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This is the ship better known in Britain as the Zong, because at some time around the time of the trial associated with it, someone misread the letter R as N. It was originally a Dutch ship; “Zorg” in Dutch means “care”, both in the sense of anxiety and in the taking-care-of sense. That usage itself has two meanings, the more criminal of which was very much a feature of what happened on board. In both its Dutch and British incarnations, it was a slaver, and in 1783 it became the subject of a famous court case because the captain and crew, running short of water en route to Jamaica with a cargo of kidnapped Africans, threw 132 of them overboard. The ship was insured for unavoidable losses, but the insurers refused to pay because they suspected the losses were in fact caused by the crew’s negligence.

The resulting court case and appeal have been the subject of several dramatizations, which have tended to oversimplify what was actually going on in court. What was at issue was whether the losses were avoidable, as the insurers claimed, or not, as the owners asserted. Nobody was concerned with the rights or wrongs of murder, because in law Africans were cargo. The jury at the first trial found for the owners. The insurers were not best pleased, because they suspected there was more to the story than the court had heard, but that might have been the end of it, except for an anonymous letter published in the Morning Chronicle from a man who had attended the court and was horrified by the casual attitude to human life. “It is certainly worthy of observation that our Legislature can every session find time to enquire into and regulate the manner of killing a partridge, that no abuse should be committed, and that he should be fairly shot; and yet it has never thought proper to enquire into the manner of annually kidnapping above 50,000 poor wretches, who never injured us, by a set of the most cruel monsters, that this country can send out”. Kara plausibly attributes this letter to the abolitionist James Ramsay.

Be that as it may, the letter came to the eyes of the freedman and campaigner Olaudah Equiano. He in turn enlisted Granville Sharp, who was not only an abolitionist but a positive tiger when it came to fighting for what he believed in. Sharp immediately began pressing for the case to be reopened, in which of course he had the support of the insurers, who were indifferent to the murders but anxious to get their money back. What they got was a hearing to determine whether there should be a new trial. Sharp hired a shorthand writer to record the proceedings (the first trial was unrecorded), knowing it would make useful propaganda for the cause.

At the new hearing, the barristers for the insurers, Davenport, Pigot and Heywood (no, there was no Garrow; it is true he was an abolitionist but he was not involved in this case) managed to elicit facts that had not come out before, including the damning evidence that it had rained during the water shortage, and slaves had still been thrown overboard afterwards. At this news Lord Mansfield, presiding, agreed that there should indeed be a new trial. There never was, because the owners quickly dropped their claim.

The point at issue had still not been murder, but that did not stop the three barristers, all strongly anti-slavery, from voicing their opinion: Heywood, son and brother of Liverpool slave merchants but very much the white sheep of the family, remarked “I cannot help thinking that my friends & myself, upon this occasion appear as counsel for millions of mankind & the cause of humanity in general.” Sharp pressed for murder charges against the crew, but the law at the time simply did not allow of it.

But the case’s effects were not over. In 1785, the abolitionist-sympathising Chancellor Peckard of Cambridge University set the topic for the university’s annual Latin essay contest; “Anne Liceat Invitos in Servitutem Dare? (Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?”). A young divinity student, Thomas Clarkson, decided to have a go and began researching a question he admitted he had previously known nothing about. His research took him to Sharp’s transcript of the Zorg/Zong case. “In the summer of 1785, Clarkson submitted his groundbreaking work, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African. In his prefacing remarks, Clarkson mentioned Granville Sharp and his heroic efforts with the ‘cruel and disgraceful case, in the summer of the year 1781, when an hundred and thirty-two Africans, in their passage to the colonies, were thrown into the sea alive, to defraud the underwriters.’” Clarkson was another tiger, who made Herculean efforts in the abolitionist cause and lived to see it triumph.

This book outlines the crime and the legal proceedings, the background that gave rise to them and the effects that flowed from them. In the process, many characters are brought to life, perhaps none more than Granville Sharp, on the side of the angels, and Robert Stubbs, one-time slaver captain, employee of the Royal African Company and complete scoundrel, who would have done anything for money – he took his 12-year-old son George out to Africa purely to appoint him to a position for which he was unqualified and thus to pick up an extra salary. On his return to England he abandoned the boy in Africa and later mentioned him in his will, apparently unaware that George had died some years earlier. It’s a thorough history, with the proper critical apparatus, and very readable. While most of the Amazon reviews are rightly positive, there is at least one curmudgeonly one from someone who admits he had read only the free sample! Ignore, if it’s still there (I am trying to get it taken down).

The idea behind this project is to take, in chronological order, eighteen British people, some famous, some less so, and give a snapshot of them at the age of eighteen. This obviously involves describing what their surroundings would have been like, what they ate, how if at all they were educated etc, so it can build up a partial picture of life in Britain for someone of that class and sex at that time. The age has been chosen as being on the cusp of adulthood.

Although it doesn’t say so, I have come to the conclusion that the book is aiming at a children/YA readership and attempting to make “history” less of a lesson and more of an adventure for them. Nothing else really explains the insistently chirpy, chatty, hyper-enthusiastic style – “Rumours spread around the villages near the River Wear: ‘News! King Ecgfrith has given planning permission for a new monastery!’ they gossiped.” For adults, it can get a bit wearing; for a younger age group it may well work better. There’s also a quiz at the end, again suggesting a young readership, but no footnotes or index, which points the same way.

Eighteen, for this audience, may well be a longed-for goal (or a watershed, from which the only way is down…). It may then be inspirational for this audience to read “While Heinrich returned to Germany to deal with rebellions, he left sixteen-year-old Matilda behind, where she spent two years in charge of Italy”, while those studying Eng. Lit, for exams may be enchanted to hear of the sartorial habits of the teenage Chaucer; “He wore an outfit so immodest, so revealing, that some blamed its popularity among young dandies for inciting God’s wrath and causing the Black Death. It was a tunic with sleeves (called a paltok), black and red tights (called a hose) and plain shoes, and was bought for him by his employer, the Countess of Ulster. But the sartorial shock came from the very snug fit. The paltoks were ‘extremely short garments . . . which failed to conceal their private parts’”.

It isn’t a bad idea for a book, but it would work better if it did more of what it says on the tin. That it goes into both the later and earlier life of its subjects is inevitable, but it could focus more on that particular year and what was going on around its subjects at the time. In some cases I think this would have needed more background research. The love story of Brunel’s parents is indeed fascinating, but I missed a sense of how London’s streets looked, smelled and sounded when he was there. Oh, and I don’t think “Easter” is in fact named after a pagan goddess called Eostre. Reading two books at once can be helpful; the other was “Proto” by Laura Spinney, an account of the development of languages, and I suspect that the derivation of the word from “austron”, meaning “dawn” in Proto-Germanic is probably the right one. The Eostre definition comes from Bede, coincidentally one of the subjects of Eighteen, and one needs to be a bit careful with Bede’s assertions.

Some of the patterns she observes in her high-achieving youngsters are interesting. Many had disturbed childhoods, often losing a parent; several also, on the other hand, had a mentor who encouraged and believed in them. Several were more well-travelled than was normal in their time. Of the eighteen, the one whose story really stood out for me was Elsie Inglis, of whom I’d never before heard but was delighted to meet. It would have been achievement enough for a woman, in the 1890s, to qualify from the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow (known as the Triple Qualification). But to go on to volunteer in the Great War and fight a typhus epidemic in Serbia, becoming the first woman to receive the Serbian Order of the White Eagle, was getting stratospheric.

She is often very informative about her subjects. I feel marginally more kindly towards C S Lewis for knowing he was a duffer at games: “The Lewis boys had one working joint in their thumbs, rather than two. This made Jack hopeless at games, not being able to throw or catch. Perhaps it’s no surprise he later wrote, ‘I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal’”. And the fact that the door-knocker of the rectory where he grew up was “an enormous, grimacing head of a lion” does indeed make one wonder if this was the genesis of the insufferable Aslan.

It isn’t quite my style of history, but then I’m not the target audience. As a learning aid for children and teenage students, I think it might well be entertaining and stimulate deeper interest.

“If there is one overarching theme in Canada’s story, it is of distinct peoples thrown together in a shared environment”

The title is unusually exact. This is not so much a “history of Canada” as an account of how, between the late fifteenth century and 1867, a number of disparate and very different territories came together to form a distinct nation. It is chronologically ordered, but each chapter is centred on one, or sometimes two, individuals who played a part in this process. He has also tried to look beyond the better known individuals who might usually be chosen as examples.

“Sometimes two”, because often advances in Canada’s development were brought about by co-operation between people from its various races. Mostly not English and French, obviously, but many other combinations. In an interesting echo of events in British India, European merchants and explorers in Canada during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often married Indigenous women and assimilated to some extent with their communities; it was only in the nineteenth century that this practice fell out of favour. The result was a mixed-race community (the French called them Métis) who had a foot in either camp and were well placed to act as interpreters, negotiators and general bridge-builders. Again and again, we find that some effective soldier or administrator with an echt Scottish or French name also had an Indigenous mother – or, in the case of James Douglas, the first governor of Vancouver Island, a mother of mixed European and African descent. And this must surely have helped them to take a less arrogant and inflexible attitude than European colonists too often showed.

However, even authentic Scottish-both-sides James Murray, tasked after the death of Wolfe with persuading the Catholic inhabitants of Quebec to accommodate themselves to living under British Protestant rule, proved more flexible than might have been expected, and certainly more so than would have been authorised by the powers that be in London, had they known what he was up to. “Murray’s instinct had been to work within the pre-existing institutions of the old French colony. That meant relying on Canadians to fill the various offices all states required, even if that violated British laws that barred Catholics and some Protestant nonconformists from public office.” He took full advantage of the distance he was working at: “When in doubt, Murray sided with the French Canadians. Wherever possible, he pushed the boundaries in favour of French language and custom and, in many instances, flat-out contradicted the rules coming from London.”

There was also a considerable Black population in Canada, for obvious reasons. Canada was not Utopia; there was prejudice and injustice there, as everywhere else in the world, but there was at least no slavery; if a man didn’t get on with his boss or his neighbours, he could do something about it. “Slave-owning was phased out by statute in Upper Canada starting in the 1790s, while courts in the other colonies simply refused to uphold the rights of slave owners, effectively strangling the institution. By the time the British government formally barred slavery within the entire empire in 1834, the last remnants of slavery in British North America had already faded away.” Even free Black people in the northern American states did not always feel safe there, especially after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act. James Williams of Maryland, explaining why he had chosen to emigrate, said “I was thinking with a number of my colored friends that I would like to breathe purer air”.

Canada’s ambiguous relationship with its larger neighbour crops up often in the story, and one realises that it is no wonder Canadians cannot brush aside Trump’s occasional threats as boorish humour, when the USA has twice invaded its borders with a view to annexation. Speaking of which, three cheers for Charles de Salaberry, one of the few with a foot in both the French and British camps, a French Canadian aristocrat who’d served in the British army and who in 1812, with French, British and Indigenous troops, trounced a far larger US force at the battle of Châteauguay. I always wondered why one of the coaches on the wonderful cross-country train The Canadian was called Salaberry; now I know.

I learned a lot from this book (I certainly never knew before that at one time the Orange Order had such a stranglehold on power in Toronto that it was known as Canada’s Belfast). Only at one point did I wonder if we were getting the full story, when, describing the anger that erupted in Montreal in 1764 over compulsory billeting of soldiers on civilians. he writes “Thomas Walker, an English merchant […] accused the governor of violating the British constitution [by ordering the billeting]. The political dispute escalated into violence when a group of soldiers badly beat Walker on the streets of Montreal, cutting off one of his ears.” Well, context is everything and what’s left out here might change the story somewhat. This is one incident I know from another source, Following the Drum, Annabel Venning’s history of British army wives. Walker was not just a merchant but a magistrate, and while the soldiers of the 28th regiment (later the North Gloucestershire) were occupied elsewhere he evicted their wives and children in December of a Canadian winter. When the soldiers returned to find their families shivering in the snow they were, quite understandably, furious, and the resulting fracas ended with Walker losing part of an ear and the 28th gaining a nickname, “the Slashers”, which stuck to them. The headline, in fact, is less “Mindless Violence By British Soldiers” than “Inhumane Order Has Predictable Result”.

This is an absorbing, informative book, and its organisation, structured around individuals, makes it entertaining reading. In many ways it is more optimistic than your average history of a country. “Canada’s story is an optimistic one, of co-operation and mutual prosperity. But it is also a cautionary tale, shot through with cruelty and violence.” That latter is true of all countries. But despite dark shadows like the mass expulsion of the Acadians, betrayals of Indigenous peoples and ongoing religious disputes (not everyone was as tolerant as Murray), it is in the end a story of many disparate peoples choosing to come together.

Moffat is a writer who has worked for the Edinburgh Fringe and STV; in the latter role he learned Gaelic and became interested in Scottish history. Here he is investigating twelve battles in which Scottish clans were involved, in a very feet-on-the ground way, going to the sites and trying to work out how the terrain affected the conflict and its outcome.

This is obviously easier in some places than in others. Looking for the traces of Inverlochy: “What disappointed me was that there was no mention of the battle of 1645. It was difficult to picture how events unfolded. Behind me a burn ran into the River Lochy and to the east a soap factory and shop had been built on the open ground where the Highlanders probably charged.” At Culloden, by contrast, the topography has not changed much, while at Mulroy it was easy to see how knowledge of the ground would have mattered:
“a burn. Hidden in a deep declivity, it made its way diagonally across the face of the hill. It wasn’t wide but might have been a surprise to anyone who did not know the ground. As I walked on, it occurred to me that Coll MacDonald and his captains did know the ground and that Lachlan Mackintosh and Kenneth Mackenzie did not. This must have influenced the conduct and outcome of the battle that took place on this wide, open and apparently unbroken hillside pasture. It faces south and catches the sun from early morning until it slips behind the mountains to the west. Anyone looking up from the road will not have seen the deep ditch through which the burn runs.”

He gives the details of his trips to the various locations, which makes for a chatty style that sometimes works and occasionally irritates. I could do without sartorial details like “I found that the most efficient arrangement in this sort of relentless weather was a long-brimmed baseball cap to keep my specs dry and then the hood of my GORETEX coat pulled up over it to stop the rain from running down my neck.” On the other hand, this method does sometimes inject a welcome touch of humour into an often bleak narrative: “classic eggs Benedict with Stornoway black pudding under the poached eggs instead of ham and under that a thick, home-made scone instead of the usual characterless bun. I was enormously comforted by the food and the knowledge that there was a defibrillator close at hand.”

Being me, I tend to react more to human than topographical detail, so what stays with me most are vignettes like the “see you, Jimmy” execution of the irrepressible Neil Macleod: “Even though his hands were tied, Macleod lunged forward and headbutted the hangman, knocking him down.” And Lord James Drummond’s ill-fated attempt to take Edinburgh castle by escalade is memorable; his men stayed too long in the tavern they had unwisely selected as a meeting place. When they finally got around to the evening’s business, they found that “the sentries they had bribed were off duty and the rope ladder they had brought was too short. Four of Drummond’s men were arrested after falling off the castle’s walls while the others fled into the darkness, some of them no doubt floundering in the boggy Nor’ Loch, probably the worse for drink”.

Moffat does not romanticise the clansmen; they were every bit as cruel and ruthless as their enemies and might have had more success against both lowlanders and the English had they not been so keen on fighting (and often betraying) each other. He does wax lyrical about the landscape, but he can hardly be blamed for that. “Beyond Eilean Fhionnan, the butter-coloured sunlight climbed the flanks of the high mountains to the north, revealing the subtleties of their pale greens and browns and the seams of grey, craggy corries as it chased the rain clouds eastwards. The bleakness of the journey down the loch had entirely fled but the stillness remained for the people had also fled.” It is easy to see why he reacts to unthinking tourism as he does: “In perhaps half an hour, more than thirty people came up, stayed for a minute or two, took photos of the view with their mobile phones and then immediately left. There was a sense not so much of looking at a beautiful, unique, atmospheric place but of somehow collecting it, ticking a box.”

There are sketch maps, very necessary in such a book, but I was reading the Kindle version in which they are inevitably very small and need zooming in on. There are also hardcover and paperback editions; I don’t know if either or both have any photographs, which would have been handy for visualising what the fields of conflict look like now.

“Human skin, of course”.

Just to clarify: this is a book published in several formats, and the hardback came out from Little, Brown & Co in 2013. But since it cost £40, it is odds-on that relatively few will have read it. A paperback (£10) comes out from Penguin this year for those who don’t care for Kindle, the format in which I read it (0.99, but that was admittedly a special offer).

Operation Paperclip was an innocuous name for a deeply immoral project, the spiriting away to the USA of scientists who had worked for the Nazis on chemical and biological weapons, using prisoners as slave labour and experimental material. The rationale for it was that if the Americans didn’t get hold of them, the Russians would (they did annex some, who were engaged in producing nerve poisons like sarin, and continued so to do for their new masters). It doesn’t seem to have occurred to either side that had these men been tried and executed for the mass murders they had enabled, nobody would have needed to deny them to the other side.

Jacobsen begins by outlining what these obnoxious men, some of whom had been internationally respected scientists before they threw their lot in with the Nazis, had been up to in the final days of the war, and it is very hard to read without becoming progressively angrier about the conditions endured by the slave labourers and unwilling human guinea-pigs they were exploiting, and about which they must have known: ““Pay no attention to the human victims,” Brigadier General Hans Kammler told his staff overseeing construction in the tunnels. “The work must proceed and be finished in the shortest possible time.”. In the first six months of tunnel work, 2,882 laborers died. Albert Speer praised Kammler for what he considered to be a great achievement in engineering”.

Wernher von Braun’s V-2 rockets were manufactured in these tunnels (he could not have helped knowing in what conditions), and Jacobsen describes a bizarre award ceremony honouring the scientists responsible:

“On this night the excitement focus alternated—from a rocket launch to award decoration, then back to a rocket launch again. After each launch, Speer decorated one of the medal recipients. The crowd clapped and cheered and sipped champagne until the banquet hall was again filled with darkness and the next rocket fired off the castle lawn. […] In the eyes of the Reich, Hitler’s rocketeers had good reason to celebrate. In Antwerp at 3:20 p.m., a V-2 rocket had smashed into the Rex Cinema, where almost 1,200 people were watching a Gary Cooper film. It was the highest death toll from a single rocket attack during the war—567 casualties.”

Meanwhile doctors, like Oskar Schröder and Hubertus Strughold, were conducting and overseeing medical murder experiments at Dachau and elsewhere, while IG Farben chemists like Otto Ambros profited from the discoveries, like sarin gas, made as a result. As Jacobsen records, Ambros “served the Reich as chief of the committee for chemical warfare, manager of IG Farben’s slave labour camp at Auschwitz and manager of the Dyhernfurth poison gas factory”.

One would have expected to see all these men put on trial at Nuremberg and Ambros in fact was, though one US officer, Colonel Tarr, went the length of forgery to try to protect him from arrest. But having been sentenced to a laughable 8 years, he was in fact released after three, and became an advisor to the US Army Chemical Corps. As for von Braun, so confident was he of his welcome in the US that he turned himself in. “I did not expect to be kicked in the teeth,” von Braun told an American reporter years later. “The V-2 was something we had and you didn’t have. Naturally, you wanted to know all about it.” In such company it is hard to name a winner for obnoxiousness, but the cocky, arrogant von Braun would be a contender.

The resettlement programme for eminent war criminals could not be kept wholly secret, though many unpleasant truths about its members were hidden or lied about, and there was naturally some opposition. But many of these men ended their lives wealthy and honoured, an infuriating thought. The Aeromedical Library at the School of Aerospace Medicine, the largest medical library in the U.S. Air Force, was dedicated to Dr Hubertus Strughold, the “Father of Space Medicine” (and listed on the central registry of war criminals). The air force promised that Strughold’s bronze plaque “will be permanently displayed in the foyer of the library.” Small as the satisfaction may be, one can raise a cheer for the Collier’s Magazine staffer who, when in a lift with ex-Luftwaffe physicist Heinz Haber and others, “reached out to Haber, rubbed a piece of the scientist’s leather coat between his fingers and said wryly, “Human skin, of course”. A cheer too for Tom Lehrer, and for the reporter at a press conference before an Apollo mission, who asked von Braun if he could guarantee that the rocket would not hit London (von Braun stormed out). It is also some comfort that the USAF, albeit grudgingly, removed the Strughold plaque the year before he died.

Jacobsen’s lucid, dispassionate writing style is ideal for such material, which is emotional enough in itself. She demonstrates very well how their mutual fear led both the US and Russia, in the end, to emulate the enormities of those they had chosen to work with. “Sometime in the spring of 1947, scientists at Edgewood Arsenal began conducting human experiments with tabun nerve agent. All soldiers used in these experiments were so-called volunteers, but the men were not made privy to the fact that they were being subjected to low-level concentrations of tabun.” Tabun had originally been developed by Nazi scientists. Fritz Hoffmann, ironically one of the few anti-Nazi Paperclip scientists, seems in the US to have developed the vicious defoliant Agent Orange. It appears, perhaps surprisingly, that we have Richard Nixon to thank for ending America’s biological weapons programme: “Mankind already carries in its hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction”, he said.

But there would be one more grim reminder of what happens when you touch pitch. “In the late 1950s, Ambros was also elected chairman of the advisory committee for a German company called Chemie Grünenthal. Grünenthal was about to market a new tranquilizer that promised pregnant women relief from morning sickness. The drug, called thalidomide, was going to be sold under the brand name Contergan. Otto Ambros served on the board of directors of Grünenthal. In the late 1950s, very few people knew that Grünenthal was a safe haven for many Nazis […] The patents suggest that thalidomide was probably one of a number of products developed at Dyhernfurth or Auschwitz-Monowitz under the leadership of Otto Ambros in the course of nerve gas research.” Those who sup with the devil really do need a remarkably long spoon.

And then she remembered the big spider that had built its web between the gorse bushes in the autumn. One day an oak leaf had got caught in the web and Miss Maple had watched the spider diligently and delicately remove it. It had taken a while for Miss Maple to realise why, but finally she got it; the leaf would have given the web away to the flies – so it had to go.
“It’s a trap!” she bleated loudly. “We’re a trap. And Yves was a leaf!”
The others looked at her blankly.
“Yves was far too big to be a leaf,” said Cloud reassuringly.
“And he wasn’t flat enough,” explained Heather.
“And he didn’t grow on a tree,” said Mopple.
It was beyond obvious, but Maple stubbornly shook her head.
“I’m not saying he was an actual leaf, But he was like a leaf. That’s why he had to die!”
“Have something to eat,” said Cloud, concerned.

Miss Maple, the cleverest sheep in the flock, and possibly the world, sometimes has trouble getting her friends to follow her train of thought. Back in 2007, I reviewed Leonie Swann’s novel about a flock of detective sheep, Three Bags Full. I didn’t notice at the time that it was in fact originally written in German and had been translated by Anthea Bell, whom I should have acknowledged in the review. I found it hugely enjoyable and would long ago have read its sequel Garou, published, again in German, in 2010, if I’d known it existed. But it has now been translated, by Amy Bojang, as Big Bad Wool, and I have caught up.

Like its predecessor, this novel is very careful to maintain its point of view; there is no scene that is not at least observed by a sheep (or goat, for this novel, besides Dramatis Oves, also has Dramatis Caprae). And its characterisation never forgets the requisite animality; these protagonists see the same things as us, but from a different viewpoint – like the ram Othello’s reaction to his reflection:

Othello warily stepped closer and the strange sheep stepped out of the shadow of the doorframe too, into the light, soundless as a ghost.
Othello just stood there, stunned. He knew the ram, had known him a long time. He was the sheep of windless days, the sheep from the depths of puddles, ponds and water troughs.

In Three Bags Full, the flock was in Ireland, investigating the apparent murder of their shepherd George, whose habit of reading stories to them had been responsible for their increased intelligence. Now, under the care of his daughter Rebecca, they have moved to France and are in a meadow next to some French goats, which is fortunate since, though the sheep can understand the goats and Rebecca, they cannot understand the French-speaking human inhabitants of “the chateau” and need the goats to translate for them. Figurative language tends to confuse them in either tongue; Rebecca’s exclamation of “Holy cow!” is baffling: “they hardly dared imagine what a cow with holes in it might look like”.

They are investigating some mysterious animal and human deaths, but reviews of murder mysteries ought not to contain spoilers, so I shall concentrate on the style, which is as drily amusing as in its predecessor, and characterisation, which is as thoughtful as ever. Othello and the ageing Ritchfield play a big part, as does the Winter Lamb, but all the Dramatis Oves are sharply delineated and as apt to engage our sympathy as before. Like Three Bags Full, this novel is not particularly aimed at child readers; indeed I would guess it might be too scary for some (the back-cover review calling it “cozy mystery” is well inaccurate). Nor, though it contains much humour, is it really a “comic novel”, just an enjoyable and thought-provoking one in which we see our world from an unusual and revealing viewpoint. Three Bags Full was shorter and, I think, tighter; the cast here is larger and the plot more complex and now and then I had trouble recalling which human character was which (this is never a problem with the sheep). But then humans are not really central to this novel’s world, and it is as absorbing a world as ever. Ritchfield and the French goat Aubrey, both haunted by their dead siblings, are particularly engaging.

You’re composing a topography of yourself,
terrain of lift and soar, of landscape and birdsong
mellow as an eager conception, rich
with the patois of new life.
(To the Foothills)

Harry Owen is a poet resident in South Africa who has long been active in support of ecological causes, and this is a collection written to reflect “the thesis that if capitalist economics forms the basis of a language that exploits and damages the natural world, perhaps ecopoetry, whether rooted in South Africa or elsewhere, can offer a more enriching alternative tongue.” However, there’s ecopoetry and ecopoetry, and this collection is also much concerned with humans; not only with how they are damaging, perhaps beyond repair, the ship they sail in, but also with existential questions like who and what exactly they are:

       And who is this ‘I’ my language identifies?
      Where is he lurking, and does I exist?
      (Never Mind).

Most of the collection is indeed very rooted in South Africa; there are excursions elsewhere but it is when he is noting things like “from deep bush the gem-bright face/ of an oryx (Miracle), or casually dropping Afrikaans words like potjes, fynbos, skaapsteker, into the mix, that he sounds most assured and at home. His emotional attachment to the landscape is clear, and is what leads to the anger that comes through the poetry when he sees it neglected and abused:

      Can’t bear the thought of it, can’t stand the taste
     of oil spills, wildfires, putrid air, plastic
     filth like some gross diarrhoea of the soul
     (Scene of crime: a fulmination).

There is a lot of anger, mostly directed at a species that has ceased to see itself as merely one part of the natural world, as in his account of a wildfire:

      Cape Town blazes, its Mountain and veld
     for many miles around exploding
     in an apocalypse of infernal smoke,
     ash, flame and cinders. But no loss of life.

      Human life, we mean, of course, as if this
     were the only kind there is, the only
     kind worth mentioning.
     (Incendiary).

This ties in with a sense of pantheism that pervades the collection

      And when he returns he is an oak-bole,
     a boulder, the obstinate
     roughness of soil that urges him lower,
     lighter, into each contentious morning.
     (Falling into the Sky).

It is this sense of oneness with things, itself the cause of his anger, that mitigates it; even as he fears the destruction of what he loves, he is conscious of how much he loves it. A rainbow, the sound of water, the face of an oryx, illuminate the writing:

      Hot afternoon, shadows transferring weight
     from air to sunlit grasses: parkland, sky,
     cool flatteries of tiny birds. Why must
     we feel guilty? Here we’re welcomed home,
     having wasted time on mortgages,

      ambitions, cars, a million fripperies.
     This was the fortune waiting all along;
     we’ve earned the right to live it now, without
     (and here’s the irony) ever needing to.
     (Working Day)

This love of the natural could easily become sentimental, but it does not, with very rare exceptions - water chattering “like a rhapsody of laughing children” (Paganini at Banhoek) is arguably a bit overdone. Mostly he has an ear for a telling phrase – “an elephant’s mountainous smile” (-ness), “Sometimes a rock calls ‘Sit here!’ and I do” (Shares). The ending of “Kariega”, the collection’s final poem, echoing the earlier pantheistic tone, is especially powerful:

      And there’s an island far ahead where we’ll rest and eat
    with the waterbuck, the crabs and blacksmith plovers,
    where the world is as it has always been, quiet and slow,

and where, if at last we should lose ourselves, it won’t be
in concrete, tar or plastic. It will seem no tragic ending.

But the warning that broods behind these poems, insinuating that there may well be a tragic ending, is never far away:

      The Earth scratches, bristles, incubates,
    applies aloe gel and hopes to assuage,
    ignoring the grief, offering prayers, pretending.
    When will she attack the swamp with earthquakes,
    volcanoes, tsunamis, defend herself? It must happen soon

No question it will come
(Incubation)

I’ve been reading Konstantin Paustovsky, which, as anyone who knows me on Facebook is aware. I do a lot of. In his book on writing techniques, The Golden Rose, he discusses two of his short stories, Sneg (Snow) and Telegramma (The Telegram), and provides background on how he came to write them the way he did. And it was fascinating, not just for what it said but for what it left out. I decided to do a post on each, starting with The Telegram which is the more straightforward case. They are both brilliant stories, by the way.

In The Telegram, an old woman, Ekaterina Petrovna, is dying in a small village. It’s a very autumnal story, deservedly famous for how it uses nature and the season to create a mood. She has a daughter, Anastasia (“Nastia”), living in Moscow, who sends her money but doesn’t visit often. A girl who keeps house for her and an old handyman, Tikhon, are her only company. Tikhon sends Nastia a telegram, urging her to come at once. But Nastia, busy organising an exhibition for a talented but overlooked artist, puts off going and misses her mother’s death and funeral. A young schoolmistress, newly come to the village, attends the funeral, thinking of her own mother who is also at a distance. Nastia, when she arrives, realises she had her priorities wrong and is deeply regretful.

In The Golden Rose, Paustovsky reveals that he was witness to much of this in real life; the old lady was real, he lodged in her house in Ryazan and it was he who sent the telegram. He also went to the funeral. He was not one for “collecting material”; he preferred to open himself to experience and trust his instinct to know what would be important – in this case, the season: “The drearier the drift of rain-clouds, the older the rains, the lighter my heart became and the more the words flowed from my pen. It was to get the feel of that autumn, the train of thoughts and emotions it aroused, that was important. All the rest, all that we call “material” – people, events, details – was, I knew, wrapped up in that feeling”.

The most obvious difference between the source material and the story is that Paustovsky has left himself out of it. This is an authorial decision not discussed in The Golden Rose. Why has he done it? To come to an answer, we must look at part of the story he wasn’t witness to but included anyway; Nastia in Moscow. In the background notes from The Golden Rose, he sounds fairly contemptuous of her, but in the story he takes a more even-handed view. She is genuinely busy, doing a useful job; she is not naturally cold-hearted, just young, enjoying city life and supposing, as the young tend to, that her mother will always be there.

And here, I think, is the clue. Paustovsky’s situation was in some ways very like Nastia’s. He was a journalist, roving the country writing for many different outlets, and he got on with his mother best at a distance. He loved her, but found her colder and less affectionate than he would have liked (he took after his father, another hopeless romantic). He sent her money but did not visit much, and he was at the other end of the country when she died of pneumonia in Moscow – he, like Nastia, missed the funeral.

There’s more… his sister Galya lived with their mother, and died days after her. Galya had become blind and almost deaf; she could not survive alone, but before she lost her sight and hearing, her ambition had been to become a village schoolmistress. The invented schoolmistress in the story is not much like her, and Ekaterina, drawn from life, is nothing like Paustovsky’s mother. But I think they were, beside being themselves, his way of commemorating his mother and sister, and that this subtext is why he did not write himself into the story; it was too close to home. In The Golden Rose, he mentions a moment when he was with the real Ekaterina: “I accompanied her into the house, thinking that if only I had a mother like her I would be the happiest man on earth”.

So we are left with a story of distance, of love that doesn’t quite reach far enough, above all, of the autumn his instinct told him was the key. “October was unusually cold and wet. The wooden roofs grew black. Tangled grass in the garden lay down flat and just one small sunflower by the fence kept on flowering and flowering and could not shed all its petals. Over the water-meadows, from beyond the river, porous clouds dragged, and caught on the bare willows. Rain drizzled down from them constantly.” (Trs. Beatrice Scott). In Russian, it reads like the very sound of melancholy: Pastushi razhok zatikh do vyesni” – the shepherd’s horn fell silent until spring.

The full title first, "The Private Lives of the Saints: Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England by Janina Ramirez, pub. W H Allen 2025", which really is terribly misleading. For one thing, much of it deals with pre-Anglo-Saxon times; for another, anyone hoping to find out what St Patrick liked for breakfast or whether St Dunstan had a hobby (still less a steamy sex life) would be heading for disappointment, because of course that sort of information, certainly for the early saints, just doesn’t exist. When she remarks of St Alban, “it is still uncertain which phase of Roman persecution he died under”, one is tempted to add “or indeed if he ever lived”, for the only testimony that he did comes from monks like Bede, who had a vested interest in the cults of saints, and whose attitude to historical truth we shall see later. As for Brigid, demoted by Pope Paul VI on the ground that there was no proof she existed, it can’t have helped her cause that she shared a name and feast day with a pagan Irish goddess. The unfortunate St Ninian, meanwhile, appears to be a typographical error for Finnian. We are on surer ground with St Patrick, who left writings; he certainly existed, though there do seem to have been two of him, whose stories somehow got conflated.

The more interesting question, in fact, is why people felt the need of saints, and why they chose the ones they did, and on this the book is more enlightening. It seems clear that early monotheists missed the pantheon, not only of gods with specific functions, but of well-deities, divine heroes and spirits of place that had enlivened and localised polytheistic worship. Saints provided a more human, intimate way of interacting with an impossibly distant and impersonal god.

As to who became saints, as she points out, the notion of sainthood, to a mediaeval person, “encompasses notions of piety, virtuous living and generosity, but it is also wrapped up in celebrity, public profile and social status”. She gives Princess Diana as an example of a person who in earlier times might well have attracted a cult of sainthood after her death. She could equally well have named an actual modern example of a sainted person, Teresa of Calcutta, whose public profile was very much that of a media celebrity and who shared with the likes of Columba and Dunstan a certain ruthlessness and taste for power that seem to have characterised many of the saints described here. Columba, the “Dove”, was a killer; Wilfrid a power-hungry accumulator of wealth. Gregory “the Great”, hearing a monk from his monastery confess on his deathbed to stealing some coins, ordered him to die alone and then be thrown on the rubbish heap. Most saints in fact, perhaps unsurprisingly, don’t sound like very comfortable companions, though Hild of Whitby would have been an interesting one (Ramirez, rather irritatingly, insists on calling her Hilda, which to my mind makes her sound like a character from Coronation Street). The power that could be wielded by the church, and the wealth it attracted, is evident in the way Anglo-Saxon kings manoeuvred their spare daughters into the position of abbesses. One suspects the daughters, with access to learning and influence they could never otherwise have attained, rather enjoyed it.

The conflict between Roman and Irish Christianity, and the determination of people like Gregory to enforce the Roman version on Britain, plays a large part in the book. There are some fascinating stories, like that of the mission that failed because Augustine had no manners: “They [the British bishops] had sought his advice on whether to bend their views to the Roman missionaries, and were told that, if Augustine rose to meet them when they reconvened their meeting, then he was honouring them and they should follow his guidance. However, Augustine did not get up, preferring to stay seated in the presence of bishops. This single act of apparent arrogance set the Christian mission back by many decades, and may have coloured relations between native and Continental Christians long-term. This says much about both Augustine and the Gregorian mission.”

Another fascinating anecdote concerns Bede’s notion of translation. He worked on editing the Codex Amiatinus, a copy of Jerome’s Vulgate Latin bible made at Jarrow by the abbot Ceolfrith. “The original Vulgate, in the story of Noah’s Ark, has the raven, like the dove, returning to the ark. But Bede has added a small ‘non’ before ‘revertebatur’. It flies in the face of the Vulgate translation, but instead creates a negative action for the raven – he goes away and does not come back.” Bede of course did this because for Saxons, and indeed almost anyone from Northern Europe, the raven was the bird of Odin and had strong pagan associations. The fact that for reasons of dogma he allowed himself this freedom should be borne in mind when assessing the evidence of mediaeval scholars.

There are a few typos, most unfortunately “the level of animosity between he and Wilfrid”, but full marks for “Peter Cubicularius met a particularly grisly end”. I have recently read two history books which assured me that people had met “grizzly” ends when they had not, in fact, been eaten by bears. I’m glad to see that this is not a universal error!

You took a reid threid [red thread] and knetis [tied] it about your cow’s tail. Which is also a special point of witchcraft.

This is an account of witch trials in one particular part of Scotland, during five outbreaks of what might be called witch-hunting. It begins with an overview of the historical background, then documents a considerable number of trials whose details survive in court records (the Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives) and finally discusses what might have caused these outbreaks to happen.

The quotation from the court records above illustrates how easily such an accusation might arise. In truth, the red thread sounds like a harmless country superstition, and if nothing untoward had happened afterwards, it would probably never have come to the notice of the authorities. When, however, such an event chanced to be followed by a misfortune to someone else, they looked for a cause, and preferably someone to blame, whereupon innocent words and actions suddenly became questionable.

Lawlor’s decision to recount in succession the records of these trials strikes me as a good one. In some ways they are very repetitive, but that is the point; it becomes clear from these unadorned records, related without comment or speculation, which factors were in play. Over and over we find, for instance, that midwives and amateur healers were at risk if their efforts went amiss, and even if they didn’t, for their ungrateful clients seem sometimes to have concluded that if someone could cure them, he or she might also have made them ill. This may be one reason why women were so much more often accused; they were responsible for midwifery and most everyday doctoring as well, since few could afford actual doctors. There are a few revealing cases also where battered wives seem to have gone to the local reputed wise-woman for poison to rid themselves of their abusive husbands (which, considering they then had no other means of doing so, I should say was a public service).

Women were also more likely, if involved in a dispute, to resort to words, including curses and idle threats, when a man might have had recourse to his fists. Threats that came to nothing might be forgotten, but if they happened to be followed by some misfortune, this would eagerly be ascribed to the “witch”, rather than to one’s own fault or sheer bad luck. “When we read people’s witness statements, they rarely mention any concern with Satan. Their run-ins with the witch-accused are mostly focused on arguments they have had, illnesses they or their family members may have suffered (and sometimes died of), strange or inappropriate behaviour, or business deals that did not go the way they wanted.” Strange behaviour could be simply being out after dark: “They took a great fear of you, that you had meit [met, run into] them at that time of night without ane erand [an errand, a reason].” And we should now be inclined to ascribe George Barclay’s troubles to his own poor judgement: “Isobell, by her witchcraft, caused George Barclay to marry a puire husse [poor hussy, a poor wanton woman]. And all men wondered why, seeing as he was a good and rich man that came from honest parents, and she an vgle harlot quyne [ugly harlot woman], come from baise degre [low societal rank]. He is now impoverished.”

Some of the accused do sound like cantankerous persons and had a name for being quarrelsome. They also, very often, turn out to be relatives of other accused persons. This is partly down to the belief that witches recruited others – hence the “contagious” quoted in the book’s title. It was dangerous to be too closely related to a convicted witch. But some of these families may also have been what we should now call problem families or, ironically, neighbours from hell. One’s reputation in the neighbourhood could be crucial when one could be described in court as “a known witch, by open voice and common knowledge”. Of Isobell Scudder it was recorded that “the whole parish […] swear that they never heard any good tales being told about her”.

One reason these outbreaks could spread, and were themselves “contagious”, was that the accused were encouraged, sometimes very forcibly, not only to confess but to implicate others in hopes of a pardon. It didn’t always work. Margaret Aitken, accused in 1597, turned into a witchfinder and, aided by a gullible minister, caused the death of many, perhaps hundreds, of falsely accused people. Eventually she was exposed as a fraud and executed. An opponent of the trials, Marion Walker, leaked the record of Aitken’s confession to the public, which brought about the end of the 1596-7 outbreak of witch trials.

One really odd species of repetition is the description people gave of their supposedly witch-induced illnesses; “Half of the day they grew cold, and the other half of the day they burned and melted away, like wax in a fiery furnace.” “He spent a part of the day birnand in ane gryte heit [burning in a great heat, fever] and the other half of the day als cauld as iise [as cold as ice].” “He spent half the day rossin [roasting] in his body. […] the other half of the day he spent in an extraordinar cauld sweat”. This sounds like your average fever, flu perhaps, but the use, over and over again, of the same formula also sounds like auto-suggestion, how people imagined they ought to feel in such circumstances.

As to what caused such outbreaks; as Lawlor says, there are generally several things going on at once. The 1649 outbreak followed “the coldest years of the Little Ice Age (approximately 1450–1859), and the years 1649–53 were particularly poor in Scotland for agriculture. There was a general scarcity of food and supplies (obviously impacted as well by all the wars), so social unrest would have been bubbling. Bubonic plague had also reared its ugly head in 1644–49, so the Scottish were taking beating after beating … no wonder they were looking for someone to blame”.

“Looking for someone to blame” in fact is crucial. In Britain, the habit of blaming witches was killed off by the Enlightenment; after 1735 it was illegal for people to “claim that they had magical powers”. Every relevant Act since has focused on this element of fraud, tacitly admitting that the magical powers witches and others might have thought they possessed did not exist. But the Enlightenment did not happen everywhere, especially not in rural communities and theocracies. A woman was executed for “sorcery” in Saudi Arabia in 2011, and this year (2026) a woman and infant in Jharkhand, India, were attacked and killed by fellow-villagers who accused the family of witchcraft. The trigger seems to have been the sudden illness and death of a local man – nothing much changes about human nature.

This book is well researched and written. Some of the places that were important to the Aberdeen trials can still be seen – St Nicholas Church, where convicted witches were held, and the nearby memorial to the victims, the art installation “Gallus Quines”, which inspired the book. Like Lawlor, I had often visited Aberdeen and never seen this, but shall go looking next time.

Humpbacks off the starboard bow, blowing and blowing.
One breaches for the sheer joy of it
(“Stellwagen bank and a god’s breath”)

This is one of your “themed collections”, the theme being, basically, living with severe asthma, though it does sometimes go wider, to consider the lungs and the act of breathing in a more general and indeed sometimes metaphorical sense. Themed collections can have the advantage that poems play off against each other, illuminating the theme from different angles, a bit like Monet painting Rouen Cathedral. The different angles are crucial, because with a collection on one theme there are always the dangers of repetition and monotony.

One way of avoiding these dangers is by thinking figuratively, finding various images in which to encapsulate and convey the act of breathing and the impediments to it. In “Ice threatens my breath”, the image is that of bagpipes, and sharply evocative:

the lungs
steadfastly Scottish,

      as when an infection
     has me struggling to inflate them,
     only to expel air

too, too quickly
from the goatskin bag.

I drone for days

And the image of the “stone dresses” in “Asthma is dressed stone rasping”, though not as immediate, is convincing to anyone who has seen an asthmatic fighting what clearly feels like a stone wall. In “The living death, a childhood nightmare”, Snow White “in her glass coffin” is a striking likeness for the girl in hospital:

      Immobile, she is condemned to forced breath,
     this living-death-iron-lung no handsome prince
     can rouse her from.

In those poems that relate directly to her own experience there are inevitably personal references and not all communicate equally well – I am still puzzled by the line “my certificate will say I died like little Ella” (“Particulates”), because I don’t know who she may be; a literary or film reference or something more personal – I even wondered momentarily if it might be a mistake for “Little Eva”. And “Common ground”, quoted in full, totally lost me:

I can’t breathe because of the environment
and five defective genes.

You can’t breathe because in this environment
the police think all your genes defective.

I can only suppose the “you” of the poem is someone she knows and I don’t, but the poem’s intent eludes me.

Many poems, though, go beyond the personal into a world where the naturalness of breathing, which most of us take for granted, becomes an envied luxury:

      The frog
     breathes on through skin or mouth or lungs
    (“Kent marsh frogs”)

The “lungs” of the world itself are in danger, as we all know (well, all except the climate change denial nuts) and in “Dead ice: the end of a glacier”, the image of breathing is persuasive and illuminating throughout:

Winter’s snows are its inhalation: a freezing
draw, replenishment.

Another successful poem, I thought, was “Painting for people with asthma”, which vividly conveys what may not be obvious to a non-sufferer (as it happens, I am married to an asthmatic, so it especially resonated with me):

      Everyone is clasping their hands to their breasts.
     This does not signal love or respect
     or their hearts being touched. […]

      Their faces have changed colour –
     to scarlet mostly from the strain of inhalation.
     Somehow scant air needs to be rendered
     as a trail of fine smoke or thin wind.
     Cigarettes are often involved.

I also liked “Pearl fishers” up to the last line and a half. But perhaps the most convincing of all the metaphorical takes on the theme was “How the night breathes”:

      in the random shufflings of tiny creatures
     in the hedgerow trying to stay alive,
     and in the longed-for call of the tawny owls
     making a swift end to them.

I’ve always been a little wary of themed collections, feeling that the occasional weaker poem may sneak in because it fits the theme, when in a non-themed collection it would have been culled. I don’t think this is totally immune from that tendency, but mostly the poems earn their place and enable the reader to see the world from an unusual and thought-provoking angle.

This is a collection by what you might call a doubly displaced poet: brought up in England, he moves to Spain and experiences being seen as a foreigner there, but when, many years later, he returns to the scenes of his youth (as the Welsh poet JT Jones put it, “to walk in the places where I used to run”), both he and they have changed enough to make him, again, a “foreigner”.

The collection is thoughtfully structured to reflect this narrative; in the first section “Britanico”, we can sense the strangeness of a new climate in “Calor”:

This isn’t heat. This is Calor,
silting and clogging up the air

and the effect of different history and memories in “Translator, Traitor”:

    The War was 39 to 45,
    suffering for the sake of a cause—
    common enemies, common memories.

   La Guerra, 36 to 39,
  was brother killing brother, scores settled
  with the neighbours, decades of reprisals.

He is good at focusing on the small details that constitute identity – forgetting which side of the road to drive on, having trouble with the Spanish rhotic “r” – the poem “Rolling my ‘r’s” echoes in reverse the Proclaimers’ anthem about how they could never “throw the R away”. I did think his reaction to surrendering his UK driving licence a bit overdone:

     my balance
    tilted and swayed— I had to make a grab
    for the counter. (“Carnet de Conducir”)

But then I’ve never had a driving licence, so perhaps I underestimate the trauma involved…

There is a section dealing with “Family Matters”, principally memories of parents, in which there are some memorable images, like the paper clip around documents:

    How it brings their things together.
    How neatly, temporarily,
    it brings them together.

The section “Starting Eleven”, at first sight, is something of an outlier in the pattern, concerning as it does past players for Aldershot FC. But since most of them seem to have come from elsewhere and later moved on, they too can be seen as deracinated, only ever temporarily at home. I liked “Ian Phillips”:

   All he wants is to play one more season,
  one more season, his shoulder relishing
  the chance to usher dainty right-wingers
  straight into the advertising hoardings

The last section, “Retracing Steps”, is the mirror of the first: on a visit to England it is the poet’s wife (or possibly son), rather than he, who is the foreigner, and post-Brexit, this takes on a menacing tinge. Brexit and its aftermath do not crop up much in UK poetry, but then few UK poets have this perspective on it:

Just don’t raise your voice if speaking
Spanish while on a bus or train.

Just don’t think anyone means you
when they slag off the foreigners.

Just take no notice of the flags
in every town. (“Warning”)

The poet himself, though screened by the English accent he has never lost, is conscious that he is no longer quite the same person who left:

But there’s a lift of my eyebrow,
rise in my tone at the end
of words. My dancing hands.

I wear these clues, can’t take them off
like some disguise. I’m different.
Are you afraid of me?

I was reminded of Confucius’s observation: “Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that drive them far apart”.

But the most powerful poem in this section, and perhaps in the whole collection, for me was “Aveley Lane”, heavy with the transience of human existence wherever it is, “temporarily”, lived:

   Here’s another mother getting supper
  in Neil’s kitchen. Here’s another father
  parking his car in Adrian’s driveway.
  They go about their family routines
  as if they’ll never be replaced.

This is an unusual collection, from a viewpoint we do not often see, and correspondingly enlightening.

What was so frightening to authorities—those whom Widman spoke for—was that these people took to the road to Niklashausen and did not ask anybody’s permission, not from their landlords to leave work, not from their priests to go on a pilgrimage. Social rank and obligations just seemed to dissolve.

And we’re back to revolutionary history, in particular the class struggle in mediaeval Germany. In 2024 I reviewed Andrew Drummond’s fascinating account of the life and times of Thomas Müntzer, a priest who fought alongside his flock in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525. Here, from 1476, is an earlier revolutionary, Hans Behem, or Böhm, who herded animals for a living (though so contradictory is the information about his life that we are not even sure if it was sheep, cattle or pigs) and who for recreation played the drum and wrote songs.

Both, after their death, were traduced by their enemies, but while Müntzer, a highly educated man, left us his own trenchant writings to correct the balance, Behem was illiterate. So we are left with the words of his opponents, and they differ wildly. Bishop Rudolph von Sherenberg of Würzburg, a contemporary, saw him as a dangerous opponent, shrewd and intelligent despite his lack of education. Later writers seem to have been determined to mock and belittle him, asserting that he was a noted fool whose words were dictated to him by a Franciscan friar – it is at this time that they begin to call him a swineherd rather than a shepherd, presumably with the symbolic implications of each in mind.

We do know, from the charges against him, some of what he preached to the peasants who flocked to his home valley of Niklashausen. In a time when land was held by a small number of nobles and churchmen, and peasants had few if any rights, he preached that “the waters and woods belonged to everybody; and that the rich should be stripped of their wealth “so that we all have enough” (so hetten wir glich all genugk); and that “the time will come when princes and lords must work for a daily wage” (eβ karnpt dar zu, daβ die fursten und hern noch umb eynen taglone mussen arbeitten)”. He also held the recent Church invention of Purgatory in contempt and did not believe priests had the power to excommunicate people.

Behem’s transformation, apparently sparked by visions of the Virgin Mary, took place just after the season of Karneval and Wunderli argues convincingly that this season, when the world briefly turned upside down and normal social conventions ceased to apply, may have been the trigger.

Like Drummond, Wunderli is writing a history with many lacunae. He is scrupulous in indicating when he is speculating rather than reporting known facts, but I could do without his attempt to reconstruct from fragments one of Behem’s actual sermons. He is honest about it being a reconstruction, but it still feels off-key, because though we may know the gist of what Behem said, we can only guess at his tone, his delivery, whatever it was that so impressed his listeners.

Nevertheless, this is an absorbing account of a turbulent time and its main characters come very alive: Sherenberg, himself a would-be reformer whose attempts were constantly frustrated; the mysterious Beghard Brother who accompanied Behem to execution; the pragmatic Count Johann of Wertheim, who, replying to Church requests to prevent pilgrims travelling through his lands to see where Behem had preached, said that “he was reluctant to ban the movement of pilgrims through his lands because of the revenues pilgrims brought in. At least the count held a consistent position: banning tourism is bad business.” And Hans himself, commonly called “the youth”, whose behaviour at the stake, albeit reported by one of his detractors, who did not see it, still rings oddly true: “When he was tied to the stake for burning, however, he sang certain songs or verses in a high voice about Our Lady, which he had composed in the German language. […] But as soon as he felt the flames, he cried out three times, with a weeping voice, ‘O, o, o’. He was then engulfed by the flames. His voice uttered nothing again.”

"So unprepared were most people; so little did a large part of Denmark’s population understand what had happened; so little had a majority grasped the nature of Nazism."

This is an account of the Nazi occupation of Denmark in World War 2, with special reference to Danish Jews and the largely successful efforts of the resistance and others to save them from genocide. But its relevance goes beyond that one situation; it also concerns the difficulties of deciding how to deal with aggressors and madmen in power, which could hardly have more contemporary relevance.

While Sweden’s neutrality was respected, Denmark, like Norway, was invaded and occupied by Germany early in the war (1940). They were caught unprepared: “Intelligence had suggested for weeks that German forces had been building on the border near Jutland in obvious preparation for an invasion, but Danish leaders in the foreign ministry had decided that any defense preparations would be viewed as provocative by Hitler, so they opted to do nothing, which left the Danish Army and Navy with their hands tied” (I should mention that Brady is American and hence naturally uses US spelling conventions). Now faced with vastly superior forces, the king (Christian X) and government reluctantly decided to submit, under protest, rather than resist at the certain cost of many Danish lives.

This did not sit well with most Danes. There were some, especially near the border with Germany, who supported Hitler, but most were indignant and ashamed at having been invaded and without resistance – sabotage, on a small scale, began almost at once and soon escalated when SOE were able to help. But it is hard to see what else the Danish authorities could have done, except be better prepared in the first place. Resistance, once the invasion had begun without warning, would not only have cost many lives but would also have been futile. The king, especially, hoped to be able to influence the course of events and protect his people better by staying and wielding at least some authority.

For some time, this seemed to work. The Germans, warned by their men on the spot about the Danish character – “The Dane is freedom-loving […] He rejects every coercion and every subordination. He lacks a sense of military discipline and authority” – adopted a hands-off approach. Saboteurs were dealt with under Danish law rather than shipped off to Germany and there was at first no persecution of Jews, the king having made it very clear that “there is no Jewish question in the country. There is only my people.”

With hindsight, the first hint of trouble came when, after invading Russia in 1941, the SS demanded the arrest of Danish Communists. “Would the Danish government insist on their protection as Danish citizens? […] The answer to that last question was no, […] Danish Communists were rounded up and taken to a Danish internment camp, Horserod, in August. Soon after, the Danish Ministry of Justice drafted a law making any Communist activities and organizations illegal in Denmark”.

Danish Communists had made themselves unpopular with their fellow-citizens by supporting the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland. But resistance fighters, like the Kieler family, recognised that this was the thin end of the wedge, an admission that Denmark could not rely on being able to protect its own citizens from the invader. But the Communists were at least still in Denmark, and many still allowed themselves to hope things would get no worse. This, by and large, included Denmark’s Jews. They had had a long and mostly untroubled history of settlement in Denmark, since the 17th century when Sephardic Jews came to escape Tsarist pogroms in Russia. They were very assimilated. “The Jewish population, in general, felt as certain as most other Danes in the hope that the country’s culture, its democratic traditions, its king, and its economic importance to Germany would save it from the usual depredations visited on Germany’s own Jews and the Jews of Eastern Europe. If they just kept their heads down; if they stayed as invisible as possible, they might make it through.”

But imitating the action of the ostrich can be risky, when faced with an unpredictable and capricious opponent. Hitler’s attitude to Denmark apparently hardened after he sent Christian X a rather fulsome birthday greeting in 1943. This seems to have disgusted the king, already no fan of his, who replied with a curt 4-word note of thanks. Hitler went into a tantrum, as mad despots tend to do when they feel insulted; indeed much as Trump does these days. From then on, the Jews of Denmark were in as much danger as elsewhere, but it would still take a lot to convince them.

Fortunately there was by now a flourishing Danish resistance. In response to their increased activity the Germans demanded that the Danish government declare a state of emergency and enact draconian laws. The government refused and abdicated its functions, while Christian X declared himself a prisoner of war. “The next day, the citizens of Copenhagen awoke to find German troops swarming everywhere in the city, guarding and occupying all government buildings. In addition, von Hanneken ordered the roundup of hundreds of Danish leaders, including military figures, intellectual and political leaders, and, for the first time, leaders of the Jewish community.”

The resistance now applied themselves not just to sabotage but to helping the Jews to escape. But many would not have been persuaded of their danger in time, had it not been for a German diplomat, Georg Duckwitz, who tipped off both the Danes and Sweden that arrests were imminent and urged Sweden to accept the refugees. The physicist Niels Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, had also been working to this end and continued to do so once he had escaped to Sweden.

From then on, the book describes the efforts of good and brave people to thwart the genocide. Led by the young surgeon Dr Karl Koster, the staff of Bispebjerg Hospital turned the whole place into a safe house. The Kieler family, Henny Sinding and others organised boat crossings to Sweden and raised money both for the emigrant families, and for the fishermen who were risking life and livelihood by carrying them. “During a particularly busy moment at the height of the evacuation, Dr Koster found the coffers bare just as a group of Jews were being prepared for transport. In searching around for some source of emergency funds, he remembered that King Christian was being held under house arrest in nearby Sorgenfri Palace. In a move that was considered as audacious as it was necessary for the rescue of the refugees, Koster sent two of his most trusted nurses to the king to ask for his charity. According to Koster’s own account of the incident, ‘They were not disappointed’.”

The book focuses on individuals and is the livelier and more absorbing for this. But the message it left with me concerned the danger of the ostrich approach. If it looks like a fascist, talks like a fascist and acts like a fascist, don’t waste time hoping it may turn out to be a pussycat. Believe that it will do what it says. 95% of Denmark’s Jews were saved, but the conduct of the Nazis toward those they did lay hands on, including all the inhabitants of an old folk’s home, indicates what would have happened were it not for people like those in this book. Don’t think you can appease the beast either; you probably can’t. Elsebet Kieler, one of the resistance, was conflicted because she was a confirmed pacifist and hated the idea of causing death. She consulted the pastor, poet and resister Kaj Munk, who advised “Burn all your literature on this topic, at the present moment it is not relevant, or is simply a millstone round your neck—and learn how to use a machine gun”. Munk was eventually killed by the Nazis.

This is an introduction to twenty ancient civilisations that don’t get as much attention as some more famous ones, partly because there is less archaeological information on them, partly because they have not the initial glamour of ancient Greece or Egypt. Some are more obscure than others. I would guess many know at least something of the Cretan, Akkadian and Indus Valley cultures, while far fewer will be acquainted with those of Great Zimbabwe, the Lapita of Oceania, and the Moche of Peru (a bunch with whom you wouldn’t want to be at all closely acquainted, unless you had an unusual interest in torture and Toby jugs). And I certainly wasn’t aware there had ever been such a thing as a Mississippian civilisation.

Each section begins with an imagined and italicized reconstruction of a moment in the life of someone from the culture in question. I don’t mind these, since the italics make it clear that they are fictional. Then we get an overview of the particular civilisation: where its people came from, what marked them out as a culture, what caused their decline and what influences and achievements they left behind.

Surveying so many cultures in succession can be slightly overwhelming; one tends to merge into another. But there is a great advantage: it shows not only what individualises these civilisations but what they had in common. It becomes clear, for instance, that few things matter more to any urban or semi-urban culture than good management of water and sewage. Over and over, we find that societies which lasted for any length of time - the Hittites, the Minoans, the Nabateans - had engineers who could ensure a supply of pure water and the removal of waste. At Harappa in the Indus Valley, they “created water management and sanitation systems that were unheard of for their time, and not seen again until Roman times, two millennia later. Drains and sewage systems were built to help remove wastewater and other sewage from the city. They normally ran down the middle of the main streets”. This would have materially reduced death by disease, though in that way towns could become victims of their own success – at a later stage of Harappa’s existence, its population outstripped the infrastructure, “sewage overflowed onto streets and into houses, forcing the city’s inhabitants to raise the level of their doors and walls.”

One craft product which individualises any culture, and which fortunately for archaeologists tends to survive in the ground, is pottery, and here the variety is extraordinary, from the Minoans of Crete, who, almost alone in the Bronze Age, ignored the celebration of rulers and wars in their art, favouring instead flowing designs of sea creatures, to the Moche, who preferred depictions of sacrificial victims, or possibly just enemies, being tortured to death. They also, no kidding, seem to have invented the Toby jug: “the Moche created lifelike portrait vessels either in the form of a human head or of their full figure. These vessels were modelled with individual traits and features that evoke their personalities so well, that they appear to have been modelled after living people. These portraits are so detailed that researchers today have been able to identify individuals possessing infectious and neurological diseases, mutilation, and congenital disorders. People were masterfully sculpted with various conditions such as Down syndrome, extra toes, and cleft lips.” An odd lot, the Moche.

Another common factor that emerges is the way these cultures go into decline. She makes it clear that there is seldom or never one reason for this, rather a number of factors coming together, but one possible cause that crops up over and over is environmental. Sometimes it is in the form of climate change outside human control, like the Little Ice Age which may have put an end to the Thule Inuit. Sometimes it is down to over-use of natural resources: the wealth of Nubia was built on iron, but the smelting of iron requires huge amounts of charcoal, which entails burning wood. “Eventually, this caused mass deforestation and Meroë depleted its local wood supply. This, combined with overuse of their fields, led to the complete exhaustion of their environment.”

Downsides to this book. There are too many typos, at least in the Kindle edition, I can’t speak for the print version. There is no index, at least in the Kindle version. There are also infelicities of style. The chapter heading “A Return Back Home” is just an irritating tautology, and the sentence “The girl poked her head around the stable door, careful not to alert her father of her presence” is bad grammar; “of” should be “to”, but at least the meaning is clear. But this sentence; “To the European colonists, Great Zimbabwe was made by who they considered to be the great people of the ancient world, and centuries older than what it really was” is so clumsily phrased that I am not at all sure what it means. This is infuriating, as it occurs in the course of a fascinating and informative account. I was not surprised that early Europeans insisted on believing buildings, monuments and artefacts in Africa to have been made by ancient Phoenicians or Arabs; indeed most are aware that they did. But it was news to me that long after it became clear that this narrative was false, as late as the 1960s, “the ruling political party, the Rhodesian Front, even went as far as blocking books about Great Zimbabwe. Some archaeologists who refused to accept the narrative of the site’s biblical origins were imprisoned and deported.”

This book, then, has much to tell us, and while I don’t find the style always to my liking, I can’t deny the import. It does not claim to be anything but an introduction to all these cultures, there is a bibliography for those whose interest has been whetted by some chapter and who want to find out more (on the Akkadians, I can recommend "Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East" by Amanda H Podany).

Use three Physicians still; First Doctor Quiet, Next Doctor Merry-man, and Doctor Dyet.
- From Sir John Harington’s translation into English of the Regimen Sanitatis Salerni

“Avoid stress, keep cheerful and eat the right things” is not bad advice for maintaining good health, and a feature of this book is that it does not spend much time mocking the supposed credulity and ignorance of our ancestors. There are of course some outlandish “cures” that can only have made matters worse. But as Knight points out, quite apart from the state of medical knowledge at the time, most people simply could not afford a qualified doctor – as Nicholas Culpeper observed in a bit of tart wordplay, “Too many Physitians in England being like Balaams Asse, they will not speak unless they see an Angel.”

People were therefore driven back on their own knowledge and resources, and “people” generally meant housewives, who were responsible for keeping their families healthy as they were for feeding them. Medicine, in an everyday context, seems to have been viewed as a rather specialised branch of cookery – indeed this was how the author, from an original interest in historical cookery, came to research the subject - and the “household books” that many women kept contained recipes and remedies indiscriminately mixed: “in 1699 a cure for urinary gravel appears between recipes for potted tongue and potted herrings”.

Most of these remedies were of course herbal and relied on knowledge, or assumed knowledge, passed down generations. When this was observational, the result of trial and error or of watching what animals ate to relieve pain, it often worked. The use of onion juice to treat burns, for instance, was based on the work of Ambroise Paré, a French surgeon of the sixteenth century, who pioneered more humane and effective methods of treating battle wounds, and since, as we now know, onion has antibiotic properties, it would have helped the damaged tissue to resist infection. And Lady Egerton’s remedy for “greensickness” in girls, which involved dissolving iron hobnails, looks less eccentric when one realises that greensickness was probably a form of anaemia.

Remedies were less useful when based either on the ancient medical knowledge of men like Galen which, though outdated, had acquired a sort of unchallengeable authority, or on superstition and sympathetic magic – eg, yellow plants would be good for jaundice. And some herbal cures would have been of more use if their authors had not crammed in as many herbs as they could think of, presumably either on the basis that more was better, or in hopes that one of the many might prove curative. In fact though, the effect of one ingredient might well counteract that of another, while boiling them to intensify their essence might also destroy much of their virtue.

Indeed some of the receipts are fiendishly complicated and would have taken days to prepare. Knight suggests, plausibly, that the amount of work involved may have been as much to relieve the home physician’s feelings as the patient’s condition. Referring to a medicine for advanced TB, a condition which was almost certainly going to be fatal, she says:

“It is a ‘raire watter’ distilled from a cock, half a gallon of sack, milk, dried fruit, herbs, rose water, hartshorn and china root – plus sugar candy, gold, musk, ambergris, horn of unicorn and bezoar stone. Very expensive, but when a life was obviously ebbing it may have helped to realise how much one was prized by the family who were paying for these costly ingredients. As far as the family was concerned, too, perhaps they felt that they had done their utmost for the patient.”

The mention of gold among the ingredients is interesting. As late as the mid-20th century the tubercular George Mackay Brown was being given injections of gold which probably did no good and were certainly potentially toxic. We may no longer tie dismembered tench to the stomach to cure jaundice, and we know that tobacco, far from being the panacea Culpeper thought it, caused his early death, but we are perhaps not so far removed from our ancestors as we might think: sick folk and their relatives still hope for miracles and sometimes look for them in bizarre places. Richard Burton (the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, not the actor or the explorer) remarked “We see commonly the toothache, gout, […] and many such maladies cured by spells, words, characters and charms […] All the world knows there is no virtue in such charms or cures, but a strong conceit and opinion alone”. In other words, vis medicatrix naturae, the impulse of the body to heal itself, can sometimes be aided by what we would now call the placebo effect, the feeling of being valued and looked after.

There are amusing moments in this book, but the feeling it left me with was one of sympathy for ordinary people, usually the women who kept those “household books”, who were doing the best they could in the face of diseases they knew very little about.

Thank you, dear,’ she said, the way adults did when they thanked you for something that hadn’t really helped and that they hadn’t really wanted.

This is a coming-of-age novel, the progress of the eponymous Henry through the sixties and seventies, from birth to leaving for an unspecified university. It is written in close third person, and almost all from Henry’s point of view.

A child’s-eye view can give a fresh outlook on things, because their perspective is so different from an adult one. They observe in a way adults seldom do – “the mangle, a strange thing that looked alive and sad and whose rubber lips were chapped and perished” – and their sense of priorities and realities is different, as becomes apparent when a sudden accidental death happens at Henry’s primary school. The adults are horrified, but the children sharing the news, “smiled, because deaths never happened at boring old school, and it was exciting and not quite real, like something in a story or film”.

They also tend to be solipsistic, and Henry is no exception. He is not particularly likeable or dislikeable, more your average ordinary child morphing into your average whiny. self-obsessed, self-pitying teenager. Indeed a key moment in his development is when he briefly contemplates suicide, for no better reason than that a girl he’s only just met has refused to go out with him, but is distracted by a phone call from a friend. Afterwards, returning to the pills he has collected: “he stared at them for a while and tried to remember how he’d been feeling before the phone call but could not. Then he picked up the pills and went back to his mum’s room, replacing them in her medicine bag. Back in his room, he re-read his note and shook his head, as Mr Muldoon would have done, at the hackneyed phrasing. Then he tore the note into small pieces, and put them carefully in the bin.”

Henry’s viewpoint is challenging, both for the writer and any adult reader, because we can share, as Henry at the time cannot, the adult viewpoints that baffle him as a child and annoy him as an adolescent. It may be particularly challenging for a female reader, because part of Henry’s trouble, in his own mind, is that he is male. His father does not provide the kind of male role model he wants, and he feels his mother prefers his sisters and sees his masculinity as a nuisance: “‘Why can’t you be more like your sisters?’ she said, waving her duster, a technicolour nylon thing on a stick, as if she would dust him out of existence, or at least, into femininity”.

An adult reader can see that this may not be what she means at all, and can also see that Henry’s resentment at his sisters “getting away” with things at certain times stems from his total inability to appreciate how enervating the onset of menstruation can be: “They were girls; they had strange fits of weakness where all that would console them was cake and music and cartoons on TV. Henry knew then that girls would always get away with things that he couldn’t, and that, all things considered, he would have been better off born female.” But though the first reaction of a female reader to this whinge may be pardonable irritation, it is illuminating and thought-provoking to see how things look to him, and perhaps to boys in general.

Henry grows up in the 60s and 70s, which makes him about 10 years younger than me. For the most part, I think the evocation of the time period is convincing without looking over-researched. The obsession of Henry’s mother with class and her horror of anything “common” ring very true for the time, as does the gradual change in dietary habits: “You should never invert your fork and shovel in food as if it were coal going into a boiler. Holding your fork that way was only acceptable if you moved it to your right hand and were eating spaghetti Bolognese, which you sprinkled with a thin dusty cheese called Parmesan, that smelled faintly of vomit. The smell made it sophisticated and more Italian, his mother said. Sophisticated meant eating food that was slightly disgusting. This food was what was called an acquired taste.” Only at two points did I feel “hang on, it wasn’t like that”. One was when we hear that Henry and his sisters, as teens, liked The Waltons. Now admittedly it is hard to judge, because I was a teenager in the 60s, which were more rebellious and cynical than the 70s, and it’s also possible that because of the Vietnam war, we were more anti-American than the next wave of teens, but I recall The Waltons (first broadcast 1972) as the sort of squeaky-clean programme one’s parents liked, which pretty much made it anathema; I can’t imagine teenagers of any time watching it unless to mock.

The other point that puzzled me was the indifference of Henry’s teenage schoolmates to events in the wider world: “Outside the window, the other world was still there. It was a world of power cuts, and punk; a world of strikes and the IRA. Bombs were everywhere: in pubs, letters, packages, carrier bags, pillar boxes; in tube stations, trains and litter bins. There were firebombs and nail bombs, car bombs and boat bombs. All this was in the air and on the radio and on the TV in the living room, but the boys hadn’t been taught to take an interest, and these events might as well have been happening in another country.” I went to the same kind of school as Henry (except that mine was co-ed) and I remember heated conversations in the playground about current events. Again, this may point to a difference between the two decades: maybe the space race, swinging London and the 1968 assassinations in the USA were just more interesting, but one would have thought the IRA bombs at least would have held their attention.

The author’s wry, observational tone can often be very funny, and he is good at pinpointing a character. The foibles of Henry’s mother make an especially good target: “She believed in extra sensory perception and sometimes exclaimed when she turned on the radio, because the song she’d been humming in her head was playing right now, and that just showed you, didn’t it?” Not that Henry himself escapes: “He’d begun drinking coffee because he believed doing so made him an intellectual. In fact, it only succeeded in making him jittery and giving him heartburn, but still, he thought, one must suffer for one’s art.”

In many ways, this is an ambitious first novel – set in a past many can still recall, seen through a child’s eyes – and one of the most ambitious things about it is its choice of a really quite ordinary boy as protagonist. Henry’s progress toward being adult, male and reasonably comfortable in his skin is not that of someone in any way remarkable but of Everyman, which makes it the more interesting and meaningful.

“Marcus. If Meton is stuck in bed upstairs for the foreseeable future, then who’s doing the cooking?”

Who indeed? Meton the anarchic but brilliant chef is so essential to the Corvinus household that his indisposition is a serious matter, especially since the solution proposed by Vipsania, Corvinus’s mother, is to play her own chef, the too-inventive Phormio, as substitute… Meanwhile Corvinus is investigating another murder, that of an inoffensive boatman with no known enemies. His investigations take him to Corsica, where he runs into an old acquaintance of his and ours, the philosopher Seneca, currently in exile. Corvinus has fond memories of their former meeting:

“He may be a serial furkler, a social climber of the first water and a third-rate poet, but he hasn’t got a speck of real political ambition in his makeup, let alone the stomach for any kind of risk-taking. He’s a worm, the sort that gives other invertebrates a bad name.”

It's the presence of Seneca that alerts us to the fact that this is one of the “political” Corvinus cases. As so often with these cases, the ending proves frustrating for Corvinus, in that though he knows whodunnit, there is a limit to what he can do about it.

Indeed in some ways this feels like one of those films-in-the-middle-of-a-trilogy, where you can sense that the author is building up to No 3. The first in this “trilogy” would have been Family Commitments, two or three books ago, in which Corvinus became aware of certain treasonable goings-on involving a relative. Three characters from that book, his major-domo Bathyllus. the latter’s slightly dodgy brother Damon, and the freedman at the top of the civil service, Narcissus, also figure in this case. And I can guess what the climax of the third is set to be…

In the meantime we have a complex plot with one quite surprising (but plausible) twist at the end, and some memorable characters.

You can keep up with Mr Wishart’s proceedings on his website.

Here's my list of this year's reviews, with links

Poetry

Real Lear: New & Selected Poems by Claire Crowther, pub. Shearsman 2024
From Base Materials by Jenny Lewis, pub. Carcanet 2024
Chalking the Pavement by Kate Noakes, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2024
A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from the Greek Anthology, by David Constantine, pub. Bloodaxe 2024
Leaving the Hills by Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2024
Aleph Bet by Sue Rose, pub. Cinnamon 2025
maybe i'll call gillian Anderson by Rhian Elizabeth, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2025
Object Permanence by Anne Berkeley, pub. The Garlic Press 2025
The Green Month by Matthew Francis, pub. Faber 2025

Anthologies
Fire, Brigid and the Sacred Feminine, eds Shauna Gilligan and Niamh Boyce, pub. Arlen House, 2024

Prose fiction
Fox Bites, by Lloyd Markham, pub. Parthian 2024
Circulation, by Magnus Florin, trs. Harry Watson, pub. Vagabond Voices 2024
The Bruegel Boy, by Emma Darwin, pub. Holland House Books 2025

Children’s/YA
Kata & Tor, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, pub. Walker Books Ltd 2025

Non-fiction
The Hundred Years War Vol 5: Triumph and Illusion, by Jonathan Sumption, pub. Faber 2023
Edinburgh: A New History, by Alistair Moffat, pub. Birlinn 2024
Embers of the Hands; Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, by Eleanor Barraclough, pub. Profile Books 2024
The Haitian Revolution: An Enthralling Tale of Resistance, Freedom, and the Birth of a Nation, by Billy Wellman, pub. Enthralling History, 2024
Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era, by Alwyn Turner pub. Profile Books 2024
The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for an Endangered Planet by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams, pub. Viking 2021
Twilight Cities, Lost Capitals of the Mediterranean, by Katherine Pangonis, pub. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023
Bletchley Park’s Secret Source, by Peter Hore, pub. Greenhill Books 2021
The Ship Beneath The Ice, by Mensun Bound, pub. Macmillan 2022
Our Daily War by Andrey Kurkov, pub. Open Borders Press 2025

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Sheenagh Pugh

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Review of The Zorg, by Siddharth Kara, pub. Transworld Digital 2025
Review of Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives, by Alice Loxton, pub. Macmillan 2024
Review of Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives, by Alice Loxton, pub. Macmillan 2024
Review of The Making of Canada, by Greg Koabel, pub. Sutherland House 2025
Review of War Paths: Walking in the Shadows of the Clans, by Alistair Moffat, pub. Birlinn 2023
Review of Operation Paperclip: Nazi Scientists in America, by Annie Jacobsen, pub.Transworld Digital
Review of Big Bad Wool, by Leonie Swann, trs. Amy Bojang, pub. Allison & Busby 2026
Review of Mindforest by Harry Owen, pub. Quilled Ink Press 2026
The Notes and the Story
Review of The Private Lives of the Saints: by Janina Ramirez, pub. W H Allen 2025
Review of Contagious Enemies: The Aberdeen Witch Trials, by Dee Lawlor, pub. The History Press 2026
Review of Sublime Lungs by Kate Noakes, pub. Two Rivers Press 2026
Review of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, by Matthew Stewart, pub. Happenstance 2023
Review of Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard Wunderli, Indiana University 2024
Review of A Light in the Northern Sea, by Tim Brady, pub. Citadel Press 2025
Review of The Other Ancient Civilisations, by Raven Todd DaSilva, pub. Mango 2024
Review of Secrets of the 17th Century Medicine Cabinet by Katherine Knight, The History Press 2024
Review of Becoming Henry, by Graham Strugnell, pub. Constellations Press 2025
Review of Dead in the Water, by David Wishart, pub. 2025
List of 2025 blog reviews

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Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

Sheenagh Pugh's writing blog

Recent Entries

Review of The Zorg, by Siddharth Kara, pub. Transworld Digital 2025

Review of Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives, by Alice Loxton, pub. Macmillan 2024

Review of Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives, by Alice Loxton, pub. Macmillan 2024

Review of The Making of Canada, by Greg Koabel, pub. Sutherland House 2025

Review of War Paths: Walking in the Shadows of the Clans, by Alistair Moffat, pub. Birlinn 2023

Review of Operation Paperclip: Nazi Scientists in America, by Annie Jacobsen, pub.Transworld Digital

Review of Big Bad Wool, by Leonie Swann, trs. Amy Bojang, pub. Allison & Busby 2026

Review of Mindforest by Harry Owen, pub. Quilled Ink Press 2026

The Notes and the Story

Review of The Private Lives of the Saints: by Janina Ramirez, pub. W H Allen 2025

Review of Contagious Enemies: The Aberdeen Witch Trials, by Dee Lawlor, pub. The History Press 2026

Review of Sublime Lungs by Kate Noakes, pub. Two Rivers Press 2026

Review of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, by Matthew Stewart, pub. Happenstance 2023

Review of Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard Wunderli, Indiana University 2024

Review of A Light in the Northern Sea, by Tim Brady, pub. Citadel Press 2025

Review of The Other Ancient Civilisations, by Raven Todd DaSilva, pub. Mango 2024

Review of Secrets of the 17th Century Medicine Cabinet by Katherine Knight, The History Press 2024

Review of Becoming Henry, by Graham Strugnell, pub. Constellations Press 2025

Review of Dead in the Water, by David Wishart, pub. 2025

List of 2025 blog reviews