As ever, there are some absolutely scintillating book reviews in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here is a selection:
Sam Leith revels in ‘a blindly good story extremely well told’: Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of Russian America by Owen Matthews.
‘Like most if not all imperial adventures, the civilising mission (ho ho) followed the money. Ever since the first Cossack pirate found a way through the Bering Strait, fur, or ‘soft gold’, was what they were all after. The discovery that in Chinese entrepot towns the pelt of a single sea-otter would fetch the equivalent of two years’ salary for an ordinary seaman was all anyone needed to know. Fur, tea and American manufactures were the basis of a Pacific triangle trade. The Brits took an interest, and so did the Spanish — who then held bits of the West Coast up to San Francisco.
Anyone with the faintest familiarity with Russian history will be used to the idea that whatever the rest of the world can show in endurance, suffering, bloodthirst or cruelty the Russians will generally trump it without turning a hair.
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