Author: Seb Palmer

As a work of art, and labour of love, this is a five star affair. So why have I, rather meanly, knocked off a half star? 

Well, the truth is that I really rather dislike – though in truth that’s not a strong enough word, detest is better – the Bible. The over-reverence, or even just plain attention, that it is accorded, even by it’s critics, is energy that could be better spent on other things. [1]

The task of illustrating Genesis took Crumb about five years, according to the artist himself. And it was a challenge in numerous ways; he wanted to draw in a more ‘realistic’ and historically accurate manner than he might sometimes adopt in other works, and this was to be a ‘neutral’ even-handed rendering. Neither the drooling sycophancy of the acolyte, nor the cutting satire of critical disbelief. 

Both of these factors impact on the total work of art. Fans of Crumb’s more celebrated stylised exaggerations might find his style here a bit straight-laced. But, truth be told, I reckon his pure passion for rendering decent art wins out. And enough of his slightly icky primitivism seeps through to keep it well within ‘signature Crumb’ territory (he already has a strong tradition of cartoon as documentary, from his prolific sketching to his histories of early jazz, blues and folk musicians).

And then there’s the actual Biblical content. Some of it, such as the most colourful and celebrated mythical parts, like the Creation, the Flood, Joseph in Egypt, etc, is perfect material for Crumb. But there are other aspects – in particular the lineages – which are a part of the Bible, in particular the Old Testament, that I’ve always loathed. 

So, whilst Crumb’s art itself, and his sheer chutzpah in even attempting such a project, are all five star, the material itself is considerably less. The importance of the Bible in history, as great as it undoubtedly has become, is, nevertheless, continually overstated. It’s position, rather like it’s very genesis (pun intended), is one of those accidents of evolution; it just so happened, rather than the texts winning a place in history by merit, never mind Divine authorship!

Having said all that I have, I’m intending to read Isaac Asimov’s two part Biblical work as soon as time allows. My excuse for this Judaeo-Christian navel-gazing and time wasting is the working out/off of my own very religious childhood. 

As works about the Bible go, this is undoubtedly a very good one. The way Crumb treats it, very literally and completely, is a good antidote to either the fawning reverence of believers, or the sometimes overly gleeful mockery of the disbelievers. 

Believers might, one hopes, start to sense the human historicity of their founding text, and we can all marvel at the sheer nuttiness or banality of certain parts, or even cogitate on the potentially more profound ‘psychological truths’ (should you feel that way inclined) of some of the potential readings of certain foundational myths. 

In addition to an intro or preface (I forget exactly how he titles it!), there are Crumb’s ‘commentary’ notes on the text, at the end. This stuff reveals Crumb’s own take on it all more clearly, as someone with a secular historical interest in his source material. There’s a particularly interesting thread in here regarding how certain textual oddities might result from a later patriarchally slanted redaction of originally more mixed stories, some of which would have (or might have) originally had a decidedly more matriarchal slant. Fascinating!

If you’re a Crumb fan, or interested in the history of religion/myth, and I’m both, I’d say this is well worth having and/or reading. 

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NOTES:

[1] It’s a ‘pop culture’ thing; why endless genuflecting before The Beatles, or Dylan, or Miles, or even Bach or Mozart? Hero worship always requires lowering of critical faculties, a kind of group reverential hysteria takes over, and masses of ‘lesser’ stuff gets swept aside and ignored. To the loss of all. 

Fooling Yourself, The Better To Fool Others

I found this pretty compelling at the time of reading, but now I come to review it, I’m surprised at how little of it has stayed with me. Deceit and self-deception are fascinating facets of life, and I share Trivers’ desire to better understand these areas. But at times I found his writing a little opaque, either just being plain confusing, or assuming knowledge I didn’t have. I feel the best authors of such popular science books (as this appears to want to be), have the skill of making themselves understood. So, whilst I certainly admire Trivers intent, I wasn’t entirely bowled over with the execution.

Much of what Trivers discusses here, i.e. the bigger more basic ideas (such as that alluded to in the books subtitle), seemed rather obvious to me. Granted, he does in places go into some depth and detail, compared to which one’s own intuitions perhaps ought to be considered interesting but insubstantial. But I didn’t find the book as robustly scientific as I might’ve have hoped. One aspect I found rather trying being the unsignposted blending of scientific findings, anecdote and opinion. All these things may be welcome components of his thesis, but knowing if and when a statement is supported by scientific research (and the nature of that research, and it’s source) seems vitally important to me. So, for example, his comments on the cognitive dissonance reduction of ‘lifers’ who say they would murder again, whilst plausible (and predictable, really), strikes me as pure speculation, unless he has some kind of evidence for his view, in which case it should be cited.

In contrast with the way in which some of the broader ideas seem obvious, where Trivers cites material that appears to be drawn from research in his own field (biology), he’s not always clear enough, making too many assumptions for the ‘lay reader’ like myself. Perhaps he’s simply assuming a familiarity with evolutionary terminology and science I simply don’t possess? One example might be the use of the term ‘selected’, which in everyday language assumes the conscious selection of a discerning agent, whereas ‘selected’ in the context of natural selection has an entirely different meaning. His use of the term selection, though not clarified, is something I was able to cope with, but the following – “In competition over access to maternal investment, paternal genes in offspring are inevitably less related to siblings than are maternal genes” – is far from obvious (to me), and needs more and better ‘unpacking’ than I feel it got.

When it comes to the impact these ideas have on human life, there’s some pretty harrowing stuff, such as the material relating to aircraft accidents, and Trivers is clearly, as we all ought to be, very concerned about the role of deceit in national and international politics, particularly given the ramifications such deceits have in terms of the destruction of lives and environments, these days, thanks to our industry and technology, on catastrophically large scales. Still, I had hoped that he’d engage my interest more deeply, in the manner of someone like Carl Sagan, whose ruminations on similar (but also very different) themes, in his landmark  Cosmos  series, penetrated my consciousness in a more profoundly resonant manner.

Still, despite the caveats and complaints, this is a very welcome opening up of an area that we seem, on the whole, resolutely determined not to look at, And however unsatisfactory it is in places it also contains a lot worth thinking about. Trivers says himself that he sees the book as the first public word in a debate he hopes will mature into a whole area of research and understanding, and I say ‘amen’ to that. I just hope that later editions might clarify or simplify a few things on the one hand, and present arguments a bit more rigorously on the other.

Wired for Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation

Wow! Mark Pagel has written a really fantastic book here. This book has the kind of depth and breadth that is awe-inspiring enough to have an almost visceral impact. In exploring how we have evolved culture, or culture has evolved us, Pagel touches on a dizzying array of themes and concepts, never getting too complex or abstruse to follow, and always remaining both erudite and engaging.

And, in a way that reminded me of Arthur Koestler (in particular his excellent Sleepwalkers book), Pagel manages to make some pretty challenging ideas – challenging more to our sense of self (and other ‘cherished illusions’), rather than ‘difficult to understand’ – seem not just plausible, but likely.

In this respect Pagel shows that such scientific understanding as he is dealing in doesn’t necessarily suggest easy ways forward: how are we to square a growing awareness of the illusory nature of the self, along with ever clearer evidence that our access to truth, and even our ability to be author of our own responses to it, is far from what we’ve commonly assumed, with the tendency of the modern world towards a global culture, when biologically, i.e. genetically, our phenotypes (both physical and cultural) have been predominantly sculpted by the vastly longer timespans we’ve spent in smaller tribal groupings? He has answers, neither glib or simplistic, but you should read the book to find out what they are!

He frequently quotes or refers to authors like Dawkins, Dennett and Trivers (I had hoped Trivers’ recent book Deceit might be as satisfying a read as this has proven to be, and Pagel frequently refers to Trivers’ work on deception and self-deception, but I feel Pagel has brought together a broader, richer synthesis in this book), and like all three of these scientific (some might say ‘scientistic’) writers and thinkers, he uses Darwin’s evolutionary insights, chiefly the concept of natural selection, to address vast areas of great fascination, from how languages evolve (or resist change, for that matter), to such profundities as ‘what exactly is consciousness?’ Like these other writers he also demonstrates how, in Dennett’s terminology, Darwin’s dangerous idea is a seemingly ‘universal acid’, eating its way through all aspects of our understanding.

As well as addressing issues like truth and our relations with it, he looks into the origins and functions of art and religion (“beliefs take hold because they promote survival, not because they are true”), possible genetic as well as cultural roots for conflicted aspects of life in general and our being in particular, whose convoluted tendrils might ultimately manifest both in physical and psychological terms, and even why our societies have evolved to function as they do (with their vast disparities between innovation and copying, wealth and power). This really is an amazing, exciting and excellently written book.

Pagel also illuminates the incredible richness, although never glibly, of both what we’ve become and how, suggesting that, whilst in many ways things may not be as they first appear, nevertheless there’s much to admire, be thankful for, and work towards, not least of which is the understanding of our peculiar position as conscious cultural collaborators. Quite where to go from the point of finishing reading this, I can’t really say, as there’s a lot to absorb and reflect on.

In my view, with this book Pagel has stepped right to the forefront of the first rank of writers of popular science, with a superb account of how evolution creates culture and culture creates humans. The warp and weft of his argument and storytelling is densely and intricately interwoven, beautiful, illuminating and nigh on impossible to unravel.

I can’t wait to read more by this stimulating and engaging author… loved it! I just wish more books were so interesting and well-written. It’s an added bonus that this Allen Lane hardback has also been beautifully designed, typeset and printed.

Helping put anomalous monotheism in its proper historical context.

In Battling The Gods Tim Whitmarsh performs some fascinating cultural archaeology, digging up and reconstructing some of the deep history of naturalist (as opposed to supernaturalist) thinking.

There are two things about the way he deals with this subject that disappoint me a little: first, the acceptance of negative terms – his subtitle, Atheism in the Ancient World, uses the primary one – which have been thrust upon those who question religion and superstition (I nearly said ‘the deep history of disbelief’ above, which sounds snappier perhaps, but is once again a negative); and second, limiting the book to the ‘classical’ world/era.

But to be honest these are, for me, very minor gripes. The first issue arises from the fact that even two or three centuries after the Enlightenment we are still emerging (or so I fervently hope) from the religious hegemony of a Christian past, and simply accepts, more or less, the common parlance of the status quo (although to his credit and my delight Whitmarsh frequently challenges this negative framing and its causal religious bias). And the second limits a potentially massive and difficult subject to a smaller more manageable project, resulting in a wonderfully focussed and readable book.

Ever since my own ditching of religion, I’ve harboured a suspicion that the historical narrative left by a Christian dominion of close to two millennia has hidden a much more complex, diverse reality, in which alternative views, from persisting ‘paganism’ to outright disbelief survived, and were far more prevalent than surviving Christian history would have us believe. Whilst Whitmarsh doesn’t address this within the period of Christian dominance (indeed, he says ‘The arrival of Catholic Christianity – Christianity conjoined with imperial power – meant the end of ancient atheism in the West.’), he does make a very convincing case that ‘viewed from the longer perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is [not post-Enlightenment atheism, but] the global dominance of monotheistic religions and the resultant inability to acknowledge the existence of disbelievers.’

This book primarily looks at the Greeks, even when it deals with the Roman era, and we meet some fascinating characters, from the familiar, like Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, the Epicureans and Stoics, etc, to the less well known. One of my favourite discoveries in respect of the latter category was a chap called, rather ironically, Demonax, whose position Whitmarsh describes thus: ‘aggressively satirical, an enemy of dogma rather than a doctrinaire adherent to any particular philosophical code.’ Sounds like a topping kind of chap to me, eh what!?

One of the key points that emerges is that, just as human social and political organisation evolved from small tribal units to city states to empire, so did the roles and functions of religion. The loose, adaptive, and, broadly speaking, more tolerant/pluralist mode of polytheism eventually gave way to the adoption of a monotheistic faith, embraced by Roman imperial power – thanks a bunch, Constantine! – in a marriage of political convenience. Whitmarsh eloquently and succinctly sums this seismic shift as follows: ‘the real ideological revolution engendered by the Christianisation of the empire [was] the alliance between absolute power and religious absolutism.’

I really enjoyed this book. I would love to read more on the same theme, concerning similar naturalist free-thinking in other places and times. Even, dare I suggest, during the heyday of European Christianity, a period when we lived under a new and less tolerant dispensation, and from which we are only now gradually emerging.

PS – This is another archival review; I read and reviewed the book in 2016. I even went to Heffers bookshop on Trinity Street, Cambridge, around the same time, and attended an author’s talk by Whitmarsh, which was great.

Another in my ongoing series of archival reviews.

I really loved this book. Waugh’s colourful and irreverent romp, through the huge swathes of material – mostly biblical, but going much wider overall in terms of sources, albeit concentrating on the Judaeo-Christian deity – much of which is either bizarrely arcane, pure gibberish, or frequently a mixture of both, is both educational and highly enjoyable.

Not a book likely to be admired by the devout. I was in fact first made aware of it, indeed given it, by a believing friend who themselves refused to read it, for fear it would undermine their faith: exactly why they should read it in my view.

Waugh is a little disingenuous in his intro; by the end of the book – well, long, long before then, in truth – one gets a strong sense that Waugh finds the highly irrational, deeply contradictory, and frequently plain nasty image of the almighty, as glimpsed through his multifarious sources, a very ill-defined (through over-description, rather than any want thereof), nebulous, and on the whole repugnant creation of the human mind.

It is nonetheless remarkable how many of us non-believers feel so drawn to examining what a believer might choose to call our ‘apostasy’. But personally I think that just goes to show how deeply enmeshed in our lives and cultures religion remains, for both those with and without ‘faith’. And I was brought up ‘in the faith’. Or rather within a number of the myriad bastard offspring cults to have proliferated under the name Christian.

And though I might share the desire of many contemporary ‘naturalists and free-thinkers’ (a phrase I got from A. C. Grayling), in wishing to see humanity’s consciousness collectively evolve beyond the religious phase, unlike Dawkins and some others – who at one point seemed to believe such a state was imminent – I think we’re a massively long way from any such state of lucidity or rationality. But then that’s exactly why books like Waugh’s God are so important.

He is at times flippant, and frequently very funny. But underlying it all, and despite the occasional lapse into cheap shots at straw-gods, is a very serious and in my view laudable desire to see, both for oneself and as a society, just who on earth the particularly damnable god of Judaeo-Christian tradition is exactly.

Personally I loved this book and, having gone as far as buying copies for friends, would obviously recommend it to anyone interested in such things.

Like Crumb I’m both an artist and musician*, so I find this fascinating and compelling in just about every way one could. His tastes in music are, like all sorts of folk, from Woody Allen to the now deceased Dan Hicks, to some extent, what is sometimes called ‘old timey’.

Whilst my musical tastes overlap with Allen and Crumb et al to some extent, their passion for these older art forms is obsessive – i.e. well beyond my own dilettante interest – which is great, as one can learn a lot from them. Crumb’s distinctive visual style includes not just his talent as an artist, with an emphasis on the cartoonish, but also as both designer and calligrapher.

In addition to his many terrific album covers, for labels like Yazoo, Shanachie, and others, this book also gathers together many music related Crumb works, from his early blues and jazz trading cards, to pin badges, calling cards, posters, and other related ephemera.

The whole lot comes in a slipcase, the shiny black hardback making a square yet ‘record’ like insert, complete with circular cut-outs on the hardback slipcase, like an old paper record-sleeve. As with all Crumb’s stuff, it’s eclectic, individual, beautifully done, and filled with verve and joie de vivre.

Superb, and highly recommended.

* I’m not comparing myself to Crumb in terms of talent or success!

I’ve always had a somewhat confused and mixed relationship with Robert Zimmerman. Like a lot of the most famed folk in popular music, from Elvis to Sinatra, the Beatles to Led Zep, I think he’s been overly reverenced. That’s not to say that these artists haven’t occasionally, or even consistently, been great, or even brilliant. It’s just that the focus on them leaves less time and space for noticing and enjoying other stuff.

That said, I’m currently enjoying revisiting Bob’s oft-maligned Christian phase. I grew up in a Christian household in which this phase of Bob-ness helped confer some much needed hipster cool on our dreadfully dull religion. Well, that’s how I saw it, way back when (I was nine when this came out!). Now I’m no longer religious, let alone Christian. And quite a lot of overtly religious music is anathema to me. Although I must admit I love early Christian choral music, like Tallis or Victoria, etc.

Many professional hipsters slagged Bob’s Christian music off at the time. I may be prejudiced, thanks to my childhood exposure to it. But I think a lot of it is really great. The title track here, and In The Summertime, are terrific. And along with one or two others, are sufficiently vague in their religious overtones. The elegaic paean to Lenny Bruce is beautiful, and whilst the lyrical content of Property of Jesus does make me cringe, the music is great. The musicians involved are top drawer, the ensemble feel live and organic, and the music very rootsy, in an aptly gospel r’n’b vein.

Not perfect, but surprisingly good. And certainly not the fall from grace that hipster journos such as the writers at Rolling Stone pronounced it to be at the time. Definitely worth having and enjoying.

Yesterday I drove up to Leeds and bought myself a beautiful shiny Boosey & Hawkes 400 series 3/4 double bass. The drive, three hours each way, and fuel cost, of about £50, were well worth the effort and expense. I’m absolutely delighted with this gorgeous looking and sounding instrument.

On getting home, after taking Chester for his daily constitutional in the back garden, I immediately set about getting intimate with this curvaceous dusky maiden. Woefully out of tune out of the bag, thanks to an handy iPhone app I was able to swiftly get her singing much more melodiously/accurately.

To my great delight, some of the licks and riffs I used to play started coming back to me, so I made a little video. Mostly excited chatter, with a good dose of itchy nose fiddling and talking to Chester, who’s off camera mewing plaintively (wants to get outside again). Showing my ineptitude publicly like this is, perhaps, rather fool hardy. But hey… who cares!?

Why my iPhone wants to film video in a misty soft-focus – and I’ve cleaned the lens numerous times – I really don’t know. Photos come out perfectly clear and sharp. Weird! I’m thinking of naming my bass, with Brigitte and Fran as top contenders. Mind you, Valerie, or Leonie, for Valerie Leon also appeal. Mind you, I absolutely hate that total musical non-entity of a track Valerie, by Amy Greenhouse, so that’s out, methinks.

Fran is for Fran Jeffries, and, based on sheer sexiness, is my favourite. But Brigitte sounds as cool and sexy as the bass looks. Hmmm… bit of a poser, eh!? Or should I say conundrum (or even Conan-drum?)?

And sticking with the utter sexiness of this bass. The back is very feminine. Put me in mind of Ingre’s Bain Turc. But then, when I see the painting, I think the bass is actually sexier. The painting, by comparison, is less subtle or sophisticated, more harem as meat-market!

Sheesh, on the evidence of countless movies like this, Americans sure are dumb fuckers. This ridiculous porridge of run of the mill clichés is just – and only just -bearable watching*.

It’s like most entertainment these days: throw enough dollars at it, cast enough himbo/bimbo stars, and it might just work. It’s another aspect of what I call ‘the sliced white life’: employ skilled professionals to put it together, it might just stand up. It looks like bread… so surely it must be bread!? But don’t be fooled, it contains nothing of substance.

The plot driving bull is just your run of the mill McGuffin; corrupt politicians with cops ‘n’ hoods on their payroll murder the mrs of ‘the wrong guy’. You know, that former black ops dude, now just your average blue-collar unemployed guy, with the ninja killing skills. Oh, and his kill-kit, still stashed in a wall at his home.

But what is it with these heroically meat-headed dumbos? Why is it they can’t go after those serious hard-ass crims without first securing the safety of their family? Even after they’ve already killed his wife! He has the foresight to stash his kill kit. But not to relocate his family before going on a vengeful rampage. Dude, your priorities are shot!

Replete with ridiculous hairpiece, and undergoing a religious crisis of faith (like any upright American, he loves to kill, but that’s fine, like any upright American, he’s a Christian), Revolta’s Stanley Hill character goes all Arnie. He even looks like kind of like Da Dermïnadorrr! Working with an old buddy – I reckon they’re lovers; near the end buddy-boy says ‘I shaved your ass!’ (at least that’s what I heard) – they merrily butcher whole swathes of baddies, wisecracking their way to seriously psychotic serial-killer status.

Like Rambo, Last Blood, movies of this ilk, whilst mildly diverting in a sickeningly desensitised way, feed into that zombie-like consciousness (or lack thereof) necessary for a nation to be dumb enough to elect someone like Trump. Endlessly grunting and bleating about their individual rights to be better armed than a third-world dictators’ entire private army, all the while clinging to a personal pot-pourri of pre-medieval religious bollocks, mixed with toxically postmodern levels of cynical truth-is-relative poison. And to cap it all off, everything is marinaded in the ever more pervasive ‘everyone other than me is part of a corrupt conspiracy whose testicles, er… sorry, tentacles, reach into every part of society’ type paranoia, so beloved of the great unwashed.

Hill and his chum merrily widow and orphan hundreds of people**, from druggy street scum to the entire security team of the governer (but that’s ok, he’s corrupt), causing collateral damage that in real world terms would include large numbers of innocent bystanders at numerous locations.

In more ‘up close and personal’ terms, in addition to his wife, the dead also include Hills’ daughter’s au pair. But no sweat, Hill and his lover wind up sipping cocktails in Sao Paolo, whilst his daughter’s family emerge, miraculously free of any physical or mental trauma, despite the loss of their mother (dead), father (on the lam), au pair (dead), a bullet in the shoulder for the son-in-law, and all the terror normally associated with bereavement, drive-by-shootings and home-invasions, etc.

As a moral parable this is utterly vile. As a piece of cinematic work it’s competently run of the mill. Travolta is, thanks to his undoubted charisma, okay in the role, as morally bankrupt and nonsensical as it may be. Indeed, many of the cast are decent actors, doing their best with unbelievably banal and tasteless material. Amazingly, in spite of the vacuity, or worse yet the moronic mish-mash of half-baked ideas and totally addled morality, this remains reasonably diverting entertainment.

I think that this is a sad reflection on our times. Surely we all deserve better than this? I want to say ‘it’s ok’ when, frankly, it isn’t. Mass-produced pap like this elbows aside and takes up the space other better stuff might occupy. Indeed, most better stuff will never even get made, whilst dross of this ilk is produced in abundance.

I think actors like Revolta ought to have sufficient principles to turn down dumb-ass junk like this. But in the current marketplace such high principles would see most of Hollywood’s current talent forced into jobs in the kind of malls movies like this will call home.

*This sort of stuff – what one might formerly have called celluloid dreck – is also, thankfully, instantly forgettable.

**By the twisted MAGA type logic of such films the hero’s bloody antics would beget countless copycat offspring, as the angered relatives of the folks he butchers set out in their turn, looking for their own violent retribution. All of this ought to give the execs who produce this tripe rock hard boners; the possibilities for endless sequels being literally exponential.

‘The islanders have always been a mongrel race and we are the stronger for it.’

NB: I originally wrote this review around 2012, when I was sent the book to review as part of the Amazon Vine program. But, in the light of Brexit, I wanted to re-post the review here on my blog.

Wow! This book is a fascinating and exciting compendium of diverse facts, beautifully illustrated, telling the most incredible story.

Cunliffe writes with great clarity and engaging straightforwardness, weaving together various strands of scientific deduction sufficient to put Sherlock in the shade. What science there is here is, on the whole, easy enough to follow. Certainly this isn’t too drily technical a read. Indeed, throughout the book we often touch upon moments connecting us with our forebears, a very early and poignant instance of this being the discovery of Mesolithic footprints in the littoral muds of Formby point.

Covering 11,000 years, from the retreat of the ice around 10,000 BC (when these lands were still connected to the European continent), to the arrival of the Normans in 1066, Cunliffe tells how the people of these islands grew from bands of a few hundred hunter-gatherers to a mixed population of around two million. Before embarking on this epic tale he sets out what we used to tell ourselves was our history, from the first mentions of these lands in ancient Greek and Roman texts, through to indigenous writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth, examining how myth and fact interwove, before beginning on the journey to the more complex and nuanced understanding we have now.

More than half of the book is given over to the period prior to these islands entering into the written record, which Cunliffe describes as formerly belonging to ‘shadowy pseudo-history’. It’s quite moving reading Geoffrey of Monmouth, who belongs to this earlier semi-mythical phase, saying ‘Britain, the best of islands… provides in unfailing plenty everything that is suited to the use of human beings’, and then having Cunliffe, the modern post-enlightenment scholar concur, stating that indeed, ‘The British Isles … occupy a very favoured position in the world’, and explaining why this is so (geology & climate).

At around 500 pages, with a very substantial ‘further reading’ section at the back, this is a serious book. But despite the books size, as Cunliffe concedes, his scope is so huge that it remains a very general and brisk overview of a huge subject. Chapters often conclude with summarising statements, which is helpful, and there are three ‘interlude’ chapters, dealing with such topics as language and religion. As he says in his preface, ‘An archaeologist writing of the past must be constantly aware that the past is, in truth, unknowable. The best we can do is to offer approximations based on the fragments of hard evidence that we have to hand, ever conscious that we are interpreters. Like the myth-makers of the distant past, we are creating stories about our origins and our ancestors conditioned by the world in which we live’.

Unsurprisingly the nearest lands have been those to most consistently stock our genetic banks, with arrivals coming from land masses we now know as Spain, France, the Low Countries, Germany and Scandinavia, and in the Roman period an even wider ranging area. The first 9,000 years of this story are couched more in terms of generalities and theories, drawing primarily on the longer standing practice of antiquarianism, or what evolved into archaeology as we now know it, but also other associated areas, some of which, like our growing knowledge of genetics, are much more modern developments. The parts dealing with the last millennia become more like the kind of history many of us will know from school or general reading, with tales of kings and queens, war and invasion.

The ‘innate mobility of humankind … inherent in our genetic makeup’ is a continuing theme throughout, existing in constant tension with the domesticating aspect of human culture, as waves of invaders and colonists seek first to find new territories and then to live in them. Throughout this continual ebb and flow human and material traffic continues, leaving behind trails of artefacts and monuments, from grand buildings to everyday waste. Rather like the amazing detective work of Darwin, this is a tale concerned with origins, and it’s amazing what we can deduce from a close examination of the world around us, and how much that world can still tell us of our past.

As a generally interested reader of history I found this an extraordinary, fascinating, and very compelling read, fabulously supplemented by a rich array of graphic material. Loved it!