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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London, SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2015
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Copyright © Ian Sansom 2015
Cover image © Science & Society Picture Library / Getty Images
Ian Sansom asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Source ISBN: 9780007533169
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007533152
Version: 2016-12-08
For Will
And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.
Isaiah 13:19–22
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1: Good to be Back
Chapter 2: Pranic Breathing
Chapter 3: Gateway to the Riviera
Chapter 4: The Very Boundaries of England
Chapter 5: A Sodality of Pedagogues
Chapter 6: Recommendations of Where to Visit
Chapter 7: To Record Every Detail
Chapter 8: The Science Mistress
Chapter 9: Everything in Hand and Under Control
Chapter 10: The Caves at Beer
Chapter 11: Scientia Potentia Est
Chapter 12: Out on the Lawn
Chapter 13: Basic Psychology
Chapter 14: Ruritania
Chapter 15: Lex Talionis
Chapter 16: The Ciderist
Chapter 17: Aloha!
Chapter 18: An Adept
Chapter 19: Sator Arepo
Chapter 20: An Artificial Paradise
Chapter 21: The Full Moon
Chapter 22: Back to the Light
Acknowledgements
Picture Credits
Also by Ian Sansom
About the Publisher
‘AH, SEFTON, MY FECKLESS FRIEND,’ said Morley. ‘Just the man. Now. Rousseau? What do you think?’
He was, inevitably, writing one of his – inevitable – articles. The interminable articles. The inevitable and interminable articles that made up effectively his one, vast inevitable and interminable article. The über-article. The article to end all articles. The grand accomplishment. The statement. What he would have called the magnum bonum. The Gesamtkuntswerk. ‘An essay a day keeps the bailiffs at bay,’ he would sometimes say, when I suggested he might want to reduce his output, and ‘The night cometh when no man can work, Sefton. Gospel of John, chapter nine, do you know it?’ I knew it, of course. But only because he spoke of it incessantly. Interminably. Inevitably. It was a kind of mantra. One of many. Swanton Morley was a man of many mantras – of catchphrases, proverbs, aphorisms, slang, street talk and endless Latin tags. He was a collector, to borrow the title of one of his most popular books, of Unconsidered Trifles (1934). ‘It takes as little to console us as it does to afflict us.’ ‘Respice finem.’ And ‘May you never meet a mouse in your pantry with tears in his eyes.’ Morley’s endless work, his inexhaustible sayings, were, it seemed to me, a kind of amulet, a form of linguistic self-protection. Language was his great superstition – and his saviour.
To stave off the universal twilight that evening Morley had rigged up the usual lamps and candles, and had his reams of paper piled up around him, like the snow-capped peaks of the Karakoram, or faggots on a pyre, like white marble stepping stones leading up to the big kitchen table plateau, where reference books lay open to the left and to the right of him, pads and pens and pencils at his elbow, his piercing eyes a-twinkling, his Empire moustache a-twitching, his brogue-booted feet a-tapping and his head a-nodding ever so slightly to the rhythms of his keystrokes as he worked at his typewriter, for all the world as if he were an explorer of some far distant realm of ideas, or some mad scientist out of a fantasy by H.G. Wells, strapped