Authors Electric

There are a handful of books that made a big impression on me as a teenager. The King Must Die , by Mary Renault, and  The Lost World , by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, are the two that had the biggest impact. Both of these are now available as e-books, and I’ve re-read both recently on my Kindle. In the last few years I’ve visited the settings for both these books; one was a bit of a disappointment, and the other was far more impressive than I’d ever expected. and             The King Must Die is a brilliant book, narrated by Theseus and covering his time in Crete as a bull-dancer. Theseus is very much of his time and place; supernatural explanations for geological phenomena seem obvious to him, and his belief that he is the son of Poseidon perfectly plausible. Nevertheless, everything that occurs in the book happens for scientific reasons, and there is no supernatural element at all. I don’t think I’ve ever read somethin...

The book that really captured my imagination as a child was The Lost World , by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It mentions blank spaces on maps – imagine! There actually was a time when the word Unexplored was commonplace. The Romans and mediaeval cartographers used to write Hic sunt leones (here be lions) , for unknown territories. There’s one instance of Hic sunt dracones (here be dragons) on The Hunt-Lenox Globe, which dates from about 1510. So what was that about – Komodo dragons, or fossilised dinosaur bones? Hunted by Elizabeth Kay I was into dinosaurs long before they became popular – in fact, I don’t think my mother even knew what they were. Someone had given me a book called Animal Life of the World , a 1930s compilation full of wonderful chapter headings such as Death Dealers of the Deep, Queer Servants of Man and Hunters of the Air . And there, amongst them, Big Game of Other Days. Clay models, photographed in black and white and resembling over-endowed rhinoceroses...