Life on Earth – David Attenborough

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The first in a colossal series of adventures round the world and what would eventually be seen as an incredible lifetimes work is my third natural history book for August but really it is possibly the most significant book and programme series by Attenborough in his career as it totally changed both television’s view of natural history and the global influence of such programmes. Nobody, not even David Attenborough, foresaw back in the late 1970’s just where this would lead and that almost fifty years after he started planning Life on Earth that he would still be writing and presenting on huge television wildlife spectaculars. Attenborough had started out in television back in the mid 1950’s, always with a natural history theme to his work and after the massive success of Zoo Quest, which started in 1954 and which had Atttenborough as the presenter at short notice after the originally planned presenter fell ill, he became a familiar face on British television. In 1965 however his career took a different direction when he became controller of BBC2, one of the then just three TV channels in the UK and ultimately rose to Director of Programmes, taking over control of the output of both BBC channels in 1969. Amazingly despite the high pressure management role he now had he still managed to fit in presenting the occasional wildlife programme. In 1972 when offered the ultimate top job in British television, that of Director General of the BBC he declined and abruptly resigned.

Why? Well he missed the hands on presenting role where he had made his name and after a short TV wildlife series in Asia he started planning an altogether more ambitious work ‘Life on Earth’ a series of thirteen 55 minute long programmes each of which would focus on one aspect of life and would try to tell as much of the whole story from the first single cellular creatures through to the incredible diversity of today. The series took years to film and was well in advance of anything seen before from any television channel anywhere in the world when it was first broadcast weekly between 16th January and 10th April 1979. It was an immediate hit and the accompanying book, which was released as the first episode was broadcast was already into its third reprint by the time the series had finished. My copy is the first revised edition and amazingly the tenth printing dated September 1979, just nine months after it first came out.

Back then you couldn’t record, or buy for watching again, TV programmes so you saw it when it was first broadcast and then all you had was the book and that probably explains the massive amount of reprints. Whilst reading this book again, for probably the first time in over forty years, I watched the entire series again on the DVD set that came out in 2003 and I have to say it has stood up remarkably well.

The book closely follows the structure of the television series with thirteen chapters each of which is dedicated to an episode, so we start with the first appearance of life three thousand million years ago and by the end of the first chapter get to the beginning of multicellular life. But this first chapter, like the first episode is also an introduction to the series and begins laying out just what a massive project it was to be. Reading and alternating watching the programmes made me appreciate how similar but also how different the two media are. The book can go into detail that watching a presenter speil through on screen would be potentially overbearing. With the video you want to concentrate on the wonderful pictures but in the book where there are a dozen or so images per chapter you want to get immersed in the words and can take in more information at one sitting, so the two formats complement one another.

What you also are aware of looking back from today is that Life on Earth whilst groundbreaking and feeling spacious at the time in giving almost twelve hours television and 311 pages in the book, feels nowadays like a rapid flit through its subject. Chapter eight of Life on Earth entitled ‘Lords of the Air’ covers the whole subject of birds in just thirty pages, I also have the book for the much later series ‘The Life of Birds’ (1998) which oddly takes the same total number (311) pages to cover just birds over ten chapters again mirroring the episodes of that TV series. So vastly more information and detail but ‘The Life of Birds’ and the other follow up series would not have existed if ‘Life on Earth’ had not been such a resounding worldwide success. The book is an interesting read and an excellent start for anyone who wants to get a grasp on the development of species and how our planet has become populated with countless different creatures. One point that should be made is that the emphasis is on creatures that are alive today, yes dinosaurs are mentioned and fossils shown but only on the way to modern examples. There is no specific chapter on the hundreds of millions of years that dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Frankly something had to go to get the vast subject still within the time frame for the television shows and you can’t go out and film dinosaurs so they are mainly dealt with in passing.

The book has lots of wonderful wildlife photographs inside and perhaps my favourite is the one above of a three toed sloth taken in Panama by David Attenborough himself, one of nineteen photos in the book that he took. The cover photo of a Panamanian Red-eyed Tree Frog, which became an icon of the series, was also taken by Attenborough. Reliving a television milestone which I remember watching enthralled back when I was a teenager has been a great experience, the book appears to be out of print at the current time but due to the huge numbers sold over the decades it is very easy to get a copy.

The Year of Sitting Dangerously – Simon Barnes

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So this August I am devoting to natural history and by contrast with last week’s book from the 18th century this is so contemporary that it was written during the various covid lockdowns here in the UK and was first published by Simon & Schuster on the 13th April 2023. Simon Barnes was looking forward to a trip to South Africa as a guide on a wildlife tour when all of a sudden he wasn’t going anywhere, so decided to really not go anywhere and just sit in a chair at the bottom of his garden for a year and record his experiences. Now Barnes is lucky, he lives in the Norfolk Broads, an extensive flat wetland area to the east of the UK so his bird watching possibilities just sitting at home are considerably better than the average town dweller, although by the nature of it being a flat open landscape (the highest point in Norfolk is just 344 feet (105m) above sea level) he was rather exposed to the elements.

Oddly, although he had decided to do this he didn’t explain what he was doing to his family for several months, they must have assumed that he was having a rather strange reaction to being forced to go nowhere. He is actually quite fastidious about sitting out and noting whatever he sees which is why the book runs to 336 pages from Sunday 27th September 2020 to Monday 27th September 2021, the extra day signalling that he intends to continue sitting out and making notes whenever he can going forward. It isn’t an end to his experiment but a continuation of an experience he has grown to love regardless of the discomfort sometimes. I have included a couple more sample passages below so you can see the changes to the writing style as the year progresses. I think he gets more poetic as he sinks more and more into the communion with nature that his self imposed routine gives him.

There is humour and drama aplenty as he follows the lives of the various creatures he is observing, from the majestic marsh harriers swooping across his eyeline to the much bullied buzzards, which every bird seems engaged in driving away. The herons in the lakes and marshes just beyond the river flowing past his seat and the great flocks of corvids (rooks, jackdaws and crows mainly) that are often seen, to the gay pair of male swans that encroach into his garden and one morning had clearly been roosting overnight in his chair judging by the mess. Through the year we see the animals that live here all the time along with the seasonal visitors, them pairing off in the summer months and hopefully raising young although obviously not in the case of the gay swans the relationship between them only slowly dawns on Barnes as he watches them, initially trying to work out which was the female. We also get brief insights into his family life, especially his increasing frail father who is finding living alone in London through covid lock downs particularly difficult.

I was really looking forward to reading what he saw on my birthday, in early June, and was somewhat disappointed to find that he actually did manage to get away for a weeks family holiday boating on the broads which coincided with the day in question so there were no entries between the 8th and 14th June. I am always intrigued when reading diaries to see what the person was up to on my birthday, it adds something personal to the reading experience, however it wasn’t to be with this book. That however was the only slight let down in a book I have thoroughly enjoyed and definitely learnt from. His descriptions of birds, mammals, and in the later chapters insects as he starts to take more notice of them as well are really good especially as he explains how he determines which species he is actually looking at from bird calls, flight patterns, the shape of wings and other features and what they tell you about the way the bird looks for food or finds a mate. I am by no means a bird watcher although I do watch birds when they are around, a fine but important distinction I think. I no longer have a garden, but when I did I had numerous feeders up to attract birds, nowadays I am restricted to what I can see from my living room window although that does quite often include buzzards wheeling over the valley so it’s not all bad.

Each month starts with a beautiful pencil sketch of a bird that features in the chapter. These drawings were done by Simon Barnes’ wife, the artist Cindy Lee Wright. The one I have included above is the lovely picture of a robin which starts the chapter ‘February’. I have a certain fondness for robins, they are definitely the bird least bothered by human presence near them here in the UK and used to perch watching me as I worked in my garden in case I unearthed anything worth eating.

I can definitely recommend this book, the idea of just sitting in one place for a year and writing about what was seen from that vantage point could have been dull but I found myself racing through the pages totally drawn in by the gentle and engaging tone of the writing.

The Natural History of Selborne – Gilbert White

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To start off my latest August group of books, which this time is focused on natural history, I am beginning with a classic of the genre, Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne first published in 1789, along with his Antiquities of Selborne, which initially was usually included but nowadays is largely omitted leaving just his famous work The Natural History. Both of these books consist of a series of letters, which in the case of Antiquities none of were never actually posted to anyone and in The Natural History several were also not posted but were instead created to match the rest of the content. The ones that were posted are to two different people over a period of almost two decades, but even these have been edited for publication so the whole is rather contrived. Gilbert White was the curate of Selborne on four separate occasions living in what was his grandfathers vicarage and his younger brother John, who is mentioned several times in the book as providing extra information was a vicar in Gibraltar. He is now famous for this book, which was one of the first true natural history volumes based on studies of wild fauna rather than dead examples. That is not to say White didn’t make use of freshly shot birds to complete his analysis but he was rare in studying live animals and how they reacted with the environment to give colour to his studies.

The book starts with forty four letters to the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, the first nine of which were never posted and were written much later to form an introduction to the book when White decided to publish his notes on local wildlife and plants. These describe the village of Selborne and the surrounding countryside and so give a useful if somewhat tedious background to the observations that he then goes on to make. The second batch of sixty six letters are to English lawyer, naturalist and one time Vice President of The Royal Society the Honorable Daines Barrington and again several of these were never posted especially letters fifty six to sixty five, which are concocted from White’s daily journals and provide interesting details of weather extremes he has experienced in the village including winter temperatures of below zero degrees Fahrenheit (-18 degrees Centigrade) with ice forming below the beds in his house. These also include an account of the effect of a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland from June 1783 to February 1784 which killed around a quarter of the population of Iceland and left volcanic ash in the skies over Europe for months.

the peculiar haze, or smoky fog, that prevailed for many weeks in this island, and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man … The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. 

Letter LXV

One of the frequent issues raised in the various letters is the possibility of bird migration, at the time this was merely a suggestion that it might happen with the majority view, including that of Barrington, being that birds that were not seen all year round hibernated through the winter even though no birds had ever been found in such a torpid state. White is in favour of migration but doesn’t believe that something as small and frail as a bird could travel long distances so keeps going back to the hibernation theory and indeed on at least one occasion caused a potential site for ‘sleeping’ birds to be dug up searching for them. Needless to say they found nothing. But his observations and attempts to understand the natural world from them was pioneering and one of the letters regarding the usefulness of earthworms was undoubtedly an influence on Charles Darwin a hundred years later when he wrote his monograph on the subject.

Four of the letters to Daines Barrington are in the form of monographs and were published in the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society which is the worlds oldest scientific journal, started in 1665, and still in print. These four letters are by their nature longer and more detailed than the others and concern four related bird species which attracted White’s particular attention. Letter XVI is about House Martins, letter XVIII discusses Swallows, Letter XX details the habits of Sand Martins and letter XXI deals with Swifts. These are excellent articles on the differences and similarities between the four species and were ground breaking observations at the time (December 1773 to September 1774). In my opinion the letters to Barrington tend to be more interesting than the ones to Pennant which are more deferential to the addressee as Pennant had published several books on natural history including a four volume British Zoology. It is noticeable however that although there have been at least three hundred editions of The Natural History of Selborne and it has never been out of print since first coming out in 1789 I cannot find any currently in print editions of any of Thomas Pennant’s works.

My copy is the Penguin Books first edition from March 1941, which was originally planned to be a part of a second set of Penguin Illustrated Classics following the original ten from May 1938 but this set never happened. However this explains why this book, along with Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, which will be covered later this year, has lovely wood engravings within the text, some of which I have included above, unlike other Penguin Main Series books which are just plain text as these two were designed before the continuation of Illustrated Classics was shelved. The engravings in this volume are by the wonderful artist Clare Leighton who despite being born and brought up in England had moved to America by the time she did these pictures for Penguin and where she continued to live for the rest of her life, dying in 1989 at the age of ninety one.

The Club of Queer Trades – G K Chesterton

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The Club of Queer Trades is an organisation that only admits members who earn their living from a unique perspective. Having come up with this concept Chesterton wrote six excellent short stories based around a narrator called Charlie “Cherub” Swinburne, his friend, and retired judge, Basil Grant and Basil Grant’s younger brother Rupert Grant who is a private detective. Between them they experience several odd encounters with The Club.

In the individual reviews below I’m just going to set up the unusual story in each one to avoid giving away the queer trade and the denouement of each tale.

The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown

Major Brown is a perfectly respectable retired military gentleman whose passion is growing ever increasing varieties of pansies so when he is encouraged by a vendor of such plants to look over a wall near where he lives and sees spelt out in a bed of pansies “Death to Major Brown” he is more than a little perturbed. He enters the house, finds a rather unusually decorated room and speaks for a while with a somewhat enigmatic woman before hearing a noise and confronting a large man in the cellar, they fight and Major Brown comes away with the mans coat as the man himself escapes. Totally confused by his experiences the Major comes to consult Rupert Grant, who suggests that they should go to the address found on an envelope in one of the coats pockets. When they do this, instead of the confrontation expected by Rupert, the Major is simply presented with an invoice.

The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation

This story is quite a bit simpler than the first in that it revolves around a character called Mr Wimpole who has developed a reputation as a great wit at dinner parties in London if a rather cruel one as witnessed by Basil and Charlie when they pay a call on Lord Beaumont one evening. They are still in the hallway when after a gale of laughter from the dining room Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh emerges.

“Now, my dear chap,” began Lord Beaumont hastily.

“I tell you, Beaumont, I won’t stand it,” exploded the large old gentleman. “I won’t be made game of by a twopenny literary adventurer like that. I won’t be made a guy. I won’t—”

Upon being calmed down and re-entering the dining room it is clear from another bout of laughter that Cholmondeliegh had been made a fool of again.

But what is really going on here? It’s not what it seems to be.

The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit

Rupert was dressing for dinner, for he was due to go out with Basil when the Reverend Ellis Shorter unexpectedly called on him, apparently at the suggestion of Major Brown. He had a very strange tale of being set upon and forcibly being dressed as an old woman and made to commit a crime at gun point by a group of five apparently old women who were in reality cross dressed younger men. The vicar was bald headed and with substantial whiskers but these were concealed by the poke bonnet he was forced to wear, the abduction was apparently carefully planned. He had only finally escaped from them when they walked past a policemen and he pretended to be drunk so that the officer would take an interest in what was going on.

All this took a long time to explain as the Rev. Shorter was very unlike his name and was surprisingly long winded in telling his tale so that there was no chance for Rupert to go to his acquaintances home for dinner and indeed Basil would probably be already back at his home so he suggested going to see him only to find that he had also not made it to the meal as he had been called on by an elderly vicar with an unbelievable tale. Just what was going on? Basil had already worked it out.

The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent

Lieutenant Drummond Keith was an interesting character and like Major Brown a retired military man but not as successful in rising through the ranks as the Major, this means that he is also quite poor and like a lot of the poor moved around London from rented property to rented property struggling to find one he can both afford and enjoy. He had few possessions indeed we are introduced to him by means of this small collection of items.

He carried from house to house and from parish to parish a kit which consisted practically of five articles. Two odd-looking, large-bladed spears, tied together, the weapons, I suppose, of some savage tribe, a green umbrella, a huge and tattered copy of the Pickwick Papers, a big game rifle, and a large sealed jar of some unholy Oriental wine. These always went into every new lodging, even for one night; and they went in quite undisguised, tied up in wisps of string or straw, to the delight of the poetic gutter boys in the little grey streets.

I had forgotten to mention that he always carried also his old regimental sword. But this raised another odd question about him. Slim and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was quite grey, though his rather wild almost Italian moustache retained its blackness, and his face was careworn under its almost Italian gaiety. To find a middle-aged man who has left the Army at the primitive rank of lieutenant is unusual and not necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and solid this fact, like his endless flitting, did the mysterious gentleman no good.

We meet the Lieutenant as he calls on and also borrows £100 from Basil who seems to regard him as a good friend, and he then says he is heading to his house agent. Rupert however is not convinced that Drummond is all that he seems and insists on going to the agent with him much to the irritation of Drummond who nevertheless acquiesces. After a short meeting with Mr Montmorency regarding his new property they leave and Drummond is caught up in a street brawl which Rupert incorrectly accuses him of instigating. The policeman who takes his address later reports that there is no such house as The Elms, Buxton Common, near Purley, Surrey. So where is our mysterious Lieutenant? Basil is sure he can find him.

The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd

This story is an outlier, as I fail to see how Professor Chadd would raise an income from his eccentricity so he cannot be regarded as a member of The Club. Indeed the professor had invented a new language where he expressed himself via dance, nowadays interpretive dance is well known but this may be the first time it is described in literature.

The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady

In this final tale Rupert and Charlie are walking along a quiet road in London when they hear a female voice from a basement saying “When shall I get out? When shall I get out? Will they ever let me out?” Upon being rebuffed by the gentlemen living in the house they determine to return with Basil who doesn’t seem in the least concerned regarding the lady in the cellar and appears to strike up friendly terms with the two homeowners. Rupert and Charlie are concerned however and decide to take the men prisoner whilst they rescue the woman. This they duly due in an unintentionally comic manner with Basil assisting in the conflict but when they make their way down to the basement the lady refuses to leave her captivity and it is only when Basil also descends that she agrees to go.

This story has a surprise ending, set several months after the apparent end of the tale where it is finally revealed whose queer trade had led to the locking up of the old lady and the reason for her initial refusal to be rescued. I loved this final twist so I’m not about to give it away here.

The short stories originally appeared in Harpers Weekly between December 1903 and July 1904 before being first published as a collection by Harper and Brothers in 1905. My copy is the Penguin Books first edition from October 1946 which is in remarkably good condition for a paperback book that is approaching its 77th birthday and which is printed on the fairly poor paper stock still in use this close to the end of the war. I have previously reviewed one of Chesterton’s earliest novels ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill‘ written in 1904 but which was set in 1984 and which inspired George Orwell to also set his classic dystopian novel published in 1948 in the same year. Almost a hundred years after its first publication The Club of Queer Trades is still in print which I suggest says a lot for its quality and I have to agree. Chesterton wrote many superb books along with hundreds of short stories, several of which have disappeared out of print over the years but his best are still easily available. At some point in the future I will cover the five volumes, plus a few uncollected tales, of Father Brown short stories for which he is nowadays most famous but I recommend him as one of those rare authors where if ever you encounter one of his books it is almost certainly worth reading. Oh and as for Professor Chick and his own new trade, he is never mentioned again after the introduction so I have no idea what he did.

The Phantom Atlas – Edward Brooke-Hitching

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Edward Brooke-Hitching is one of the researchers for the very popular and long running BBC quiz programme QI also known as the QI Elves and turned his love of unusual trivia into his first book ‘Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports’. The Phantom Atlas was his second publication, coming out in November 2016 and very much draws on his love of maps and his own incredible collection of them. Since then he has done three more atlases, one of which ‘The Golden Atlas’ which illustrates famous explorers routes with contemporary maps, I also have in my library. This book however is particularly fascinating as it deals with places that don’t exist yet made it onto maps either in error or in some cases as deliberate fakes. The first of these I want to highlight from the book was one I already knew about and that is The Mountains of Kong.

As can be seen from the map above there is an apparently unbroken line of mountains running across the entire African continent and variations of these appeared on over forty maps by various different cartographers probably starting with James Rennell in 1798. The map illustrated here is by John Cary from 1805 and shows the Mountains of Kong running right across from almost the west coast to eastern Africa and the equally fictitious Mountains of the Moon which were believed to be the source of the River Nile. It was not until 1889 when Louis Gustave Binger gave a talk in Paris and explained that he had been to the site of the Mountains of Kong and not only were there no mountains but there wasn’t even a decent sized hill in sight. However of the over fifty places described and illustrated in detail in the book this is the only one I already knew about, a 6,000km range of mountains that were regularly mapped for almost a century without actually existing being possibly the largest geographical error you can get.

Most of the errors with islands that simply don’t exist is down to faulty navigation and the rediscovery of islands already mapped in their correct location but some are simply works of fiction including at least three islands ‘discovered’ by Benjamin Morrell, one of which he named after himself.

Morrell’s Island along with another of his fakes, Byers’s Island survived on charts for well over a century and both even made it through the British Admiralty’s 1875 cull of 123 islands from their charts that they didn’t believe existed although three of these turned out to exist after all. It is details like this that make Brooke-Hitching’s book so fascinating, he also has sections of the fabulous beasts included on various ancient maps such as Blemmyes a race of headless people with their faces in their chests that appear on the Nuremberg Chronicle map or the Sea Pig from The Carta Marina. It is the vast array of old maps illustrated in the book that are its prime interest to myself, I have a few old maps but nothing like the collection that Brooke-Hitching has to hand. One final example from the book shows just how far back this false history goes with the Cassiterides which the ancient Greeks believed were where the Phoenicians sourced their tin.

The map above is from 1694 and includes the Tin Islands as they became known as a somewhat enlarged and moved version of the Isles of Scilly which was pretty close to reality as the actual source was Cornwall, the English mainland county just to the east of these islands.

There are lots more examples of dodgy geography in the book which is well worth acquiring if you have any interest at all in maps, at over 250 pages it superbly covers its subject and from the acknowledgements at the back it is clear that Brooke-Hitching does indeed own a lot of the maps featured in his work. The book was published by Simon & Schuster who have also published Brooke-Hitching’s other works.

The Time Machine – H G Wells

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First published in 1895 The Time Machine largely created a whole new genre of fiction, for this was the first use of the phrase ‘time machine’ applied to a device to enable time travel and the first time such a machine was described. I bought my edition new in 1975 and because the title story is basically a novella, being just under one hundred pages long, the book also includes another of Wells’ short stories ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’, more of which later on in this review.

Throughout the book the main protagonist and inventor of the machine, is simply referred to as ‘The Time Traveller’, no other name is given and indeed only one of the characters we meet at the start and end of the story, which is set in what was then the present day, i.e. late Victorian London, is named, if we get anything for the others it is simply their professions. The story starts with ‘The Time Traveller’ hosting his weekly dinner club of friends and producing an intricate model of what he claims, to pretty well universal disbelief, is a time machine, placing it on a table he adjusts a lever and it vanishes. He then leads the incredulous small party into his laboratory and shows them the almost complete full size version. He explains that he will complete it in the next few days and will tell them all about his adventures at the following weekly gathering. He arrives late for this meal and is clearly dirty, injured and limping so he apologises, goes to wash and change and then after ravenously eating his fill heads off to the smoking room to tell his tale.

The story he tells of a journey into the far future to the year 802701 where he meets a race of small people called the Eloi who appear to have an idyllic lifestyle, eating the abundant fruit growing all around them, living in huge partially ruined buildings and having no need to work or otherwise stress themselves. It soon becomes clear however that they are terribly afraid of the dark. The Time Traveller however has a very specific and different fear, which is that in the morning when he goes back to his machine he finds that it has disappeared and he is therefore trapped in the future. The descriptions of how The Time Traveller gradually works out what the true and terrifying situation that the Eloi are in and the dangers posed by the subterranean Morlocks who had taken his machine is wonderfully done. You can see him slowly working out the real relationship, after several false starts, between the two races that have descended from man as he knew it and the disgust he feels at his conclusions until eventually he manages to retrieve his machine and escape.

The various radio, TV and film dramatisations of the book have varied wildly in their use of the original material so I recommend reading the story as Wells intended. It’s an extremely good tale and as I wrote at the start of this review it gave birth to a whole genre of travellers in time using a machine of some sort to do so.

The illustration on the cover is by Alan Lee now best known for his work as conceptual designer, with John Howe, on the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films but is a book illustrator par excellence see the Folio Society limited edition of The Wanderer I reviewed back in early 2020. As I would expect from an artist with his attention to detail the machine and indeed the attacking Morlocks are exactly as described in the book.

The Man Who Could Work Miracles

Also set in late Victorian England, this story was first published in 1898, we have if anything a more amazing tale than ‘The Time Machine’ as we follow the misadventures of a man who unexpectedly finds he has developed miraculous powers. Mr Fotheringay starts the tale in a bar where an argument was unfolding regarding the impossibility of miracles to demonstrate his point he gets agreement that the oil lamp in front of them would not be able to continue functioning normally if it was upside down and then says “Turn upsy-down without breaking, and go on burning steady”. To everyone’s amazement, including his own, the lamp does exactly that, but he finds that he has to expend considerable mental effort to hold it like that so it soon crashes to the ground. This was his first miracle but would definitely not be his last.

Fotheringay experiments with his power when he returns home and in the morning continues outside with ever wilder attempts which he sometimes gets wrong by not wording exactly what he wants to happen precisely. Until when surprised by a policeman whom he had accidentally hit with his stick he sends him to Hades and then repents and decides to move him to San Francisco presumably because it is far away and marginally better than Hell. Ultimately, again whilst not considering his words fully, he causes massive death and destruction and realising his mistake for his last miracle returns everyone and everything back to the bar just before he upturned the lamp and also removes his ability to perform miracles. It’s a really fun story and again Wells is experimental in his style with a fantasy story set in his present day,

I always associate Wells with late Victorian times, possibly because of books like The Time Machine and War of the Worlds both of which were written in the 1890’s but he wrote throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century, dying in 1946 at the age of 79. Until writing earned him enough money to give up he mainly worked as a teacher, indeed he was A A Milne’s first science teacher. The Time Machine was his first novel but he had been writing short stories and journalistic articles for several years before that honing his skills that would make him a world famous author.

Confessions of a Bookseller & Remainders of the Day – Shaun Bythell

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Shaun Bythell’s first book, ‘The Diary of a Bookseller‘, was one of the very first books I reviewed on this blog back in January 2018. Since then he has written three more books, two of which continue his diary of owning the largest secondhand book shop in Scotland, which is in Wigtown and it is these two books I have read this week. The diaries cover the following periods:

  • The Diary of a Bookseller – Published 2017 – covers Wednesday 5th February 2014 to Wednesday 4th February 2015.
  • Confessions of a Bookseller – Published 2019 – covers Thursday 1st January 2015 to Thursday 31st December 2015
  • Remainders of the Day – Published 2022 – covers Friday 5th February 2016 to Saturday 4th February 2017

It was only as I typed the list above that I realised that there is a five week overlap between the first two books so had to get ‘The Diary of a Bookseller’ off the shelf to compare the entries. They are completely different even down to the number of orders, customers and shop takings.

Wednesday 21st January – Diary of a Bookseller

Wednesday 21st January – Confessions of a Bookseller

As the third book, like the first, starts on the 5th of February I’m left wondering if the 1st January to 4th February in Confessions and which are clearly labelled 2015 are actually entries for 2016 transposed to the start by an overzealous editor who assumed that a diary should be for a calendar year.

The books are quite long, 328 pages for Confessions and 377 for Remainders but reading them just flies by and I finished both books inside four days. As I mentioned in my review of his first book I also own and run an independent specialist shop so the interactions with customers he details are frighteningly familiar and all the funnier for that. He has also noticed that anyone who comes through the door and says out loud “Oh I’m in heaven, this is just the sort of shop I love”, or words to that effect never buy anything, but will inevitably spend a lot a lot of time wandering round the shop and moving stock from shelf to shelf whilst not doing so. This means that you then have to spend even more time putting things back where they should be so that actual customers have a chance of finding them. I’m going to lend the books to my staff as I’m sure they will appreciate them as well and I’m thankful I don’t have staff as mad as Shaun seems to.

A few months after writing my review of The Diary of a Bookseller in 2018 I met Shaun in Hay on Wye, the Welsh book town that Wigtown has modelled itself on, lots of book shops all in one small place may sound like overkill but it really works by making the town a specific destination for collectors and there are few things I love more than wandering round book shops. Shaun was being interviewed by Jasper Fforde as part of a book collectors Instagram event which the owner of my local secondhand bookshop and I had also given a talk at a couple of days earlier on the subject of collecting Penguin books. Shaun came over as a really nice person but then again I wasn’t trying to buy a book off him at the time, I still haven’t made it to Wigtown but I’m determined to get there, in fact I just checked and it’s 285 miles from where I live and would take just over five hours to get there, the Google maps picture of the shop is from this month and shows a copy of Remainders of the Day in the right hand window along with the inevitable large number of boxes of more stock just inside the door and by the other window.

Down and Out in Paris and London – George Orwell

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I was introduced to Orwell in my first year at Grammar School, so aged eleven, when we studied Animal Farm and I’ve read a lot of his works since but somehow not included Down and Out in Paris and London which was his first book. I have no idea how I missed it especially as reading it now I loved the detailed descriptive narrative of his times in poverty in Paris and living amongst tramps around London. The writing is totally immersive and you feel with him as he lives hand to mouth, sometimes not eating for days at a time because he simply has no money left especially after all his meagre savings were stolen leaving him with just the few francs in his pocket. It is after this financial disaster that he seeks out an old friend Boris, who is a Russian émigré, and had often told him of the easy money to be made in tips as a waiter, but Boris had also fallen on hard times and together they scour the city looking for work and not finding it until after many days surviving by pawning their dwindling clothes supply they drop ‘lucky’ and get jobs in the hell of a kitchen of a hotel that Orwell leaves unnamed, just calling it X.

I was at work from seven in the morning till a quarter past nine at night; first at washing crockery, then at scrubbing the tables and floors of the employees’ dining-room, then at polishing glasses and knives, then at fetching meals, then at washing crockery again, then at fetching more meals and washing more crockery. It was easy work, and I got on well with it except when I went to the kitchen to fetch meals. The kitchen was like nothing I had ever seen or imagined—a stifling, low-ceilinged inferno of a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths and the clanging of pots and pans. It was so hot that all the metal-work except the stoves had to be covered with cloth. In the middle were furnaces, where twelve cooks skipped to and fro, their faces dripping sweat in spite of their white caps. Round that were counters where a mob of waiters and plongeurs clamoured with trays. Scullions, naked to the waist, were stoking the fires and scouring huge copper saucepans with sand. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry and a rage. The head cook, a fine, scarlet man with big moustachios, stood in the middle booming continuously, ‘Ça marche deux oeufs brouillés! Ça marche un Chateaubriand aux pommes sautées!‘

Chapter X – Orwell was a plongeur, the lowest of the low in the kitchen hierarchy

Orwell was initially amazed at the squalor behind the baize doors that separated the patrons of the hotel from the kitchen staff, what absolutely had to be cleaned was but if it didn’t then rubbish and scraps simply built up in corners or hard to clean places. But this was nothing to the hideous conditions in the new start restaurant that Boris persuaded him to leave hotel X and join. Raw food was simply left on the bare floor as they had no larder and wiped down and cooked as needed. Cats and rats helped themselves to whatever they wanted and again what was left was served to the customers. He also went from working fourteen hours a day for six days to seventeen hours a day every day. Plates weren’t cleaned as they had no hot water just wiped down either with newspaper or on the clothes of the staff and yet the restaurant drew in customers and succeeded despite the filth in the kitchen. Orwell gives the impression that this was perfectly normal in Parisian restaurants, and it quite probably was, but he couldn’t cope with the excessive hours and after a couple of weeks quit and headed back to London after being told by a friend that there was a job for him looking after a congenital imbecile.

The second part of the book dealing with life in and around London was added after Orwell initially tried and failed to get a publisher for the Parisian part on its own under the title of “A Scullion’s Diary”. Adding the English section took the work from around 38,700 words to 66,400, which in this edition is 180 pages and a much more normal size for a book.

Needless to say the job when he got there didn’t exist, both the potential employers and the patient having gone abroad so Orwell is back to no money, nowhere to live and no job, so Orwell took to the streets living hand to mouth as a tramp. This section is very different to the first sixty percent of the book as it is less like a journal of his experiences, although you certainly get his experiences of homelessness in the London area, and more a diatribe against the Vagrancy Act of 1824 and the strict interpretations imposed which meant that not only was homelessness effectively criminalised but all forms of begging were not permitted and rough hostels introduced across the country known as spikes. These, mainly unsanitary, hostels did not allow anyone to stay for more than one night and you couldn’t return inside a month, in London you couldn’t go to more than two spikes inside a month. These rules meant that vagrancy was effectively enforced as the men, and it was nearly always men Orwell met only one female tramp in his time on the road, had to keep moving ten to twenty miles a day in search of a bed if they couldn’t afford even the worst bunkhouses to sleep in and it was a criminal offence to sleep in the open air. Astonishingly whilst looking up this act to write the blog I discovered that parts of the Act are still in force in England and Wales almost two hundred years after it was first passed, I feel every Member of Parliament should be made to read this book.

The book is notable for being the first appearance of the name George Orwell in print, up until then he had used his real name, Eric Blair, for the small number of articles he had published but he wanted to be ‘anonymous’ due to the poor conditions that he had endured in both Paris and outer London and didn’t want his family linked to this book. From then on however he wrote as Orwell, rarely using Eric Blair again. As for the veracity of the stories he tells here, he wrote in the introduction for the 1935 French edition “I think I can say that I have exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers exaggerate by selecting. I did not feel that I had to describe events in the exact order in which they happened, but everything I have described did take place at one time or another.” The most obvious time distortion is that the times as a tramp around London occur after returning from France in the book whereas in reality this time was before he went to Paris in Spring 1928, as when he returned to London from Paris in December 1929 he went to live at his parents house.

My copy is the first Penguin Books edition from December 1940 and is in remarkably good condition for a wartime paperback printed on very poor quality paper yet it is still perfectly intact. This was the edition that really started interest in the book, as before then it was not a great seller. However despite 55,000 copies being printed in this edition it is a very scarce book and at the time of writing I cannot find any examples for sale on abebooks or biblio which are the two main international websites for secondhand books. Down and Out in Paris and London is of course easy to obtain, it is this first edition, possibly the first time it came out in paperback, that is so rare.

Into Iraq – Michael Palin

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Michael Palin’s latest travel adventure took place March 2022 and consisted of a short (two week) trip to Iraq, he was after all seventy eight when he made the journey and the epic trips from the 1980’s and 90’s are probably behind him now but this was still a fascinating read. This was his first documentary travelogue since visiting North Korea in 2018 which was equally short and it is now eleven years since his last trip lasting multiple months which saw him explore Brasil. The book is beautifully illustrated and written in Palin’s easy to read diary format which he has honed over decades of doing such series for television although now they are for ITN and Channel 5 here in the UK rather than the earlier, and higher budget, trips for the BBC.

The book covers eighteen days travelling, although days one to four are in Turkey as he travels down to the Iraq border finally crossing over on the evening of the fourth day and day eighteen has him getting up at 5am to dash to the airport to leave so that doesn’t really count. On the way through Iraq following the River Tigris he gets to places I read about as a child, the ancient city of Ur and its famous ziggurat, Babylon and the astonishing minaret in Samarra which can be seen top right on the cover of the book. Like Palin I have wanted to visit these places for decades, and nearly went soon after returning from Iran in 1997 but various other destinations called to me more urgently and later it became too dangerous to go. From the descriptions in this book it looks like it may be becoming possible to be a relatively safe tourist in Iraq again, however he explains that major destinations such as Ur’s ziggurat and the site of Babylon were largely reconstructed over their original ruins during the time of Saddam Hussain. That doesn’t make them less impressive and the lower parts, certainly of the ziggurat, are genuinely thousands of years old so still worth a visit. It would be the endless waits at random checkpoints that they endured for seemingly little point other than to justify the existence of the checkpoint and the guards manning it, I doubt I have the patience for nowadays.

The book is quite short, just 171 pages and a lot of those have half and half text and photographs of the trip, I therefore read it in about two and a half hours. I would have liked more details especially on the life of the people coming out of decades of conflict. Palin was always good interacting with locals in previous documentaries and whilst I haven’t yet seen the TV series that this book accompanies, that is only three sixty minute episodes and those include adverts so I doubt you get much more insight. Having said that I really enjoyed the book and when I started it was difficult to put down, the urge to just read another chapter was always there and as each chapter was a days journey it felt even more like a diary and you felt you were progressing down Iraq along with the small team making the films.

Unlike his previous expeditions where he planned a lot of the journey himself and was very much an independent traveller, albeit with a TV crew in tow, this time Palin travelled with a company called Untamed Borders which means that a large part of his itinerary can be booked direct with them if you too fancy a trip to Iraq.

The State of Poetry – Roger McGough

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I first came across McGough in the late 1960’s as part of The Scaffold, a ‘band’ which was made up of him, John Gorman and Mike McGear and the first record I ever bought with my own money was their 1968 number one hit ‘Lily The Pink’. Only McGear was a musician having taken up the guitar at a young age like his brother Paul McCartney who was also in a bit of a band in the 1960’s. This meant that they usually appeared with session musicians, such as Reg Dwight (aka Elton John), Keith Moon, Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix making up the numbers for the recorded and occasional live performances, whilst Roger McGough read his poems and comedian John Gorman did various comic sketches as well as playing the piano. I wonder what happened to those various session musicians? McGough wrote almost all the lyrics for The Scaffold with McGear (who changed his name so as not to be seen to be riding on the coat tails of his elder brother) writing the music. Although the band broke up in 1977 they occasionally appear together, although all the members are well past retirement age. At 85 years old McGough is still the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s programme Poetry Please and is very much active on the British poetry scene.

This collection of some of McGough’s short poems, some of which are very short indeed, is part of a huge body of his works published in well over thirty volumes, with one, a collaboration with two other Liverpool poets entitled ‘The Mersey Sound’ not being out of print since it first appeared in 1967. Whilst he writes poems on all sorts of subjects it is probably for his comic verse that he is most known.

Writer’s Block

The excitement I felt
as I started the poem.
Disappeared on reaching
the end of the fourth line.

McGough’s poetry is invariable upbeat and his distinctive accent makes his live performances a real pleasure, this is one of my favourites from his 2016 collection Poetry Pie just so that if you haven’t come across McGough before you can hear him in full flow. But I’m here to review this short book so back to the poems in here and one that starts off dark but still manages to have a happy ending.

Another Mid-Life Crisis

3am. Feeling like death
and wanting to end it all
I reach for the paracetamol
will there be enough?

One by one I count them out. 72?
Need more to be on the safe side.
Rummaging around I add another 30.
That should do it.

Take the first two with a glass of water.
Feel better. Go back to bed. Fall asleep.

McGough has been a fixture on British TV and radio ever since the days of The Scaffold so I’ve grown up, and started growing old, with his poetry and I find myself hearing his voice as I read the book. It was a real joy to read the 79 short works in this volume and I love the cover illustration with famous poets as geographical features. I feel the need to end this review the same way as the book ends with a simple one liner based on President Truman’s famous desktop sign.

The book stops here