The more I read about the strangeness of our universe, the more I wonder if we, humanity, will ever colonise other planets. There’s not much chance we’ll settle on a diamond planet and I have to wonder how we’d go on many of the ‘earthlike’ planets already pinpointed. We are such fragile entities, we humans….
The Man Booker award has been made, and the winner (Hilary Mantel) will no doubt sell a besquillion copies of her historical novel, Wolf Hall. And to that, all I can say is bully for her. I mean no malice, no sour grapes. I can’t imagine anything I write qualifying for a literary award. As…
For many years, Australia was known as New Holland. Anything more different to the flat, verdant and continually damp polders of the Netherlands than the forbidding, parched land of the central west Australian coast is hard to imagine. Be that as it may, two young Dutchmen from the Batavia were the first white inhabitants of…
I saw in a Dutch paper that the statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen which has proudly stood in the square in Hoorn for several hundred years, was to be replaced with a less controversial figure. The reason, it seems, was that he wasn’t at all a ‘nice’ man and his treatment of the Javanese when…
The honesty or dishonesty of reviews has been the hot topic of the month, with many people expressing opinions on sock puppets and purchasing reviews, as well as the practice of writing scathing negative reviews on books with the express purpose of driving down a book’s ranking. The fact is that practices such as these…
I recently wrote a post on my other blog concerning the bits authors leave out of time travel. With my tongue firmly in my cheek, I called it ‘the sexy side of time travel’. Imagine yourself going back from the 21st century to (say) Elizabethan London. What would your impressions be? A lot of it…
Time travel has been a popular topic in fiction for a very long … well… time. All of us could come up with a heap of examples, starting with HG Wells’ Time Machine and including the Back to the Future trilogy, episodes from Star Trek etc etc etc. It seems to be very common in…
When you’re writing about a particular time in history, it’s important to get the details right; what people wore, how they thought, what they ate. The life of the Dutch in the seventeenth century is well documented through the wonderful artists of the ‘Golden Age’ – painters like Rembrandt, van Dijk, Brueghel, van de Velde…
I woke this morning to the news that Neil Armstrong had passed away. To me, that means two things; the end of an era and that unenviable feeling of being old. The things I’ve seen, the things that are a part of the parade of my life. On Twitter I learned a friend’s husband had…
There is little doubt that Commandeur Pelsaert was much more lenient in his treatment of Cornelisz’s band of thugs than his masters in Batavia would have been. As mentioned in previous posts, Cornelisz and his major henchmen could count themselves lucky to just have been hanged. Others who were keelhauled or dropped from the yardarm…