Book review

It is more than a generation since the appearance of Barry Lopez’s classic Arctic Dreams. That book’s effortless integration of history, anthropology and ecology, mediated through its author’s radiant prose, introduced a global audience to the frozen north. It freed the frigid ice world from much historical polar literature, conjuring instead landscapes of delicate beauty and extraordinary natural abundance. Lopez also revealed the Arctic as a place of remarkable human achievement, as expressed in the survival skills and spiritual endurance of the indigenous Inuit. A follow-up has long been anticipated and now, 33 years later, Horizon has finally arrived. It is vast in both scope and size; comprising more than

Western attitudes to piracy have dripped with hubris. In his classic history of 1932, Philip Gosse confidently argued that European empires and technological superiority had ‘done away’ with pirates entirely. He and others regretted the sacrifice of these noble savages to the march of progress. Nostalgia imbued pirates with a romantic aura as happy-go-lucky rebels, rough in appearance but pure of heart. Long John Silver aspired to be an MP; the Pirates of Penzance swilled sherry, with ‘dash it all’ their adorable attempt at foul language. Dr Peter Lehr puts the brakes on: 174 incidents of piracy were reported to the International Maritime Bureau last year, with Somali pirates responsible

One of the great joys of the 18th-century novella La petite maison is the way Jean-François de Bastide matches the proportions and shape of the book to the architecture of the exquisite country house at the story’s heart. Zuzana Ružicková, the outstanding Czech harpsichordist who died in 2017 while working with Wendy Holden on this touching memoir, analyses Bach, a composer she more or less made her own in the second half of the 20th century,  in very similar terms: I have a tectonic rather than a visual memory, and as the melodies begin to build, in my mind I imagine a building… I instinctively know how it is built.

I can only remember one page of any of the dozens of Ladybird histories that I read avidly as a child: an illustration of a scene from the Third Crusade, when Richard the Lionheart, at the head of his Christian army,  met Saladin, the leader of the Muslim forces, outside the port city of Acre in 1191. The picture does not show the battle but the two men comparing swords, like top level sportsmen discussing preferred bats or rackets. They were standing before a tent, broadly medieval in appearance. On the ground lay an iron bar, evidently chopped in half with a single blow from the great broadsword between King

Carried on monsoon winds across the Red Sea, vast swarms of desert locusts have posed a deadly threat to the people of the Horn of Africa for millennia. One swarm can number billions of insects, cover a 1,000-square-mile area and consume 30–40,000 tonnes of food per day — all of which makes the desert locust well deserving of its collective noun ‘plague’. Much brain-power has been dedicated to the controlling of these insects, whose swarms can lead, and have led to, famines. Methods of control have included the digging of trenches to catch hoppers (juvenile locusts) and, later, the aerial spraying of chemical and fungal insecticides. In the early 1950s,