To write a large and consistently amusing history book by simply taking a journey around the house you live in, discussing what is to be seen there and what used to be seen, might seem a surprising idea. Although perhaps unusual, it certainly works. Even the fuse-box- a recent addition to the house – provides a fruitful topic. Passing from the wartime black-out (more dangerous than bombing) to the dangers of lighting a house with candles or the surprising inconveniences of gas, we are informed about the rise and fall of the whale-oil industry and the beginnings of the ‘oil age’.

Most of us are probably familiar with Desmond Morris‘s The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo as well as some of his ‘Watching‘ series. It was a friend who was enjoying his Christmas Watching who told me of its existence. I was able to obtain my Amazon copy through a supplier for 1p (plus the postage, of course, but I do wonder about the economics of that service!).

Like Scrooge, I am tempted to say ‘Bah, humbug’ about many of the aspects of Christmas – the endless eating and drinking, the shrieking plastic toys and the blatant commercialism of the whole thing. Desmond Morris was, therefore, a very refreshing read.

His book is composed of very short chapters (53 of them) that answer questions all prefaced with ‘Why’. Most of us are aware that many of the Christmas customs are related to pagan rites and celebrations that originally had nothing to do with the birth of Christ. Morris gives the background of these (mince pies, the yule log, the tree etc.) in easily digestible format.

Some of the facts are surprising. Who would have guessed that the red Santa Claus outfit was introduced by the Coca Cola company as late as 1933! There are intriguing anecdotes too, like the explanation of the stockings children hang up.

This is an entertaining read for the Christmas skeptic!

The Dulwich Picture Gallery in East London is currently hosting a gloriously colourful exhibition of the works of the Group of Seven. I have long been a lover of the wild and majestic paintings of the various artists who came together in the nineteen-twenties and thirties but I have never before seen some of the bright sketches or vast canvasses that are on show in this exhibition.

The exhibition traces the links with Scandinavian art and with the impressionists and expressionists who were the fore-runners of the movement then gives an area to each of the artists in turn, with explanations of their specific styles and focuses.

These artists travelled by canoe, and, supported by the Canadian Government reached remote areas of the wilderness of Canada that had not formerly been considered subjects for art.

The final section of the exhibition is dedicated to the breathtaking works of Lawren Harris, who travelled as far as the Canadian Arctic to paint ice scenery. The results were spectacular, and, in the Dulwich they are displayed in darkened rooms with light directed onto the works. We can only applaud the wisdom of the Government that was prepared to recognise this group of artists who broke with tradition and coped with such hardship in their tents and canoes, in order to record the beauty of the Canadian landscape.

This most unusual book came my way. The Redstone Book of the Eye is a picture book. What else could it be? Its 282 pages take us through photographs, optical illusions, paintings, drawings and a host of unusual and teasing images.

With very little text, we are led through an intriguing visual journey that includes pictures of eyes themselves, what the eye sees on the street, comic aspects of vision, what a child sees, satire, camera effects and strange aspects of perception.

Something is sure to bring the ‘reader’ to a sudden pause. ‘Where is the fish?’ or ‘Where is the driver?’ says the caption. Where indeed! Five minutes later, we discern the missing driver of the cab in the clouds above the houses. Thefish is tangled in the trees and the polar bear has been transformed to a cloud.

This is a Julian Rothenstein book, published by Square Peg.On the cover, Quentin Blake claims that books by Julian Rothenstein are ’extraordinary’. Indeed, it is certainly a long way from what one considers ‘ordinary’.

Last week I looked at Diana Preston’s study of Captain Scott’s last disastrous journey, the long haul to the South Pole,  for which the preparations were underway exactly a hundred years ago. Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen (now published as The Last Place on Earth) is a fascinating parallel read even if only because of the very different image the two authors project.

The material is basically the same, though Huntford, as the one-time Scandinavian correspondent of the Observer, has also told the story of the parallel journey, undertaken successfully by Amundsen. Amundsen reached the South Pole on December 15th and returned safely to his base Framheim. Scott reached it on January 17th and perished with Wilson and Bowers, of scurvy and starvation, only miles from their base.

Where Diana Preston looks with some sympathy at the miscalculations and errors of Scott and gives some credit to his claims that dreadful weather and sheer bad luck led to the disaster, Huntford has no room for sympathy. Amundsen, with his dog sleds was fifty miles away and had similar conditions, yet his calculations of supplies were accurate. His men knew how to ski and used dogs rather than the appallingly selected horses that Titus Oates had to accept – totally unsuited to the Antarctic conditions.

Even details like the type of goggles are examined. (Amundsen’s were better and avoided the snow-blindness that Scott’s team suffered).

Reading these two accounts and Scott’s journals together is a salutary lesson to anyone who accepts that what he reads is the truth.

Exactly a hundred years ago, the Antarctic winter came to an end and Captain Robert Falcon Scott‘s ill-fated party was able to begin the journey to the South Pole. Diana Preston’s A First Rate Tragedy is one of many accounts of the early explorations undertaken by Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen, Cherry-Garrard and others and I find it compulsive reading.

She begins with Scott’s first Antarctic journey of 1902-3 then follows Scott right to that dreadful discovery of his body, between those of Wilson and Bowers in the autumn of 1912. There is a careful analysis of all that contributed to the disaster but also great awareness that it is all too easy, in hindsight, for us to criticise Scott’s decisions: his choosing horses over dogs, his last minute change from a four to a five-man polar party, his failure to understand the effects of the cold on the supply depots, his lack of understanding of the origins of scurvy – the list is endless.

These issues are all carefully examined, yet every time I come back to this book, or to Scott’s own journal, to Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World or to the realistic comparison of Scott and Amundsen’s journeys, Scott and Amundsen, I am overwhelmed by the immensity of what Scott and his men undertook and by how nearly they succeeded.

Most of all, I think it is the action of Titus Oates that moves readers – those final words, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ echoed through the twentieth century.

In The Natural History of Unicorns, Chris Lavers traces the unicorn right back to classical writers. Ctesias, in the fifth century BC gives accounts of a unicorn found in India. There are several references in Old Testament texts and the unicorn came to be adopted as a Christian symbol in the complex Christian mythology.

He existed as a symbol in the Middle Ages in the world of courtly love and unicorn parts, particularly the horn, were more valuable than gold as late as the Renaissance. Sadly the twentieth century has decided that the unicorn was a myth.

However, Lavers, with great scholarship, examines all the evidence and presents all the candidates for the role of unicorn. His research moves into language and the confusion that probably resulted from the translations produced, for example, by the Septuagint. He looks at the narwhal, the oryx, the okapi, the yak and of course, the rhinoceros, all of which contributed their share of evidence.

This is a fascinating book to read and I am sure that you will be convinced, as I am, of the existence of the unicorn. I loved David Bellamy’s comment and echo his sentiment, ‘… If unicorns do exist I hope they never catch one.’

Sea Room is ‘the story of one man, three islands and half a million puffins’. Those words appear on the cover of Adam Nicolson‘s account of his twenty or more years of possession of the little group of Hebridean islands, the Shiants, in the Minch. However, there is far more than that in the enchanting work.

Nicolson received the islands from his father and, at the end of his book, is planning to hand them on to his son. The work celebrates the islands that have been his joy for twenty years since he was a Cambridge student.

We learn of the sheep, the birds that summer in the islands, the history and archaeological digs that Nicolson arranges, uncovering centuries of habitation. In a vividly-written narrative wit a wealth of anecdotes, we discover, with Nicolson a series of objects, a golden torque, a medieval brooch, shards of pottery from centuries of habitation and an unusual funeral stone that has probably served as a pillow for a hermit.

The book is so beautifully and evocatively written that we feel as if we have visited these remote islands, though I am not sure we would have stayed long with no power, no running water and a population of thousands of rattus rattus – large black plague rats – that live on the puffins but infest the single stone dwelling place.

Nevertheless it is great to visit the islands through the words of their owner.

If, like me, you find words far more interesting than numbers and find your mind wandering when friends begin to talk of calculus or Fermat’s theorem, this book is an eye-opener.

With more than a thousand images and in easily digestible chapters and almost eleven hundred pages, Jan Gullberg takes us from the beginnings of numbers right up to the most modern theories. He works from the premise that mathematics, like music, is worth doing for its own sake. He works on the basis that the student of mathematics needs to do more than remember. He needs to understand.

Dipping into this work at random produces moments of light humour like the little anecdote from Charlotte’s Web where a lamb tells the pig that he means ‘Less than nothing to me’. The pig patiently explains that ‘Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness.’

There are very serious moments too, when we are nursed through differential equations.

If, like me, you have a great mathematical void to fill, or even if you are an expert needing to check on your facts, this is an invaluable text.

Most of us have probably ‘read’ Winnie the Pooh. Or so we might think: this book shows just how little effort we really put into this task, probably assuming that it was just a simple children’s bedtime story and that the ‘words on the page’ were therefore  just a ‘story’ with a ‘meaning’, chosen by the ‘author’, A.A.Milne. How mistaken we were.

This book presents interpretations of this children’s classic that might be offered by some of the many bitterly clashing schools of post-modern literary criticism: radical feminism, Lacanian post-colonialist, post-culturalist Marxism, new historicism and others. This is done by means of a supposed collection of contributions to a meeting of the Modern Language Association (a real American association of language scholars) which discussed Milne’s work.

Not only does this provide us with an introduction to the almost impenetrable vocabulary and syntactical structures used by academics involved in such critical projects, (for example “The rememoration of the ‘present’ as space is the possibility of the utopian imperative of no-(particular)-place …”) it also provides great amusement to the ‘ordinary reader’. We might sometimes agree with Eeyore, quoted here as remarking: ‘This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it’. 

However, we will always be able to (mis)interpet anything in many other ways after reading this book.

Next stop, perhaps, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’, another famous spoof (or was it?)

Postmodern Pooh