Strange that Tom Holt managed to write such a brilliant book. He's best known for his many Pratchett-esque fantasy comedies: they started out mildly amusing, but the quality steadily fell as he churned them out till they became rather like Carry On movies: the same hackneyed characters and jokes repeated to the point of nausea.

The "Walled Orchard" is a historical tragic comedy, dealing with the last great days of the Athenian Empire, told from the point of view of comic playwright Eupolis. It deftly alternates between comic farce and moving despair, has a huge amount of realistic detail. Like his other historical books it presents the agent Greeks as earthy, bawdy and scatologically-minded.

Holt presents the Greek comic theatre as being rather like the Elizabethan theatre in the fierce and underhand competitiveness: the playwrights fiercely plagiarize each other, spy and shout out spoilers, and attempt to nobble each others actors and costumes with theft and kidnapping. Possibly not authentic, but definitely amusing.

Holt's other histories Olympiad and Alexander at the World's End are similar if not quite as good. I've just started reading his newest, A Song for Nero, but it's showing disturbing signs of going the same way as his other comedies: there's much less detail, and it seems a little more formulaic and repetitive. Will have to wait and see.

As a tie-in I grabbed Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War just to check the official accounts of a few things. Holt seems to have followed it pretty closely: the battles and the harbour and the Walled Orchard seem accurate. Eupolis was a real character, though only fragments of his verse remain. Tracked down one short translation in a book, but it's not very good. Can't seem to find any translations of his stuff on the intarweb. FWIW anyway...

"Pericles" by Eupolis
In eloquence no man could equal him--
When Pericles arose and took the floor,
By ten good feet our common orators
As by an expert runner were outstript.
Not only voluble, but with persuasion
Sitting upon his lips. He bound a spell,
And had the power, alone of orators,--
To prick men's hearts and leave behind the sting.

What I'm Watching
Last week I watched that channel 4 documentary about British "black propaganda" in WW2: Sex Bomb. Wasn't hugely impressed by it in spite of all the hype. Discovering that soldiers tended to throw away propaganda unread, both sides starting mixing porn and semi-porn in with it; which encouraged soldiers to keep the leaflets and tune into the radio.

While the sex/WW2/nazi combination must have had the network execs hyperventilating with sheer joy, once you've actually explained that there's not really a lot more to put in a documentary, though it did give them an excuse for lots of slow panning shots of boobies. Some of the non-sexual details were more interesting. They obtained metal fonts from Germany and used them to produce fake-official documents, purporting to show the trial of SS officers for fake sex offences. The propaganda unit had access to the latest intelligence, and would broadcast details of exactly which streets and numbers had been destroyed in the night's bombing. They would interrogate prisoners who were often willing to talk about incidental details, and mix in names of officers, names from the brothers and bars to give the impression of omniscient knowledge.

The storyline of the documentary, was that the head of the unit Sefton Delmer paid "a terrible personal price" of guilt at his actions. It implied that it caused the breakup of his marriage. This seemed pretty unconvincing, which Richard Ingrams confirmed in the Observer.

When people ask you to go on television, they have generally decided in advance what it is they want you to say...

Because Delmer worked closely with my father during the war, I came to know him very well and was later commissioned to write his entry for The Dictionary of National Biography. What the TV people wanted me to say when they phoned was that Delmer had suffered terrible remorse as a result of his wartime propaganda work which, according to the programme makers, was almost exclusively concerned with pornography.

I have seldom met a less guilt-ridden man than Delmer, a Falstaffian figure, a lover of good food and wine who once said: 'I can only think clearly in a five-star hotel.'

C4's programme described him as 'a tabloid journalist', tabloid being shorthand for sex and sleaze, so just the kind of person to do this dirty work.

In fact, Delmer was the chief foreign correspondent of the Daily Express which was not a tabloid and was in those days a more serious and influential paper than the Times is today. I mention all this not merely in order to defend an old friend but because I suspect that this programme is sadly typical of the kind of pseudo-historical rubbish regularly being put out...

Gmail, Opera, Yahoo
Glad I've got a gmail account with my common-as-dirt real name. Don't think it's worth switching though, since it's not at present compatible with my Opera browser. Managed to find some explanations of why and it's not a trivial issue. Gmail apparently depends on the ability to make "HTTP GET requests from Javascript." In IE it uses ActiveX to do this, in Mozilla special JavaScript.

Apparently Gmail are going to introduce a pure HTML version which will presumably work but have fewer features. Otherwise it's down to Opera to release a new version with extra features just for Gmail.

From what I've seen though, Gmail isn't really in competition with Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, it's in competition with Outlook. It's not designed with the ultra-simplistic philosophy of Google Search, but it's designed to be huge and rich in features. I love the Javascript spellcheck.

When it gets out of beta and has an HTML version, it may well be a competitor for Yahoo mail, but at the moment it just isn't. It's too big to work well over dialup, it doesn't seem to have Yahoo's excellent WML interface for phones... at the moment it's not portable enough to compete.

Glad that the competition's forced Yahoo to up their storage limits though. Even hotmail are claiming 250 MB of storage "coming soon". That should be interesting: wonder how many Windows server licences they'll need for all the machines to run that storage...

Web
Rock, paper, Saddam.

Guardian: The developing world's homophobia is a legacy of colonial rule.

The violent homophobia in Jamaica, which saw 16 men killed in prison in August 1997, because it was believed they were homosexual, the murder of the gay activist Brian Williamson last month, and the emergence of a popular culture whose principal characteristic seems to be to rid the world of "battyboys", is simply a more extreme example of a familiar cultural oddity, whereby colonised peoples often internalise and perpetuate values which pass away in the countries which originally imposed them; just as mid-Victorian leg-of-mutton sleeves still cover the bare shoulders of many African women.