Better to be bold than right

That's the first law of academic job talk as set forth by BU historian Bruce Schulman in an engrossing cautionary tale of a history department interview gone horribly bad.

Schulman is included in History News Network's roundup of Top Young Historians making a mark on the profession at a young age.

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The remarkable Lord Cochrane (above) was the real-life inspiration for Captain "Lucky Jack" Aubrey in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, on which (as some astute readers have discerned) I've recently embarked. (Next stop, Desolation Island.)

Not having read any of the books on originally seeing the film Master & Commander a few years back, I had no opinion on the casting of Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey, a point of contention in some quarters.

Now, listening to Patrick Tull's outstanding audio-book readings of the series, I picture Aubrey in my mind's eye as a young Robert Hardy from his Siegried Farnon days on All Creatures Great & Small, before he went on to play Churchill.

As for Russell Crowe, he'd make a fine Richard Sharpe – an observation, come to find, that also has been made before at the Llamas'. On the Sharpe front, I checked out an episode of the Sean Bean series that ran on PBS and found it pretty much unwatchable: Heavy metal guitars do not a Napoleonic War saga make.

I did watch Master & Commander again a few weeks back and still found it entertaining – just not the Aubrey-Maturin of my imagination.

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I may have to try the Flashman series next on the recommendation of Man About Mayfair, whose fine blog is largely dedicated to staving off massed ranks of Dervishes and then dressing for dinner afterwards. Were my aftershave a website it would be Man About Mayfair.