Snezana Lawrence - A Little History of Mathematics (Yale, 2025) ****

In one of the first chapters of this book, the story is told about Greeks in the 5th Century BC who consulted the oracle of Delphi to appease the god Apollo after the plague rampaged across the country. The oracle said that "in order to assuage the god, they should double the size of Apollo's altar, an ornate then-foot-high cube. That didn't sound very difficult to do. Double the cube? How hard could it be? (...). This problem, known as the Delian problem, 'rested on how to find the cube root of 2, and was eventually proven - not until the 19th Century - to be an impossible task using only Euclydian tools of geometry available in the fifth century". (p. 31). 

This little example illustrates the book well. It's a historical overview of new challenges and solutions in mathematics from the earliest ages to today. Math was definitely not my thing in school, and I only realised that integrals could be used to calculate volumes when on the exam we had to calculate the volume of a flat tyre. I never knew what it was actually used for. In retrospect, a lot of math could have been made more attractive by using some of the challenges in this book. It requires some basic knowledge of math, but not exceptionally so. 

The example also demonstrates the weird thing that is relatively unique to mathematics: on a very abstract form, there are many riddles that have no other apparent function or relationship with reality other than keep very smart minds busy for centuries, yet other times, the link with reality becomes obviously clear, and most of our current technology would not be possible without it. 

Lawrence takes us step by step through the creative processes of mathematical geniuses who solved ancient and new problems with sometimes completely creative approaches, opening new vistas for other scientists to go even a step further. This includes the amazingly long time it took to have a symbol for zero or for the equation, things which are so obvious today. 

Maybe in stark contrast to other sciences, discoveries in math have usually been the result of the stubborn passion of individuals to find solutions for mind-boggling problems. I have used the approach of Kepler in some of my presentations: to make people understand that the earth is revolving around the moon, he forced his audiences to imagine they were looking at the earth from the moon, which gave a totally different perspective on how the planets rotated. This sudden change in perspective clarified everything. 

From the early use of numbers to calculating in 24 dimensions, her story is accessible as it is fascinating. Her explanations and examples are sufficiently well explained for non-mathematicians to also enjoy the book, even if many will have trouble understanding how you can work in 4 or 5 dimensions, let alone in 24, but yes, today's math is capable of that. 

Peter Frankopan - Earth Transformed - An Untold Story (Bloomsbury, 2024) *****

The words that come to mind when reading this book are colossal, gargantuan, massive, monumental, gigantic, not only because the physical characteristic of its 660 pages, but also because of its incredible and erudite picture of the history of our world that is described here, viewed from the perspective of the interaction of our environment with historical events. 

Peter Frankopan is a British historian and writer. He is a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford, and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is also author of the best-selling "The Silk Roads". 

I identified over fifty passages in the book that I intended to refer to in my review, but this is simply too much. 

The book starts at the real beginning, around 4.5 billion years ago, takes us over the origin of our species, prehistory, and then through history to our currrent times with a view to the future. The geography is our entire world, with impact and interaction between environment and people in every geography: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, droughts, plagues, and other calamities that shaped nations, beliefs and cultures. 

"as societies become larger in size and more specialised in their work, rulers and priests become the interpreters of everything from natural disaster to environmental challenges, from_ resource surpluses to shortfalls, from military defeats to premature deaths, helping explain punishments or bounties that were being administered by unseen gods. Environmental and natural calamities in particular were closely linked to 'moralising gods' who, out of anger or simply from boredom, handed out punishments for transgressions and apparent lack of respect. It is striking, though perhaps not surprising, that regions that were vulnerable to changes in weather conditions - above all droughts, but also floods and storms - developed cosmological systems based on 'moralising gods' who used such events to punish, show their displeasure and teach lessons" (p. 87)

Next to influencing the development of religions of course, the destruction of nature by man has also been something of all times, even if the recent developments are possibly more devastating. Frankopan gives many examples, but I'll just list some from Ancient Europe. 

"deforestation had seriously depleted wood supplies in many regions. The forests in what is now Tuscany had been cut down and exhausted, wrote Strabo around 2,000 years ago, to provide wood both for ships and for houses in and around Rome, including over-the-top villas that were of'Persian magnificence' - a nod to opulence, excess and bad taste. Pliny the Elder, writing not long afterwards, noted sadly that too many people undermine nature with the sole purpose of self-enrichment; it should hardly come as a surprise, therefore, that the earth should occasionally show its displeasure, through disasters such as earthquakes. Rather than content themselves with the bounteous food and natural wealth that the world provides, humans were too busy being overwhelmed by avarice to stop overexploiting its resources" (p. 192)

Despite the endless list of destruction and calamities, the author remains optimistic about man's capabilities of behavioural change and good stewardship, but then with a number of conditions that need to be fulfilled. 

"Some climate sceptics point out - rightly - that forecasts that look into the future can be highly speculative, and they also seek to dampen alarm by noting, again quite correctly, that economic growth, new technologies and adaptation may alleviate the problems that lie ahead and, in some cases, may even s.olve them. 8 That too, however, requires faith and confidence; moreover, what history in general and this book in particular show is that there have been a great many times in the past when societies, peoples and cultures have proved unable to adapt. Indeed, in some respects, the human story of progress is about batons being repeatedly dropped and picked up by others. 

The question, then, is not so much whether to adapt, but how, where and when to do so. And in that sense it is certainly true that there is plenty of good news, much to celebrate and reasons to be optimistic." (p. 643). 

As you can expect, this is a really important book, not only because of its perspectives on our history, but also as great background knowledge that should help us to become more environmentally conscious and especially for politicians to finally act in a meaningful way. This book was of course written before the current Trump administration, which decided to step out of the Paris Agreement, and claiming that global warming is a hoax, promoting "beautiful, clean coal" instead of renewable energy. I hope this short-sightedness will stop soon, yet with the probability that Donald Trump reads this book are zero, prospects become worse. 

Often when reading, I deplored the fact that the sources of all the references are missing in the book. At the end, he explains that there is a dedicated website that contains the 200 pages with his source material. The QR code below leads the reader to the source material. 

Vincenzo De Meulenaere - Coudenberg (Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, 2025) ****

In "Coudenberg" brengt geschiedkundige Vincenzo De Meulenaere het kasteel van Coudenberg weer tot leven. Op de "mons frigidus" zoals de heuvel in het oude Brussel ooit heette, werd in de tiende eeuw een versterking (castrum) gebouwd, die gaandeweg uitgroeide tot het koninklijk paleis voor vele koningen uit onze geschiedenis, om dan te worden vernietigd door een grote brand in de nacht van 3 op 4 februari 1731. De oorzaak hiervan is onbekend, maar het betekende het einde van het paleis, dat nog lang als een ruïne bleef bestaan tot het uiteindelijk in 1774 met de grond gelijk werd gemaakt. 

Vandaag zijn enkele ruïnes van dat paleis nog te bezichtigen onder het Koningsplein in Brussel. Het Koninklijk Paleis staat eigenlijk op dezelfde plek vandaag. Het Coudenbergpaleis heeft een gigantische geschiedenis gekend, en ongeveer al wie ooit macht had in Europa, van de vroege middeleeuwen tot de 18e Eeuw heeft er zijn intrek genomen of is er te gast geweest. Het is de verdienste van De Meulenaere om dit op een heel overzichtelijke en frisse manier weer tot leven te roepen, met veel aandacht voor anecdotes en zin voor detail. Het zijn vaak dezelfde hoofdfiguren als in "De Boergondiërs" van Bart Van Loo, maar hier geconcentreerd op een enkele plek. 

Als Brusselaar vind ik het fantastisch dat hier zoveel aandacht aan wordt geschonken, maar ik denk dat elke Belg verrast zal zijn dat een dergelijk paleis volledig verdwenen is. Ik heb ook in Tervuren gewoond, waar ook een gigantisch kasteel stond aan de vijvers, maar dat ook totaal is verdwenen, en ongeveer in dezelfde periode ook uitgroeide van een kasteel tot een paleis. 

De Meulenaere schrijft met veel liefde en belangstelling voor zijn onderwerp, wat het lezen ook de moeite waard maakt. Op het eind van het boek worden nog enkele kleurplaten weergegeven van schilderijen over het paleis en zijn protagonisten op verschillende tijdstippen. Van mij hadden dat er gerust veel meer mogen zijn, omdat het visuele natuurlijk ook zijn aantrekkingskracht heeft, maar ik weet dat het niet altijd eenvoudig is om reproductierechten te krijgen voor publicaties. 

Wie van onze vaderlandse geschiedenis houdt en van onze hoofdstad moet dit boek zeker lezen. Een aanrader. 

Michael Taylor - Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion (Bodley Head, 2024) ****½

What a wonderful treat of a book. It describes the discovery of "impossible monsters", the skeletons of dinosaurs and other reptiles in the cliffs of Lyme Regis in Dorset, Southwest England, first by the 12-year old Mary Anning. The ongoing discoveries of other skeletons created a completely different view on ancient animals and on the age of the earth, questioning biblical stories in which these strange animals never even featured. But the book is not about the animals themselves, but how they became the subject of intense debates with the Church and scientists who claimed that the earth was only 6,000 years old. 

Not much later Darwin developed his theory of evolution of the species which added even more fuel to the heated discussions. 

The book gives a wonderful overview of the debates that ensued between religion and science, the opposing views, the discrediting of scientific evidence by religious dogma, but also the whole public debate, including the reports of the actual meetings of the Royal Society of Science in which the topics were debated. 

Michael Taylor was born in 1988 and graduated with a double first in history from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD. He is also the author of "The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery". The discoveries of Mary Anning have been made into a worthwhile movie, called "Ammonite" with Kate Winslet in the leading role. 

The discoveries of ancient animals and Darwin's theory of evolution found fertile ground in the now formal questioning of the actual reality of the Bible stories: 

"In 'The Essence of Christianity' (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach developed an anthropological approach to religion, which he described as merely 'the dream of the human mind'. Here, the God of justice represented human ideals of justice, and the God of love was the perfection of human ideals of love; it followed that Christ the miracle-worker was 'nothing else than a product and reflex of the supernatural human mind'. In 'The Life of Jesus' (1835) David Strauss had meanwhile looked at the gospels, striving to separate historical evi­dence from mythology. Though he did not deny that Christ had lived, Strauss decried the New Testament's 'false facts and impossible conse­quences which no eye-witness could have related'. Fatally, in his view, 'there was [for a long time] no written account of the life of Jesus', so that 'oral narratives alone were transmitted'; such tales had become 'tinged with the marvellous', growing into 'historical myth[s]'. For Strauss, these stories 'like all other legends were fashioned by degree', only in time acquiring 'a fixed form in our written Gospels' (p. 133)

The discoveries shoock the very foundations of religious belief, of the concept of right and wrong: 

"And what of the Lord Himself? (conservative priest) Richard Froude despaired at the 'goodness' of a god who had chosen to bless 'arbitrarily, for no merit of their own, as an eastern despot chooses his favourites, one small section of mankind, leaving all the world besides to devil-worship and lies'. Just why were the chosen people chosen? And how could Sutherland believe the Lord to be 'all-merciful, all-good' when He was 'jealous, passionate, capricious, [ and] revengeful, punishing children for their fathers' sin', tempting men 'into blindness and folly' when He knew they would fall, and punishing them eternally in a 'hell prison-house'? This god was not divine. He was 'a fiend' (p. 135)

The broadening of the number of scientists and other amateur scientists to deal with the information and the data, led to even further destruction of the foundations of religious belief: 

"Here, he (William Parker Foulke, an American lawyer) compared 'the modified bird Archaeopteryx' with 'the ordinary Dinosauria' in which class, in con­tradiction of Wagner, he placed the Compsognathus. There were differences to be sure, but Cope remarked upon 'the union of the tibia and fibula [of the Compsognathus] with the first series of tarsal bones, a feature formerly supposed to belong to the class Aves [ that is, birds] alone'. He also looked at 'the transverse direction of the pubes', the hip-bones, and again observed 'an approach to the birds'. After describing other 'bird-like features' such as the number and nature of its vertebrae, Cope suggested that the Compsognathus stood 'inter­mediate between the position in most reptiles and in birds' (p. 249)

"All this was proof, he concluded, that 'the facts of palaeontology . . . are not opposed to the doctrine of evolution, but, on the contrary ... enable us to form a conception of the manner in which birds may have been evolved from reptiles'. The 'fowl that may fly above the earth', sup­posedly created by the Lord on the fifth day of the first week, had in fact evolved from the sixth day's creatures 'that creepeth upon the earth'. The book of Genesis lay in ruins, the dinosaurs had tri­umphed, and even Richard Owen recognised the quality and force of the bulldog's performance. (p. 251)

"John William Draper (American chemist, professor at New York University) moved from the library at Alexandria to the 'pillared halls of Persepolis', from the Arabian schools of mathematics to the courts of the Inquisition, and from Renaissance universities to the learned societies of London. There was no question of his favour: 'The history of Science', he declared, 'is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expan­sive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other'. Of that 'traditionary faith' he was unsparing, describing the development of Catholicism as an 'intellectual night' which settled on Europe, .during which spiritual affairs passed from the control of classical philoso­phers 'into the hands of ignorant and infuriated ecclesiastics, parasites, eunuchs, and slaves'. At last, however, that night was lifting, and civi­lised society had recognised the truth: 'that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being abso­lutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice - it cannot have both'. (p. 286). 

Taylor's erudition is a pleasure to read, as is the fluency of his writing style. Highly recommended reading. 

Irene Vallejo - Papyrus (Hodder, 2023) ****½

I love books that give a broad, sweeping overview of everything there is to know about a subject, an encyclopaedic vision through history and the boundaries of our knowledge. This is such a book, and even more interesting, it's a book about books, about writing, about the importance of the physical aspects of human writing: clay tablets, parchment, paper, but even more so about what they achieved in terms of sharing stories, ideas and values. Irene Vallejo is a Spanish classical philologist with degrees from the universities of Zaragoza in Spain and Florence in Italy. 

Her passion is clear from the very start. She writes with incredible erudition, but with equal personal joy and personal experience of her relationship with texts and writing. 

 "After all the agonies of doubt, after exhausting every possible delay and excuse, one hot July afternoon, I face the void of the blank page. I've decided to open with the image of some enigmatic hunters stalking their prey. I identify with them. I appreciate their patience, their stoicism, the time they have taken, their steadiness, the adrena­line of the search. For years I have worked as an academic, consulting sources, keeping records, trying to get to know the historical mate­rial. But when it comes down to it, I'm so amazed by the true and recorded history I discover that it seeps into my dreams and acquires, without my volition, the shape of a story. I'm tempted to step into the skin of those who traveled the roads of an ancient, violent, tumultu­ous Europe in pursuit of books. What if I start by telling the story of their journey? It might work, but how can I keep the skeleton of facts distinct beneath the muscle and blood of imagination?  

The initial idea seems to me as fantastical as the journey in search of King Solomon's mines or the Lost Ark, but historical documents show that in the megalomaniacal minds of the kings of Egypt, it was truly possible. It might have been the last and only time - there, in the third century BC - that the dream of gathering all the books in the world, without exception, in a universal library, could become a reality. Today it seems like the plot of a fascinating, abstract story by Borges - or perhaps his great erotic fantasy." (p. XV)

She starts in ancient times, with the endeavour of Alexander The Great to conquer the known world, to create his own city of Alexandria in Egypt, with the largest collection of written material from all the places in his realm. He opened up the world to create a kind of proto-globalism where all cultures could meet and mingle, if not in person, then at least in their written forms. She draws a fantastic picture of how scrolls were written, how they were traded and collected, how they were catalogued and copied. It's a fascinating journey, one that we are of course by and large aware of, but she adds so many snippets of concrete examples and information that it make for fascinating reading. As in this example of the last Egyptian scribes, "who witnessed the shipwreck of their civilization". In 380 CE, Christianity became the compulsory state religion, and pagan cults were prohibited in the Roman Empire. 

"(In the) Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, to the south of the first cataract of the Nile, (...) a group of priests took refuge, men who were repositories of the secrets of their sophisticated writing system and who had been forbidden from sharing their knowledge. One of them, Esmet-Akhom, engraved on the walls of the temple the last hieroglyphic inscription ever written, which ends with the words "for all time and eternity." Some years later, the emperor Justinian I resorted to military force to close the temple where the priests of Isis were holding out, taking the rebels as prisoners. Egypt buried its old gods, with whom it had lived for thousands of years. And, along with its gods, its objects of worship, and the language itself. In just one generation, everything disappeared. It has taken fourteen centu­ries to rediscover the key to that language. (p.53)

Or in this example on the origin of poetry, which makes sense and appears quite obvious once you think about it: 

"In their effort to endure, denizens of the oral world realized that rhythmic language was easiest to remember, and on the wings of this discovery, poetry was born. During recitation, the melody helps the speaker repeat each line without alteration, since it is when the music is broken that the sequence falters. All of us were made to learn poems in school. Years later, after forgetting so many other things, we find we can still remember these poems with extraordi­nary clarity" (p. 81)

I also liked this example to please and annoy my friends in medical practice: 

"What kind of education did those Greeks receive? They were steeped in culture in all its variety. Unlike us, they weren't remotely interested in specialization. They looked down their noses at knowl­edge of a technical nature. They weren't obsessed with employ­ment; after all, they had slaves to work for them. Those who could avoided anything as degrading as having a trade. Leisure was more refined - in other words, it involved cultivating the mind, fostering friendships, making conversation, and leading a contemplative life. Only medicine, an unquestionable social necessity, demanded its own particular kind of training. As a result, doctors suffered from an overt cultural inferiority complex. All of them, from Hippocrates to Galen, repeated the mantra in their texts that a doctor is also a philosopher. They wished to avoid being confined to their field and tried to show themselves to be cultured, slipping the occasional quote by a key poet into their writings." (p. 179) 

She also gives a reflection on her own academic research, and the book format gives her also the opportunity to write about herself, about her own experiences, sometimes funny, sometimes deeply personal. 

As a PhD student she went to the Oxford Library to do some research, but she is confronted with the obligation to "take the oath": 

"A bald man behind a desk interrogated me with­out making eye contact. I answered all his questions, justified my presence, and showed him the papers he asked for with somewhat intimidating politeness. There was a long silence while he entered my information into his vast database, and then, hands still on his keyboard, in a startling swerve in time, he suddenly stepped into the Middle Ages and informed me pompously that the time had come for me to take the oath. He handed me a small stack of laminated cards that showed, each in a different language, the words I would have to say. I did so. I swore to obey the rules. Not to steal, damage, or deface a single book. Not to set fire to the library or help cause a blaze and watch with diabolical pleasure as the roaring flames engulfed its treasures, reducing them to ash." (p. 44)

 Or this even more personal reflection, which again lifts the book out of the academic space into a more personal environment, the perspective that is obviously excluded from any scientific research and publications: 

"Violence among children and teenagers is protected by a barrier of murky silence. For years I took comfort in not having been the class snitch, the tattletale, the coward. Not to have stooped that low. Misplaced pride and shame made me fol­low the rule that certain stories aren't told. Wanting to be a writer was a belated rebellion against that law. The stories that go untold are exactly the ones you must tell. I decided to become the snitch I was so afraid to be. The roots of writing are often dark. This is my darkness, the darkness that nurtures this book, and perhaps nur­tures everything I write. (p.226)

But of course the main message is the power of literature, of writing, of books in all their forms, how they made ideas accessible to anyone around the world, to start sharing common values and a common culture, or at least to value that they're might be other perspectives to look at the same reality: 

"In a time when the vast majority of Greeks scarcely set foot outside their native village, Herodotus was a tireless traveler. He enlisted on merchant ships, moved in slow caravans, struck up con­versation with many people, and visited a great number of cities in the Persian Empire, to give an account of the war with knowledge of the terrain and a range of perspectives. When he met the enemy in his daily life, he offered a different and more precise vision than any other writer. In the words of Jacques Lacarriere, Herodotus strove to topple his Greek countrymen's prejudices, teaching them that "the line between civilization and barbarism is never a geographic bor­der between countries, but a moral border within every people, and beyond that, within each individual." It's curious to note, so many centuries after Herodotus wrote his work, that the earliest history book begins in a ferociously modern way. There are wars between East and West, kidnappings, mutual accusations, differing versions of the same events, and alternative facts".  (p.162)

It is an ode to knowledge, to intellectual curiosity and debate ...

"In its ambiguous state as a Greek city outside of Greece and the seed of Europe beyond the bounds of Europe, Alexandria came to see itself from the outside. During the Library's greatest era and following in Alexander's wake, the Stoic philosophers were bold enough to teach for the first time that all people belonged to a com­munity without borders and were obliged to accept humanity wher­ever and under whichever circumstances they encountered it. We should remember the Greek capital of the Nile delta as the place where this effervescence was born, where the languages and tradi­tions of others began to matter, and where the world and knowledge were understood to be a shared territory. In these aspirations we find a precursor to the great European dream of universal citizenship. Writing, books, and libraries were the technologies that made this utopia possible". (p.232)

... and of course the incredible value of the freedom of speech: 

"Days before The Satanic Verses appeared in bookstores, during the publicity campaign, an Indian journalist asked Rushdie, off the record, whether he was aware of the row that was coming. The writ­er's response was unequivocal: 'It is a funny view of the world to think that a book can cause riots." 

If we look back at the general history of book destruction, we'll see that in fact, the funny view of the world - the oasis, the strange paradise, the Shangri-La, the forest of Lothlorien - is freedom of expression. Over the centuries, the written word has been stubbornly persecuted, and the times when bookstores receive only peaceful visitors who do not wave flags or wag fingers, break windows or set things on fire, or give themselves over to the primitive zeal for prohibition, are in fact the unusual ones. " (p. 294)

The scientific study of writing and books becomes a personal story as well as a humanistic manifesto. At times it is not easy to follow the logic or the thread of her narrative, because so many pieces of information are provided. It is this wealth that makes the book so entertaining and a pleasure to read. 

Highly recommended!

Abbott Kahler - Eden Undone (Harper Collins, 2024) **½

When buying books on Amazon, they often give "recommendations based on your past choices", and this book popped up, with the amazing subtitle "A True Story of Sex, Murder and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II", which appealed to my boyish nature. 

I will refrain from doing semantic exercises on the description "A True Story" as initiated by the movie Fargo. What happened then is not a story. It is true. A German physician and his patient move to Floreana in 1930, one of the Galápagos Islands with the sole intent of creating their own paradise, their own eden, far from the madness and obligations of society. Dr. Friedrich Ritter also has the high aspirations to write his own philosophical treatise about how to live in this world. He describes their new paradise in a series of newspaper articles, which of course leads to other people sharing his idea. They are followed by another German couple who are looking for a place where their ill and almost blind son, still a boy, can hope to benefit from a good environment. Next comes an Austrian-French sex-obsessed Baroness with two 'male slaves' and an Ecuadorian translator. The baroness is a true narcissist, self-obsessed, manipulative, dictatorial, charming if need be, seductive and commanding. 

Because the media attention they create, they also generate the interest of the very rich Americans, who come to visit with their cruise ships to see for themselves how these Europeans have eked out a living in the harsh environment of the Galapagos. 

Needless to say that this Eden soon becomes a nightmare for all involved, with the truth becoming a commodity as rare as luxury goods. Human nature comes to the fore even among the most principled people, leading to theft, hypocrisy, gossip, shifting alliances, hate, death and murder. 

Kahler brings it like a documentary, extensively using excerpts from letters and articles, and literally including all events that took place, which gives possibly a very distorted view of the actual boring life these people must have had on the island, with the exception of the conflicts that were documented. The book has also no literary ambition to bring more than just a report. It's a missed opportunity with this kind of material to work from. 

It's a fascinating microcosm of humanity, isolated and reduced to a handful of people. It could have been staged for a play, to reduce the madness of our kind on one tiny location, with high hopes and lofty aspirations leading to a predictable catastrophy within a very short time span. It's a mirror to all of us, and if a fiction author had developed a plot such as this one, the reader would say it's possibly too programmatic, too artificial to be credible. 

In this sense it really is a story. But then a true one. 

Sarah Bakewell - Humanly Possible (Penguin, 2023) *****

When reading the short description of the book's content, I was hesitant. I am already convinced of the value of its contents. Second, I have read already so much on the subject that I wondered whether it would convey anything new. The reality of reading proved me wrong. Even if you consider yourself a 'humanist', and maybe because you are, you should read this book. It is extremely well-documented and extremely well-written. Bakewell starts the book with the 'credo' of humanism, as penned by Robert G. Ingersoll in the 19th Century: 

Happiness is the only good. 

The time to be happy is now. 

The place to be happy is here. 

The way to be happy is to make others so. 

Even if I was well aware or vaguely aware of the content of the thinkers and authors that she describes in this book, the real novelty is how these thoughts were received in society and how they evolved to become part of broader political and philosophical thinking. 

Her journey starts in the early 14th Century with the writings of Petrarch and Boccacio ("When his father contemplated training him for the church as 'a good way to get rich' it turned out he had no liking or aptitude for that either"). Both authors raided libraries to re-discover the ancient Latin authors, revived them, wrote about them. Bakewell mentioned that Bocaccio at one stage considered abandoning his literary endeavours because "a monk, Pietro Petroni of Sienna, warned him in 1632 that he would imminently die if he did not get rid of all the non-Christian books in his library and stop writing books himself. This had been revealed to him in a vision". Luckily, Petrarch used smarter arguments to convince him of the opposite: 'ignorance is not the path to virtue". He advocated for knowledge and learning, of a healthy abundance in words and ideas. 

We take it for granted today that we have immediate access to the works of Cicero, Epicurus, Terentius and Democritus, but that is of course not the case. Very few scholars even spoke Greek, so they had no way of understanding or valuing whatever Greek texts still existed in hidden libraries across Italy or elsewhere. The geneaology goes further: Poggio rediscovered Lucretius' "On The Nature of Things". Printing was invented and became a great power to share old and new ideas about broader groups of people. Lorenzo Valla is the next in line. 

"His name was Lorenzo Valla, and his 1440 treatise On the Donation of Constantine is one of the great humanist achievements. It combines a precise scholarly assault with the high rhetorical techniques learned from the ancients, served up with a sauce of hot chutzpah. All these assets were necessary to Valla, because he was daring to attack one of the church's central modern claims: its justification for having complete power over all of western Europe. It could be a short step from that to questioning its other claims to authority, too, including the authority it held over peo­ple's minds. Valla seems to have been a man who had no fear and could never be persuaded to keep quiet. He traveled all over Italy, working for a series of patrons and supporters-at this point he was living in Naples-but he made enemies everywhere as well. The poet Maffeo Vegio had already warned him to seek advice before writing things that would hurt people's feelings, and generally to restrain his "intellectual violence." (p.87)

It takes courage to have intellectual curiosity, to be open to ideas that challenge beliefs and established authority: "Dispute and contradiction, not veneration and obedience, are the essence of intellectual life. And crucially, Valla did not merely tell people they were wrong, he gave the reasons why they were wrong" (p.93). 

On Vesalius: 

"He blamed both himself and other anatomists for having been too Galen-reliant: "I shall say noth­ing more about these others; instead I shall marvel more at my own stu­pidity and blind faith in the writings of Galen and other anatomists." He ends the section by urging students to rely on their own careful examina­tions, taking no one's word for anything, not even his own. This was a good warning, since Vesalius himself did not get every­thing right. One error was that he failed to identify the clitoris cor­rectly, misdescribing it as part of the labia. It took another Padua anatomist, Realdo Colombo, to correct him. Realdo even knew what it was for, which implies that he had noticed it in contexts other than the dissection table. He named it ''amor Veneris, vel dulcedo" ("love of Venus, or thing of pleasure"), gave details of its role in women's sexual experiences, and remarked, "It cannot be said how astonished I am that so many famous anatomists had not even an inkling of such a lovely thing, perfected with such art for the sake of such utility." (p. 130)

On education and Erasmus schooling in a monastery: 

Instead, the effect on Erasmus was to implant in him a lifelong aver­sion to cruelty or intimidation of any kind. He would have agreed with a remark made centuries later by E. M. Forster in describing the miseries of his own public-school education: "The worst trick it ever played me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible." That was another reason Erasmus took a poor view of his schooling: the unworldliness and irrelevance to real life of the monks' attitudes. It was a common humanist complaint to say that such institutions were old-fashioned, pedantic, and out of touch with reality. For Erasmus, as for Agricola, and later for Forster, a young mind needs to be liberated from meaningless, useless systems of knowledge as taught by unenlight­ened masters of an outmoded stamp who themselves have no idea how to live." (p. 142) 

Other luminaries who are part of the genealogy: Pico della Mirandola, Leon Battista Alberti, Andreas Vesalius, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, Diderot, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Paine, David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, Jeremy Bentham, Frederick Douglas ("There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him"), Oscar Wilde, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm von Humboldt ("The State that enforces a particular belief is denying people the right to be fully human"), Matthew Arnold. Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Ernest Renan, Auguste Comte, Bertrand Russell, ...

Bakewell is also very conscious of the value of humanism to all humans and not only to the male part of it. 

"Pericles (told) Athenian free men in 430 BCE that they are excel­lent because they are harmonious, responsible, and politically active - only to add that this does not apply to women, whose only virtue is never to be mentioned by anyone at all. That continued to be the norm for millennia: instead of the mainstream of human excellence, women were offered a rivulet of negative side virtues: modesty, silence, placidity, innocence, chastity. Each of these is characterized by the absence of some positive quality (confidence, eloquence, active responsibility, experience, and - well, I'll leave it to you to decide what the virtuous opposite of chastity is, but whatever we call it, it is surely more fun)." (p.203) 

There

"Connections, communications, moral and intellectual links of all kinds, as well as the recognition of difference and the questioning of ar­bitrary rules: these all go to form the web of humanity. They enable each of us to live a fulfilling life on Earth, in whichever cultural context we are at home, and also to try to understand each other the best we can. They are more likely to encourage an ethics of worldly flourishing, in contrast with belief systems that picture each frustrated soul waiting hopefully for a correction of fortunes in the afterlife. The modern humanist will always prefer to say, with Robert G. Ingersoll, that the place to be happy is here, in this world, and the way to be happy is to try to make others so.  The old Golden Rule, associated with several religions as well as with secular morality, has much to offer here: "Do as you would be done by." Or, in the more modest, reversed form that is more hospitable to diver­sity: Don't do something to others if you wouldn't like it yourself. It is not perfect, but a good rule of the humanist thumb is to say that, if you don't like being told to stay silent and invisible, or being enslaved and abused, or being unable to get into buildings because no one thought to install a ramp, or being considered less than human, then the chances are that other people are not fond of it, either. Or, as Kongzi said: "The Master's way consists of doing one's best to fulfill one's humanity and treating others with an awareness that they, too, are alive with humanity." (p 218, 219)

This book is a great overview of humanist thought: inquisitive, inclusive, caring, ethical, motivated by a happiness for all, in diversity of thought and the right of each individual to personal freedom and fullfilment and happiness. For me this overview is the absolute hope and despair of humanity. Hope because it offers a clear perspective and a way of thinking, despair because over the centuries of expanded thinking on the subject, we have not moved significantly further at a global level. Our technology has advanced exponentially over the last two centuries, mainstreaming it across the globe, yet humanist thinking has despite its obvious value and benefits barely created strong understanding and use in most of the world. 

Bakewell is an excellent guide, erudite and entertaining and truly committed. 

Not to be missed. 

Noel B. Gerson - Queen of Caprice - A Biography of Kristina of Sweden (Sapere, 1962) ***½

I am sure that all Swedes know the story of Kristina of Sweden, who was queen from 1632 when she was 16 years old till 1654, when she abdicated after having converted to catholicism. She was a unique personality, controversial, smart, curious, headstrong, and sometimes incredibly selfish and even childish. Hence this biography's title: "Queen of Caprice", and that seems an apt description. So many elements of her character were in conflict with each other, that it is easy to qualify her as a tragic figure, but on the other hand she has always been master of her own destiny with a privilege that few other people had. Today we would categorise her as "highly gifted", a situation which was both a blessing and a curse. And that makes her biography so interesting to read. 

Here are some nice excerpts which describe some aspects of her personality. She did everything to make Stockholm the Athens of the North, by inviting scientists from around Europe to Sweden to teach and to experiment and to share ideas. 

"Professor Stiernhielm brought the microscope and the burning glass home from his travels, and in his classroom he demonstrated their marvels. He showed his students a flea under the microscope, and in a dramatic demonstration of the power of the glass, burned the long beard of a peasant. He was arrested, thrown into prison, and tried before a provincial court. The peasant declared that he was a sorcerer, and a pastor who had been present when the flea had been exhibited under the microscope, testified that the professor was an atheist. Stiernhielm was sentenced to burn at the stake. The case was called to Kristina's attention, and she hastily reversed the order, restored the professor to his former position and rebuked the court. But a few months later, Stiernhielm's life again was threatened. He made the statement in a lecture that Hebrew was an older language than Swedish, and this startling pronouncement so infuriated his students that they rioted. A detachment of royal cavalry saved the professor's life and escorted him to Stockholm, where Kristina expressed her opinion in terms that no one could misunderstand: she made Stiernhielm a noble and expelled the rioters from the university." (p. 82)

Despite her being very catholic, and asking any support possible from the Vatican to help her with her situation, she was still - as usual - very critical of the Church at the same time/ 

 In one of her letters: "In all candor, however, I am compelled to observe that the Church must certainly be governed by the Holy Spirit, for since I have been in Rome I have seen four popes, and I swear that not one of them had common sense" (p. 263)

 She was also a social non-conformist, and even when young she enjoyed horse-riding and sword-fighting for which male clothing was more comfortable. She did not care about what other people thought or said about this. If she wanted to wear trousers, she would wear trousers. At the same time she was very conscious of her femininity. She also liked to be confrontational and expose hypocrisy. 

"A new law caused her to revolt. The Pope issued a stern decree in which he said that the dress of ladies was shocking and extravagant; even those who could afford to buy costly gowns should find other, worthier ways to spend their money, and he deplored current styles, which featured low-cut dresses and bare arms. Kristina made no protest, but invited the Pope to call on her at his convenience. When he arrived at her palace, she received him in a shapeless, ragged, long-sleeved dress that she had bought from a peasant woman. She had expanded her court in recent years to include several ladies, and all of them made their obeisances similarly attired." (p. 276)

She was an unusual character with an unusual personality. This makes her biography interesting and fun reading. The book is well written and nicely documented with diary notes and correspondence by the queen herself or by her long-time servant Mathilde. It offers plenty of anecdotes about her interaction with the highest nobility and royalty of Europe, while at the same time about her almost boyish sense of rebellion. You marvel at her single-mindedness, her broad-mindedness, her cultural and scientific curiosity and the constant counterforces in her that undermine most of her grand scale endeavours. 

John Glassie - A Man Of Misconceptions (Riverhead Books, 2012) ****

Several years ago I read Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès novel "Là Où Les Tigres Sont Chez Eux" in which he extensively mentions the 17th Century polymath and jesuit Athanasius Kircher, who was as much a scientist as he was a fantast and con man. For one or the other reason I stumbled upon a biography of the man, which is easy to recommend for anyone interested in the history of science or religion. 

To the man's credit, he was interested in everything, and his arrogant self-confidence made him also belief he was the best at everything, from math over astronomy and physics to medicine and linguistics, and of course also astrology and alchemy. He taught for more than 40 years at the Roman college. He wrote extensive books on many subjects. Some of his contributions were valuable, but for many of them he got away with them because nobody else had any knowledge on the subject. 

His books were read by scientists and philosophers such as Leibniz, Descartes and Christiaan Huygens. Descartes sent the books back with the following comment: "The Jesuit is quite boastful; he is more of a charlatan than a scholar". Leibniz was then much younger and absolutely fascinated by Kircher's writings, even if he already asked for some evidence for the claims made by the Jesuit. 

The Jesuits were at that time among the world leaders in science education and development, and Kircher's role is best placed in this context. 

"Clavius envisioned an elite corps of mathematician priests "distributed in various nations and kingdoms like sparkling gems," serving as "a source of great fear to all enemies" and as "an incredible incitement to make young people flock to us from all the parts of the world." Many of his proposals were put in place. And so while he was rigorously and rather inflex­ibly educated in Aristotelian and Thomist doctrines, Kircher also received private instruction in the very discipline that was beginning to undermine them." (p.34)

Although already at that time, the role of the jesuits was often mocked, and Kircher clearly did not match the description of the ideal jesuit: 

"Recall that for the Jesuits, the path toward Christ was predicated on an effort to achieve humility. It's unclear how well or how often Kircher took a good look at his apparent lack in that regard. But given that hypocrisy is almost requisitely present in human beings, and common among religious, political, and philosophical practices, he surely wasn't the only vain or selfinterested member of the Society of Jesus. As the satirizing sermon by a monk from another order in Rome went, the Jesuits "are the best Men that Live on the Earth. They are as Modest as Angels. They never open their eyes to cast a Look upon the Ladies at Church. They are such great Lovers of Restraint, that you never see them in the Streets. They are so in Love with Poverty, that they Despise and trample upon all the Riches in the World. They never come near Dying Persons or Widows, to importune them to be Remember' d in their last Wills .... They never go among Courts, or mind State Affairs."  (p.209)

Kircher claimed that he could decipher hieroglyphs, and because nobody else had any clue, he was believed in this matter. When a heavy fallen obelisk was found, Kircher even gave the translation of the side that had not been revealed yet because it was still lying on the ground. 

""They in turn marveled at my boldness," Kircher claimed, "and perhaps my lack of temerity, but several decreed that the truth of the matter must be determined by the original on the obelisk itself' After the obelisk had finally been rolled, they compared Kircher's scheme with the newly revealed side. "And when they had discovered that soundly and without error all of my markings were composed as on the original," he recalled, "they were utterly stupefied, those same men who were formerly mocking my interpretations as merely pure conjecture." This left "certain individuals saying that this knowledge had been inspired by the power of God, while several, not without calumny, even asserted that the knowledge had been acquired by some illicit pact with a demon. Some, finally, judged that this type of knowledge, attained by many years of study, was able to be acquired by the strength of a singular intellect." (p.204)

Kircher collected automata and made some himself, such as this wonderful tool that could do almost anything: 

"What is known about Kircher's device comes from an instruc­tional guide he wrote titled Specula Melitensis (Maltese Observatory), which, as one historian says, mostly conveyed Kircher's "enthusiastic capacity for fatiguing detail." The apparatus had "the form and figure of an observatory," or watchtower, hence its name, and it evidently employed the Llullian discs. Beyond that, it's hard to say precisely what this instrument looked like or how it worked. A "universal chronoscope" was on "the first cubical side." A "cosmographic mir­ror" was on the second. A "physico-mathematical mirror" was on the third, and the fourth cubical side was used for "medical-mathematical" purposes. The top of the structure was a pyramid. In all, the device had one hundred twenty-five functions. Among other things, it could be used to determine: 

• the "amount of dusk"
• the "flux and reflux of the seas"
• the astrological houses of the planets
• the signs of disease and "simple medicines for healing"
• the best times to go fishing and to give birth" (p.90)

He was fascinated by everything, often boastful, less competent and scientific than he presented himself, but like with Leibniz, his unbridled interest in everything, and his incredibly productive output on so many topics raised the interest among other, possibly better scientists, to also start investigating the same topics with more success. 

"Peiresc put it very mildly when he said that Kircher's ambitions were "a little grander than the ordinary goals of his colleagues." This led to a lack of restraint as well as other problems, including a certain flexibility with the truth. But for Kircher there were greater truths and lesser ones; there were different measures of truth, metaphors, and-multiple meanings, things for which fact-based modern science has no place. Progress required another kind of split, between the literal and the literary. But that was not a split Kircher ever would have been able to abide. And it makes sense that as his scientific reputation diminished, his work continued to capture and to fuel the creative imagination. (p. 269)

This biography is well-documented, well-written and offers a fascinating view on the century when science was still in its early infancy. That some did not make great inventions such as Kircher, is inevitable. His broad interests, his assured self-confidence and his deliberate fabrications make this a wonderful read. 

Bart Van Loo - De Bourgondiërs (De Bezige Bij, 2022) ****

Wat een klepper! Al die bekende namen uit onze geschiedenislessen, zoals Filips De Goede, Karel De Stoute, Maria van Bourgondië, Filips De Schone komen in dit ongelooflijk goed gedocumenteerd boek weer tot leven, en uiteraard veel menselijker en beter gekaderd dan ooit op school mogelijk was geweest. Voor mij was die sterke verwevenheid tussen Vlaanderen en de Lage Landen enerzijds, en het huis van Bourgondië anderzijds nieuw, en zeker het feit dat vele van deze heersers zich in Vlaanderen ophielden, of hier opgroeiden en zelfs soms onze taal spraken. 

Wat ik wel wist, maar niet in deze mate, was de grote rivaliteit tussen de steden Gent en Brugge die elkaar naar de kroon staken als rijkste plekken van Europa. Ook het politiek opportunisme van de Bourgondiërs om bondgenootschappen te sluiten met wie het hen op dat moment het best uitkwam - Frankrijk, Engeland, de Habsburgers - en hiervoor soms duizenden mensenlevens vergooiden in oorlogen en veldslagen om dan plots hun kap te draaien en weer bevriend te worden met de vijand, ongeacht de horror die de gewone mens hiervoor moest ondergaan. Hetzelfde geldt voor hun feesten. Het kon niet groot en uitbundig en rijk en extreem genoeg zijn. Van Loo geeft tot in het kleinste detail een overzicht van alle gerechten, gerechtsculpturen en vertier dat bij deze zwelgpartijen voor honderden genodigden plaatsvonden, niet voor het genot zelf, maar vooral om rijkdom en macht te tonen aan de buitenwereld. 

Van Loo geeft ook een heel knap beeld van de kwaliteit van onze Vlaamse en Hollandse kunstenaars van die tijd en de meesterwerken die ze op vraag van de Bourgondiërs maakten, uiteraard schilderijen in de eerste plaats, maar ook graftombes, beeldhouwwerken en andere wandtapijten met sterke tips waar je die kan gaan bezoeken. 

Het is een meesterlijk boek, goed geschreven, grondig gedocumenteerd, met veel oog voor de menselijke kant van de zaak en met een duidelijk perspectief naar de context van vandaag. Het enige euvel is mijn eigen geheugen dat worstelt om al die stortvloed aan informatie te blijven bewaren. Het is veel, heel veel, maar gelukkig kan ik altijd terug grijpen naar dit exemplaar. 

Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat u er evenveel leesplezier en kennisverrijking aan zal hebben als ik. 

Joren Vermeersch - Vlaanderens Waanzinnigste Eeuw 1297-1385 (Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, 2023) ***½

Wat een heerlijk boek. Wat een plezier om een dergelijk vlot geschreven geschiedenisboek te kunnen lezen, over een periode in onze Vlaamse geschiedenis die ons helpt om ook onze situatie van vandaag in perspectief te zien. 

Vermeersch 'vertelt' deze waanzinnigste eeuw vanuit de fictionele perspectieven van mensen uit die tijd, visserskinderen, burgers, arbeiders, soldaten, wat het verhaal een stuk realistischer en laagdrempeliger maakt. Deze verhaaltechnische ingreep doet overigens niets af aan de geschiedkundige waarde van dit heel goed gedocumenteerde boek. Het nadeel is wel dat wanneer sommige situaties worden beschreven, we niet meer precies weten of dit nu effectief zo is gebeurd, dan wel dat Vermeersch hier zelf een brug legt naar onze moderne tijden. 

Om een voorbeeld te geven. Op blz 270 schrijft hij: "

"Op 10 maart 1325 had d'Auxonne een bijeenkomst belegd van de grafelijke raad in Oudenaarde, om de rekeningen van het voorgaande fiscale jaar te bespreken. Pas toen drong de ernst van de budgettaire noodtoestand tot Louis door. In 1324 werd er een krater geslagen van exact 5.185 pond. Dat kwam neer op een begrotingstekort van liefst 37%. Gualterotti zetelde op dat moment amper twee jaar als grafelijk ontvanger in de raad, maar had in die periode al bijna achtduizend pond aan Louis geleend. Elke nieuwe lening vergde het verpanden van een nieuwe reeks grafelijke belastingen en tollen. Als de schuld niet tijdig werd vereffend, zou Gualterotti ze vele jaren lang voor zijn persoonlijke gewin mogen innen.   

'Die gewiekste aasgier was goed op weg om heel Vlaanderen uit te kleden,' sakkerde Louis in de marge van die vergadering. Maar d'Auxonne wuifde zijn mokken daarover argeloos weg: 'Maak u toch geen zorgen, Monseigneur. Eens de laatste rebel aan de hoogste boom hangt, zullen we heel Vlaanderen doen bloeden en boeten. Dan kopen we alle verpande tollen en belastingen makkelijk terug. U zal het zien: de staatsschuld is er vanzelf gekomen en ze zal ook vanzelf weer weggaan.' "

Dat laatste citaat lijkt verdacht veel op wat PS Minister Guy Mathot zei over onze Belgische situatie in de jaren '80: "Le problème des déficits budgétaires est arrivé de lui-même, il partira de lui même". Verwees Mathot naar d'Auxonne? Of heeft Vermeersch het citaat van Mathot naar de 14e Eeuw verplaatst? Of is het zuiver toeval? De paragrafen tonen wel aan dat toen zeker de grote financiers, zoals hier uit Italië, een zeer grote politieke macht hadden achter de schermen, met name de Compagnia dei Bardi en de Compagnia dei Peruzzi, zelfs nog tientallen jaren later. 

Vermeersch schetst de machtsverhoudingen tussen alle betrokken partijen zeer goed: de Fransen, de Franse graaf, de Kerk, de burgemeesters van de vijandige steden Brugge en Gent, de gegoede burgerij die over veel geld en macht beschikte, de arbeidersgilden die onder elkaar dan nog naijver toonden. Ondanks de onwaarschijnlijke rijkdom van Vlaanderen, of misschien precies door die immense rijkdom, lag iedereen met iedereen overhoop, wat een ongelooflijke opportuniteit was voor de bevolking om zelf op te staan en een vorm van democratisch zelfbestuur te kiezen. 

"Maar in Vlaanderen was de geest uit de fles. Aangestoken door revolutionaire koorts riskeerden jonge mannen en vrouwen de gesel en de galg om de revolutie te prediken. Er brak een nieuwe tijd aan waarin het volk zelf zou heersen en afrekenen met zijn vroegere meesters, zo orakelden zij. Het zou rivieren van bloed vergen om die geest terug in de fles te krijgen. Daar was Louis van overtuigd. En met hem alle hoge edelen in de grafelijke raad. 

Want het vuur van de opstand - of moeten we zeggen het gif -had ondertussen ook de grate steden aangetast. In februari was ook in Brugge, het kloppende hart van de Europese handel, de revolutie uitgebroken. Opgezweept door heetgebakerde textielarbeiders, had de volkspartij er de rijke poorterij uit het stadsbestuur gekegeld. Voortaan regeerden de ambachten er helemaal alleen. Sujetten met radicale anti-Franse en anti-adellijke overtuigingen voerden er nu het hoge woord." (blz 278)

 Vermeersch vermeldt dat deze "gevaarlijke ideeën uit Vlaanderen over vrijheid, gelijkheid en broederschap begonnen namelijk de geesten te besmetten in naburige vorstendommen" (bls 315). Ook hier neem ik aan dat deze leuze van de Franse revolutie van 1789 eerder een dichterlijke vrijheid is dan dat het Vlaamse volk die zo expliciet uitte in die tijd, om aan te geven dat de zaden van deze revolutie al veel vroeger al werden gezaaid. 

Hij belicht de grote rivaliteit tussen de steden, de ondankbare situatie van de boeren- en arbeidersklassen, de hardvochtigheid van wie macht had, en de absolute gruwel van geweld, folteringen, verkrachtingen, moord. 

Ik denk en ik hoop dat vele geschiedenisleerkrachten dit boek zullen gebruiken bij hun lessen. Ik ben verre van een nationalist (integendeel zelfs), maar het is wel belangrijk dat ook jongeren onze geschiedenis kennen, en uiteraard ook alle Vlamingen. Het is niet allemaal zo zwart-wit als vaak wordt gesteld. Ik heb veel nieuwe zaken geleerd in dit boek, en ook genoten van de vertelstijl. 

Een aanrader!

Robert K. Massie - Catherine The Great (Head Of Zeus, 2011) ****

Last year I watched the television series "The Great", of which the latest Season 3 has just finished, with Elle Fanning as Catherine The Great, and Nicholas Hoult as her husband Peter. The series is possibly one of the most politically incorrect series ever to appear on television, but among the funniest you are likely to watch. It is presented as "an occasionally true story". Reason enough to check out the real life to find out what's actually true in the series. 

The book "Catherine The Great, Portrait Of A Woman" gives a substantial insight in the life of one of Russia's greatest leaders, a woman who against all odds had the character and the courage to go against the system and introduce some of the basic concepts of the Enlightenment into the Russia of the 18th Century. 

As a 16-year old German princess, she was married to the Peter, the heir to the Russian throne, and selected by Empress Elisabeth and her entourage in order to create a better alliance between Prussia and Russia, with the implicit understanding that she would generate off-spring for the imperial family. 

Her husband Peter was in reality also the somewhat immature and childish character that the series depicts. Their marriage was never consummated because Peter was not sexually interested in Catherine. Both had lovers. Catherine indeed staged a coup against her husband. Intellectually - she was an avid reader - superior to him and most other courtiers, she built alliances with other leaders against Peter. In 1762 she became Empress of Russia, setting up a lot of reforms in education, public health, serfdom, culture and arts. 

She wrote her own epithaph

HERE LIES CATHERINE THE SECOND

Born in Stettin on April 21, 1729.

In the year 1744, she went to Russia to marry Peter III

At the age of fourteen, she made the threefold resolution to please her husband, Elizabeth, and the nation. She neglected nothing in trying to achieve this. Eighteen years of boredom and loneliness gave her the opportunity to read many books. 

When she came to the throne of Russia she wished to do what was good for her country and tried to bring happiness, liberty, and prosperity to her subjects.

She forgave easily and hated no one. She was good­-natured, easy-going, tolerant, understanding, and of a happy disposition. She had a republican spirit and a kind heart. 

She was sociable by nature.

She made many friends.

She took pleasure in her work.

She lved the arts.

The biography itself is phenomenal, as is the Empress herself. One of the major surprises of reading her real life events, is that many of the stories and plots in the television series are not too far from the truth. 

I can recommend both to the readers of this blog.  

Simon Sebag Montefiore - The World - A Family History (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2022) *****

An insane undertaking, an incredibly ambitious project, a brilliant achievement and an exceptional read. 

Readers - exhausted, crushed, enlightened - will look at the world and history through a different lens after having read this book. Its author - Simon Sebag Montefiore, the author of the equally excellent "Jerusalem, a Biography" - introduces you in a very personal way to the individuals and their families that shaped our history, from the very first days up to the corona crisis and the invasion of Ukraine. 

He describes all major civilisations from a same time perspective across the globe, bundled in chapters based on the number of inhabitants in the world. The sources used to write this book are so abundant - another 137 pages - that the actual bibliography of the book is to be found on his website instead of the book itself. 

Sebag Montefiore is a born story-teller, with an excellent feeling for keeping the reader interested in his "characters" and the great plot of history. The book starts with the story of Enheduanna, living 4,000 years ago, princess of the Akkadian empire, daughter of Sargon the Great, who wrote a sad verse of how she was raped by a raiding rebel: "he dared approach me in his lust", a vivid angle of approach to start with the history of humanity, then jumping back a few million years to prehistory to take you along on this fascinating and horrific journey. The story sets the scene for the entire book: a journalistic style of writing: direct, personal, empathic, with a great sense of using the right anecdotes and quotes to bring otherwise boring historical processes to life. 

These distant rulers whom we know - and mostly not - from our history books and history lessons, whose conquests and treaties and wars we may remember, now come to life as if you're part of the events. Sebag Montefiore offers all the personal information that no history teacher would ever (dare) serve you: the power struggles among kings, emperors and presidents, the ruthless extermination of rivals and family members, the power-hungry warlords, whose only interest is their own personal gain, honour and lust. He writes about the dynasties of ancient Egypt, China, Africa and the Americas, about siblings killing each other with cunning, lists or brute force. It seems as if the author enjoys the cruelty and the lust, as if this is a historical gossip colum, but gradually you come to understand that this was - and probably to a large extent still is - the standard practice of how countries are ruled. Human life to many of these leaders is without any value. People are just pawns on their own personal chessboard, and the colour of the pawn does not matter, whether it's the adversary's or your own. 

Here are some random examples, taken for each 100th page in the book: 

• "Berenice solved the problem in family style. Bursting into the maternal boudoir with her posse of killers, she surprised her husband and her mother in bed. Berenice killed her husband, spared her mother and then proceeded triumphantly to Alexandria to marry Euergetes" (p. 100)

• "Shah Khusrau II arrived in Roman territory. The grandson of the Immortal, he was just twenty when a coup against his inept father brought him to the throne, but he had already shown his mettle running Iranian Armenia. His father was blinded then strangled by his voracious uncles, but as generals bid for power, young Kliusrau escaped, accompanied by Shirin, his 'extremely beautiful' Christian queen, and aided by her fellow Christian, the Arab king al-Numan." (p. 200)

• "Blonde and blue-eyed with 'flowing hair and white shoulders', Wal­lada enjoyed a rare life for an Islamic woman in Corboda, now ruled by noble clans. No longer secluded in the Umayya harem, independently wealthy, she appeared in public, wearing silks that showed off her beauty and her figure, recited her poetry in public, competing against men in poetry contests, and set up a school for female poets. She flaunted her lovers. When the religious authorities grumbled, she had lines of poems defiantly written on her dresses: 'I allow my lover to touch my cheek and bestow my kiss on him who craves it.' Around 1031, she fell in love with an aristocratic vizier, Ibn Zaydun.(...) Ibn Zaydun turned nasty, writing to Wallada, 'You were for me nothing but a sweetmeat that I took a bite of and then tossed away the ­crust, leaving it to be gnawed on by a rat.' Wallada got her revenge exposing his affairs with slave boys: 

Because of his love for rods in trousers, Ibn Zaydun,

In spite of his excellence

If he would see a penis in a palm tree

He would turn into a woodpecker" (p. 300)

• (On the slave trade) "'It's not their religion but humanity that makes me weep in pity for their sufferings,' wrote a witness, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, royal archivist and Henry's biographer. 'To increase their sufferings still more they now began to separate one from another in order to make the shares equal. It now became necessary to separate fathers from sons, wives from husbands, brothers from brothers ... ' Much of the slave trade had originally been by demand for domestic slaves who joined family households. Now at the birth of Atlantic slavery, slave traders captured entire families, then tore them apart. Slavery was an anti-familial institution. This small scene, filled with cruelty, hypocrisy and avarice, was the beginning industry that would sweeten European palates and poison socie­ty for centuries. (p.400) 

• "As the Islamic millennium got closer, he (Akbar) called himself the Mahdi or Renewer of the Second Millennium. In 1585, he minted coins that read 'Allahu akbar jalla jalaluhu', which would usually mean 'God is great' but could also mean 'Akbar is God', as he toyed with substituting himself for Muhammad. He pulled back from his own apotheosis, but projected the sanctity of Mughal monarchy, promoting himself as Tamerlanian padishah, Islamic saintly ruler and Hindu chakravartin. (...) As energetic sexually as in all things, he insisted on having the wives of his amirs if he fancied them, and his demands for new girls were 'a great terror ... in the city'. Like all the steppe monarchs, however, he consulted wise women in the family, particularly his senior wife and first cousin, Ruqaiya". (p.500)

• "In 1611, Artemisia Gen­tileschi, seventeen years old and a virgin with curly auburn hair, full lips and a wide face, was painting with the artist Agosti­no Tassi, twenty years older, when he and a male helper raped her, aided by a female tenant. Tassi, who had been tried for incest and would later be tried for trying to kill a pregnant courtesan, promised marriage but then changed his mind, at which her father brought charges. Gentileschi had to relive the agony by giving testimony. Tassi, devious and violent, tried to suborn witnesses and taint her as a whore. Astonishingly, she was then taken to visit Tassi in prison and tortured with a thumbscrew to test her veracity. 'E vero, e vero, e vero,' she repeated. 'It's true!' 'You're lying in your throat,' Tassi shouted. He was found guilty, but his sentence was later overturned." (p.600)

... you get the gist. Juicy stories, lots of quotes, very personal anecdotes as if you're witnessing the action yourself, and deepening the interest in these incredible amounts of characters whose names you risk to forget once the page has been turned. A quick calculation: there's an index of 37 pages with on average 40 names per page, which means that there are about 1,500 characters in the novel of our history. 

The amount of information you get to absorb is enormous, humongous, colossal, gigantic and immense. In one word: monumental. This may seem terrifying at first, but the writing is so good that you just keep reading. Our history is fascinating, gruesome, horrifying, and yes, there are major shifts in history that led to change, such as climate change, trade routes, technological inventions, and religions, but the main drivers from what we understand are the egos and personalities of individuals, most of whom seem to have considered themselves as unique, irreplacable, geniuses and even divine, while from reading the book you can only see them - with today's Western eyes - as pathological, narcissistic power-hungry megalomaniacs. 

The paradox of the book is that while it's all-encompassing, it's also intimate and personal, it's grand and detailed, it's detached with balanced observations from a political and cultural perspective yet with an often understandable and human appreciation or disapproval of the behaviours of the protagonists, making it objective and subjective at the same time. 

Simon Sebag Montefiori has been smart enough to guide us through this shocking narrative with sub-chapters that come with attractive titles that make you want to read further. In this sense, the writing is closer to journalism than to scientific historical writing. It's as entertaining as it is instructive. 

The effort to have collected all this is by itself hard to imagine, but to write it with such enthousiasm, with such sustained controlled and well-paced quality of writing till the 1262nd page is even more astonishing. 

An easy contender for the non-fiction book of the year. 

Martin Dougherty - Celts - The History And Legacy Of The Oldest Cultures In Europe (Amber Books, 2015) ***

Geographically, I could be a descendent of the Nervii, the Celts that lived in Belgium prior to the German and Roman invasion. But who were those Celts, and what more can I know than what I remember from the superficial things we learned in school? In this nicely illustrated book, Martin Dougherty gives many of the answers I needed, discerning myth from reality, leaving the question marks open when information is lacking.

Informative.

David Wootton - The Invention Of Science (Penguin, 2015) ****

David Wootton's "The Invention of Science", has a very appropriate subtitle: "A New History of The Scientific Revolution".

Wootton is a professor of history at the University of York, who has done a lot of actual research by reading the old manuscripts first-hand, which allows him to come with very detailed accounts of how scientists since the renaissance thought about their world they gradually started discovering, but at the same time he has this broad sweeping vision of discoveries and evolutions in a variety of disciplines to give the big picture as well.

He starts by explaining how until 1492, the year of Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas, every intellectual was of the opinion that everything there was to know, was actually already captured in the scriptures and in the texts of the ancient Greeks, with Aristotle as their number one source. Intellectual work was often limited to understanding these texts better, or interpreting them differently. Columbus's discovery came as a shock, because it was evidence that the world was a different place than actually thought, and that not everything was already written. It even changed the concept of time and the concept of progress, since many medieval people, did not consider the Romans or the ancient Greeks as more technologically backward. They were just people living at another time, just as they were living in another place. The idea that new technology could improve things, was not very high on the agenda.

And actually, many of the new discoveries came from the mundane and military. Telescopes evolved from monoculars to watch ships, physics partly evolved from calculating the ballistic trajectory of cannon balls, how double bookkeeping changed the way to represent data, etc. Brahe, Galileo, Copernicus, Bruno, Newton, ... of course all come into the picture, in a way that is both known and new, because Wootton expertly describes what these great scientists thought and felt about their own discoveries, how they struggled, also internally, with the shifting reference frameworks to look at reality.

He expands quite a lot on the simple aspect of using "fact" as evidence, a concept which was totally alien to the world before the early 'modern age'. He describes how experiments were made to test the validity of theoretical assumptions, again something that shattered the words in the books of for instance Galenus. Observation and testing suddenly got valued, and the first experiments with the vaccuum paved the way to create the barometer.

Obviously all this is further increased through the creation of scientific communities, who no longer only needed to write letters to each other, but who, thanks to the invention of the printing press, could share their insights more broadly, generating interest and inviting in comments from many more people to collectively move a better understanding forward. Despite this, the time frame within which new discoveries were accepted as scientific evidence could take and did take much more time than it does today. For instance, Newton's 'Principia' on his discovery of gravity, was first published in 1687, but resistance against his findings continued until the 1740s by other eminent intellectuals such as Huygens and Leibniz.

It's a long book, 570 pages with another 200 of notes, bibliography and index, but amazingly interesting and well written. Wootton knows so many little details about the tests, the personal opinions of the scientists to make it read like a novel. He is also a master in explaining the other side of rational thinking, that was equally part of the world in which science evolved: astrology, alchemy and witchcraft, and other bizarre theories about how our body and our world function.

It is only through this lens that Wootton offers us that we can really understand what progress actually means, and how our current world view has struggled to emancipate itself from the obscure, bizarre, dangerous and sometimes funny worldviews of the past.

A book to read when you have lots of time.