Tag: History

A History of the World in 47 Borders – John Elledge

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I should admit up front that the very title of this book is misleading. It contains 47 chapters – but some are concerned with multiple borders

Elledge’s introduction does include the above admission, however that only applies to the hardback, this is the paperback which has 48 chapters as there is an extra bonus one concerning Poland in this version.That it should count chapters not borders is immediately clear as many of the chapters deal with multiple borders although usually in the same geographical vicinity. In fact the subtitle “The stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps” is probably better as I would argue that the chapters concerning The Prime Meridian, The International Date Line and time zones do not deal with national, state or even county borders, but do cover lines on maps which can be very different things. As somebody who loves history and geography I knew I was in for a treat with this book and I definitely wasn’t disappointed.

Each chapter is effectively a stand alone essay of around 2,500 to 3,000 words with twenty three maps where they are needed to clarify the points made,. This makes the book easier to read and digest than might be expected from a roughly 360 page factual volume (excluding index) as you can pick it up, read a couple of chapters, and then put it back down again having gained some insight into what caused a particular group of borders to coalesce where they currently are, or were when dealing with historical examples. The first twenty two chapters are grouped as ‘Histories’ and these cover such diverse subjects as the probable boundaries of Upper and Lower Egypt, The Roman Empire, Charlemagne’s short lived empire, how borders were created in Africa by white men who never went there, right up to the partition of Ireland and the Berlin wall in the twentieth century. Part two, entitled ‘ Legacies’ covers such oddities as the town of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau which changes its name depending if you are in the Dutch or the Belgian parts or the Dutch bits in the Belgian bits in The Netherlands, yes it’s a mess, crossing the road can mean changing country and in some cases just walking across a room can do the same. One of my favourite youtubers The Tim Traveller has recently done a video covering the current state of the town but bear in mind it used to be far more confusing. Also in this section is included the far less amusing Israel/Palestine borders, China’s nautical nine-dash line, and bits of Switzerland that aren’t in Switzerland, which turns out to be a less complicated version of Baarle-Hertog and Baarle-Nassau but further south. The book continues with ‘Externalities’ where you will find the time zone and Prime Meridian chapters, but also how Antarctica is split up, how maritime and airborne boundaries are determined, Eurovision, and other oddities that didn’t really fit in the first two categories.

Elledge manages to inject a little humour in his writing where appropriate, it really isn’t when discussing Israel’s borders, or the partition of India, so he writes those in as deadpan factual a manner as possible, but the general lightness of touch especially when discussing downright odd accidents of history was much appreciated when reading the book and yes it is very readable. I was particularly amused reading about the multiple accidental invasions of Lichtenstein by its neighbour Switzerland as troops and more worryingly artillery crosses the border with surprising frequency. You can also make use of the further reading suggestions, which every chapter has and which usually includes the books cited in most chapters as source material, it really is very well researched and documented and if you want to know more then you are given suggestions as to where to look. As implied in the few examples I have given in this blog the breadth of issues covered is impressive but I’m equally certain there is more than enough material to produce a second volume is Elledge wanted to and I for one would be front of the queue to buy a copy.

Meanwhile I’m off to stake my claim to Bir Tawil, the bit of Africa nobody wants, see you next week.

The Four Corners of Mathematics – Thomas Waters

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My second book from A K Peters recreational mathematics series is unlike any other maths book I’ve read as it attempts to explain mathematical development in a historical context. Now mathematics goes back over multiple millennia and is so diverse a topic that a comprehensive historical treatise would be impossible so Waters instead looks at four distinct topics and tries to show how they developed over the centuries, these four being Geometry, Algebra, Calculus and Topology. The examples used are considerably more advanced than the first book I read and reviewed from this series, Jun Mitani’s ‘Everyday Life is Full of Math‘, this time you need at the very least A-level standard maths and probably first year undergraduate to really follow what is being explained, now I did physics rather than maths at university and A-level maths, at least for me, was over forty years ago so I confess to struggling in places but it was a great mental workout as I tried desperately to remember basic calculus during the hot weeks of this summer. The way the book is split up into roughly sixty page sections on each of the four topics is neatly summarised by this chart at the end of the book.

The great genius that is Swiss Leonhard Euler and French Polymath Henri Poincaré are the only people to be sufficiently significant and wide ranging in interests to appear in all four subjects and mentioning Euler here is an example of his work in the section on complex numbers, part of the chapters on algebra, although e isn’t a complex number it is logical to be here as part of the discussion on possibly the most famous and beautiful equation in mathematics which combines e, i, π, 0 and 1.

One of the features of the book which I particularly like is the inclusion of famous parts of mathematics in their original form, so we get an extract from Riemann’ Uber die Hypothesen in the original German and the opening page of Liebniz’s classic on calculus Nova Methodus from 1684 in Latin as almost all scientific papers were at the time, Along with possibly the most famous throwaway line in all of mathematics Fermat’s last theorem where Pierre de Fermat claimed to have found a proof that although there are lots of solutions where the sum of the squares of two whole numbers equals another whole number squared there are no examples where the power is greater than two and that he couldn’t write this proof down because the margin he was writing in was too small. Something that was not finally proved for several centuries and utilising mathematical techniques that were not available to Fermat so nobody to this day knows what proof he was referring to.

Interestingly the only mathematicians in the entire book to have their portraits included are female, in an attempt to at least partly redress millennia of male control over who could do research or publish papers and not be ‘pushed’ into the background or have their work misrepresented as somebody else’s (i.e. a male). A small number of female mathematicians have managed to be acknowledged in the past, and those are celebrated here along with several of the ones who didn’t get their due recognition at the time. Academia is fortunately not so male dominated nowadays but it is nowhere near 50/50 representation. One of the mathematicians so featured is Mary Somerville and specifically her work in translating the ‘The Mechanism of the Heavens’ by French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1831.

Somerville did get recognition in her lifetime and posthumously gave her name to Somerville College, part of Oxford University, which was founded as a women’s college.

The book can be obtained from the Routledge website and is well worth reading, the historical development is fascinating and, for me at least, a novel way of approaching the subject. The maths, although tricky in places, especially after four decades of not doing some of it, is definitely understandable and frankly you need the examples given in order to follow the way the subject has evolved over the years. Thomas Waters is Associate Head in Mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Portsmouth and this is his first book.

1066 and All That – WC Sellar & RJ Yeatman

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1066 and All That is a 20th century classic piece of humour written by two people who although they worked together many times afterwards never achieved the level of success of this, their first book, ever again. Walter Sellar was a school teacher at various private schools in England including his old alma mater Fettes College and ending up at the highly prestigious Charterhouse. Appropriately he originally taught history although later on switched to English, he also wrote humorous pieces for Punch magazine as did Robert Yeatman although the two originally met at Oriel College, Oxford after the First World War. Yeatman came from a relatively prosperous family involved in importing Port wine in connection with Taylor’s Port but largely worked as an advertising copywriter and executive for such businesses as Kodak. The introduction of this Folio Society edition was written by broadcaster and stage director Ned Sherrin and very informative it is too, as it has anecdotes from several people who knew both men including Yeatman’s son Bill who recalls that his father had a sign on the gate CAVE CANEM (Latin for Beware of the Dog) when someone pointed out that burglars wouldn’t understand the notice he replied “Then they are not the sort of burglars we want.” I think this gives a good insight into the humour that you will encounter on reading the book.

As the subtitle states it is “A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates”. The two genuine dates are The Battle of Hastings in 1066 which led to the Norman conquest of England and 55BC which was the date of Julius Caesar’s first and not entirely successful foray onto the British Isles, this last one is followed by the observation that “Julius Caesar was therefore compelled to invade Britain again the following year 54BC , not 56 owing to the peculiar Roman method of counting”. We then proceed to race through English history up until World War I, several people, including Ned Sherrin, have written follow up volumes taking the history further on in a similar style to the original but none of them have really caught the public imagination the way ‘1066 and all That’ did in 1930 when it was first published as ably illustrated by the fact that 96 years later it is still in print.

A lot of the humour revolves around confusing dates, events and people in a way that would have been all too familiar to Sellar during his time teaching, such as the appearance of two Henry V’s, Part I and Part II as in the Shakespeare plays and the chapter on Henry VIII which begins:

Henry VIII was a strong king with a very strong sense of humour and VIII wives, memorable amongst whom were Katherine the Arrogant, Anne of Cloves, Lady Jane Austin and Anne Hathaway.

There are also various test papers inserted amongst the main text which sometime bear a passing relevance to what has preceded them but more often are there just to allow a slightly less structured series of jokes to step away from the list of monarchs and battles which school history textbooks at the time were fixated upon and which are the basis of this parody. History is not really taught like this anymore in British schools, lessons nowadays bounce around the past and places in a seemingly random manner, when I was at school we plodded through English history in sequence reaching the Gunpowder Plot (1605) after three years of studying just before I gave up the subject, not that I didn’t enjoy history I just didn’t like the somewhat tedious sequential nature of the teaching although I understand the reasoning behind it. Sellar and Yeatman were partly inspired by this rote learning to produce the book and also ‘Our Island Story’ by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall which was a major children’s text at the time and depicts some events as desirable and others as undesirable leading to ‘1066 and All That’ and its emphasis on Good Things and Bad Kings. Now that history isn’t taught in the manner parodied I wonder if ‘1066 and All That’ will survive, I hope it does, although you do need to have learnt a lot of real history in order to get a lot of the jokes and it’s therefore possible that it may not.

The Folio edition is designed to look like a school textbook of the period which has been wrapped in brown paper to protect it from ink stains, an all too common issue when young people are using fountain pens at school, I remember several books receiving this treatment during my school days although I never managed to make such a mess as seen on on the cover of this book brilliantly designed by David Eccles. It has the original 1930 illustrations by John Reynolds which are so perfect for the book that few editions have ever changed them.

The Samurai – H Paul Varley with Ivan & Nobuko Morris

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This book is far more than the story of The Samurai in Japan, rather it is a history of Japan from the medieval period through to mid to late 19th century because to understand the development of Samurai it is essential to place them in context and as this warrior class was a significant feature of Japanese society for over a thousand years. Despite the book covering all of the Samurai Period, which is generally considered as running from the Nine Years War, which started in 1051, and concluding with the abolition of the Samurai class in 1876, the book actually starts on 26th February 1936 in a military attempt to overthrow by assassination the Japanese government and bring back the Emperor as the ultimate ruler. These junior soldiers were inspired by the Samurai of old, but unlike previous centuries the Emperor wasn’t interested in being made absolute ruler again and the senior officers of the army soon quashed the mutiny and those involved in organising it were dealt with swiftly, often by execution, without having a chance to declare their ideas in a court. This was not the first time that such an uprising had occurred in the 1930’s but it was the last; and the only subsequent appearance of the Samurai spirit in Japan would arguably be by the Kamikaze pilots of World War II. After highlighting these modern day examples the book then leaps back to the end of the Heian Period (794-1185 AD) to cover the Nine Years War and the later Three Years War (1086-88) and the rise of the Samurai fighter during those conflicts.

Early warfare in Japan was a particularly strange form of fighting and would have greatly confused a westerner if they had seen it. The Samurai would enter the field of combat and determine which of their opponents was an honourable, similarly ranked, foe and then once the armies had paired off they would effectively fight duels, only moving on to another enemy once they had defeated their current opponent. Gradually warfare evolved into something we would recognise with planned movements of blocks of men and greater strategy rather than one on one combat. This probably grew from the rise of the Shogun or General commanding whole armies on behalf of his Emperor which occurred more often during the Mongol invasions of Japan during the Kamakura Period (1185-1333 AD). This also led to the creation of one of the most remarkable documents on medieval Japanese warfare ‘The Mongol Invasion Scroll’ which covers both of the invasions and the successful repelling of Genghis Khan’s troops, although he didn’t accompany his warriors on either occasion. Below you can see a story of a particular Samurai during the second invasion which highlights the ‘code’ of these specialist warriors.

All very odd, but as stated above later conflicts were more ‘normal’ to western understanding and through the Ashikaga Period (1392-1573 AD) we see opposing warlords attacking each others fortifications and the book explores the various rivals for the throne and then during The Period of Unification (1573-1600 AD) a combined army was to make its first foreign invasion, that of Korea, up until then Japan had largely ignored the rest of the world and even when they had come across guns had largely rejected them as not appropriate to the man to man combat favoured by the Samurai.

It should be noted that the book is not for the faint-hearted, there are several references to seppuku or ritual self disembowelment often incorrectly known in the west as hari-kiri, a cruder term literally meaning belly slitting. There is even a three page eye witness description of the ceremony being performed in 1868. But the concept of a Samurai committing suicide dates back to the middle of the Heian Period and it would be done to avoid being captured in battle, to atone for a particular unworthy action or even more bizarrely for westerners to admonish the Samurai’s lord and master. Samurai generally wished to avoid being captured as there was no concept of ransoming prisoners or prisoner swaps as occurred in medieval Europe, instead they would quite often be severely badly treated as it was deeply dishonourable to be captured alive, not that this would happen often as massacres seem far more likely that the taking of prisoners. The authors make the point that ritual suicide is so common in the Japanese medieval war tales that it is unusual to go more then two or three pages without at least one account of seppuku.

Print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) depicting the ceremonial forging of a sword, attended by the fox spirit

The book was first published by Weidenfield and Nicholson in 1970, my copy is the Pelican first edition from 1974. I greatly enjoyed this exploration of a very different, at least to those of us in the west, civilisation and it was extremely well written assuming no prior knowledge of the subject matter so was an ideal introduction to a history I knew little about.

English Drama 1485–1585 – FP Wilson and GK Hunter

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I’ve always liked Shakespeare, whose first play was performed in the 1590’s, but didn’t really know much about who came before him so decided to pull this volume from The Oxford History of Literature off the shelf and actually read it, rather than my usual use of books from this set which is as reference material. I was quite surprised to discover that this volume at least is quite readable so I’m now tempted to complete the set, as I currently only have ten of the fifteen volumes that take the history of English literature from Middle English in 1100 to 1400 through to the early twentieth century and DH Lawrence. Firstly a little bit about the history of the hundred years covered in this book as the choice is quite deliberate. The year 1485 saw the crowning of Henry VII after the fall of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field and the end of the War of The Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster over which should rule England. Henry VII (Lancaster) married Elizabeth (York) linking the warring families and founded the Tudor dynasty which would rule for the next 118 years. We then see Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and finally Elizabeth I, who was the last Tudor monarch, reigning from 1558 to 1603, so the period covered in this book is almost the entire Tudor dynasty but ending before the great flowering of English drama at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I as this has its own volume.

The period starts with the tail end of the countrywide performances of religious Mystery and Passion plays which had started as instruction to the populace centuries earlier (think of the still performed decennial Oberammergau Passion Play for a modern example) and leads us through the development of other subjects beyond religion becoming the basis of performances both comedy and tragedy along with the first appearance in England of professional actors. In 1485 there were no companies of players, plays were normally performed by children, often cathedral choristers or pupils of the Grammar schools, which would be given at the royal court or in their own halls. For adult performances there would be plays by teachers at the universities (primarily Oxford and Cambridge) and oddly by members of the four Inns of Court, presumably due to the eloquence of professors and barristers. Indeed members of both the Inner Temple and Middle Temple are referred to many times throughout the book as performing plays especially at Christmas. No dedicated theatre as such existed in England until the last decade or so covered by this book and it was only then that adult actors started to outnumber child performers and professionalism began to gain ground.

But let’s get a flavour for the plays being performed, these were often inspired in structure and sometimes in subject by the Roman playwrights Terence and Seneca with the latter being the dominant influence as the century progressed, at the end of the 1400’s Latin was still used but the English language was beginning to be more common for plays. driven by its rise in poetry and song. For an example of the sort of thing you would have encountered at the end of the 15th century with a playwright better known as a poet John Skelton’s Magnificence, a five act play of 2,567 lines with a distinct moral theme.

One aspect of plays of this period is that characters rarely had ‘normal’ names instead they would be called after the vice or virtue that they represent, a good (or possibly bad as I’m sure I wouldn’t want to see the play) example of this is Lupton’s ‘All for Money’ the essence of the plot is described below:

etc. I’m sure you get the idea. The plays would be in verse, with probably the most clunky format, the fourteener, which was very popular at the time. Blank verse would not make its appearance until the late 1550’s and even then would barely have an impact in the morality plays which were still being written.

The comedies that start to appear in the 1540’s by playwrights such as Udall from Eton College who wrote Jack Juggler and Roister Doister, two of the better plays of the period that would stand up to modern performance which frankly most of the works covered in this book would not. Tragedies however would need to wait for later writers before becoming suitable and not something that audiences would probably walk out of from boredom. A lot of the plays of the period only exist as titles, so much has been lost but the authors of the book are not dismayed by this as they say themselves:

Dramatically the hundred years covered here yield little of real substance but they set the ground for what was to follow and as the Elizabethan proverbs say “a bee sucks honey out of the bitterest flowers” and “out of a little spark came a great flame” within a decade we would have Christopher Marlowe (Dido and Tamburlaine both 1587), Ben Jonson (various minor plays he didn’t really get going until the late 1590’s) and of course William Shakespeare (first play Richard III – early 1590’s date uncertain). It has definitely been an interesting read even though it has given me little in the way of encouragement to delve into the plays of this time themselves. The massive leap in quality of play-writing and indeed performance at the end of the Elizabethan period is remarkable and it is no wonder that Shakespeare is still the most widely performed author in the world.

The volumes I have so far, quite an attractive set.

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes – Amin Maalouf

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I’ve read several accounts of the Crusades but all from the perspective of the Christian west so it was fascinating to read this version from the Islamic side. The first thing you discover is that the invaders were not taking on established states, but rather what was mainly individually controlled cities and towns which were sometimes in loose alliances but more often were warring amongst themselves making them relatively easy prey for the more organised crusader forces. Certainly for the first hundred years or so of the crusader conflicts whenever an Islamic ruler died there would invariably not be a clear successor so internecine warfare would break out making the city and its surrounding territory ripe for conquest by not only the crusaders but also the neighbouring city states that were, in theory at least, on the same side. What the Islamic forces lacked was a leader that most of them would follow and this was why the crusaders found the invasion of the holy lands relatively easy in the beginning and with a couple of short lived exceptions this would be the case until the rise of the Kurdish officer Salah al-Din Yusef known in the west as Saladin, who had gone to Egypt with his father in 1173 as a young man despite having no appetite for warfare and ended up the effective ruler of Egyptian lands but still nominally under the control of Nur al-Din from Syria who had sent the army in the first place. The complex interrelationships between the various states and warlords with the added mix of a fanatical sect founded in the 1070’s by Hasan Ibn al-Sabbah who became known as the Assassins. Although these killers would operate independently they were often paid by various rivals, or even other family members to remove people in the way of their own rise to power. How these original assassins operated is described in the book.

Although the preparation was always conducted in the utmost secrecy, the execution had to take place in public, indeed before the largest possible crowd. That was why the preferred site was a mosque, the favourite day Friday, generally at noon. For Hasan, murder was not merely a way of disposing of an enemy, but was intended primarily as a twofold lesson for the public: first the punishment of the victim, and second, the heroic sacrifice of the executioner, who was called fida’I or ‘suicide commando’ because he was almost always cut down on the spot.

This constant warfare amongst the various states and cities lasted long into the Crusade period and the various parties rarely agreed on alliances to take on the invaders and when they did, at least initially had nothing that would allow them to ambush knights in armour as they had no equivalent defences so hadn’t developed weapons to defeat them. But the book is not all negative regarding the Islamic resistance there were leaders who could push back the Crusaders, at least temporarily, before Saladin and he had a bad habit, at least in a war leader, of being too merciful to those he defeated often simply sending them away, along with their armaments, leaving them free to attack again at a later date or surrendering territory in the hope of achieving a more lasting peace

The book is fascinating, especially if you have read any of the various western accounts of the period, I will be reading The Chronicle of the Crusades by Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Jean de Joinville at some point next year, the book is already on my shelves, and this will round off the overview of the Crusades I started with T.E Lawrence’s book on Crusader castles which I read at the start of this year. It’s a period of history I remember reading a lot about whilst at school both as set texts and independent study and this book has certainly given me a lot to think about with its alternative viewpoint.

Crusader Castles – T E Lawrence

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Originally written as Lawrence’s thesis for his Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern History at Oxford University in 1910 this was his first time in the Middle East, a part of the world that would become forever linked to him during the First World War as he became famous as Lawrence of Arabia. It doesn’t only deal with Crusader castles however as the year before he had cycled extensively in France exploring the castles there and this is also made use of in his paper. The basis of the thesis is exploring the differences and similarities of European castles with those constructed in the Middle East as part of the Crusades to determine if the castle builders in the East took their inspiration from Byzantine castles they found there, as was the belief of scholars at the time, or if they were more heavily influenced by the western European castles they had left behind. Lawrence was firmly of the opinion that the European castles drove the design of the Crusader castles and his thesis was instrumental in changing the opinion of academics in the subject as it was so well researched and full of examples making his case, most of which hadn’t been studied first hand before, that it ultimately resulted in his First Class degree. This sounds like it could be quite a dry subject but actually it is surprisingly well written and one of his tutors encouraged him to get it published soon after it was submitted, however the sheer number of photographs and drawings, none of which could sensibly left out, would have made such a project financially unviable in the 1910’s.

One interesting feature of the book is the addition of Lawrence’s notes alongside the text from his planned revisions in the 1930’s, these sometimes add to the text but quite often are almost his thought processes regarding what he has written. The section of the book reproduced below, which is discussing the fortifications at Carcassonne in France shows both these types.

Sometimes the notes are somewhat ironic, where he either no longer agrees with what he wrote or how he wrote it, or even the references he cites. I have long had an interest in castles and architecture mainly from having been taken to most of the extant castles in Wales as a young boy with my family. I do love the chance to visit castles I haven’t been to before and a trip to the Levant in 1996 allowed me to follow, if only briefly, in Lawrence’s footsteps.

Below is one of my photographs of Krak des Chevaliers in Syria, described by Lawrence “as a finished example of the style of the Order (The Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, commonly known as the Knights Hospitaller) and perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world”. This castle is truly enormous, as can be appreciated from the barely visible person standing on top of the Warden’s Tower, a place I had been an hour or so earlier. Lawrence dedicates many pages to this castle in the thesis with extensive descriptions, plans, photographs and drawings, the result of spending five days intensively studying the castle.

The book concludes with several of the letters Lawrence wrote during his travels in the UK and Europe, almost exclusively to his mother but dealing more with the architecture and military history he was learning about. These were originally published, with a foreword by his mother, as the second volume of the Golden Cockerel first edition of this work printed in 1936, a year after Lawrence’s untimely death in a motorcycle accident. But nowadays they are normally included with the main text in one volume as in this lovely Folio Society edition from 2010.

Bitter Lemons of Cyprus – Lawrence Durrell

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Following on from his brother Gerald’s book last week, this is one of Lawrence Durrell’s travelogues and covers the years he spent in Cyprus from 1952 to 1956 after he left the British Council in Belgrade and planned to restart his novel writing, hopefully inspired by returning to a Greek island. Although he was there with his very young second daughter Sappho, born 1951, and without his wife who had been hospitalised back in England with post-natal depression you wouldn’t really know it as he largely avoids his family problems in the book. Indeed apart from a brief mention of Gerald, whom he claims had died in Thermopylae fighting alongside the Greeks in order to calm down a somewhat drunk Greek in a bar there are very few family references.

Sappho makes her first (and unnamed) fleeting appearance on page 102 and then only to note that she could see Turkey from an upstairs window of the house Lawrence is having renovated. Lawrence’s mother even makes an appearance, mainly I suspect to look after Sappho whilst Lawrence is working away to support the renovations, and Gerald threatens to appear, which as Lawrence points out would be awkward due to his apparent death at Thermopylae. One odd thing did occur to me at this point, why could the brother who died fighting not be thought of as Leslie, anyone who has read Gerald’s accounts of growing up in Corfu knows that there is another brother but Lawrence seems determined to ignore his existence, much as Gerald left out Lawrence’s first wife Nancy whom he lived with throughout the time the family were in Corfu and not with the rest of the Durrell family as stated in the books, and with whom he had his first daughter, Penelope.

Back however to this book, chapters vary wildly from good humour and even hints of farce when considering the purchase of the house and the crazy driving from person to person to get the legal process complete before they are caught up with by the rest of the sellers family who don’t think she is getting enough money for the property; to extremely serious such as the chapter entitled ‘A Telling of Omens’ which deals with the issue of Enosis, or the proposed union of Crete with mainland Greece and thereby ending the British rule, which was still in place whilst Lawrence was there. You can tell when reading this chapter that Lawrence initially didn’t believe that this would such an issue and neither did the Cypriots he lived amongst. It is only from the older students he started teaching English to in order to raise money to complete the house that he starts to see the first flickering of the violent unrest that is less than a few months away. But from this point onwards the tone of the book changes, turning from gentle humour to deadly serious as the situation on Cyprus quite literally explodes.

Lawrence was also a poet and the book ends with his poem Bitter Lemons, as does this review, but the beauty of his text can be seen in this extract describing a beach at dawn.

In the fragile membranes of light that separate like yolks upon the cold meniscus of the sea when the first rays of the sun come through, the bay looked haunted by the desolate and meaningless centuries which had passed over it since the first foam-born miracle had occurred. With the same obsessive rhythms it beat and beat again on that soft eroded point with its charred looking sand: it had gone on from the beginning, never losing momentum, never hurrying, reaching out and subsiding with a sigh.

When Gerald and his wife arrive Lawrence is about to take on a new role as press adviser for the colonial government which would mean living in the capital rather than his out of the way village so he basically left the house in Gerald’s care during the week, only returning at weekends. This role also gives him an insight into the ramshackle government operation which is totally ill prepared for what is to come and it is this summary of the failings of the British administration that makes the book so important as a document of the times. The book changes tone roughly halfway through as Durrell leaves the realm of good natured village life and instead describes the slow disintegration of all that he had come to love about Cyprus and the introduction of thousands of British troops to try to put a lid on the bombings and shootings which would eventually lead to independence in 1960, long after Durrell had left the island.

The Madman’s Library – Edward Brooke-Hitching

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In July last year I wrote about the second book published by Edward Brooke-Hitching, ‘The Phantom Atlas‘, this more recent volume, first published in 2020 was a gift I received least Christmas, Brooke-Hitching is the son of an antiquarian book dealer and his love of books shines through in this guide to some of the oddest works ever produced from books like The Blood Quran which was written in beautiful calligraphy using around fifty pints of Iraqi dictator Sadsam Hussain’s blood as a major constituent of the ink in 1997 to ones that use arsenic as the dye for the covers so could literally kill the reader as the poison leaches from the boards. It is six years to the day since I started this blog and I think this book about books is an appropriate subject to mark this milestone of three hundred and fourteen articles and almost three hundred thousand words about books in my own library.

The book starts with a fascinating history of books and their precursors such as clay tablets or Sumerian foundation cones along with parchment scrolls including one that was used to wrap an Egyptian mummy. Then there are books that conceal other things such as one with a built in gun for self defence or astronomical equipment or objects that look like books but are actually boxes made from a specific wood with leaves and seeds from the tree inside them. I was reading about these and thinking it would be interesting to own one when the author pointed out the smell of decay that goes with them which somewhat put me off. There is also a long section on literary hoaxes such as biographies of people that didn’t exist or travel books of journeys that never happened several of which I am tempted to track down examples of.

There are further sections on books of the occult and religious oddities which include some of the strange animals depicted in medieval manuscripts and then examples of tiny and gigantic books. I have a love of tiny books, see my blog on the Lilliput Press so this section was particularly interesting and whilst I do have huge books such as the Folio Society’s Temple of Flora I don’t have anything like the atlas made for Charles II which is 1.76 metres tall and 2.3 metres wide when opened and is truly spectacular. There is a special mention in this section for the classic Audubon work ‘The Birds of America’ which exists in several editions but which is most prized for the version where all the birds are depicted life size which as this includes pelicans and flamingos gives some idea as to its immensity.

All in all this is a really interesting compendium of literary oddities, some of which I knew about but a lot that I didn’t and like the other books by Brooke-Hitching is again richly illustrated and it’s well worth a space on the shelf of anyone who loves books.

The Hills of Adonis – Colin Thubron

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First published in 1968, Colin Thubron’s second book finds him still in the Middle East, his first book from the previous year ‘Mirror to Damascus’ covered his travels in Syria and for his third which came out in 1969 he stayed in the same geographical region with a book set in Israel entitled ‘Jerusalem’. None of these early works are particularly well known today, especially compared to his more recent travelogues, indeed the most recent publication of ‘The Hills of Adonis’ I can find is from fifteen years ago, whilst my copy was published in 1987 during the last few years of the Lebanese Civil War. Thubron spent four months walking around Lebanon, a country of just 4,036 square miles (10,452 square km) so slightly less than half the size of Wales or for Americans roughly the size of the two smallest states combined (Delaware and Rhode Island) so it was possible to cover most of the sights in the country on foot in this time frame.

Thubron weaves his way up the country from the southern border with Israel, which even in the mid 1960’s was already a dangerous place to be, up to the northern border with Syria visiting most of the significant places on the way. The first part of the book however is also concerned with a breakdown of the mythology prevailing ancient Lebanon and for me this was convoluted and unnecessary in the amount of detail and number of pages dedicated to it. Fortunately after the first few chapters Thubron largely drops the subject and proceeds to describe the history, geography and most importantly the people of this tiny but extremely culturally diverse country. This is where the book really gets into its stride although it can be difficult at times to determine if he is writing about the near or ancient history of a place, he does rather bounce around a lot. But the people he meets are fascinating and because he includes tiny villages as well as the metropolitan centres you start to get a feel for the various peoples, the Maronites and Druze, the remains of ancient and isolated monastic orders, the agricultural people of the mountains and the largely more prosperous people of the coastal regions especially as he moves further north.

In the late 1960’s, at the time Thubron was travelling in Lebanon, it was a place largely at peace. This was before the civil war which would destroy large parts of the country and kill around 150,000 people in the fifteen years from 1975 and Lebanon was still seen as a significant tourist destination in the region. This is what initially drew me to the book, a snapshot of a now long vanished time and place and whilst I was in Lebanon just six years after the civil war ended, the destruction of its once beautiful capital was all too evident when I was there and it would have been impossible to replicate Thubron’s journey as the south of the country was still occupied by Israel and would be until the year 2000. Reading the book and seeing what Lebanon was like, and unfortunately has no obvious way of getting back to, is depressing but at least here is a record of what has been lost.

The cover picture, by Mark Entwhistle, is of the ruins of the palace in Anjar in the Bekaa region of Lebanon, which I photographed in September 1996, although from the opposite side of this particular surviving section. When Thubron got there the people were clutching radios tuned to Radio Cairo and waiting for war and he was deeply troubled by his experience there far from the peaceful scene depicted on the cover. Far from ‘driving the Israelis into the sea’ which is what everyone told him would happen the conflict that actually occurred turned out to be Six Days War where Israel defeated most of its neighbours in a series of decisive air strikes largely destroying the air forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in one day. But before then Thubron had left Lebanon and was presumably working on this book, which with all its faults is still an interesting read. Below are a couple of my pictures from Anjar.

a closer view of the arches