Looking for Nessie

It wasn’t until I drove past Loch Ness a couple of years ago that I realised just how enormous it is. Over 20 miles long and deep enough to hide Blackpool Tower, it could hold the water from all the lakes in England and Wales combined. But it’s still not as big, I found myself thinking, as the human imagination.

Gareth Williams’s excellent book isn’t about the Loch Ness monster; it’s about the people who have looked for it. There is Alexander Keiller, rich from marmalade and ‘fond of sex, sometimes on a near-industrial scale’. There’s wing commander Basil Cary and his wife Winifred, known as Freddie, who can work out which pub her husband is in by dangling a pendulum over a map (she then rings up and shouts: ‘Send him home!’). There’s even the Daily Mail, who in 1933 tried tempting Nessie with a leg of mutton. Unimpressed, a Mr R.M.