Giles Milton (1996)

It’s surprising to read a book that goes into the detailed history of a book that I haven’t read, but not to worry…

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is a mediaeval travelogue unlike any other. It starts off well enough, as a guide-cum-memoir of a trip to the Holy Land in the mid 14th century. But then it continues, with the protagonist travelling to India, Java, China, and beyond, meeting and describing – in the same reasonable voice as previously – a range of people and creatures straight out of a mediaeval bestiary. The question has always been: what’s going on? Is the whole thing a fraud? An elaborate satire? A prank? That these questions exist for what was, at one time, the single most-read book in the English language is a huge challenge.

Milton doesn’t exactly nail the solution: that’s probably impossible after all this time. But he does do some heroic research both in the archive and in the real world. In the former, he traces many of the original sources from which Mandeville (if indeed this is the author: even his identity is disputed and mysterious) derived some of his stories, and shows how he elaborated them far beyond what any mere copyist would do. In the latter he find confirmation for elements in the Travels that have been perplexing, including (for example) verifying that Mandeville’s descriptions of certain statues in Constantinople, while now wrong, were correct for the dates he claimed to be there. Some of the most dramatic scenes occur in St Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, difficult to reach even now, where Milton searches through Crusader graffiti looking for a Mandeville coat of arms, as well as viewing manuscripts that have remained untouched for over a thousand years.

Altogether this is literary history of the highest order. While it remains tantalisingly un-definitive, it adds extra layers to the reading of the Travels, which is at the top of my holiday reading list.

5/5. Finished Monday 12 August, 2019.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Tim Marshall (2015)

A concise discussion of geopolitics, by someone in a position to understand. Marshall brings years of political commentary to bear on how governments see, and respond, to geography – both their own and those of their potential rivals.

It’s purely about the effects of geography on States’ behaviours, which sometimes lends the book an almost nineteenth-century feel. There’s no discussion of the possibly conflicting attitudes of large national and multinational companies, whose activities might be difficult for governments to steer. I suspect Marshall views States as still to dominant actors without actually saying such – and he may well be right, in the sense that the credible threat of force can trump other approaches. The arguments are quite compelling, and show how the forces that affect grand strategy haven’t fundamentally changed since the days of the Great Game and earlier.

4/5. Finished Monday 5 August, 2019.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Simon Winder (2019)

Lotharingia, the part of Europe lying between what are now the agreed cores of France and Germany, the part of the continent that doesn’t readily fit into the national character of either country. This is a very small-scale history, full of anecdotes and insights as to the connections between the various actors and events that have criss-crossed this area. I read it shortly after reading The Shortest History of Germany, to which I think it makes a very agreeable companion and contrast while picking out a lot of the same themes, especially the difference between the eastern-oriented, Prussian and Hohenzollern Germany and the western-oriented Rhineland.

It’s personal history, though, which means that the author’s life breaks into the narrative quite intrusively. I’ve only given the book four stars because of this writing style, which detracted (for me) from the otherwise excellent research and observations.

4/5. Finished Friday 26 July, 2019.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Roger Levy (2018)

4/5. Finished Friday 5 July, 2019.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

William Davies (2018)

How did we end up where we are, with a seemingly unstoppable rejection of reasoned argument in favour of blatantly false – if somewhat reassuring – fantasy positions served up by charlatans? Davies presents a very convincing case, and some prescriptions for the future, that should be read by anyone who considers themselves to live in the world of objective reality – and especially those tasked with explaining that reality.

The essence of Davies’ position boils down to the idea that there’s been a change in the nature and purpose of information: that it has gone from being used as a way of understanding a shared reality to instead operating on that reality, with the significance of this change being that the latter requires neither global agreement on a set of facts nor any real persistence in time. It’s perfectly possible to discover, act upon, and profit from something that them disappears without a trace, and this changes both what it means to be a fact and how these (perhaps purported) facts are presented: it doesn’t matter if something is later falsified, since the purpose was not to state a permanent position but to achieve a timely objective.

Davies backs this proposition up with a deep-dive into military history, philosophy, and the emergence of the commercial internet: this is definitely a book fore the widely-ranging mind. His prescriptions are troubling to those of us who work in science: that we need to shed our public scruples and engage politically, not giving up the search for the objective but making sure that we use it to act on the world. In that sense he’s supportive of events like the “March for Science” that were opposed by many scientists as a corruption of objectivity – and I have toi say that that’s not something I wanted to hear, but that I find rather compelling.

5/5. Finished Friday 28 June, 2019.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)