Miller’s thumb and Mother-in-law’s garotte: the marvellous lexicon of angling

Despite its many centuries of popularity – enthusiasts have ranged from Cleopatra to Eric Clapton – angling has been the subject of precious little historical scholarship, giving rise instead to anecdotalists or grim technicians. So Chris McCully’s latest animated and vigorous addition to the Bibliotheca piscatoria arrives as fresh and welcome as a run of summer salmon from the estuary.

The lexicon of angling, he suggests, can encode cultural histories – and so it does. The result is a stargazy pie of a book rich in natural lore and quirks, assembled with etymological rigour and finished with crisp wit. Drawn from diverse literary, ichthyological and halieutic sources – I ought to refrain from saying that McCully has cast his net wide – it spans Aelfric’s Colloquy and modern electronic resources, and runs from ‘adipose fin’ (that heraldic appendage of certain salmonids) to ‘zed’ (a nickname for the zander, misleadingly called the pike-perch, though it is no hybrid).