MUST READ
THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON
by Adrian Tinniswood
(Vintage £4)
On the evening of September 1, 1666, Thomas Farriner closed his bakery shop in Pudding Lane and retired to bed.
THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON by Adrian Tinniswood
A couple of hours later, he woke to find his house full of smoke.
The bakery was on fire, and Thomas was trapped upstairs with his daughter Hanna and their two servants. They escaped over the rooftops to raise the alarm.
To prevent the fire from spreading, they asked the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Thomas Bloodworth, to authorise the demolishing of nearby houses to create firebreaks, but Sir Thomas dithered: ‘A woman might p*** it out’, he sneered, and went home to bed.
So began the Great Fire of London, which raged for four days and reconfigured the medieval city.
Adrian Tinniswood’s indispensable short guide to the fire contains vivid contemporary accounts, including eyewitness testimony from the great diarist Samuel Pepys.
STITCHES IN TIME
by Lucy Adlington
(Random House £9.99)
STITCHES IN TIME by Lucy Adlington
We get dressed each morning with varying degrees of interest. For some, it is a carefully considered act of creativity, involving designer labels and matching accessories; for others, a matter of fishing whatever seems least whiffy out of the laundry basket.
But rarely do we pause to consider the relationship we have with our clothes.
As costume historian Lucy Adlington points out, ‘clothes are at once the most intimate things we own and the most public’. They are the face we present to the world, and lie next to our skin.
And, for many of us, clothes retain memories with piercing clarity — many a wardrobe still harbours an ancient dress, unworn for decades but too freighted with romantic associations to discard.
Adlington’s history of clothing in Western culture is a fascinating exploration of knicker elastic, sock garters, trouser turn-ups, glove-stretchers and other sartorial curiosities.
BEING A BEAST
by Charles Foster
(Profile £8.99)
BEING A BEAST by Charles Foster
‘Wittgenstein,’ writes Charles Foster, ‘said that if a lion could speak, we wouldn’t understand a word it was saying, since the form of a lion’s world is so massively different from our own.
He was wrong. I know he was wrong.’
Most of us would leave it at that, but not Foster, who decided to test his theory by living like a badger, otter, fox, red deer and swift.
In everyday life he is an Oxford academic, but for the purposes of his experiment he ate worms, discovered that ‘the more respectably dressed you are, the harder it is to be a fox’, and tested his ability as an otter to identify his children by their ‘spraint’.
(His wife, who sounds saintly, sat ‘reading about gracious living in a glossy magazine’ during this activity.) Violently original and beautifully written, this is a book with a passionate message about our relationship with nature.
