GILBERT WHITE: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne
by Richard Mabey
Profile Books, £8.99
We are an urban people now, but our roots still reach to the rural. If the quintessence of Englishness lies in village greens, leafy lanes and singing birds, the bibliography of that identity begins with Gilbert White (1720-93). He was a vicar who spent most of his life in the Hampshire village of Selborne. In detailed diaries, he recorded what we would call its ecology. White’s book, The Natural History of Selborne, made an immediate impact. It inspired Charles Darwin to study biology and has remained arguably the most influential work of natural history.
Thanks to White, we know a lot about Selborne and its agrarian and natural rhythms. But until Mabey wrote this, we knew too little about its vicar. Gleaned largely from White’s voluminous correspondence with the traveller Thomas Pennant, the naturalist Joseph Banks and his friend and fellow divine John Mulso, now we do. In unaffected, plain prose, Mabey lets White’s life unfold. It is an enchanting, yet salutary, story.
Earlier accounts of White have been hagiographical. Mabey presents no “ruminant tranquil, simple, wholesome and unworldly”, but a surprisingly modern man. Mabey shows White struggle, as we do, to reconcile his love of nature with (rapidly urbanising) human life; to balance the need to earn a living with his true vocation. We could have asked for more on White’s legacy. That aside, this is a crisp, clear biography.
THE SPICE ROUTE
by John Keay
John Murray, £8.99
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Nowadays spices are “shrink-wrapped in supermarket sachets and then paraded on dinky racks in kitchens where nobody cooks”. But in the 16th, 17th and even 18th centuries, they were unimaginably valuable in Western Europe — although not, as Keay points out, for their negligible preservative qualities, but for their taste or smell. We may know about frankincense and myrrh. Keay gives us the sultan of Bengal’s chamberlain, who made a fortune every year from “ selling the particles of masticated camphor retrieved from his master’s golden spittoon”.
Keay traces the history of spices and the many routes by which they came to us. He takes us from prehistoric times until their propagation further west — costus, or putchuk, from Kashmir is apparently the only spice that has “never been naturalised outside its native sward” — brought about the decline of the trade in the late 18th century. It is an astonishing story of vast range and consequence, even if one questions Keay’s persistent assertion that “the great Renaissance pioneers invariably sailed in search of spices” — as opposed to gold, or glory, or out of simple curiosity.
Keay crosses centuries as confidently as the great tea-clippers once coursed oceans. He writes elegant, exemplary prose, and this book is as full of bounty as any 18th-century privateer could pray for. The illustrations are excellent. The index is the only thing that could be improved.
FOUR ELEMENTS: Water, Air, Fire, Earth
by Rebecca Rupp
Profile Books, £8.99
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A mobile phone contains 42 chemical elements. We mere human beings, in contrast with our most pawed possession, consist of only 31. The entire world is made up from one or more of 92 elements that occur naturally. They are, as Rupp puts it, “the alphabet of matter”.
Humans have added from laboratories a further 26 man-made elements, so today the Periodic Table lists 118 elements. But for more than 2,000 years of human history, the agreed elements numbered just the four in this sub-title. This is their story, and a rattling good read it is.
Rupp writes well. There is much droll humour, too. For example, in the 17th century you could use the word atom as a verb, as in “atom things into dust, which concept still, depending on the things, retains considerable appeal”.
Above all, in this account of four elements that are not elements, there is a cornucopia of the curious, an eclectic and fascinating fusion of history, science, biology, mythology, ethnography and volcanology. Rupp ranges from the etymology of curfew to the coins of King Croesus. She has an expert eye for anecdotes, such as the story of the great Russian chemist Mendeleev, who was arraigned for bigamy. “Mendeleev may have two wives, yes,” ruled Tsar Alexander II. “But I have only one Mendeleev.” This is a fine,funny and fascinating book that succeeds — in 118 ways.