Angels and Demons

I didn’t dislike the book – in fact it has rather pleasant associations as the result of being a summer read during a trip to Rome. Easier to suspend belief about the story when you’re sitting with a glass of wine looking at the Bernini fountain to which reference is being made.

The film is another matter. Hard to forgive the casting of Tom Hanks rather than Harrison Ford. Hard not to laugh at the physics (no laughing matter that CERN felt obliged to issue ‘reassurance’ to the public about anti-matter).  Hard to forget quite how bad Ewan McGregor’s accent is. Last but not least, impossible to forgive the treatment of an archive facility

Andrew Taylor, Caroline Miniscule

William Dougal, a postgraduate student (in London rather than Cambridge as misleadingly claimed on the cover), is drawn into a mystery, having discovered the dead body of his supervisor.  The key to the mystery appears to be a manuscript written in Caroline miniscule.

There are a number of details to enjoy, particularly for anyone familiar with palaeography, Senate House library or PhD study….okay so that makes it sound rather specialist

A couple of female archive students were muttering gloomily to one another at the table nearest the door, their heads close together over a photostat. He heard the one with glasses saying with hushed passion, ‘But the ascenders are beginning to fork. And Bastard Anglicana would never be so scruffy…’

…having been one of those archive students, I found it amusing….

More generally, this works well at a comedic level if you can accept Dougal as a selfish innocent abroad caught up in a wider web of fairly fantastical events.

Alison Joseph, Shadow of Death

A mystery-solving nun this time – might the formula of the crime fiction genre be getting ever so slightly stretched? Even better, it’s a nun with problems with her superior (so to speak) so ticking one of the boxes on my personal list of essential characteristics of crime fiction. And, tick number 2, she’s sorting through an archive and library collection (okay, so that one is a little specialist).

Readable stuff, even if I got slightly distracted by the constant concentration upon good food and eating (it was after all a nun who had lived in France), and the fairly lax approach to attendance of religious observance.

 

Libraries and archives on the frontline

When I used to tell people that I was an archivist (and then explained what that was…), people used to comment how nice and peaceful such a job must be. Not so for the Director of the National Library and Archive of Iraq, Saad Eskander. In a recent interview with the BBC World Service, he described getting death threats, staff being tortured and trips into dangerous parts of the city to rescue key collections of books and documents. It was truly inspiring to hear his perspective on the role of archives and libraries in supporting cultural and democratic development, and about his staff’s work to rescue books, such as Jewish literature, that had been repressed under Saddam Hussein.

More detail is available from Dr Eskander’s diary, hosted on the British Library’s website.