The man who saved the world

The early hours of 12 September 1983.  Stanislav Petrov, a civilian in a military system, is on duty monitoring the USSR’s nuclear war early-warning system. The computer registers an incoming US missile strike. The siren howls. His screen lights up and flashes the peremptory order ‘Launch it’. Petrov is under default order to press the button. He has to act. What should he do?

Searching for the sultan's heart

In September 1566, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent was bogged down before the walls of Szigetvar, an insignificant Hungarian fortress. He was seventy two years old. It was his eleventh campaign. Suleiman had spent years in the saddle, extending the reach of the Ottoman empire. He had shattered the Hungarian before, at Mohacs in 1526; the skulls of the defeated still whitened the plains, but the wars went on, were never ending. Frustrated by the resistance of this military pimple disturbing the projects of the 'The Shadow of God on Earth' he seemed to have become enveloped in gloom. His long and brilliant reign had been dogged by tragedy, revolt, disillusionment. The sultan had become reclusive, pious and grave. 'This chimney is still burning, and the great drum roll of conquest has yet to be heard', he wrote from his magnificently embroidered tent. A few hours later he was dead.

 

The elderly Suleiman, haggard with the cares of office.

The body was embalmed secretly, packed into a chest and trundled back to Istanbul, whilst a body double, seated in his imperial carriage behind a curtain, preserved the illusion that he still lived - until the time was right to proclaim his successor and only surviving son - Selim. All the others had died or been executed for fear of insurrection.

His heart, though, was apparently buried at Szigetvar, which was totally destroyed in the final collapse of a heroic defence. And now a team of Hungarian researchers are looking for it.

The Ottomans are big in the modern Turkish imagination. A fantastically popular TV costume drama has ignited interest in the greatest sultan as Turkey seems to be propelling itself forward in a new era of Ottoman-inspired influence. They'd love the heart to be found. And the Hungarians would love to find it - fantastic for the tourist trade! Read the BBC story here.

I'm off to Istanbul on Wednesday to take part in a cruise round the Black Sea. Maybe I'll find time to tip my turban at the great man's tomb - even if he is lacking a heart, so to speak.

The machine gun inventor who vanished

An absolutely fascinating story on the BBC website today. The mystery of William Cantelo. The sounds of rapid gunfire from the basement in a house in Southampton in the 1880s – an inventor called William Cantelo tells his sons that he has invented a new type of gun that will fire bullets in rapid succession. He packs it away and sets off – presumably to sell it. He vanishes into thin air.

A couple of decades later, another inventor, Sir William Maxim, is getting rich from an invention of his own – the Maxim gun, mowing down thousands of men in the First World War.

 But Maxim and Cantelo look uncannily alike. And Cantelo’s sons put a private detective on the case. They spot ‘Maxim’ at Waterloo Station and shout "Father"…but the elusive figure gets away. And money disappears from Cantelo’s account after he vanishes. Maxim meanwhile has a reputation for ‘brain-sucking’ – stealing people’s ideas. Were Maxim and Cantelo the same man? Did Maxim somehow steal Cantelo’s invention? Who knows? A murky Victorian melodrama? Read it here.

The Dark Lady comes to light

I admit to having a slightly nerdy interest in Shakespeare. We know so little about him. His personality, his biography, his relationships - these are almost a blank. Yet we think we know so much through the rich, complex, evocative worlds that are the plays. It's so tempting to make connections between the man and the work, as it is for any writer. The plays and their inhabitants are so vivid, yet, as Shakespeare suggests, they’re all just unstable illusions, magnificent cloud structures conjured out of words. They die when the players depart the stage, leaving the master puppeteer invisible in the darkness beyond.


So from the fragmentary information that we do have, I'm absolutely fascinated when someone is able to find new hard data about his life. In today’s Guardian Saul Frampton makes a hugely convincing case based upon linguistic analysis, close study of contemporary writers and scrutiny of English parish records for having identified the Dark Lady, one of the addressees of his sonnets (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’). It's a tale of sexual jealousy and literary revenge on Shakespeare by a man called John Florio that concerns his wife AD, Avis Danyell, baptised February 8 1556, died of the plague sometime around the end of the century. Absolutely fascinating. The wonder of dogged scholarship. If you're interested in the step by step process of patient deduction you can read it here.


That still leaves unresolved the equally fascinating issue of Shakespeare's relationship with a young man, Henry Wriothesley, and a possible love triangle... 

A face in the dark

It’s been uniquely hot in England over the last few weeks – we wait a decade for a spell of good weather like this then I find myself spending much of my days in a cool darkish room in our three hundred year old stone cottage, writing. My companion on the desk has been this picture. It’s an image on a book mark for a book that I bought – hence the names of the authors visible on the section I’ve reproduced. I didn’t particularly choose to have it there but the desk tends to accumulate objects that take up residence – until it all gets too crowded and I shoo them off, but I like this face, and it’s survived the recent clearing back.

 

It’s a portrait of Vasco da Gama, painted at the very end of his life. I’ve seen the original in a museum in Lisbon, which is surprisingly small. It’s an exquisite image. The face glows against the dark background; a gentle, almost serene expression, the beard caught by a soft radiance. The gold cross gleaming out of the blackness is that of the Order of Christ, Portugal’s crusading order, the successor to the Templars who uniquely escaped persecution in the country by a crafty piece of rebranding just as they were being wiped out.

 

It seems to me the face of a man who has lived his life and come to terms with everything. The cross is evidently there as an emblem of his faith and deeds as a crusader for Christ. I have to say the meekness of the face rather clashes with the known facts. Da Gama enjoys a terrible reputation as the conquistador of the Indian Ocean, guilty of some awful atrocities, possessed of a violent temper and not in the least tranquil. Maybe in old age serenity came upon him; maybe he was flattered in the painting. Whatever, he gazes calmly up at me. The days are hot. Outside the bees rummage the flowers. I write on.

Voices from Cairo

As Cairo becomes a turbulent battleground for the soul of modern Egypt I have found myself reading about its equally turbulent, exotic and frankly weird past.

I’ve been trying to skip read a chronicle covering the years roughly 1500- 1515 to discover how the sultan in Cairo reacted to the aggressive arrival of the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. The trouble is that the detailed accounts of daily life in the city are so fascinating that I keep getting distracted. It’s an extraordinary Arabian Nights world – violent, fantastical, prone to bouts of superstition and magic, obsessed with rituals, exotic pageantry and terrible deaths. It charts the dying years of the Mamluk dynasty who ruled much of the Middle East – Egypt, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula – for some two hundred and fifty years – a dynasty on the edge of collapse, like the last years of Tsarist Russian, before extinction at the hands of the Ottomans who marched in and killed the last sultan in 1517. It’s living on borrowed time – but vividly.

The writer, Ibn Iyas, captures everything. There are firework displays and processions to mark the great days of the Muslim year; the construction of scented palaces, adorned with fruit trees and aromatic plants, streams of running water and shady pavilions; the polo season is declared open in the hippodrome, a horse falls during the match, the state of sultan’s health is a subject of public interest (colic, diarrhoea). The seasons are marked by his change of costume from wool to white cotton. The rise and fall of ‘the blessed Nile’, on which everything depends, is obsessively measured at the ‘Nileometer’. Plague cuts a swathe through the city; an outbreak of bird flu kills all the chickens; earth tremors shake the minarets. Three people are trampled to death during a free handout of food to the unemployed. Law and order is, to put it mildly, something of an issue: a man kills his wife, puts her body in a barrel of tar and sets fire to it; robbers ransack a market – they are caught and torn in two; a revolt by the Bedouin is put down, a grand procession includes 800 heads fixed to spears; the sheik Ahmad ibn Muhamma is paraded on a camel then hung from the city gates…

 

It’s a phantasmagoria of incredible vividness…two camels carrying flax brush the lantern hanging from a stall and catch fire. The terrified animals stampede with their flaming cargo and trample people underfoot, crashing through the markets, spreading death and destruction. A report from Gaza tells of an enormous sea creature washed ashore; the sultan writes to the governor asking him ‘to send this fish to Cairo, if it’s feasible.’ A dervish is hung. A Turk escapes in a borrowed uniform. Terrible tortures are inflicted on Badr al-din ibn Muzhir. The sultan’s performance at polo is judged mediocre. The Portuguese interrupt Muslim shipping and cause a shortage of turban material. A man has a dream that a huge treasure is buried under the pillars supporting a mosque, but he is unable to say exactly which one; the sultan orders the demolition of all the pillars; a huge crowd gathers to watch but the sultan then changes his mind - the dreamer is thought unreliable. A one year old elephant from Zanzibar is processed through the streets – the whole city turns out to watch, no elephant has been seen in the city for forty years. There are bloody quarrels among the black slaves. At night an eerie light is seen, shaped like the sail of a ship – there is no explanation. It’s a world of colour, passion, magic and dreams!

 

And ‘in the first days of this month, one heard of the death of Aziza bint Sathi, one of the most famous singers in Egypt, the marvel of the age. Her diction and her voice were admirable and were worthy of the poetic language (of the words). No other singer afterwards could be compared with her. No other chanteuse enjoyed such an appreciation among the nobles and grand functionaries of the state. This woman, whose reputation has been immense throughout Egypt, was over eighty when she died.’

I wonder what she sounded like. I’d love to have heard her sing.

Midsummer England

It’s the Glastonbury Festival this weekend but we went to a more cultural version of this midsummer celebration of tribal identity – the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of As You Like It in Stratford-on-Avon. Every thing the RSC do is amazing, and this was quite quite wonderful. Drawing on Shakespeare’s deep affinity with the folk customs and seasonal rhythms of the forest of Arden – the area around Stratford – the RSC dreamed up a modernised, Glastonbury-like, recreation of the earth celebrations of pagan England – a world of horned men, primal dancing, cross-dressing and fertility rites, exquisite music by Laura Marling and the kind of audience connection that only fantastically well-done live theatre can provide. An energetic celebration of the spirit of midsummer.

Coming out into the dark, swans float asleep on the River Avon; the trees of Warwickshire are in full sail, like ships on an inland sea; a deer crosses the road as we drive home; the year is at its height. Here's the trailer and some of Laura Marling's music for the play.