Here be dragons, dog-headed men and women growing on trees

I have to confess that this book sat on my desk for several months. The words ‘Harvard University Press’ cast a strange and unsettling spell which prevented me from even opening it. Let’s be honest: academic presses are not always synonymous with rollicking reads, nor indeed are academics. They can ask an awful lot of the general reader – that would be most of us. Given how short life is, there is no good reason why reading should be more of a pain than a pleasure.

Thankfully, the spell finally wore off, which was fortunate, because this book about a book, like the book it describes, is a rare and marvellous thing. It tells the story of Wonders and Rarities, the 13th-century natural history, cosmography and compendium of marvels written by Zakariyya Qazwini, a Persian naturalist and judge.

‘The path is tortuous and only for the brave of heart,’ Travis Zadeh, a professor of religious studies at Yale, warns in his introduction, and here I admit my morale faltered.