Ancient DNA analysis reveals how the rise and fall of the Roman Empire shifted populations in the Balkans

Peer-Reviewed Publication

CELL PRESS

 

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THIS IMAGE SHOWS THE SKULL OF THE EAST AFRICAN INDIVIDUAL PLUS THE OIL LAMP WITH THE LEGIONARY EAGLE THAT HE WAS BURIED WITH.

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CREDIT: MIODRAG GRBIC

Despite the Roman Empire’s extensive military and cultural influence on the nearby Balkan peninsula, a DNA analysis of individuals who lived in the region between 1 and 1000 CE found no genetic evidence of Iron Age Italian ancestry. Instead, a study published December 7 in the journal Cell revealed successive waves of migrations from Western Anatolia, central and northern Europe, and the Pontic-Kazakh Steppe during the Empire’s reign.

From the 7th century CE onwards (coincident with the fall of the Western Roman Empire), large numbers of people emigrated from Eastern Europe, likely related to the arrival of Slavic-speaking populations, which resulted in present-day Balkan residents having 30%–60% Slavic ancestry seen in present-day Balkan peoples.

“We found this genetic signal of Slavic migration all across the Balkans,” says senior author and paleogenomicist Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE:CSIC-Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona. “This could have important social and political implications given that the Balkans has had a long history of conflict associated with their perceived identities.”

Most ancient DNA studies focus on pre-history—before the written record—but ancient DNA methods can also provide insight into more recent historical periods, especially when used in combination with historical and archeological information.

“Ancient DNA can give a lot of insight into historical periods, especially for regions where historical sources are scarce or when we don’t know whether sources are biased or not,” says first author and population geneticist Iñigo Olalde of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). “For example, most historical sources from the Balkans are written from the side of the Romans because the Slavic people didn’t write at that time.”

Previous studies have investigated the ancestry of people who lived in Italy and England during and after the fall of the Roman Empire, but little is known about demography and ancestry of the Balkans during this time. “This region was one of the distant frontiers of the Roman Empire, which makes it interesting to study because this is clearly a place where you would expect people to come in contact with people from outside the Empire, so you can test things such as globalization,” says Olalde.

To explore the population history of the Balkans and examine the influence of the rise and fall of the Roman empire, the researchers extracted DNA from 136 ancient individuals excavated from 20 different sites across the Balkans—defined as the region bounded by the Adriatic, Central Mediterranean, and Aegean Seas and the Middle and Lower Danube and Sava Rivers. These sites included large Roman cities, military fortresses, and small rural towns. The team focused on three periods: during the expansion and height of the Roman empire (1–250 CE), during the late Imperial period (circa 250–550 CE), and following the Western Empire’s collapse (550–1000 CE).

To provide cultural and historical context for the genetic data, the team collaborated with local archeologists and historians. For each grave, they documented burial type, as well as any objects buried alongside the individuals, such as coins, jewelry, pottery, tools, and weapons. The researchers also used radiocarbon dating to verify the age of 38 of the ancient individuals, which generated isotopic data that provide a window into those individuals’ diets.

The researchers were surprised to find no evidence of Italian Iron Age ancestry in the Balkan populations during the height of the Roman Empire. Instead, they showed that there was an influx of people from Western Anatolia, another part of the Roman Empire, during that period. They also found evidence of individual migrations into the Balkans from both within and outside the Roman Empire. Notably, a 16-year-old male who was excavated from a necropolis in a large Roman city was of 100% East African ancestry. The individual was buried with an oil lamp depicting Jupiter-related eagle iconography, but isotopic analysis of his teeth indicated that he had consumed marine protein sources during his childhood and therefore had likely grown up in a distant location.

“This was the only full Eastern African individual that we analyzed, and he was also a clear outlier with respect to the diet compared to the rest of the individuals buried in the same necropolis, which tells us that this individual clearly grew up outside the borders of the Roman Empire,” says Lalueza-Fox.

During the late Imperial period, between 250 and 550 CE, the researchers detected migrants with mixed ancestry from Northern Europe and the Pontic-Kazakh steppe. “We found that those two ancestries—central/northern European and Sarmatian-Scythian— tended to come together, which suggests that these are likely to have been multi-ethnic confederations of moving people,” says senior author and population geneticist David Reich of Harvard University.

However, these sources of ancestry disappeared after 700 CE. From 600 CE, shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, there was a major influx of individuals from Eastern Europe. After 700 CE, individuals in the Balkans had very similar ancestral composition to present-day groups in the region, suggesting that these migrations resulted in the last large demographic shift in the area. These migrations coincide with recorded Slavic migrations, but the DNA analysis provides insight into the scale of these migrations that is impossible to glean from historical resources.

“There have been debates about how impactful these migrations were and to what extent the spread of Slavic language was largely through cultural influences or movements of people, but our study shows that these migrations had a profound demographic effect,” says Reich. “More than half of the ancestry of most peoples in the Balkans today comes from the Slavic migrations, with around a third Slavic ancestry even in countries like Greece where no Slavic languages are spoken today.”

The team are already planning what they call “version two” of the study, which will take advantage of improvements in ancient DNA technologies. “We are now able to sequence hundreds of individuals from the same site, so we can go to another level of resolution and start to understand more about the social interactions and kinship between the different individuals,” says Olalde.

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This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science of Innovation, ‘la Caixa’’ Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia, the National Institutes of Health, the John Templeton Foundation, the Allen Discovery Center, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Cell, Olalde and Carrión et al., “A Genetic History of the Balkans from Roman Frontier to Slavic Migrations” https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(23)01135-2  

Cell (@CellCellPress), the flagship journal of Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that publishes findings of unusual significance in any area of experimental biology, including but not limited to cell biology, molecular biology, neuroscience, immunology, virology and microbiology, cancer, human genetics, systems biology, signaling, and disease mechanisms and therapeutics. Visit: http://www.cell.com/cell. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.

This photograph shows the Mausoleum of Viminacium.

This photograph shows a Roman aqueduct that supplied water to Viminacium, a large Roman city. 

CREDIT

Carles Lalueza-Foz

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JOURNAL

Cell

DOI

10.1016/j.cell.2023.10.018 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

A Genetic History of the Balkans from Roman Frontier to Slavic Migrations

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Dec-2023

 

Ancient Balkan genomes trace the rise and fall of Roman Empire’s frontier, reveal Slavic migrations to southeastern Europe

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SPANISH NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL (CSIC)

A multidisciplinary study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Spain (a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council and Pompeu Fabra University), the University of Belgrade in Serbia, the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and Harvard University in the USA, reconstructs the genomic history of the Balkan Peninsula during the first millennium of the common era, a time and place of profound demographic, cultural and linguistic change. The team has recovered and analyzed whole genome data from 146 ancient people excavated primarily from Serbia and Croatia—more than a third of which came from the Roman military frontier at the massive archaeological site of Viminacium in Serbia—which they co-analyzed with data from the rest of the Balkans and nearby regions. The work, published in the journal Cell, highlights the cosmopolitanism of the Roman frontier and the long-term consequences of migrations that accompanied the breakdown of Roman control, including the arrival of people speaking Slavic languages. Archaeological DNA reveals that despite nation-state boundaries that divide them, populations in the Balkans have been shaped by shared demographic processes.

Massive demographic influx into the Balkans from the East during the Roman Empire – largely from the eastern Mediterranean and even from East Africa

After Rome occupied the Balkans it turned this border region into a crossroads, one that would eventually give rise to 26 Roman Emperors, including Constantine the Great who shifted the capital of the empire to the eastern Balkans when he founded the city of Constantinople.

The team’s analysis of ancient DNA shows that during the period of Roman control, there was a large demographic contribution of people of Anatolian descent that left a long-term genetic imprint in the Balkans. This ancestry shift is very similar to what a previous study showed happened in the megacity of Rome itself—the original core of the empire—but it is remarkable that this also occurred at the Roman Empire’s periphery. A particular surprise is that there is no evidence of a genetic impact on the Balkans of migrants of Italic descent: “During the Imperial period, we detect an influx of Anatolian ancestry in the Balkans and not that of populations descending from the people of Italy", says Íñigo Olalde, Ikerbasque researcher at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and co-lead author of the study. "These Anatolians were intensively integrated into local society. At Viminacium, for example, there is an exceptionally rich sarcophagus in which we find a man of local descent and a woman of Anatolian descent buried together."

The team also discovered cases of sporadic long-distance mobility from far-away regions, such as an adolescent boy whose ancestral genetic signature most closely matches the region of Sudan in sub-Saharan Africa and whose childhood diet was very different from the rest of the individuals analyzed. He died in the 2nd century CE and was buried with an oil lamp representing an iconography of the eagle related to Jupiter, one of the most important gods for the Romans. “We don’t know if he was a soldier, slave or merchant, but the genetic analysis of his burial reveals that he probably spent his early years in the region of present-day Sudan, outside the limits of the Empire, and then followed a long journey that ended with his death at Viminacium (present-day Serbia), on the northern frontier of the Empire”, says Carles Lalueza-Fox, principal investigator at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) and director of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona (MCNB). “Archaeogenetics is an indispensable complement to archaeological and historical evidence. A new and much richer picture comes into view when we synthesize written records, archaeological remains like grave goods and human skeletons, and ancient genomes”, says co-author Kyle Harper, a historian of the ancient Roman world at the University of Oklahoma.

The Roman Empire incorporated “barbarian” peoples long before its collapse

The study identified individuals of mixed Northern European and Pontic steppe descent in the Balkans from the 3rd century, long predating the final breakdown of Roman imperial control. Anthropological analysis of their skulls shows that some of them were artificially deformed, a custom typical of some populations of the steppes including groups labeled by ancient authors as “Huns."

These results reflect the integration of people from beyond the Danube into Balkan society, centuries before the fall of the Empire.

"The borders of the Roman Empire differed from the borders of today's nation-states. The Danube served as the geographic and military boundary of the Empire. But it also acted as a crucial communication corridor that was permeable to the movement of people attracted by the wealth Rome invested in its frontier zone," says co-author Michael McCormick, Francis Goelet Professor of Medieval History at Harvard University.

Slavic populations changed the demographic composition of the Balkans

The Roman Empire permanently lost control of the Balkans in the sixth century, and the study reveals the subsequent large-scale arrival in the Balkans of individuals genetically similar to the modern Slavic-speaking populations of Eastern Europe. Their genetic fingerprint accounts for 30-60% of the ancestry of today's Balkan peoples, representing one of the largest permanent demographic shifts anywhere in Europe in the early medieval period.

The study is the first to detect the sporadic arrival of individual migrants who long preceded later population movements, such as a woman of Eastern European descent buried in a high imperial cemetery. Then, from the 6th century onwards, migrants from Eastern Europe are observed in larger numbers; as in Anglo-Saxon England, the population changes in this region were at the extreme high end of what occurred in Europe and were accompanied by language shifts. "According to our ancient DNA analysis, this arrival of Slavic-speaking populations in the Balkans took place over several generations and involved entire family groups including both men and women," explains Pablo Carrión, researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and co-lead author of the study.

The establishment of Slavic populations in the Balkans was greatest in the north, with a genetic contribution of 50-60% in present-day Serbia, and gradually less towards the south, with 30-40% in mainland Greece and up to 20% in the Aegean islands. "The major genetic impact of Slavic migrations is visible not only in current Balkan Slavic-speaking populations, but also in places that today do not speak Slavic languages such as Romania and Greece," says co-senior author David Reich, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School and professor of human evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Bringing together historians, archaeologists, and geneticists

The study involved an interdisciplinary collaboration of over 70 researchers, including archaeologists who excavated the sites, anthropologists, historians and geneticists.

“This work exemplifies how genomic data can be useful for getting beyond contentious debates around identity and ancestry that have been inspired by historical narratives rooted in nascent nineteenth-century nationalisms and that have contributed to conflict in the past," says Lalueza-Fox. The team also generated genomic data from diverse present-day Serbs that could be compared with ancient genomes and other present-day groups from the region. "We found there was no genomic database of modern Serbs. We therefore sampled people who self-identified as Serbs on the basis of shared cultural traits, even if they lived in different countries such as Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro or North Macedonia", says coauthor Miodrag Grbic, Professor at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Co-analyzing the data with that of other modern people in the region, as well as the ancient individuals, shows that the genomes of the Croats and Serbs are very similar, reflecting shared heritage with similar proportions of Slavic and local Balkan ancestry.

"Ancient DNA analysis can contribute, when analyzed together with archaeological data and historical records, to a richer understanding of the history of Balkans history” says Grbic. “The picture that emerges is not of division, but of shared history. The people of the Iron Age throughout the Balkans were similarly impacted by migration during the time of the Roman Empire, and by Slavic migration later on. Together, these influences resulted in the genetic profile of the modern Balkans—regardless of national boundaries.”

Paper: Olalde & Carrión et al., 2023, Cell 186, 1-14; December 7, 2023; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2023.10.018

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JOURNAL

Cell

DOI

10.1016/j.cell.2023.10.018 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

A genetic history of the Balkans from Roman frontier to Slavic migrations

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

7-Dec-2023

 

Less ice on the road leads to more salt in the soil, air, and water

Human activities, such as deicing roads, are disrupting the natural salt cycle on a global scale. A team of Virginia Tech researchers seeks to mitigate the existential threat by slowing salinization down.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

VIRGINIA TECH

 

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AT THE OCCOQUAN WATERSHED MONITORING LABORATORY, CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING RESEARCHERS TEST WATER FOR SALT CONTENT AND OTHER CONTAMINANTS.

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CREDIT: PHOTO BY PETER MEANS FOR VIRGINIA TECH.

When temperatures drop and roads get slick, rock salt is an important safety precaution used by individuals, businesses, and local and state governments to keep walkers, cyclists, and drivers safe. However, according to a new scientific review paper from a team of researchers at Virginia Tech and the University of Maryland, the human demand for salt comes at a cost to the environment.

Published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment with researchers Stanley Grant, Megan Rippy, and Shantanu Bhide from Virginia Tech’s Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory, findings revealed that human activities are making Earth’s air, soil and freshwater saltier, which could pose an existential threat if current trends continue. 

“This is a slow-moving train wreck,” said Megan Rippy, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering. “It’s playing out so slowly that it’s easy to overlook that our streams, lakes, and drinking water resources are becoming progressively saltier.”  

Distrupting the natural salt cycle

Salts are compounds with positively charged cations and negatively charged anions, with some of the most abundant ones being calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sulfate ions. When dislodged in higher doses, these ions can cause environmental problems by impairing water supply for humans and wildlife. The study conducted at the Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory considered a variety of salt ions that are found underground and in surface water.

Although geologic and hydrologic processes bring salts to Earth’s surface over time, human activities such as mining and land development are rapidly accelerating the natural “salt cycle.” Agriculture, construction, water and road treatment, and other industrial activities can also intensify salinization, which harms biodiversity and makes drinking water unsafe in extreme cases. This research is establishing for the first time that humans affect the concentration and cycling of salt on a global, interconnected scale. 

“Ecosystems are finely tuned to a certain level of salinity, and as that increases over time it can lead to big impacts, for example loss of important species, including fish. That applies to humans too. Too much salt in irrigation water can cause crops to fail, and salt in drinking water supplies has been linked to human health effects like preeclampsia. This is happening in the U.S. and around the world,” said Rippy. 

Over the course of the study, Rippy, Grant, Bhide and University of Maryland researchers showed that human-caused salinization affected approximately 2.5 billion acres of soil around the world — an area about the size of the United States. Salt ions also increased in streams and rivers over the last 50 years, coinciding with an increase in the global use and production of salts.

Salt has even infiltrated the air. In some regions, lakes are drying up and sending plumes of saline dust into the atmosphere. In areas that experience snow, road salts can become aerosolized, creating sodium and chloride particulate matter, which lowers air quality and can be detrimental to wildlife and crops.   

“One way that humans are upsetting the natural salt cycle is through our use of rock salt for deicing roads and parking lots in the winter,” said Bhide.  

Finding new deicing methods

Stanley Grant, director of the Occoquan Watershed Monitoring Laboratory, said road salts have an outsized impact in the U.S., which churns out 44 billion pounds of the deicing agent each year. Road salts represented 44 percent of U.S. salt consumption from 2013-17, and they account for 13.9 percent of the total dissolved solids that enter streams across the country. This can cause a “substantial” concentration of salt in watersheds, according to the paper. To prevent U.S. waterways from being inundated with salt in the coming years, policies limiting road salts or encouraging alternatives can be beneficial, the researchers said. Washington, D.C., and several other U.S. cities have started treating frigid roads with beet juice, which has the same effect but contains significantly less salt. 

“There’s a lot of interest in how we can change the way roads are maintained in the winter to reduce road salt use and its impacts on ecosystems and drinking water supplies,” said Bhide. “It’s a tricky issue, because deicing roads also reduces traffic accidents and saves lives.” 

Salinization is also associated with “cascading” effects. For example, saline dust can accelerate the melting of snow, which can harm communities — particularly in the western United States — that rely on snow for water supplies. Because of their structure, salt ions can bind to contaminants in soils and sediments, forming “chemical cocktails” that circulate in the environment and have detrimental effects. These significant environmental and health implications are creating a need for a more sustainable approach to salt usage.  

“History is littered with ancient civilizations that collapsed because they couldn’t balance their salt budget. I’m hoping this article will raise awareness and lead to action on this issue, so that history doesn’t repeat itself,” said Grant.

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JOURNAL

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment

ARTICLE TITLE

The anthropogenic salt cycle

 

Less asphalt gives stronger trees in urban areas

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG

 

IMAGE: 

STUDIED HORSE CHESTNUT TREES GROWING IN ENVIRONMENTS WITH A HIGH AND LOW DEGREE OF PAVING.

 

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CREDIT: JANINA KONARSKA

Trees planted in urban areas can provide shade and contribute to a lower air temperature. For these services to be optimal, it is important to let asphalt give way to trees, according to research from the University of Gothenburg.

The role of trees in the urban climate is an issue that has grown in importance in the wake of climate change, where average temperatures are expected to rise. Trees provide shade and lower the air temperature. To get most benefits from your trees, you need to give them the right conditions.

“Our research shows that an important factor is how much of the area around the tree is paved,” says Janina Konarska, researcher at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of the study in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

Bigger trees with less asphalt

Therefore, the researchers believe that it is a good idea to at least give the trees some extra grass around the trunk.

“We found in our study that 20–30-year-old trees surrounded by grass were on average 2.6 metres taller and the crown was 1.3 metres wider than nearby trees growing with paving close to the trunk. The trees also had a crown that was 61 percent denser and provided twice as much cooling,” says Janina Konarska.

The researchers studied the impact of the surface cover around the trunk on pin oak, horse chestnut and common lime at several sites in Gothenburg and Mölndal. The assessment was based on various parameters, including crown density, tree growth and the amount of water released by the leaves, known as transpiration. All these determine the tree's impact on the microclimate. The density of the crown and the size of the tree determine the shading effect, and releasing water vapour from the leaves in the transpiration process acts as air conditioning that cools the air.

“In addition, the air above an asphalt surface will be warmer than the air above grass or soil. A hardened surface also prevents rainwater from reaching the roots, which impacts the growth of the tree,” says Janina Konarska.

Invest in good soil

There were differences in how much the different tree species were affected by not getting water to the roots. Horse chestnut is least affected by hardened surfaces, but on the other hand it performs worse than pin oak and common lime when conditions are better.

The researchers' conclusion is that while the choice of trees planted is very important, the cooling effect of the trees may be more dependent on how close to the trunk the hardened surface starts.

Planting trees is expensive, and it takes time for a new tree to grow to the desired size. In urban areas, it can often be difficult to provide an optimal growing environment for trees.

“You have to do the best you can when planting trees in urban areas. If it is difficult to create open spaces around the trees, it is a good idea to invest in better soil and preferably to water the tree. It is important that we take care of the trees, they are valuable in many ways,” says Lasse Tarvainen, an environmental scientist at the University of Gothenburg.

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JOURNAL

Landscape and Urban Planning

DOI

10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104872 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

ARTICLE TITLE

Surface paving more important than species in determining the physiology, growth and cooling effects of urban trees

RIP

Denny Laine, musician who went to No 1 with the Moody Blues and Wings and was Paul McCartney’s right-hand man – obituary


Telegraph Obituaries
Wed, 6 December 2023

Denny Laine backstage at a Wings gig in 1976 - Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

Denny Laine, who has died aged 79, was a singer and guitarist with the Moody Blues before spending the 1970s with Wings, Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles outfit; he featured prominently on two chart-toppers, singing lead vocals on the Moodys’ first big hit, Go Now!, and going on to co-write Wings’ Mull of Kintyre, which outsold all The Beatles’ singles.

“Paul and I sat with a bottle of whisky one afternoon outside a cottage in the hills of Kintyre and wrote the song,” Laine told the Beatles Bible website. “Paul had written the chorus and we wrote the rest of it together.”

He was born Brian Frederick Hines on October 29 1944 in the Channel Islands, but grew up in Tyseley, Birmingham; his father was a former boxer. The family had Romani roots, and young Brian took up the guitar, inspired by the celebrated gypsy player Django Reinhardt, and claimed to have given his first solo performance aged 12.

He attended Yardley Grammar School but, inspired by Buddy Holly, he was more interested in a musical career, and in his teens he joined a local band, Johnny Dean and the Dominators. After a year he persuaded another group, the Diplomats, to become Denny Laine and the Diplomats; the band included drummer Bev Bevan, later of the Move and the Electric Light Orchestra.

Laine and the Moody Blues performing at Holborn Viaduct Station in London in 1964 - Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

He hit on the name Denny, he said, from the nickname given to him by childhood friends who used to share the den in his garden, while his surname was a tribute to the singer Cleo Laine.

While the band built a following, Laine had a day job in the electrical section of the Rackhams department store in town. They were turned down by EMI and Pye, though in July 1963 they supported The Beatles at the Plaza Ballroom, Old Hill.

Laine began rehearsing on the side with another band, the Soul Preachers, who soon changed their name to the M & B Five, hoping to gain sponsorship from the local Mitchell and Butlers brewery. They evolved into the Moody Blues, and progress was rapid: though their first single failed to chart, when Laine heard Bessie Banks singing Go Now, written by her husband Larry and Milton Bennett, he told the band they had to record it.

With an exclamation mark added to the title, the single went to No 1 in the UK in January 1965, with Laine on guitar and vocals. But a follow-up hit proved elusive, and he quit to form a new outfit, the Electric String Band. That was short-lived, and though he next secured a sizeable advance from Warner Bros to form a new group, Balls, they too failed to roll.

Along the way he tried his hand as a solo artist, and though his song Say You Don’t Mind saw no chart action, it was later a hit for the former Zombies singer Colin Blunstone.

Laine had a brief stint with the new supergroup formed by Cream’s ex-drummer, Ginger Baker’s Air Force, which included Steve Winwood on vocals; they played the Royal Albert Hall, and at Wembley Stadium to mark the start of the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.

Then in 1971, he recalled, he took a phone call from Paul McCartney, who asked him to join his new band (this later recollection seems to disprove his earlier claims that he had “co-founded” Wings). In August that year they recorded in a week the album Wild Life, which just missed the Top 10 in the UK and failed to move the critics.

The 1973 follow-up, Red Rose Speedway, fared much better, and Band on the Run – recorded as a three-piece, by the McCartneys and Laine, and released at the end of the year – hit paydirt, and remains Paul’s most successful post-Beatles album. As well as contributing guitar and vocals, Laine co-wrote the track No Words.

Wings on Top of the Pops in 1974 - David Redfern/Redferns

In 1972, meanwhile, backstage at a Wings gig, he met an American model and groupie, Jo-Jo LaPatrie, who claimed to have lost her virginity to Jimi Hendrix in his dressing room aged 16. They threw themselves with gusto into the rock’n’roll lifestyle.

Mull of Kintyre – a paean to the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland where the McCartneys owned a farm – was released in 1977, a stately riposte, perhaps, to punk, which was just getting into its stride. It held the record for the biggest-selling UK single until Do They Know it’s Christmas? in 1984 – though McCartney never saw it as a hit, and was won over by the local pipers who played on it, he recalled.

“When we finished recording it, all the pipers said, ‘Aye, it’s got to be a single, that.’ I thought it was a little too specialised, but they kept saying, ‘Oh, the exiled Scots all over the world, it’ll be a big single for them.’ I still thought, ‘Yeah, well, but there’s maybe not enough exiled Scots,’ but they kept telling me, after a few drinks.”

In 1978 Wings released their fifth album, London Town, which featured five songs co-written by Laine. That year he and Jo-Jo were married, and bought Yew Corner in Sussex, the inspiration for Pooh Corner; the repository of childhood daydreams became notorious for its wild parties.

There were inevitable tensions in Wings, exacerbated by the fact that Jo-Jo and Linda did not hit it off. The wheels finally came off the juggernaut when McCartney was arrested and held for nine days in Tokyo in January 1980 after being arrested at the airport with half a pound of marijuana in his suitcase as Wings prepared to embark on a lucrative tour of the country.

Laine was furious: his extravagance meant that his money troubles were mounting, and McCartney refused to compensate the band members for lost earnings due to the tour cancellation; there were a few half-hearted sessions, but the leader’s passion for Wings had drained away.

Laine undertook a solo tour, which featured Jo-Jo on maracas, then in 1981 he was summoned to Montserrat to play on sessions for what would become McCartney’s solo album Tug of War. But when he returned home he heard that he had been all but replaced at the ex-Beatle’s right hand by Eric Stewart, formerly of 10cc, though he did play on the 1983 follow-up, Pipes of Peace.

Laine continued to record solo albums and tour, though there were cancellations due to poor ticket sales, and in 1986 he was taken to court by the Inland Revenue, owing £55,000. He denied that he had ever been extravagant, insisting: “I have never had a new car. All my Ferraris and Rolls-Royces have been second-hand.”

Laine with the McCartneys on the Thames in 1978 promoting the new Wings album London Town, which featured five songs co-written by Laine - Rolls Press/Popperfoto

He had, though, spent £40,000 sponsoring a racing driver, David Coyne, written off a £32,000 yacht in the South of France and stumped up a huge settlement to Jo-Jo when they divorced in 1982; he had also, strapped for cash, sold his songwriting royalties back to Wings. (Jo-Jo, meanwhile, went on to become one of the Marquess of Bath’s “wifelets” on his estate at Longleat for a few years. In 2006 she died after falling downstairs.)

Laine and McCartney did not reconnect for two decades, their estrangement exacerbated by Laine’s willingness to dissect the McCartneys’ relationship for reporters. They finally met again after Linda’s death, when they attended a UB40 concert together. Laine, who moved to the US for a time, continued working, his last LP, The Blue Musician, appearing in 2008.

Denny Laine – who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Moody Blues – is survived by his wife Elizabeth, “Lizzie”, who he married earlier this year, by his two daughters with Jo-Jo, Laine and Heidi Jo Hines, who both followed in their father’s musical footsteps, and by three children from other relationships.

Denny Laine, born October 29 1944, died December 5 2023

REST IN POWER

Eddie Linden, illiterate Glasgow labourer who became an unlikely star of 1960s London’s poetry scene – obituary

Telegraph Obituaries
Tue, 5 December 2023

Eddie Linden: 'I’m a Glasgow Communist lapsed Catholic manic depressive bastard homosexual' 

- Granville Davies

Eddie Linden, who has died aged 88, was a poet and poetry editor who combined persistence, loyalty and a complete lack of inhibition to persuade the most prominent poets of the late-20th century to contribute to his magazine, Aquarius.

Given his background, and his journey from illiteracy to literary London, this may have seemed unlikely; but among the poets of 1960s Soho and Fitzrovia, he found an open-minded and welcoming crowd. They provided him with a sense of family that he had never experienced as a child, even though he had searched for his real relatives, and had tried to find a different kind of kinship in the Communist Party and the Roman Catholic Church. His outbursts could provoke his most devoted supporters to rage and even violence, but he never saw his frankness as an obstacle to friendship.

His account of himself became familiar to those around him, but he would deliver it as if sharing a confidence: “I’m a Glasgow Communist lapsed Catholic manic depressive bastard homosexual.” This range of attributes, not least the last, gave him an entrée into artistic circles.


He would sometimes add Irish, working class and alcoholic into the mix. Some would dispute alcoholic, although he became integral to a poetry scene that centred on pubs, especially an old haunt of John Dryden’s, the Lamb and Flag in Holborn. There he would organise poetry readings so packed that the landlady expressed a fear that the ceiling would fall in.

When he launched Aquarius in 1969 with a party at Compendium bookshop in Camden, guests wondered who had paid for the drink. Linden would later explain that it came from a short stint working in a library, from which he had saved £70. The stint was short because he wanted to read to the children who visited the library, even though he had been employed as a porter. “I hated bosses,” he would recall of the episode. “I always liked to be my own man.”

Eddie Linden, pictured in 2005, edited the poetry magazine Aquarius from 1969 to 2004 - Eamonn McCabe/Popperfoto

This was as true of jobs as it was of relationships and credos: he drifted away from Communism following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956; his Catholicism survived the initial guilt he felt about his homosexuality, although in 1968 he was at the heart of a scuffle on the steps of Westminster Cathedral when he challenged worshippers who held up a banner in support of Pope Paul VI’s ruling against contraception.

His own poetry is straightforward and frank, and his best-known poems, such as “City of Razors” and “Hampstead at Night”, are the rough and rude ones. The former has been widely anthologised and translated, with its unflinching account of sectarian violence in Gorbals; the latter is one of many unambiguous, unornamented poems he wrote about sex.

At other times, though, he could be mystical, even lyrical, and would recite his work in a kind of rapture, not always with much warning. The poems stayed easily in his memory, which he convincingly attributed to the legacy of Irish oral performance. There are two collections to his name: City of Razors and Other Poems (Jay Landesman, 1980); and A Thorn in the Flesh: Selected Poems (Hearing Eye, 2011).

As a curator of others’ work, he favoured the direct over the dry. Aquarius captured the mood of the late Sixties, with its freedom and boldness of expression. The first edition included work by George Barker and Stevie Smith, as well as the more surprising John Heath-Stubbs. Linden was a carer and companion to Heath-Stubbs, often acting as the latter’s “eyes” (glaucoma left Heath-Stubbs unable to read after 1961, and completely blind by 1978). They were a striking pair – one tall, the other short, one high Tory and evidently erudite, the other demotic and trenchantly Left-wing – but the loyalty ran deep: one issue of Aquarius was devoted to Heath-Stubbs’ poetry.

A Thorn in the Flesh

Eddie Linden was born John Edward Glackin on May 5 1935, in Motherwell, Lanarkshire. He would tell this differently, saying that he was born Sean Glackin, in Coalisland, Co Tyrone, moving to Motherwell a few months later. Certainly he was illegitimate, and his mother’s hasty move from Ireland was to avoid the disgrace. His birth parents were Joe Waters and Elizabeth Glackin. The Glackin family trade was carpentry.

In Motherwell, he was adopted by his uncle’s brother-in-law, Edward Linden, who was a coal miner. He and his wife Mary raised Eddie as a Roman Catholic in Bellshill. Mary died when Eddie was 8, and two years later, Edward married again, to perhaps the only person Eddie could never forgive.

His new stepmother didn’t want the boy, and tried to place him with his birth mother, who was now in Glasgow. This was unsuccessful (her new husband also did not want Eddie), and so was an attempt to put him in an asylum. He spent the next four years in an orphanage run by Roman Catholic nuns, attending the Holy Family School in Mossend, and then St Patrick’s in New Stevenston. He left school at 14. He was still barely able to read, much less write, at the age of 16.

He worked in a coalmine and a steel mill before becoming a railway porter and ticket inspector. This led him to join the railway union, and also the Young Communist League. The Communist Party provided the kind of education that he had lacked at school: it was not only political, but also cultural, and led Linden to literature, in particular Dickens, whose novel Oliver Twist made him feel he was reading about himself.

Trips to London as a Communist Party delegate enabled him to visit the theatre, in particular the plays of Arnold Wesker.

Linden’s commitment to Communism wavered, while his Catholicism lingered, in spite of his avowed difficulties with believe in God. It was sustained by a love of ritual. Seamus Heaney took some of Linden’s words in an interview, and turned them into a piece he called “A Found Poem”: there we hear Linden suggesting that words “like ‘thanksgiving’ or ‘host’ / or even ‘communion wafer’ … have an underlying / pallor and draw, like well water far down.”

Eddie Linden - Eamonn McCabe/Popperfoto

He still found his homosexuality troubling, and attempted medical intervention, but he fell out with the doctors. In 1958, he met Father Anthony Ross, a Dominican priest who would later become Rector of Edinburgh University, and who enabled Linden to reconcile these elements of his personality. One result was that he became active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, carrying a Roman Catholic banner at the Aldermaston march of 1959. He also co-founded a charity for the homeless, the Simon Community, in 1963.

In 1966, he went to Plater College, for workers, linked to Oxford University. He left shortly afterwards, with a breakdown, but among others he met at Oxford was the writer Sebastian Barker. He would later write a biography, Who Is Eddie Linden, which also became a play starring the Scottish actor Michael Deacon. It was staged at the Old Red Lion in Islington; Linden saw it many times. By the mid-1960s, he was befriending other writers and poets, such as George Barker, John Heath-Stubbs and Derek Mahon. When Aquarius appeared, many of them contributed their poems for free, and also their editorial advice.

The magazine, which Linden produced from his small flat in Maida Vale, ran from 1969 until 2002; there were 26 issues. Linden was able to publish Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy early in their careers, when each had only one collection to their name. Aquarius readers included John Betjeman, who would send the publication £5 every Christmas; Harold Pinter, who was a financial backer and is thought to have based the character of Spooner in No Man’s Land on Linden; and the Conservative cabinet minister Kenneth Baker.

In 1991, fears that cash was running out led Brian Wilson MP to mention it in the House when asking about Arts Council funding. The then Arts Minister, Tim Renton, gave £2,000 to save the magazine. The last edition was in 2002, although a special Festschrift edition, called Eddie’s Own Aquarius, appeared in 2005, with tributes from Seamus Heaney, Elaine Feinstein, James Kelman, Bruce Kent, Andrew Motion and Clare Short.

Although tales of Linden’s drunkenness abound, he was proud to have gone through his last decades without alcohol.

Eddie Linden, born May 5 1935, died November 19 2023

Five of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2023

Adam Roberts
Wed, 6 December 2023 


Composite: Guardian

Conquest
Nina Allan (Riverrun)
Frank sees patterns in everything. He loves the music of Bach and is exceptionally good at his work as a coder, but he gets drawn into an elaborate conspiracy theory about a secret alien invasion, the “conquest” of the book’s title, supposedly predicted by an obscure 1950s science fiction tale by John C Sylvester. When Frank disappears, his girlfriend hires a private investigator to find him. This absorbing detective story is interspersed with concert reviews, true crime, film criticism, biographical sketches and a healthy chunk of Sylvester’s text detailing the aftermath of an interstellar war and the building of a gigantic tower from living stone. The novel touches on David Bowie and Upstream Color, The X-Files and Stephen Hawking. Are these elements merely disparate, or do they add up to something bigger? Does connecting them, as the story increasingly does, induct us into a dangerous conspiratorial mindset, or do the distinct elements cohere, as individual notes come together into the gestalt of music? Allan’s story is as mellowly complex as the Bach variations its main character adores, and her best novel yet.

Him
Geoff Ryman (Angry Robot)
Him is a powerful piece of historical fiction, recreating ordinary life in first-century Judea with vivid immediacy; but it is also a science fiction novel about the multiverse, alienness and the possibilities of reality. The story is, in one sense, familiar: the childhood and ministry of Jesus – here “Yeshu”, born a girl called Avigayil but identifying from an early age as male (Ryman uses Aramaic names rather than the more familiar biblical ones for greater historical verisimilitude). The novel’s God presides over a multiverse, and into each proliferating reality he sends a slightly different iteration of redemption. This grand science-fictional conceit is grounded by Ryman’s superbly precise and evocative writing, his immersively believable world. The relationship between Yeshu and his mother Maryam is beautifully rendered and the ending, though it can’t be unfamiliar, is intensely moving. Ryman’s gospel achieves what SF does at its best: beautifully estranging our too-familiar world, and making us think and feel anew.

Some Desperate Glory
Emily Tesh (Orbit)
This sparky debut is a blend of space opera and military SF that refreshes both modes. Desperate Glory moves briskly, page-turningly, and provides all the satisfactions of widescreen galactic worldbuilding and adventure as it goes; but it never sacrifices complexity or trades in easy answers. Humanity is one of three galactic species to have independently discovered the “shadowspace” tech that powers starships, but we are regarded by the others as uncontrollably violent, having evolved “as apex predators in a hazardous biosphere” – the Earth. Now Earth has been destroyed, and the novel’s protagonist, Kyr, a genetically enhanced supersoldier, grows up in the military space station Gaea, unthinkingly embodying Gaea’s militaristic, fascistic ethos, focused on revenge. But as the story proceeds and she learns more about the universe, questioning her own assumptions, a richer, more complex sense of the nature of things grows in her. Kyr’s coming-of-age journey does not take the path plot-cliche leads you to expect, and the telling is bracingly twisty. An instant classic.


In Ascension
Martin MacInnes (Atlantic)
Longlisted for the Booker, MacInnes’s novel is both spacious and intimate. Two sisters take different paths through life: outgoing Leigh becomes a marine biologist and travels the world; quieter, smaller Helena stays home with their mother and becomes a financial lawyer. Leigh is part of a survey-ship team that discovers an impossibly deep fissure in the ocean bed. Later, she joins a space mission to investigate an anomalous object passing through the solar system: a kilometres-long, spirally decorated traveller from deep space. This object eludes the mission as they chase after it through the solar system, but something happens to the consciousnesses of the crew. What Leigh sees in outer space are “the planets, the sun, the moons as a single curved body drifting through space like the juvenile stage of an aquatic life form”. It’s a novel about big, complex ideas – our place in the cosmos, our interconnectedness with one another and with the natural world – that is also brilliantly readable, wide-ranging and thrilling.

The Circumference of the World
Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon)
Tidhar has recently intimated that he wants to leave SF and fantasy behind him (“I want a Booker,” he announced in the author’s note to his historical epic Maror, “and they don’t give you one of those for a book about elves”). But I don’t believe it: Tidhar’s imagination is so saturated in, and attuned to, the excellences of SF/fantasy that I don’t think he could abandon it even if he tried. The Circumference of the World is a case in point, a book that is not only SF but is about SF – about the golden age of Heinlein and Van Vogt, and the fantastical output of L Ron Hubbard, here fictionalised as Eugene Charles Hartley, pulp writer and founder of “the Church of the All-Seeing Eyes”. In a complex, expertly orchestrated set of nesting storylines, various characters search for Hartley’s schlocky novel Lode Stars, which may or may not explain the nature of the universe, but which appears to vanish as it is read. Detective noir rubs shoulders with epistolary fiction, a prison story and expertly pastiched pulp SF. Inventive, thought-provoking, audacious and, as ever with Tidhar, superbly readable, this is where his genius lies.

New Doctor Who episodes will upset diehard fans, says Russell T Davies

India McTaggart
Wed, 6 December 2023

New Doctor Who. Ncuti Gatwa, with the BBC classic's showrunner, Russell T Davies

 - Scott Garfitt/SHUTTERSTOCK FOR BAFTA

Russell T Davies has said that new Doctor Who episodes will upset die-hard fans of the science fiction franchise.

The Welsh screenwriter and television producer, 60, discussed the new release, which will be the centrepiece of the BBC’s Christmas Day line-up.

Speaking to Radio Times about the special episode, he said: “The show is taking a sly step towards fantasy, which will annoy people to whom it’s a hard science-fiction show.

“Episode two next year is wildly fantasy. Completely making up scenarios on screen that we’ve never been able to show before.”

The episode will air at teatime on BBC One on Christmas Day, and has been called a “blockbusting adventure”.

Quipping about how he got the broadcaster to agree to a show, he said he “kicked in the door”.

“I was just a bit jealous that all those other shows were getting a bigger taste of the pie, so this Christmas, the enemy is goblins,” he said.

The Doctor Who Christmas Special marks the first since 2017, although there have been 60th anniversary specials this year starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate.

Davies said the episode will be “properly Christmassy from beginning to end”.

Ncuti Gatwa, the 31-year-old star of Netflix’s Sex Education, will feature as the new Doctor.

Davies said his casting was obvious after the audition “blasted him off the face of the earth”, adding that he had auditioned women and non-binary people for the role too.

“Every new Doctor should be a chance for brand-new viewers to step on board. And I think Ncuti will bring in a new audience,” Davies said.

Matt Gaetz accuses media of ‘greenlighting’ Trump assassination

Gustaf Kilander
Tue, 5 December 2023

Far-right Florida Rep Matt Gaetz has claimed that the press is “green-lighting” the assassination of former President Donald Trump by reporting on what a second Trump term would look like.

On Monday, Mr Gaetz tweeted “They’re obviously green-lighting assassination” and included a screenshot from a Washington Post op-ed by Post Opinions contributing editor Robert Kagan bearing the headline “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending”.

Responding to Mr Gaetz, Condé Nast Legal Affairs Editor Luke Zaleski noted that “There is nothing you can say or do to confront Maga gaslighting that won’t be met with more MAGA gaslighting”.

“They’ll say anything to make themselves the victim and hero in everything. And there is nothing you can say to do anything about it. That is the MAGA gaslighting paradox,” he added.

The image for the op-ed was a split image with the top being the head of a statue of Roman dictator Julius Ceaser, who was assassinated in 44BC, and the bottom being the face of Mr Trump.

Mr Kagan writes that “the national mood less than a year before the election is one of bipartisan disgust with the political system in general. Rarely in American history has democracy’s inherent messiness been more striking”.

“In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions,” he added. “German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done. It didn’t matter who was behind the political paralysis, either, whether the intransigence came from the right or the left.”

The Post editor goes on to say that the “likeliest outcome” of Mr Trump’s many upcoming trials “will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president”.

“Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers,” he adds.

Mr Kagan argues that if Mr Trump wins in 2024, he’ll “become the most powerful person ever to hold that office” with the “fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term”.

“Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?” he asks.

“Trump might not want or need a third term, but were he to decide he wanted one, as he has sometimes indicated, would the 22nd Amendment block him any more effectively from being president for life than the Supreme Court, if he refused to be blocked?” Mr Kagan notes.

“Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air,” he adds, noting the many baseless accusations of those not on Mr Trump’s side being “communists”.

“The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it,” Mr Kagan goes on to say. “In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not ... if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.”

Mr Gaetz’s followers on X were quick to respond with outrage.

Auron MacIntyre, a columnist at the rightwing outlet The Blaze, wrote: “Nobody talks about it but there were already assassination attempts on Trump. When Trump inevitably becomes the nominee you are going to watch the very last shred of sanity break in the media.”

He didn’t provide any evidence for his claims.

Failed GOP 2022 Arizona gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake simply called The Post “despicable”.