Thursday, October 24, 2024

a slightly drunken violin

Pirate luthier adventures continued:

violin number 18)

This is one that I am going to return to the people who have inherited it, as they want to keep it in the family, which is always a good thing. It came from Poland originally, and looks a little bit like my number 1), so could be Markneukirchen perhaps?

It needed a bridge, tailgut, and nut. After a few attempts with tailguts made from the bits of gut string I have lying around, I gave up and bought a pack of five nylon ones.

Inside, the soundpost is in place but leans at a crazy angle. On closer inspection, I realised that the hole for the tailpin is decidedly off centre as well, and the bass bar looks quite rough, all of which left me with the impression that the maker was perhaps a little bit drunk, or couldn't quite get their fiddle straight.

However, my preliminary setup with random old strings revealed that the instrument sounded quite nice, so the owners agreed to invest in a new set of strings, after which it sounded even better. Especially at Baroque pitch which I initially used because one of the pegs refused to stick at modern pitch. Compared to many of the fiddles I've handled, it has a warmer sound at the top and nothing boxy about the lower end, so all good as far as I can tell.

It came with an interesting but somewhat damaged old bow, which I'll try to fix up next.

In other pirate luthier news, I have picked up a donation of 19 dead cello bows earlier this week, and delivered violins 15) and 19) to the local secondary school which was looking for instruments for a violin club, providing access to violin playing to children who wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity.

PS to see some professional luthiers at work, see this lovely photo gallery. I believe this is the workshop which has internal windows to the RAM's little museum, so when we visited the museum back in the old days we could watch the luthiers at work. I thought the museum had closed permanently, as the gate was always locked when I came by, but on checking up I find it's open on Fridays only. Need to revisit - hoping the luthiers don't take the Fridays off ...

Previously in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) is my new favourite and the one I currently play in folk sessions.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 10) is the broken one with traces of multiple repair attempts. I'm still gathering courage to try and fix that one.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violins 13) through to 15) I bought locally through gumtree or facebook, nothing special to report.

violin 16) is branded Sebastian Klotz, but sadly not by the Mittenwald Luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name. This one needs a serious repair, may write more about it when I've done it and found out whether it was worth it.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken violin described above.

violin 19) is a Stentor studend violin which only arrived last Sunday, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

star struck

History of astronomy typically begins with the ancient civilisations and the ways stargazing changed their view of the world. The book "Starborn" by Roberto Trotta goes back further. The author explores the question how humans evolved under a starry sky and whether we would have turned out different under a permanent cloud cover. Some of the answers are mindboggling yet convincing.

Read all about it in my latest essay review:

Stars in their eyes

Chemistry & Industry Volume 88, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 35

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled PDF of the whole review section)

SCI (premium content, ie members only) link to follow when it shows up on the SCI website

As always, I'm happy to send a PDF on request.

Here's a snippet:

More intriguing still, Trotta recounts a hypothesis that argues in favour of a shared human experience of observing the stars dating back more than 70,000 years ago. The Pleiades, as we know them today, are six stars, but many cultures from Ancient Greeks through to Australian Aborigines associate these stars with a legend of seven sisters, and one of them disappearing. With modern telescopes, astronomers can see the seventh sister, too close to one of the others to be distinguishable by the naked eye. They also see a few more, so there is no explanation for the number seven. Calculating back the movements, however, they have found that around 100,000 years ago, an average human eye would have seen seven Pleiades. Thus the myth of the seventh sister lost could be the oldest evidence of human observation of the night sky, as well as just about the only thing that humanity has preserved from the time before the expansion out of Africa.

I don't think the title captures the content of the book very well - it makes me think of how our very atoms have come from stardust, whereas the main gist of the book is how our minds have been shaped by the sight of the firmament. Hence the title of this entry.

Monday, October 21, 2024

flapping pterosaurs

Today's issue of Current Biology is a special theme issue on physics and biology, so there's lots of exciting stuff there from this particular interdisciplinary intersection. My contribution looks at the biomechanics of animals of the deep past, including one of the first species to crawl around on the sea floor as well as the very impressive pterosaurs, which were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight. As some pterosaurs grew to sizes much larger than today's biggest flying birds, researchers have some explaining to do here.

Modelling moves

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 20, 21 October 2024, Pages R947-R950

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(NB it appears to be open access right now, possibly because of the special section, and possibly time limited, but in any case it will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

Investigations of the bone structure of different pterosaur species suggest some evolved to meet the mechanical demands of soaring flight, whereas others were optimised for flapping. (Image: © Terryl Whitlatch.)

Friday, October 18, 2024

all about the gaze

Some thoughts on

Dans la ville de Sylvia (In the city of Sylvia)
José Luis Guerín, starring Pilar López de Ayala
France, 2007

When I researched the adventures of my great-grandparents in Belle Epoque Strasbourg (1901-1908) I started following the #Strasbourg tag on tumblr and mastodon, and via tumblr I discovered this movie which is set in central Strasbourg (not many movies are, actually, I'd struggle to name another one?!). Took me a while to get hold of it, but this week I got lucky and found a DVD in the library of the Maison Francaise.

So, in Strasbourg, we follow the footsteps of a slightly clumsy young artist who returns to the city in search of a young woman he met there six years earlier. He spends three days looking intensely at a number of women in the streets and in a cafe, stalks one of them (Pilar López de Ayala, who played an obsessive lover herself in Juana la Loca), but eventually has to admit defeat. The conversations of the people he observes in the cafes are strangely muted, so we are left with what is essentially an Eric Rohmer film without the dialogue. Just the glances.

And the glances are getting a bit uncomfortable in a male gaze kind of way. The searchlight of the artist's eyes rests on the young women a little longer than would be socially acceptable, and we as audience become complicit in this intrusive male gaze. I don't think that the sketches he draws are a viable excuse these days. I was left wondering what kind of discussions the male director and female cinematographer (Natasha Braier) had about this at the time, and whether they would see it the same way today. The stalking bit in the middle is explicitly discussed in words, but the gaze isn't. However, it is alluded to in the presence of advertising displays which also appear to take part in the network of gaze connections. A recurring graffity tag reading "je t'aime" also appears to comment on the obsession.

It is a shame, in a way, that the young artist doesn't pay more attention to the lovely city that surrounds him, which also happens to be a model of sustainable transport. We do get to see a lot of the modern tram system (handy device for the cinematographer to reflect or hide people), and there are bikes everywhere. In a very refreshing contrast to most movies, I don't recall seeing any cars in this one. The tumblr where I first saw this movie mentioned is a blog that matches up stills from films with an online map of the locations. Would be fun to revisit Strasbourg and follow the trail of 7 locations listed, without staring too much at all the elusive Sylvias out there.

Still from the stalking sequence, where an ad display looks on. (source)

PS after consulting IMDB on other films shot in Strasbourg, these might be of interest:

Tous les soleils (2011)

Baden Baden (2016)

quite a few films listed in IMDB with Strasbourg as filming location are actually meant to show Paris, including Amelie. Not sure about Truffaut's last one Vivement Dimanche, will have to investigate.

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

intertwined

My new book, exploring how all life on Earth is connected to everything else, is out today:

Intertwined
From Insects to Icebergs
by Michael Gross
Johns Hopkins University Press
15. October 2024
424 pages
ISBN 9781421449975
Hardcover RRP £27.50 / $32.95

It can now be ordered from the publisher's website or from wherever else you get your books (eg from Oxford's very own Blackwells). I understand that an audiobook version is also in the making, slightly scary thought, but as long as I don't have to do the reading out loud, it's all good.

I prepared a magazine feature based on the introduction of the book, which came out yesterday in The Scotsman magazine. Here's a snippet:

I have found and made many connections over the years and have broadened my interests from the physical sciences into ecology and environment issues. Increasingly, I became aware that ecology is all about how in the living world everything is connected to everything else. Beyond the predator-prey relations of the food web, there are multiple ways in which species shape their environment and create opportunities for others. And this web of connections operates across a vast range of different scales from the molecular interactions (related to my background in biochemistry) to global cycles of important chemical elements like nitrogen and carbon. For instance, microscopically small cyanobacteria were responsible for giving our planet an atmosphere rich in oxygen.

Ecology is a relatively young concept, with the term coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. Many of these crucial connections are only beginning to be explored by science, although human activities have already started to destroy them. For instance, whales, sea birds, migrating fish like salmon, and bears are all part of a global pump that transports nutrients uphill, against the flow direction dictated by gravity and the hydrological cycle. Scientists only discovered this connection within the last few years. By this time, its capacity to cycle nutrients was already severely reduced, not least by the industrialised whaling of the 20th century, which was only stopped just in time to avert extinction of the species targeted. Hydroelectric dams blocking salmon runs and the decimation of big beasts like bears by hunters and habitat loss also helped to disrupt this nutrient pump.

And here's the table of contents:

Introduction: Everything is connected
Chapter 1. Plants and their little helpers
Chapter 2. Fantastic animals
Chapter 3. Insects rule the world
Chapter 4. Looking after our forests
Chapter 5. This time, the asteroid is us
Chapter 6. Save our seas
Chapter 7. Living with animals
Chapter 8. Listen to nature
Chapter 9. Animals shaping the environment
Chapter 10. Life in the times of climate change
Chapter 11. Our shared burden of disease
Chapter 12. The Anthropocene and beyond

Sunday, October 13, 2024

all things weird and wonderful

ooops, I have a lot of catching up to do in my book-keeping of German pieces, so you'll find a vast range of weird and wonderful topics below. I'll just start with the latest and see how far I get ...

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Pharmazeutika als Umweltproblem
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 10, October 2024, Pages 65-66
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: Drugging the biosphere

Ausgeforscht: Stadtluft macht hemmungslos
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 9, September 2024, Page 112
free to read via Wiley Online Library
a sketch about flies mating across species barriers when exposed to polluted air

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Neue Wege zu künstlichen Zellen
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 7-8, July-August 2024, Pages 68-69
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
a feature about new routes towards artificial cells

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Von Muscheln lernen
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 5, May 2024, Pages 66-67
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: Learning from bivalves

Ausgeforscht: Der Mensch als Kaffee-Biosensor
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 5, May 2024, Pages
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
a sketch about a novel electronic coffee-testing device which still requires a human as part of the setup

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Enzyme gegen die Plastikflut
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 3, March 2024, Pages 74-75
free to read via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: Can we end plastic pollution?

Ausgeforscht: Altern abgeschafft?
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 3, March 2024, Page 98
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
a sketch about the latest immortality treatments - slightly more serious treatment in English: Forever young

Ausgeforscht: Und ewig tropft der Stein
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 2, February 2024, Page 114
restricted access via Wiley Online Library
a sketch about the medical uses of stalactite water (aka moon milk)

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften: Vielfätige Gifte
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 1, January 2024, Pages 70-71
free to read via Wiley Online Library
related content in English: The venom menace

Ausgeforscht: Planet der Dinosaurier
Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 72, Issue 1, January 2024, Pages
free to read via Wiley Online Library
a sketch about the finding that life on Earth was more readily detectable for extraterrestrial scientists in the time of the dinosaurs than it is today. So if we proceed to discover lots of exoplanets inhabited by dinosaurs we know why.

Not directly linked to my articles, but as I have been a member of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) for 38 years now and my dad was awarded the golden pin badge for 50 years membership, I kind of feel we've been part of its 75 year history, commemorated with this cover in June this year. I was first contacted about writing regularly for the magazine in the summer of 1999, so that's a silver jubilee too.

----------

pieces for 2023 yet to be completed ...


Nachrichten aus der Chemie Volume 71, Issue 2, May 2023, Pages
free to read via Wiley Online Library
related content in English:

Monday, October 07, 2024

a whale of a tale

The rise of cetaceans (whales and dolphins) to become the dominating megafauna of the oceans happened remarkably quickly, within only 50 million years since some sort of hippopotamus-like species took the plunge to go fully aquatic. Their demise, which very nearly might have led to the extinction of a number of species, happened even more rapidly, within less than a century.

A couple of recent studies have enlightened us on the rise of whales, and ongoing news regarding whaling remind us of their entirely human-made fall, so I combined these two to the feature called:

The rise and fall of whales

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 19, 7 October 2024, Pages R877-R879

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

Baleen whales like this humpback typically feed on krill. (Photo: Admitter/Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0).)

Saturday, October 05, 2024

when the cat's away ...

Cowley Orchestra runs on a no-commitment policy which we take seriously, so everybody including our part-time conductors can be absent any time. These last two weeks it so happened that we had no serving conductors, so the task of picking music out of our library of 400 pieces fell to me. I went through the database and put some effort into my selections (which I also documented on Mastodon and Facebook), so here comes the summary after two weeks (normal service should resume on Wed). Title links lead to youtube videos of other people's performances, which I have also added to a new playlist:

25.9.

  1. Just one cornetto - although it says "O sole mio" on the sheet music which is probably a lot older than the Cornetto ad.
  2. Albert Ketelbey, In a monastery garden. I actually discovered Ketelbey through playing another piece of his at Cowley (have that one lined up for next week):
  3. Cosi fan tutte Ouverture (Mozart). Based on our no-commitment policy, we have a lot of experience in playing orchestral pieces with whatever instruments turn up on the night, even if it's only 7 and no violin. So it's good to see professionals also like to play (and even record) these pieces with smaller ensembles, in this case just 5 wind players.
  4. Handel Suite No. 1. No this is not the famous water music, it is Handel's keyboard suite arranged for orchestra by the founder of our ensemble and collector of much of its music library, Henry Gosling. I tend to moan when I see the handwritten dots but the flip side is that this arrangement is a unique piece of music that probably doesn't exist anywhere else.
  5. As we have a few lovers of #musicals in the ensemble, we return to this selection of tunes from Oklahoma! fairly regularly, maybe once a term.
  6. Alexander Borodin: Polovtsian Dances (Prince Igor). Borodin was obviously very important because he was both a chemist and a composer. We had a go at the Prince Igor dances before running out of time - may help to study the dance video to get a feeling for the spirit of the piece.

2.10.

  1. 'Souvenir de France' by Ronald Hanmer - a medley of traditional French songs, some very widely known even in the UK ... Strangely youtube had two different recordings of this by different ensembles but in the same bandstand. I've picked the one which looked a bit sunnier.
  2. As promised, here comes the other Ketelbey piece, the one that first introduced me to this composer, In a Persian Market. In this video I love the fact that the English orientalism is diffracted through the prism of a Taiwan orchestra with traditional Chinese instruments and a conductor from Turkmenistan.
  3. This week's musical was Showboat by Jerome Kern - also a favourite we play around once per term. There are five selections left which we didn't get round to this week. Next week the conductors are back in charge but maybe they'll take on one of my leftovers in which case I'll highlight thoses as well.

Some other pieces we played on a previous occasion.

Monday, September 23, 2024

dodo and company

Here in Oxford we feel a special cultural connection to the dodo (Raphus cucullatus) - seeing that an important specimen of the extinct species is housed in the University Museum, where it inspired Lewis Carroll to assign it a small role in Alice's adventures in wonderland, which ironically secured its immortality. Witness the pub down the road from me which is run by the Dodo Pub Co. At this year's Alice Day (the Saturday closest to July 4, the day when the story was first told), there was an excellent talk about the museum's specimen, and soon after a paper came out evaluating the entirety of the scientific literature on the dodo and on its relative the equally extinct Rodrigues solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria).

All of which clearly indicated that I needed to write a dodo-themed feature. The more general question I have tried to address is what the study of extinct species can teach us for the conservation of those that are endangered but still alive. The feature is out now:

The way of the dodo

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 18, 23 September 2024, Pages R837-R839

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

A life-sized dodo sculpture by palaeoartist Karen Fawcett, created on the basis of the most recent scientific investigations into its anatomy. (Photo and sculpture © Karen Fawcett.)

Monday, September 09, 2024

a silent summer

This summer, I was quite spooked by the total absence of wasps around here, and after I read that they have also been missing elsewhere in the UK, that was a good enough excuse to write up a feature on their ecological importance. And start it in my own garden.

The wonderful world of wasps

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 17, 9 September 2024, Pages R795-R797

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

The common wasp (Vespula vulgaris) is widely seen as a nuisance, especially in the late summer, when its workers are desperate for sugary food. (Photo: © Roman Eisele (CC BY-SA 4.0).)

Friday, September 06, 2024

a supersized violin

Pirate luthier adventures continued:

violin number 17)

In June I gave away six violins via freegle bringing the resident population down from 10 to 4. After that I had a bit of a hiatus in terms of offers. Now however, a freegler kindly offered a neglected violin that had been tucked away in the attic for too long. I had to put the soundpost and bridge back in place but otherwise it was in good shape. Although it groaned a bit when I first tuned it up last Saturday, it has now settled down nicely and I have played it a bit this week, including for two hours in the slow session of September 1.

So it looks fairly normal (on my new old musical cushion which I found by the roadside on my way home from orchestra):

It has a very beautiful backside:

and a lovely flower intarsia in the tailpiece (there's also a round dot inlayed closer to the tail end):

Another thing that is special about it is harder to spot and only visible when you compare it to another violin:

... or if you get out the measuring tape. Compared to a standard violin like my number 5) (top), number 17) is 1 cm longer overall, with the body length of 363 mm compared to standard length of 356 mm. By contrast, the width and thickness of the instrument are normal, so it's basically a stretched version. Looking into it I understood there have been makers in France, for instance, embracing this "long strad" shape hoping to gain a more powerful sound. Others object to the fact that the larger instruments don't necessarily fit into standard cases, see for instance this forum discussion. It came in a 1960s style hardcase which is loose-fitting anyway, so no problem but also not much protection. Luckily I had a modern case ready which I saved from landfill and which happened to have the extra centimetre to accommodate the longer instrument.

Having played it for nearly a week now, I appreciate that the sound is very strong and clear, which was particularly useful for hearing myself in the session playing with 20 others. Playing on my own at home, however, I tend to find the sound a bit too piercing. As a result, I am now developing my technique to play more quietly, but at this point I still prefer playing number 5) when I'm on my own.

Another special feature is the chin rest which is unusually high, as you can see in the last photo (it still had the price sticker on the underside, it was bought from Newingtons the Music Centre at Tunbridge Wells for £5.50, not to be confused with Newingon Strings who supplied the very lovely bridge). The higher chin rest has the advantage that I can play it comfortably without a shoulder rest (it came with a shoulder cushion), so don't have to mess around with that when I switch between instruments. Which in this case works well, as the setups seem to be similar enough.

Previously in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) is my new favourite and the one I currently play in folk sessions.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 10) is the broken one with traces of multiple repair attempts. I'm still gathering courage to try and fix that one.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violins 13) through to 15) I bought locally through gumtree or facebook, nothing special to report.

violin 16) is branded Sebastian Klotz, but sadly not by the Mittenwald Luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name. This one needs a serious repair, may write more about it when I've done it and found out whether it was worth it.

violin 17) is the supersized violin described above.

Sunday, August 25, 2024

the generation game

Some thoughts on

I couldn't love you more
by Esther Freud
Bloomsbury 2021

I've been following the work of Esther Freud since the time when we both turned 30, and as we both turned 60 last year, that's half our lifetimes, scary thought. The mix of dysfunctional families and artsy / intellectual people populating her novels always speaks to my own views and experiences to a certain extent, even if my family doesn't have quite as famous people in it as hers. Thanks to this I always find something in her books to relate to, although more of it in some books and a bit less in others.

My favourite so far has been Summer at Gaglow (read before I had a regular blog so I may not have reviewed it, will have to re-read and review!), which reflects her mixed German/British heritage to great effect. This, her ninth novel, is at least as rich and rewarding as I remember Gaglow to be, so it may well be my new favourite (until I re-read Gaglow).

Whereas many of the other novels feature on young(ish) people's experience (eg Love Falls, Lucky break), this one skilfully interweaves three generations (plus a young girl in a smaller role) of women, who have suffered from various degrees of male awfulness and society prejudice in their different lifetimes. The connecting thread is that the middle generation woman becomes pregnant and is forced to deliver her daughter in a convent in Ireland where children born "in sin" are routinely offered for adoption. Freud has written about the real life background that informed this side of her novel in the Guardian. In real life, her mother shared many of the experiences of the middle protagonist but narrowly escaped the fate of giving birth in the convent.

It is both helpful and scary that Kate, the younger protagonist born in the convent, is my age (as many of Freud's protagonists happen to be, because it also happens to be her age). So it is easy to imagine the other generations in the novel, as they neatly align with generations in my family. And of course I am also taking notes re how to turn one's family history into fiction.

All in all, highly recommended to readers of all ages and generations.

I'm loving the photo by Willy Ronis used for the cover of my edition. It shows Gaston Berlemont's pub, The French House, in Soho, in 1955.

PSA: As I now have separate tags for literature written in French, Spanish, Galician, I should reserve the literature tag for books written in English - this will need some tidying up as I appear to have used it randomly over the last 15 years.