Authors Electric

I have just re-read Wild Swans , by Jung Chang, for my book group. It wasn’t my choice, as I read it several decades ago, and I thought I remembered it. But once I opened it I realised there was so much I didn’t remember at all. Even though I had a Polish father, and was well aware of the paranoia associated with a totalitarian government due in part to a trip to Poland in the middle of the Cold War in 1966, I still hadn’t grasped the full implications of mind control. Mao was a ruthless and heartless dictator, and the hero worship he encouraged looks far more familiar today than it did then. The England in which I grew up was a safe and relatively honest country, and I simply couldn’t believe it could be so dangerous to say the wrong thing. The China of Wild Swans bears a strong resemblance to the North Korea and Russia of today, and strong rulers are in vogue with populations who believe what they read on Tiktok, Instagram and Telegram. This time, I saw things very differently from ...

Night is the time when sabre tooths and cave bears were out and about, and our eyesight was not as well adapted as theirs was. Night is scary, which is probably an evolutionary adaptation for keeping human beings safely in their caves when predators were out and about. These days the most dangerous night-time predators are leopards, crocodiles, vipers and mosquitoes. And other humans. Fear is a natural r esponse that triggers an adrenaline rush and results in the same fight-or-flight response that anger does: your heart rate and breathing quicken, your breathing becomes shallow, you feel flushed, your muscles tense up, you feel shaky, and weak at the knees. With fear, you might also find that you become dizzy or lightheaded, feel nauseous, and experience pain, tightness or heaviness in the chest. Fear causes specific behaviour patterns so that we can cope in adverse or unexpected situations that threaten our wellbeing or survival – like a fire or a physical attack. It’s a familiar emo...

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...

When I was a kid, my mother complained to one of my teachers that I read the same books over and over again. “Just as long as she’s reading,” said the teacher, with a smile. There were, of course several reasons why this happened. Firstly, we didn’t have that many books at home, so the choice was limited. My father’s books were all in Polish, and as I didn’t speak the language I didn’t find out until many years later that Sienkiewicz was a terrific writer. The book most people have heard of is Quo Vadis , which was made into a film. It’s available free on the Kindle. Secondly, I’d often enjoyed a book so much that I wanted to repeat the experience, get that same glow of visiting a favourite haunt once more. I think I practically knew The Chronicles ofNarnia and the Silver Brumby books off by heart. And thirdly, by the time I was ten I’d read all the ones that interested me in the junior library. A couple of years later I managed to persuade the librarians to let me have a ticke...

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...