Seeing red | 18 August 2016

Early on in his excellent and protean biography of a colour, Spike Bucklow quotes Goethe, writing in 1809:

Every rope in the English Navy has a red thread running through it, which cannot be extracted without unravelling the whole, so that even the smallest length of rope can be recognised as belonging to the crown.

Bucklow’s book follows a red thread through human history, whose twin strands are material extraction — the animal, vegetable and mineral lives of red — and the extraction of meanings from redness itself.

All colour is cultural. We have our private definitions — the unshareable conviction as to what is and is not red — but it is societies that ‘make’ colours and their associations. Colour has always been used to code and classify, to divide and demarcate. In the case of red, the borders are especially porous: ‘red line’ and ‘red carpet’ belong to different worlds, as do red lips and red-eye.