For me the books have depth that the TV series doesn't – and can't – have: some of the plots are dumbed down a bit to give more visual impact, and of course you don't get the same depth of characterisation, or the insights into Lamb's and the others' pasts because much of it comes out in interior monologue, and it's much harder for the shows to, erm, show.
And you miss one of the glories of Herron's writing: as a stylist is on a par with Terry Prachett for cramming wisdom into short witty phrases. He is very good at memorable phrases skewering contemporary life, and particularly politicians. The shows bring some of this out, but there's only so much that you can do in dialogue.
Take this passage from the first book:
> Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-haired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations – Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! – Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. (‘Damn fine city,’ he’d remarked on a trip to Paris. ‘Probably worth defending next time.’) Not everyone who’d worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who’d witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle.
Herron, Mick. Slow Horses: The bestselling thrillers that inspired the hit Apple TV+ show Slow Horses (Slough House Thriller 1) (p. 187). (Function). Kindle Edition.
That is a brilliant piece of characterisation, and if you know anything about British politics, you know exactly who he's describing, and how accurate a character assassination this is. The TV show's Peter Judd goes out of its way to make the character a lot more generic – their Judd is merely 'typical cynical nasty venal politician' and it loses a bit of force accordingly.
Or take the set piece descriptions which start every book: they recreate the seedy world of Slough House in a way that the shows can only hint at.
Not to say the shows aren't very good – they are one of the best things on TV – but the books are even better.
I think that's true (particularly about the Dark ages not being uncultured), but in some places, the signs that what came before was vastly superior technologically (and culturally) would have been all around them.
E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.
And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period – in the service of religion in the monasteries, of course, but also in what we'd know call 'science'. E.g. wasn't Aristotle taken as the go to authority in scientific matters for the scholastics?
> E.g. a century after the Romans left Britain, it would be fairly obvious to everyone that whoever built the aqueducts, villas, fortresses etc had vastly superior technology.
Yes, but
1. Britain was where there is the best case for a serious regression.
2. Building those systems was also a matter of imperial priorities and imperial centralisation. Smaller kingdoms did not need it.
> And much of the literacy was aimed at preserving what knowledge had survived from the classical period
Much was, and Aristotle was taken as far too much of an authority. There were probably not many advances in science during the early middle ages, but there were in high and late medieval. Even in the early middle ages there were advances in architecture and agriculture and some amazing art produced.
I chose Roman Britain because I live in a city (Deva) which was once meant to be the capital of the whole province, where the evidence of lost glories would have been glaringly apparent to everybody for a long time, even though the settlement was still major in contemporary terms.
More generally, some technology was lost everywhere (well, in the Western world anyway): nobody knew how to make waterproof concrete again until a manuscript reappeared in the fifteenth century.
Roman Britain is just one example, but it does disprove the general thesis that people always think they are the pinnacle of civilisation – and it's by far from the only example, of course. For much of the next thousand years (and beyond) Classical Rome, and later, Ancient Greece were seen as a lost golden age, something to learn from and aspire to (and adapt to religious dogma in a fallen world which was going to end fairly shortly anyway…)
Of course they had their fair share of brilliant people and they made significant advances and it's facile to disparage them ("Dark ages") but it does seem like a very different mental view of the world.
>There were many medieval advances in technology, art, architecture and science.
My favorite is the gothic arch because it basically decomposes into the math of man hours, calories and the work of moving stone. They didn't have the surpluses the Romans did so they were forced to invent a more efficient arch.
Yes, I'm not denying that there were a lot of developments in that time period - more that there was a perception that things were declining, even if that wasn't actually true.
The Dark Ages refers to the 2-3 centuries immediately after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Medieval era / Middle Ages extend all the way to the start of the Renaissance.
I'm not sure every era did think it was the apex of human progress, though, because sometimes they had physical or cultural evidence that previous generations could do things that they couldn't.
E.g. if you were a petty kingdom emerging in the centuries after the Romans left Britain, you'd be fairly sure that you no longer had the technology to build aqueducts, baths or villas. And for centuries after that, a large element of learning was trying to recreate / understand the classics - e.g. the influence of Galen and Aristotle.
Doesn't the modern idea of inevitable human progress really come in with the enlightenment?
Did they? For example, the Roman formula for waterproof concrete was lost and only rediscovered (in the 15th Century) when a manuscript came to light. I think it's more than just a lack of people or wealth (though that comes into it of course): people thought of the Romans as being 'superior', hence the effort they went to to preserve surviving classic manuscripts.
It's not to say that the early medieval period couldn't eventually built magnificent edifices or build on the knowledge, but for many centuries, Rome and Greece was seen as something to aspire to.
That isn't relevant as they didn't have the spare resources to dedicate people to the task. If they did a few smart researchers could figure something out. Just going through all their archives would have done the job if they had people to dedicate to the search (though of course they couldn't have known that and so a track to create it from scratch would also be needed).
Depending on where you are talking about there may not have been local resources to make waterproof concrete, which back to my point: they didn't have the resources if they wanted to. Though we have plenty of buildings (most obviously Cathedrals) dating to well before the rediscovery of roman concrete to prove that isn't needed. Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time. Those cathedrals also were in use for church services - usually in the first year of construction - to fuel the dream.
> Those Cathedrals only exist because they had a few resources and so they could build them over time
They also only exist because they used architectural techniques that the Romans never developed, namely the flying buttress, which could support massive relatively thin wall without hundreds of columns and arches everywhere.
I don't think anybody seriously suggests that the medieval period was incapable of developing anything new or of building some stunning things – it's clearly nonsense. They had as many geniuses and craftsman as any generation and they produced some wonderful things comparable to anything we can.
I don't think it's simply a matter of lack of resources, though – some of the early kings had the manpower to do things like build an 80 mile rampart between Mercia and the Welsh states.
In thinking about what you've written, I started to look for more detail on any research into why there was such a drastic change in architecture post the collapse and you're right, it clearly is more complicated than just lost knowledge. I didn't look far, only https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_architecture, but that's enough to suggest that it's now accepted that conscious cultural choice had a lot to do with it as well (if not more…). So I learnt something and will dig into it more - thanks!
But I'm not sure that specific (Anglo Saxon architecture) point really negates the proposition that for a thousand years people looked back to Rome (and later Greece) writers to legitimise their knowledge. This knowledge was sought after and preserved (and amended to fit in with religious dogma, of course). There were innovators, of course, but there's a reason that writers like Galen and Vitruvius, held so much sway for so long, isn't there?
In the political sphere, there were countless (real and figurative) battles to be seen as the heir to the Roman Empire because that was what success looked like… Yes, all these states would have torn each other to shreds anyway, because that's what states do if they're not stopped, but isn't it telling that they did explicitly so in terms of being the inheritor of Rome?
Of course it's all more complicated than that, but it does seem fairly clear that the ancient world generally was seen as something to aspire to, to get back to, in a way that's probably foreign to us now.
Unless I've misunderstood what you're asking for (in which case, apologies…) then there's a setting in `Settings > Desktop & Dock > Mission Control` to govern this behaviour.
Turn off `When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application` and then you'll be able to create a new Safari window in the current Space, not the 'existing Safari space'.
The specific path is for Tahoe, but the setting itself has been there for a long time, I think.
For me the books have depth that the TV series doesn't – and can't – have: some of the plots are dumbed down a bit to give more visual impact, and of course you don't get the same depth of characterisation, or the insights into Lamb's and the others' pasts because much of it comes out in interior monologue, and it's much harder for the shows to, erm, show.
And you miss one of the glories of Herron's writing: as a stylist is on a par with Terry Prachett for cramming wisdom into short witty phrases. He is very good at memorable phrases skewering contemporary life, and particularly politicians. The shows bring some of this out, but there's only so much that you can do in dialogue.
Take this passage from the first book:
> Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-haired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations – Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! – Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. (‘Damn fine city,’ he’d remarked on a trip to Paris. ‘Probably worth defending next time.’) Not everyone who’d worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who’d witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle.
Herron, Mick. Slow Horses: The bestselling thrillers that inspired the hit Apple TV+ show Slow Horses (Slough House Thriller 1) (p. 187). (Function). Kindle Edition.
That is a brilliant piece of characterisation, and if you know anything about British politics, you know exactly who he's describing, and how accurate a character assassination this is. The TV show's Peter Judd goes out of its way to make the character a lot more generic – their Judd is merely 'typical cynical nasty venal politician' and it loses a bit of force accordingly.
Or take the set piece descriptions which start every book: they recreate the seedy world of Slough House in a way that the shows can only hint at.
Not to say the shows aren't very good – they are one of the best things on TV – but the books are even better.
IMO, of course…