Hugh Thomson | The Spectator columnists & writers

Tales of the riverbank: the power of the Po

It may not be the grandest of the world’s waterways – the Nile and Amazon are ten times its length – but the Po has always exerted a fertile grip on the Italian imagination. Virgil called it ‘the king of rivers’; Dante died in its marsh estuary, having earlier described in Purgatorio how Jacopo del Cassero was chased there and fell fatally, ‘entangled in the mud and reeds of the Paduan swamp’, leaving a pool of blood on its waters. Yet the rest of the world has been less interested. Perhaps it has something to do with the modern name’s slightly comical sound: shortened from the original, more euphonic Padus – ‘the Paduan plain’ fits every metre – the word ‘Po’ somehow lacks the weight the river deserves. If the Thames had been shortened to the ‘Toe’ it would have had far less poetical traction.

The wonder of the wandering life

Anthony Sattin begins with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin, who famously tried all his life to produce a book about nomads but never quite succeeded (the nearest he got was Songlines). Hoping to persuade Tom Maschler at Cape of the virtues of the project, Chatwin described nomads as ‘a subject that appeals to irrational instincts’ – perhaps not the best way to sell something to publishers, who tend to pride themselves on their rational ones. But Chatwin’s thesis – that we were all originally nomads and need to recover some of that instinct – is now triumphantly brought to its conclusion in Sattin’s fascinating journey through 12,000 years, from the nomadic ways of prehistoric man to the Bedouin and Maasai of today.

New light on the building of Stonehenge

When it comes to Stonehenge, we are like children continually asking why and never getting a conclusive answer. There are plenty of theories as to its purpose, ranging from the ludicrous to the dull, but perhaps we would be better off concentrating, as in this excellent book, more on how our ancestors got the stones up in the first place. Attention has always centred on the original bluestones which made up the first circle at Stonehenge, because they were brought, remarkably, all the way from Wales. These are the smaller – but still two-ton – megaliths, carved from the Preseli quarries in Pembrokeshire. It used to be thought they must have been transported by water, around the considerable circuit of the south-west coast and then up the River Avon.

How to explore Colombia’s majestic Pacific coast

The poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote of South American waterfalls that spill over the sides of mountaintops ‘in soft slow motion’, and I was reminded of her lines on the Colombian Pacific coast where seemingly every bay has a wonderful waterfall tumbling down into it. As there are no roads to speak of, the only way to see something of the jungle is to advance up streams from the sea until you reach one of these waterfalls – with the great advantage that there is usually a rock pool to swim in when you get there. And because of the press of vegetation on the banks, you’re walking in the water, not beside it – perfect for crocs, the only shoes I chose to bring on the basis that if Ed Stafford could get down the whole Amazon from source to sea in a pair, they were good enough for me; although pleased also that my children weren’t around to comment on what they consider a grievous fashion mistake.

Spend the weekend...on the Isle of Skye

When Samuel Johnson and James Boswell passed through Skye on their celebrated tour of the Hebrides in 1773, they were disconcerted by the lack of Highlands customs. Where were the fierce clans, the costumes and the Jacobite sympathies they had expected? Instead, in the person of the clan chief, Alexander Macdonald, they found a cultivated old Etonian more interested in reciting Latin verses to his distinguished guests. The visit did not go well. Johnson asked why he didn’t have a magazine of arms hidden in his cellar and Macdonald replied that it was so damp they would only rust. Johnson complained when the sugar was served without tongs for his tea the visitors left early, in high dudgeon, although things improved when they later met Flora Macdonald and she could relate how she had saved Bonnie Prince Charlie some decades before.

The least familiar stretches of Nile prove the most interesting

It’s one of the most tantalising travel images in the world — a felucca floating along the Nile at sunset, its lateen sail spread aslant to catch the wind. It takes us back to the beginnings of ancient Egypt, when the need to manage Nilotic flooding and the imperative to trade along the river’s course were the motors of civilisation. Even 2,500 years ago Herodotus was fascinated by the ease with which the Egyptians had learned to cultivate the soil with its waters rather than with laborious ploughs — which, some speculate, had given them the leisure to build pyramids in the down months. Of course many authors have been attracted to the river since — notably Alan Moorehead, with his fine books on the Blue and White Nile in the 1960s, and more recently Anthony Sattin, with his wonderful account, Winter on the Nile, of a journey Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert may have taken in the same boat.

When will Stonehenge’s lockdown end?

Another year, another row about Stonehenge. A rather sad piece on the BBC News website describes how its lacklustre custodians, English Heritage, had to cancel a live feed of the sunrise on the day of the solstice due to unspecified ‘safety concerns’ when a few people were seen climbing over a low fence to access the stones. More than 200,000 people around the world had tuned in to the live stream ‘but ended up watching pre-recorded footage of the stones until the feed returned at around 5am, showing largely cloudy skies’. Oh dear. But then disappointment has been hanging over our most famous prehistoric monument like a cloud for over a century. Since a generous landowner gifted it to the nation in 1918, successive governments – and more recently English Heritage – have done a remarkably bad job of looking after it.

The curious cancellation of the Rex Whistler restaurant

We laugh at how the Victorians put plaster fig leaves on nude statues; but when the annals of the strange new puritanism that has been sweeping the British Isles come to be written, then the latest debacle over Rex Whistler's mural at the Tate must surely comprise a central chapter. As Macaulay once wrote, 'We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality.' In 1926, Rex Whistler was commissioned to paint a mural around the Tate’s basement restaurant. He was only 20 and still a student at the Slade, so a bold choice but one he amply justified. The resulting mural, In Pursuit of Rare Meats, shows a party of epicures travelling across a fantasy rococo landscape dotted with architectural capriccios.

The jab that saved countless lives 300 years ago

This timely book celebrates one of the most remarkable women of the 18th century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was so impressed by the Turkish technique of ‘engraftment’ to prevent smallpox that in 1721, exactly 300 years ago, she arranged for the first such inoculation in England — and, even more controversially, had it carried out on her own three-year-old daughter. Smallpox pus from a sufferer was carried in a walnut shell and applied to a cut made in her daughter’s arm. She discovered the technique too late to use it on herself. As a young woman and court beauty, she had contracted smallpox during one of the frequent epidemics that swept London, leaving her scarred and without any eyebrows. This gave her what contemporaries described as ‘the Wortley stare’, a penetrating gaze which, allied with her fierce intelligence, made her a formidable proposition.

How Neanderthal are you?

BBC Four and the dumbing down of British television

The announcement this week that BBC Four is to stop making new programmes and become a largely repeats-only channel – which they are cheekily calling ‘archive’ to make it sound better – is a depressing reminder to viewers of a very long-term trend. When BBC Four was launched amidst much fanfare in 2002, its slogan was 'Everybody Needs a Place to Think'. Has the BBC decided that they no longer do? Or perhaps the corporation – in focusing on ‘youth programming’ like BBC Three – thinks it isn't its job to provide one. Oh dear. Whatever happened to television? And in particular, the area that BBC Four was particularly supposed to promote: factual and arts television. Time was when working in television was to work in one of the most exciting industries around.

Has Britain learned from its failures in Afghanistan?

As the Americans prepare to leave Afghanistan, and in the UK we hold our own Defence Review, should we not be asking: have we really learned from the lessons of our failures there? I was in Afghanistan for a brief and intense time in 2007 when I was filming for Channel 4 Dispatches and CNN. We saw a country that had been brutalised for decades by the Russian occupation, the ensuing civil war and then American carpet bombing to ensure US troops met no resistance. A country which was becoming restive as the allies seemed increasingly unable to help them rebuild, or for that matter interested in doing so once they had been distracted by Iraq. It was a pivotable moment. In the first five years after the 2001 invasion, only a handful of British troops had died in Afghanistan.

Peru’s beauty has been a real curse

As the planet gets more and more ravaged, the mind can begin to glaze over at the cumulative general statistics — so much rainforest lost, so many glaciers melted, so much less oil left. Joseph Zárate’s masterly new book reminds us that when it comes to fighting on the front line of the environmental wars, it’s all in the detail, and that nothing is quite as simple as might at first appear. Some years ago I went to a remote area on the border between Peru and Bolivia where a meteorite had landed on a small village and caused mass poisoning. The hospitals had filled up both with the locals and with the police who had been sent to investigate. Given that meteorites are not known to contain toxic materials, this seemed curious to say the least.

Exotic and endangered: Madagascar in peril

Madagascar. There are so many delightful incongruities about the island. Despite being off the coast of Africa, because of the way the ocean currents work it was mainly settled by people from Borneo, 3,700 miles away — what Jared Diamond has described as ‘the single most astonishing fact of human geography’. For similar reasons, it is a biodiversity hotspot; more than 90 per cent of the wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth. And as one of the world’s largest islands, the sheer size can make it hard to assimilate. If ‘the Republic of Madagascar’, its formal title, were stretched out across Europe, the country would reach from London to Algiers. The exoticism of both the name and location has always lent itself to enjoyably fanciful tales, whether in today’s animated series from DreamWorks — all too familiar for parents — or from Marco Polo in 1298, who claimed its gryphon birds were so large they could lift an elephant into the air.

She just keeps rollin’ along: Colombia’s Magdalena River

As Colombia comes out of 50 years of civil war and into a still precarious peace, with some 220,000 dead, this timely book explores one of the few dividends to emerge from such a terrible conflict. Large areas of the country were isolated by the war, and so spared the ravages of modern development. Unlike neighbouring Ecuador, where oil and gas exploration has done its worst, Colombia still has an essentially roadless expanse of pristine forest nearly the size of France. When I travelled in the mountains near Cali last year, I was struck by how depopulated the rural areas were. The peasant farmers, the campesinos, were only slowly returning from their exile in the comparatively safer cities. Many Colombians, weary of the ideologies of left and right that did so much to perpetuate the conflict, have turned instead to the Schumacher ethos of ‘small is beautiful’ — working in local community groups to reclaim the land and start up farmers’ markets.

The pleasures — and trials — of knowing Bruce Wannell

Bruce Wannell was by some way one of the most charismatic travellers I have ever met. Despite his almost complete penury, he would dress in perfectly tailored cashmere and, with a shawl swept over his shoulder, fix his attentive listeners with a glittering eye and a voice that could sweep dangerously low when he was about to cast aspersions on someone else’s cooking or scholarship. As this affectionate compilation of tributes by friends and admirers shows, Bruce himself ‘not only spoke Persian with a dazzling, poetic fluency, he could also talk in Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, Swahili, be amiable in Amharic, Spanish and Greek and could lecture in French, Italian or German’. Like Bruce Chatwin, whose sensibility he shared, he took a magpie approach to the world and its artefacts, with an instinctive avoidance of anything dull.

Lake Ohrid: an oasis of peace in the war-torn Balkans

Kapka Kassabova’s previous travel book, Border, was rightly acclaimed and won several prizes. The author travelled to the edge of Europe, between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, and teased out ‘where something like Europe begins and something else ends, which isn’t quite Asia’. This is a sequel of sorts. She now travels to another border, that between Macedonia, Albania and Greece, where the vast and beautiful Lake Ohrid remains one of the Balkans’ surviving religious melting pots, despite considerable nationalist pressure. It is where her mother was originally from, so her journey is partly a rediscovery of her own roots. Kassabova feels as though she came from a family pattern of absent men and the women they left behind — ‘we are epigenetically determined to wander’.

Can’t anyone travel for fun any more?

There was a time when travel writers would set off with a spring in their step: Coleridge knocking the bristles from a broom in his impatience to make it into a stick; Laurie Lee walking out one midsummer morning; Patrick Leigh Fermor singing as he headed down the lane. To travel was an expression of freedom and exploration; to step out of the front door the beginning of a grand adventure. Not any more. Travel writers now come troubled and weary before they’ve even begun. A journey can no longer be a jeu d’esprit. It has to be undertaken to expiate some trauma. It is almost as if, in today’s new puritanism, it has to be painful. One thinks of the old nursery rhyme: ‘Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go.

Glorious mud

Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man if every person who told him that the Fens were ‘flat and boring’ had given him five quid. Yet these million acres of water-logged land making their way from Lincolnshire through Norfolk and towards Cambridge have one quality that makes them irresistible to archaeologists like him. The peat preserves wood perfectly for thousands of years in a way that happens almost nowhere else in the country. As a result, and although few of us are aware of it, ‘some of the most imaginative and technically advanced excavations in the world are taking place in the Fens at the moment’. Using new archaeological techniques such as ground-penetrating radar and laser scanning (Lidar), as well as old-fashioned digging, some quite fabulous wooden artefacts from the Bronze Age have just emerged.

The deadly allure of Mount Nanda Devi

After one of the most difficult missions ever undertaken in the Himalayas, Indian mountaineers have now finally been able to reach a team of climbers on Mt Nanda Devi who went missing last month. As of writing, they have recovered the bodies of almost all of the eight climbers, four of them British, who were caught in an avalanche on its slopes, bringing to a close another tragic chapter in the mountain’s history. To most people, Nanda Devi is just another peak in the Himalayas and might as well be anonymous. But once it was a name to conjure with. At 25,640 feet, it was the highest mountain in the British Empire, and the Alpine Club, the first mountaineering society, were determined to make a first ascent. Yet no one could even get to its base.

Stormy sees

There are more than 100 cathedrals in England, Scotland and Wales of many different denominations (although I for one had been previously unaware of the Belarus Autocephalous Orthodox Church). But, wisely, Christopher Somerville focuses on those great galleons with which we are most familiar: the cathedrals that first rose up above the plains of England after 1066. The metaphor which Somerville uses, of these cathedrals as ‘ships of heaven’, runs before the wind throughout this book. If the early cathedrals were blunt old battleships, built as foursquare as castles to show that the conquering Normans were here to stay, later Gothic ones were as elegant as grand and beautiful yachts. Somerville describes the atmosphere in the cathedral towns as being much like that of a seaport while the giant constructions were built in their midst, with a crowd of attendant prostitutes, merchants and craftsmen.

Travel literature

Jonathan Raban was largely responsible for changing the nature of travel writing. Back in the 1970s when he began, the genre still viewed the world from under the tilt of a Panama hat. (‘I looked at the tops of the columns. Were they Doric or Ionic?’) It was considered as ill-bred for a writer to reveal anything about themselves as to have illustrations — ‘the best travel books never do’. Raban tore a lot of this up, and with glee. He had worked closely with confessional poets from America like Robert Lowell and John Berryman, producing what is still one of the best essays on Lowell’s late poems about his messy divorce. He had even been Lowell’s lodger for a while. Now he took the same transatlantic approach to travel writing, and elicited the same chorus of disapproval the poets had experienced for being so personal.

A drizzle of nature writers

A parliament of owls. A gaggle of geese. A convocation of eagles. But what is the generic term for the army that has recently advanced over the literary landscape? Perhaps a drizzle of nature writers? Here they come, heads down in the rain, turning out their pockets for the samples of fungi and moss they have collected on the outskirts of our cities. Bookshops now have whole tables dedicated to contemporary British nature writing. The first wave of this literary phenomenon was far more cheerful: the late lamented Roger Deakin sitting in his pollarded hornbeam and imagining himself at sea; Richard Mabey, the godfather of it all, with his wonderful Flora Britannica; Robert Macfarlane striding across wild places with lyrical intensity; Helen Macdonald eulogising her hawk.

Raiders of the lost lands

Graham Robb, apart from being a distinguished historian, biographer and literary critic, is one of our most accomplished travel writers. His The Discovery of France remains a classic, made both engaging and accessible by his very francophile obsession with cycling. Indeed, his new book, The Debatable Land, opens with a declaration that ‘writing and cycling are inseparable pursuits’. The debatable land in question is the thin wedge of territory between England and Scotland on the west coast which, for a period in the late Middle Ages, was officially declared as lawless by the parliaments of each country. The resulting piece of English legislation contains a quite magnificent disclaimer: All Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock… without any redress to be made for same.

Blowing hot and cold | 9 November 2017

I spent part of the summer sailing around Ithaca and the Ionian Sea. It was a good reminder of how capricious Homeric weather can be. In the space of a few days the wind shifted dramatically to three different points of the compass — and none of them was the gentle westerly Zephyr that brought Odysseus and his men back to almost spitting distance of their homeland. Almost, because just as they approached, the crew became suspicious of the goatskin bag in which Aeolus had helpfully packed away the other hostile winds and let them all loose. Nick Hunt tries to track down a few of Europe’s more errant and potent winds. He starts with the homegrown Helm, which blusters across the Pennines. In its day this has been known to blow a countryman off his horse and demolish what had been the only remaining tower of Haresceugh Castle.

Our islands’ story

Britain has 6,000 islands. Not as many as Sweden’s 30,000 but quite enough to be going on with. Only 132 of ours are populated, on a scale that slides from the 85,000 people on the Isle of Man to tiny St Kilda, with its summertime population of just 15. Patrick Barkham is a skilled compiler of lists. His charming and successful first book, The Butterfly Isles, chronicled the sighting of every one of Britain’s 59 butterflies within a single summer. It is high up on my own list of ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ ideas. Clearly trying to gazetteer all Britain’s islands in a similar way might be indigestible, so he has restricted himself to a representative First Eleven, a team of big hitters scattered evenly around the mainland from Orkney in the north to Alderney in the south.

In England’s green and pleasant land

The idea came to me after I had just got back from South America after a long trip to Peru. Perhaps because I was badly jetlagged, everything about England looked strange, different — and certainly worthy of as much exploration as I would give to a foreign country. The few other times I've ever had really bad jet lag — the sort where you walk in a trance, as if under water and sedation — have been when I've travelled abroad, not travelled home. The only cure then has been total immersion in the new culture. So I felt like plunging into England — and to do so by the darker, underground ways, like a mole, tracking the older paths. It was easy to live in the countryside, as I did in Oxfordshire, and not know what was stirring beneath its surface.

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Monday

Monday

Thursday

Friday

Friday

Thursday

Saturday

Wednesday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Saturday

Thursday

Thursday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Thursday

Friday