MB Reed

Author and mathematician

Chesterfield’s speech at the start is from Mao. All the other Mao quotes are authentic, mainly from the Little Red Book. But the song The World Turned Upside Down is adapted from a chorus in the opera Nixon in China by John Adams.
Neighbourhood Committees for the Defence of the Revolution were a feature of Castro’s Cuba.
The Schools Action Union was born out of a campaign against assessment, involving tearing up exam scripts.
The spelling Mao Tse-Tung was replaced by the pinyin transliteration Mao Zedong in 1978.
The Red Guards were the shock troops of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966-71. They led class struggle sessions denouncing their teachers, as described in this chapter.
The abstract poem recited by Mr Bushell is Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters. The surrealist George Melly was surrounded by yobs in a pub car park after a performance, who were starting to beat him up, but when he started reciting this poem they stopped and left in disgust.

The Cultural Revolution in Socialist Britain is strangely prescient of modern-day events.
The minibus with weapons poking out, driving around the main square, was something i witnessed in Addis Ababa in 1977 on a brief stopover. Colonel Menghistu was in control of the city, but not the country.
While I was a student at UEA 1968-71, an American postgrad was arrested by the police for possession of cannabis. Magistrates gave him a fine. But then the university Registrar also expelled him. Students saw this as double jeopardy and we had our own student protests, culminating in the occupation of the Arts Block.

Very flat, Norfolk is a line from Noel Coward’s play Private Lives.
The decimal currency was introduced on 15th February 1971. The story about the village shop which didn’t believe decimalisation would reach her, was reported in the student newspaper at the time. I recall going into Woolworth’s on that day and being given these toytown coins in change, so much smaller and lighter than the pennies and half-crowns we were used to.
See this link for the Kalachakra Mandala. At the end of Tommy’s trip it morphs into this Escher print called Upstairs and Downstairs.
The LP Tommy is listening to is All Good Clean Fun, a two LP compilation from United Artists. See Frontispiece.

The Who played the University of East Anglia on 27th October 1970 (which to my shame I have no recollection of).
Some features of the resistance to the Army Intervention reflect the public reaction to the August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by Brezhnev’s Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.

The scenes in Trafalgar Square reflect the 1989 Tienanmen Square Massacre.
Sir Peter Naysmith’s heart attack reflects the heart attack suffered by leading reformer Hu Yaobang during a Politburo meeting, which led to the Tienanmen Square protests.
Varder = look, basket = male genitals, thews = thighs. See Polari
Perhaps the only pop concert I attended during the 1960s was the perfomance in Norwich of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, singing their 1968 hit Fire!. I also remember them on Top of the Pops.
I first travelled to Prague in 1969, a year after the invasion. You could still see the bullet holes which pockmarked the stone columns of the National Museum at the top of Wenceslas Square, which had been rather poorly filled in.

In 1971-72 I studied for an MSc in Algebra at the University of Sussex. I shared digs in Brighton with a guy who had been in Chile during General Pinochet’s 1973 CIA-sponsored coup against President Salvador Allende. He told how he and other left-wingers were incarcerated and tortured in the national Football Stadium in Santiago.

Maryse is modelled on the enigmatic 1960s socialite, prostitute and spy Mariella Novotny. She was closely involved in the Profumo scandal, and slept with top politicans in Britain and the USA (including President Kennedy?). Officially she died of a drugs overdose, shortly after revealing she had written her autobiography) but it is rumoured she was murdered by British secret agents or the CIA. And, of course, on Jane Fonda in Barbarella.
Normalisation was the process of reversing the Dubcek reforms and reimposing hard-line control in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the invasion. Dubcek himself was sent into obscurity as a forestry warden in Slovakia. People were called to Party interviews to account for their actions during the Prague Spring; punishments included demotion or loss of jobs. The joke told here was one going the rounds then. There was an increase in consumer goods to mollify the citizens. The public reacted by retreating into their private lives: holiday cottages, sports, pubs.

Alex’s modest proposal is consistent with 1969 Normalisation measures in Czechoslovakia, including the National Artist (Narodni Umelec) scheme and consumerism.
For more details of airship travel see The Hammond Conjecture.
The details of Princess Margaret’s liaison with the East End gangster John Bindon are all accurate. There were even rumoured to be compromising photos of the pair, which were stolen by MI5 agents from a safety deposit box during a set-up raid. Bindon’s party trick was apparently to hang four half-pint beer mugs on his erect penis; I thought of including this in the novel but it sounds too far-fetched!

The lighthouse on Lismore, seen from the ferry.
The Iona Community.
Iona’s imagining of a world without borders seems to have inspired John Lennon’s 1971 song.
Iona’s idea of a computer program to prove every mathematical theorem echoes Kurt Godel’s 1931 Incompleteness Theorems.
Tommy’s daymare at the end of the chapter recalls Christopher Robin’s farewell to Pooh at the end of The House at Pooh Corner.