, and as the book unfolds and memories return,, the horrors of that childhood haunt Sally, and the reader.
It is a book which is sad and triumphant at the same time. I would really recommend it
Lyn
The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux,
In late winter 1979 Paul Theroux, successful novelist and travel writer, boarded a train in New England which was full of commuters going to Boston. He was going to the
southernmost point of South America.
He planned his journey from a map showing railway lines and stopping at places he knew nothing about. He had previously travelled by train through the Middle East and southeast Asia and returned on the Siberian Railway. So he was fairly confident he could manage this journey to Patagonia.It started badly with a blizzard causing disruption and it took him some time to get to Chicago. Working his way through the USA he eventually arrives in Texas where he has to cross into Mexico - on foot. He contrasts the very sleepy Texan town he leaves with the lively nightlife in the Mexican town over the border which is full of Texans enjoying the music, drinking and prostitution.
His journey through Central America is full of problems. The trains are mostly very old and frequently stop for several hours for no obvious reason. One “express” takes 24 hours longer than the scheduled time. People keep telling him he should fly or catch the bus. The trains seem mostly used to transport farm produce. There is an interesting description of the American settlement in Panama where the Canal Zone was still governed by the US. (Trump means to turn back the clock).He is astonished at the poverty all through Latin America until he arrives in Argentina.
He suffers from altitude sickness crossing the high Bolivian plateau on the Pan American Express and often has nothing much to eat. Eventually he arrives in Buenos Aires where he travels on the Buenos Aires Subterranean, an efficient five line underground railway built in 1913 (before Chicago and Moscow). He meets Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer, and describes their interesting discussions. Then his final 1000 mile journey through Patagonia is very monotonous but the last short part is on a very small and dilapidated steam train called the Old Patagonian Express. He says when he arrives in Esquel (“a dot on the map”) “I knew I was nowhere. My arrival did not
matter. It was the journey that counted.”
It was an enjoyable read. His observations about his fellow travellers are well written and he talks a lot about the books he is reading to pass the time. He also quotes well known writers who make observations about travel. He makes the point that travelling by train is an experience, unlike air travel which is about arriving. He is not a tourist or writing a tourist guide. NOTE Many of the trains he used no longer exist.
Richard
Chris's notes on Raymond Chandler.
'Farewell My Lovely', 1940 & 'The Long Goodbye', 1953.
I chose these books simply for the titles, which matched our May theme. I'm fairly certain that I hadn't read them before. The years following WW2 in America are a fascinating period. The films of Chandler's Philip Marlowe tend to glamourise the grittiness and I wanted to know more about the author.
The plots of these two novels are both long and complicated, especially 'The Long Goodbye'. So there is not much point in trying to describe them. It is the style and the characterisation that are important.
Chandler invented a genre and was a founder member of of the 'hardboiled' school of detective fiction - along with Dashiel Hammet and James M Cain. From the 1940s on his detective, Philip Marlowe became the archetype. Marlowe is nuanced, educated, ethical, tough. He drinks and smokes a lot. (Chandler himself was an alcoholic) He is also racist, sexist and homophobic, which is hard for the modern reader to take but typical of the time. The author was married to his first love whom he met in Canada until she died just before him. Philip Marlowe by contrast was not married and was wary of beautiful women who wanted to hire him and then tried to seduce him. Several women did this in The Long Goodbye (don't ask me to remember who it was who took so long to say goodbye!)
Before he wrote his first novel in 1939, The Big Sleep, when he was 51, he had led an immensely varied life. Educated at Dulwich College in London, then passed the Civil Service exam, took a correspondence course in bookkeeping in San Francisco, strung tennis racquets in Los Angeles, enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces and saw combat in the trenches. He taught himself to write by reading pulp fiction magazines.
In Chandler's novels there are bad criminals and good criminals; bad cops and good cops; good politicians and bad politicians. Marlowe would be in trouble if he couldn't quickly work out which was which. Chandler's prose style is probably the finest in the genre: his similes and descriptions are a joy to read. The weather, the scenery and the wildlife; the high life and the low life - those sleek cars powering up and down the canyons - vivid pictures of San Francisco and the surrounding areas bring the plots to life. I enjoyed the style but found the plots tedious. But I did want to know who dunnit and for that, of course you have to wait until the very end. ***
Most of this is my own thoughts and research. I can't remember where I got these quotes, probably Wikipedia.
Chandler was also a perceptive critic of detective fiction; his "The Simple Art of Murder" is the canonical essay in the field. In it he wrote:
"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."
Parker wrote that, with Marlowe, "Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious—an innocent who knows better, a Romantic who is tough enough to sustain Romanticism in a world that has seen the eternal footman hold its coat and snicker. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held."
The Farewell Party by Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia but fled to France in 1975 after Communist suppression banned his books. He died in 2023. He is best known for his book “The Incredible
Lightness of Being” which was also made into a film.
“The Farewell Party” was written in the 1970s and is set in a spa in a fictitious country resembling Czechoslovakia. The action takes place over five days around a fertility clinic. There are four sets of characters who don’t all know each other but who all have a connection with the doctor who runs the clinic: the charismatic jazz trumpeter with a jealous wife who suspects him of having affairs; a nurse at the clinic who is pregnant after a brief affair with the trumpeter on a previous visit and who has a rather boring jealous boyfriend who is convinced the baby is his; a rich American who is terminally ill; and a dissident who is going into exile and has come to say goodbye to the doctor.
The book is a dark farce which is rather amusing at times but the characters raise a number of philosophical and ethical questions. Kundera was a nihilist believing that life is meaningless and that moral values are baseless. So the trumpeter loves his wife but is a philanderer and persuades the nurse to have an abortion. The dissident accidentally poisons the nurse but does nothing when he realises that she has accidentally taken his suicide pills. He weighs the rights of the individual against their responsibilities.
It is only a short book which would benefit from a second reading. It would make a good play.
“Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War and the Catastrophe in Ukraine”. By Scott Horton. The second, “Underground Empire: How America Weaponised the World Economy”, by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. (This was in an audiobook version on Spotify.)
Between them, the two books give a complete picture of how the US government, US presidents from Ronald Reagan (remember the ‘Star Wars’ project?) right through to Obama, plus the CIA and a ‘shadow CIA’, used taxpayers money to fund both sides in insurgencies in territories previously occupied by the failing USSR, from the Baltic states, down through the Balkans to the Caucasus, Syria, Iraq. They even attempted to involve Saudi Arabia (who were funding Wahabi Jihadists). This involved draining so much money from the US economy that it created a real underclass of the poor.
America was attempting to influence all the former Russian states that border Europe to join NATO with a view to having missiles based there as well. When restructuring began under Gorbachev, the US bribed Russian oligarchs to stay in Russia and ‘help’ the move to a capitalist economy. Boris Yeltsin eventually gave in to the US pressure. When Putin became first the head of the FSB and then President of Russia, the US assured him that the border states, especially Chechnya and Ukraine, would not be part of NATO, it did not take long to realise that he had been screwed. (And we wonder why he is so implacable now?)
All along, the US had been training Al-Qaeda Jihadists to fight in the Balkans and it was Al-Qaeda under Osama Bin Laden, who had trained the two terrorist groups that flew airliners into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Incidentally, the shadow CIA learned of the plot 2 days before the flight but failed to stop them because it might reveal their involvement (!!). We all remember the controversy over the invasion of Iraq by the US, the non-existent WMD, and the complicity of Tony Blair and the British government (who imagined they had a ‘special relationship with the US).
This ‘Underground Empire’ still exists. Though of course, Trump hasn’t a clue…
Would I recommend these books? Scott Horton’s book is pretty heavy going. It is really an academic paper, published for general consumption. Each thread in the story is continually re-traced from different points of view so it can become pretty tedious. Every aspect of the book is built from press releases, on-the-record statements, statements by members of congress and the House of Representatives and de-classified documents. The list of these, plus the index takes up half of the 1200+ pages. Not for the faint hearted!
The Farrell and Newman book was much easier to follow and more entertaining. Still, the fact that the man of the US and UK population are aware of all this is pretty frightening.
Chris
'GOD IS NOT GREAT: How Religion Poisons Everything', Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in 1949 and his early years were somewhat itinerant as his father and mother were both in the Navy at the time. He attended two private schools: a Prep School in Devon and a Public School in Cambridge. He studied and attained a 3rd class degree in PPE at Balliol College Oxford. From an early age he began to question the preachers’ and priests’ pronouncements from the pulpits and from the age of 18 was an atheist.
Christopher Hitches was different. He learned that his Grandmother had been Jewish, so he decided to be Jewish. He was socially a Conservative but for a time was a Marxist. Interestingly he became more right wing as he got older. He travelled as a War correspondent for Vanity Fair and honed his writing skills on a range of periodicals including the International Socialist magazine, TES & New Statesman, after he became an American citizen. He also wrote lots of argumentative articles and book reviews for a range of newspapers and magazines. He supported the US involvement in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan but didn’t live long enough to learn of the US Government’s clandestine involvement with genocidal rebel leaders including Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. He probably believed that the WMD inspector who committed suicide was lying and he certainly wouldn’t have known about the secret CIA involvement & knowledge of the Twin Towers suicide bombings nor the bombing of PanAm103 involving Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi both of which were kept top secret until recently.
‘Hitch’, as he was to his friends, is probably the only Atheist I know who has studied the whole King James Bible cover to cover and as much of the ‘Koran’ as he can persuade his Arab friends to translate. From the start, he begins to expose the dubious origins of both texts: how they are a ragbag of myths and stories passed on by word of mouth and then, in the case of the Jewish Torah, by odd scraps of stone and paper when writing was invented. A ‘definitive’ edition is accepted as having been compiled in around 500 BC but in actual fact, it has been revised ever since then; for example to incorporate the predictions of a ‘Messiah’.
The Koran was purportedly dictated by God to Mohammed in the late 7th Century but it was fairly soon discovered that he had patched it together with Jewish ‘history’ and, he admitted, adding his own conquering, murdering tendencies into the bargain. Islam split into separate factions almost as soon as it was invented and has been at war with itself ever since. Whether Jesus was a real person or not, is impossible to say. There were many self styled prophets and teachers around and most of what Jesus preached about, including raising the dead, and being the ‘Son of God’ were based on Old Testament prophesies. (Hitchens didn’t do a list but if anyone’s interested let me know and I’ll send you some of my research.)
Otherwise Hitchens is extremely thorough, countering every strand, every argument, every apologist and every apology. So it did seem to me a bit repetitive. However, he provides full set of references and a comprehensive index.
I enjoyed reading it. It was thorough, informative, sardonic and, at times, very funny. He was also a heavy drinker and smoker and died, like his father of throat cancer. A prolific, talented writer.
“If you are a religious apologist, invited to debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline.” - Richard Dawkins
Chris
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, 2006
This is a great read for atheists but I am pretty sure annoyed a lot of Christians. Well researched especially concerning the contents of the Bible. It reminded me of how much I had forgotten. It's amusing at times as well as horrific that many people still take the Bible literally. I am sure some of them have not read it all or just chose the good bits . Haven't finished it yet but love it and everyone should read this especially so called Christians.
Sharon Holden
Our Best Reads of 2024
*Chris’s Book Of The Year 2024, “CLOUD CUCKOO LAND” by Anthony Doerr.
As I was writing the review of this novel at the end of March, I thought it might be a candidate for Book of the Year. Anthony Doerr is a great writer and this was enjoyable as well as having a terrific story and a relevant message.
The idea of having a number of interconnected or interrelated stories set at different times in history with alternating chapters is not a new one and very fashionable at the moment. Authors are also into intensive research into history, science and philosophy - Justin Cartwright comes to mind.
Each Strand is grippingly told; from the disastrous global warming and pollution at one end of the timeline and a philosophical examination into the transmission of knowledge and ideas at the other end.
The novel opens in a strange space, some time in the future. A 14 year old girl is sitting on the floor examining scraps of paper covered in her handwriting. A disembodied voice from a translucent cylinder full of glowing golden strands that stretches up behind her keeps urging her to eat, that she hasn’t eaten all day. Her name is Konstance and she has been researching a lost Greek prose tale by the writer Antonius Diogenes around the end of the 1st century CE, called ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’. It relates a shepherd’s journey to a utopian city in the sky full of birds. The next chapter describes the remains of the text - not the original written on wooden blocks, now lost, but on scrolls onto which it has been copied. These are significantly damaged but somehow preserved.
Next, in a public library at Lakeport in the USA on February 4th 2020 at 4.30pm a drama club for young teenagers is preparing a dramatisation of ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ that they have improvised themselves with the guidance of Zeno Ninis, the translator of the text.
Other chapters are set in Constantinople between 1439-1452 and alternate between the lives of Ana, a young novice nun and Omer, a Bulgarian Shepherd with a hare-lip who has been press-ganged into travelling with the Ottoman armies to besiege Constantinople. Back in Lakeport we get the story of Seymour, a clearly autistic young man who has been recruited into carrying out a bombing by a violent version of ‘Extinction Rebellion’. He and his bomb are in a stand-off with the police in the public library. Konstance, it turns out, is on a spaceship heading to a planet four light years from a now uninhabitable earth.
That's all the summary I can muster for the moment. Suffice to say, all the actors in this amazing drama turn out to have remarkable resilience and ingenuity. The message is clear. You don’t have to be a genius to work out that the author is reminding us of our propensity for living in Cloud Cuckoo Land and, of course for repeating the mistakes of the past.
Constantinople was besieged 36 times throughout its history. We have two major disastrous sieges taking place right now and several others that get less coverage. We never learn. Anthony Doerr’s novel ends each strand on a hopeful note. Hmm…
Barbara Palmer’s Book of the Year. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey
Published in 2012/paperback 2016, it won several prizes for a first book.
The author was born in Alaska and still lives there. The novel is set in Alaska in 1920 and is about a couple from the Midwest who move to Alaska after their first child is still born. The wife is suffering from a sense of failure and they decide to make a new start by settling on a small farm as pioneers.
The first few chapters describe their bleak experience in this remote place as winter approaches. The husband is struggling to grow enough crops to sustain them and the isolation and loneliness brings his wife close to suicide. Her relationship with her husband is strained because she wants to help him in the fields but he says her place is in the home. The writing is powerful and it makes for difficult reading. But it is important to read on.
The first snow fall arrives and they decide to make a snowgirl which they dress with a scarf and coat. That night the wife sees the girl move off into the forest. Her husband thinks she has imagined this but some nights later he also sees the girl come to life and follows her through the forest into the mountains where she shows him the body of her father which he helps the girl bury. He also sees a cave where they had been living. They become very attached to the girl and ask her to come into their house but she refuses because it is too hot. When Spring comes she vanishes. Their sense of yearning for the child is overwhelming. Next winter she reappears.
The book can be described as magic realism. The snow scenes are beautifully written and the love the couple experience is very moving. Throughout the story the reader can never be sure whether the girl is real but as the story unfolds it becomes more likely although the ending is still ambiguous. (No spoilers but I recommend you read it)
After the finish the book contains a story written by Arthur Ransome from Old Peter’s Russian Tales called “Little Daughter of the Snow”. This was the inspiration for Ivey’s story.
Lyn Cartner's best read of the year 2024 was "Strange Sally Diamond" by by Liz Nugent.
It's quite a dark read, It begins with Sally unclear why she has created such a fuss. She did exactly what her father told her, and put him out with the rubbish when he died.
What unfolds is the story of a reclusive young woman who learns to live in the world for the first time. Her story is linked to a childhood she barely remembers, and as the book unfolds and memories return,, the horrors of that childhood haunt Sally, and the reader.
It is a book which is sad and triumphant at the same time. I would really recommend it
Other best books of 2024 were:
Jim - “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver
Alison - “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles
Sharon and Ann both chose - “Lessons in Chemistry”by Bonnie Garmus