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1. Understand everything in context, personal and historical. A woman today wears perfume in order to smell good; 500 years ago she wore it in order not to smell bad; and these two are not the same. A gourmet chef today cooks food in spicy sauce to demonstrate his culinary sophistication and cosmopolitanism; but the sauce was invented to hide the rancour of high meat. So we must read every text through the lens of its era, and not forget that language too is in constant flux.

2. Some years ago I was attending a conference of the Board of Jewish Education in Toronto, Canada, where a good friend who happened to be a Rabbi told a story that summed up my entire attitude to writing and publishing, explained why it took me forty years before I published anything, and still with reservations now that I’ve started. The story of a student who was given an assignment by his professor, on which he worked, fastidiously over many weeks, researching as thoroughly as he could, attending lectures and seminars to obtain background and to hear the arguments pro and con debated; then he wrote, redrafted, asked friends to read and comment, rewrote again, and finally the day came when he had to submit the paper. He waited for the professor’s response, but what came back was simply his own essay, without marking, comment, marginalia, a grade, anything; only a single question at the foot of the final page: “Is this the best you can do?” The student was mortified. After all this endeavour, so brusque and unequivocal a rejection. Undaunted, he returned to the task, went over his research again, rechecked his findings, re-examined the arguments on every side, found new material, restructured his presentation of the whole; and submitted it again. And again the professor’s response: no grade, no marginalia, just the terse and succinct disparagement: “Is this the best you can do?” He rewrote it a third time, had friends read it and reassure him there was nothing left to add or modify…but this time he did not submit it in the usual envelope; he took it by hand, and knocked on the professor’s door. “You cannot imagine how much work I have put into this,” he explained, and the tension in his voice was evident, the cracks through which a sound like tears was echoing. “How many hours, how much revision. And all you can do is throw it back at me with ‘Is this the best you can do?’” “I didn’t throw it back at you,” replied the professor. “I asked a simple question, and I am still waiting for you to answer it.” The student looked perplexed. “What question?” “Is this the best you can do?”. The student stood, bemused, bothered and bewildered. “Yes,” he said, “this is the best I can do. Believe me, it’s the very best.” The professor smiled. “In that case,” he said, “I shall be pleased at last to have the opportunity to read it.”

I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd what I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the human mind, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t ntaetr in what oerdr eht ltteres in a word are, the olny iproamtnt thing is that the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseae the human mind deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Azanmig, huh! Yaeh, and I awlyas tghuhot slpelnig was ipmornatt! And if you raelly can’t raed this, you may be dyslexic.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Soviet poet and novelist, born July 18, 1932 in Zima, Russia - part of the Literary Genealogy section of my novel "Going To The Wall".

   His novel “Wild Berries” (Yagodnyye Mesta, 1981) starts so badly you wonder if he wasn’t deliberately trying to put off the average reader, or simply misleading the lazy censor. Crassly sententious pastoral with love interest, poorly written in formulaic clichés…but keep going long enough and politics takes over, all manner of dialogue and narrative for which a man could be sent to Siberia. And then, all on one page, three very particular moments of redemption:-

1.   “I stood in line all night at the Writers’ Bookstore to buy the one-volume Mandelstam, but didn’t get it. I found it on Nevsky for fifty, from book scalpers.”

   As did I, Yevgeny; as did I.

2.   “Which contemporary poet do you like? Krivtsov?”

   “Pushkin.”

   “No, you didn’t understand me. I’m asking about contemporary poets.”

   “He is the most contemporary.”

   “No, I mean contemporary in the sense of being alive.”

   “He is the most alive.”

   A dialogue I have conducted many times over the years, though I usually choose Aeschylus

3.   “What about Yevtushenko?”

   “His stuff is passé.”

   Nice touch! Nice touch!

   And then another fragment catches my attention:

   “You typed the whole novel ‘The Master and Margarita’! Seryozha exclaimed. “How much time did it take?”

   “Much less than it took Bulgakov to write it,” Kostya joked. “What else could I do? I couldn’t get the book. I don’t have pull. And a book like that should always be around. So I typed it. By the way, it’s very beneficial. You really come to sense the author’s style, the course of his thoughts; you feel every word. I managed to get Mayakovsky and Yesenin. But I had to re-type Pasternak’s one-volume collection. And then I understood with my own fingers that his early poems are denser, more complex; the later ones are more transparent, but diluted. He gained something, but he lost something too.”

   And concealed within this commentary on how to read properly, the continuing act of keeping banned and murdered writers alive and read, by the simple act of mentioning them, which nobody but Yevtushenko could have dared to do and got away with – an act of literary heroism which few western readers now will even recognise.

I am writing this on August 15, which is Macbeth's day, though I rather wish I'd started yesterday, for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

Everyone knows the story of Macbeth - the monster who murdered Old King Duncan in his bed, slaughtered his way to despotic power, and died at the hands of Macduff on the steps of Dunsinane Castle after the Battle of Burnham Wood. The "facts" are surprisingly different.

August 14 is the date of Duncan's death, in 1040, but in battle, not in bed. He had become king of Scotland at the age of 19 when his grandfather, Malcolm II, died in 1034. He led an army into Northumbria in 1039, but was driven ignominiously back. Then he turned his attention north, into Macbeth's territory, to prevent the only lawful challenge to his right to rule, though Macbeth hadn't actually issued such a challenge. Macbeth - which should be written MacBeth - called for help from his cousin the Earl of Orkney, and together they defeated Duncan near Forres. Duncan died in battle. He was just 26 years old.

As to MacBeth himself, he was the Mormaer of Moray, not the Thane of Cawdor. August 15 was his death-day, but not at Dunsinane, and not at the hands of MacDuff. 17 years had passed since the Battle of Forres. Accounts of his kingship suggest he was widely respected for his strong leadership and wisdom, that he ruled successfully and peacefully from his castle at Dunsinnan (Dunsinane is another of Shakespeare's errors) north of Perth, and that the realm of Scotland was so secure the king was able to go on pilgrimage to Rome in 1050. But Malcolm, Duncan's surviving son who had been taken to safety in Northumbria after his father's death, was determined that he would be king of Scotland. In 1054, supported by Earl Siward, he marched to stake his claim, defeating MacBeth at the Battle of Dunsinnan - but not killing him. MacBeth remained king, and restored Malcolm's lands. But Malcolm wasn't satisfied. In 1057 he raised anotther army, and attacked MacBeth at Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire. It was here, on August 15, that MacBeth was defeated and killed, leaving Malcolm as king.

So why did Shakespeare get it so badly wrong? He wrote the play for King James I, just after his coronation. James was also king of Scotland and wanted a version of his ancestry that fitted his picture of how history should look. And why all those witches? In 1597 James wrote a treatise on the subject, entitled "Daemonologie"; he was obsessed by witches to the point he personally carried out their torture. Who could resist then, including them in a dramatic work of fiction?

The Internet affords possibilities that never existed before, one of which is the writing of cooperative or collaborative works, another of watching a novel grow by stages. 
 

"A Journey in Time" will be published in 2014. In this blog I shall create a sequel, "A Book of Days", though plot and characters, if any besides the historical, remains open. Each entry will add parts, so you can watch it grow - and contribute, with full acknowledgement. Where "Journey" is fixed on a single date, this will cover the entire year, but focus on a single subject: the creations of the human brain. Submit your suggestions to argaman@theargamanpress.com. I do not guarantee inclusion.
 

But the Internet is full of Books of Days. You can obtain long lists of who was born and died this day in history, or what events deemed to be significant took place.
 

Indeed. But how much is excluded from those lists, and why? Facts are meaningless without context and commentary (Santorio Sanctorius, born March 29 1561, Trieste). Facts are not knowledge, simply because they can be repeated in an exam or on a quiz-show. Without context, without awareness of the agenda of the historian who selected them in, or out, we cannot determine what is "true" or "correct", let alone draw lessons from them. I imagine a future history book which will declare that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden and Julian Assange were heroes in the cause of freedom, and another which will declare them traitors to the same cause. How can we make an intelligent determination, and use history to construct the future?
 

We create history fictionally by misremembering the past. Sometimes wilfully, as propaganda, to acculturate patriotism, to ensure the past is remembered as we wish it to be; sometimes by denial, as Holocaust revisionists attempt; sometimes by ignoring evidence, as in the case of Roderigo Lopes - another of my books scheduled for release in 2014. Once the fictional version is established as "history", we reinforce it by repetition - the myth of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, or that other residue of pre-Christian paganism transformed into a political hero, Robin Hood: I shall return to both later in the year.
 

I am fascinated by the ways in which novels and movies determine history - the elevation to sainthood of Oskar Schindler or Lawrence of Arabia, for example; but also the crookbackedness of Richard III, which has become so "historical" that a hunchback disinterred in Leicester in 2013 has been "confirmed" as his corpse, when Shakespeare knew he wasn't hunchbacked, and was satirising a different member of the aristocracy, who was - Robert Cecil. But the corpse is now fact, and the dispute only over tourist opportunities: York versus Leicester.
 

But what of the aforementioned Sanctorius, with whom you are certainly unfamiliar? In 1610 he devised a temperature scale for Galileo's recently invented air thermometer, long before Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Celsius. In 1613 he developed it for use with humans, and then produced a hygrometer, which measures the density of gases. A remarkable man, who would be a Nobel candidate today, and deserves to be remembered for his life, but also for his death - yet he is absent from most history books. He died on Feb 22 1636, in Venice, burned at the stake by the Inquisition as a heretic. His crime: the pursuit of science.

   I started writing when I was 17, at school. Poems and short stories to begin with, then first attempts at novel-writing, both historical and contemporary, and a number of what I hope may be considered scholarly works along the way. 40 years and more than 25 books later I still haven't managed to convince myself that writing and publishing are in any way connected, probably because I've known a lot of published writers, not one of whom ever managed to publish the book they wrote - in every case, the books that bear their names are the result of a literary agent's rewriting to make it showable to a publisher, and then the editorial committee at the publisher's rewriting it again to make it filmable. So there's writing, and then there's publishing, and between the two there are all the layers of thought, imagination, craft and artistry that made the writing worthwhile in the first place.

   But then the age of the Internet came along, and suddenly it's possible to put your work out there for people to read or reject, exactly as you wrote it, standing or falling on its own merits.

  Starting in September 2013, and taking advantage of the fact that one no longer needs an agent or a publisher, I will begin publishing these books under the imprint of TheArgamanPress. Which book, on which date? Follow this blog, or go to TheArgamanPress.com, for information.

 And why TheArgamanPress? The ancient Hebrews lived in Canaan, whose aboriginal inhabitants called it "Kinnahu", a word which means "purple", and is derived from the manufacture of a purple dye from the crushed shell of a sea-snail called the murex; with this dye Joseph's coat of many colours could be made, the priestly garment of the Hyksos "shepherd-kings", the scarlet of all priests and kings and tribal sheikhs for ever after. The neighbours of the Canaanites were the Phoenicians, who invented the alphabet that would become Greek, then Roman, finally English; but also Hebrew. They called their land "Phoinix", which also means "purple", and for the same reason. The Bible tells us that there were three shades of purple, the one derived directly from the juices of the murex, and two others, obtained by diluting the dye with milk or henna to soften it. The latter made red and blue, the former remained purple, and in Hebrew the word for "purple" is "Argaman".

   Writing "The Flaming Sword" in the early 1980s, I needed a codename for Bernhard Aaronsohn when he joined the French Maquis, and later the Black Underground in Poland. Imagery throughout the book had played with the colour purple, from the lilac trees in his parents' garden which were my way of taking Eliot's poem "The Wasteland" as a source text for the whole book, to the colour of iodine, which can paint bruises back into healing. So Bernhard Aaronsohn became "Argaman", and the quintet found its name as well. So, now, the means of publishing it.