History

I was dozing, a little hungover, on the morning flight from Prague to London, when I saw them for the first time. Ten men on a beach, dragging a landing craft up the sands. Where? Can’t tell yet. When? The fourteenth century. Who? Don’t know, but they look like trouble. I woke up. Through my AirPods I heard the Blur singer Damon Albarn growling the final song from their 1997 album Blur. “In these towns, the English army grinds their teeth into glass / You know you’ll get a kicking tonight...” I opened my laptop and started making notes. The men came surprisingly well-formed. They were soldiers of fortune in the Hundred Years’ War. They already had names. Faces. Talents. Foibles. Yearnings. Secrets. I wrote down as much as they could tell me before the plane landed.

One of the things I did during my nine-month hiatus from Prufrock, the email newsletter I send three times a week (if you aren’t a subscriber, why not give it a try?) was to cycle the Blue Ridge Parkway twice. I started in Cherokee, North Carolina, rode to the start of Skyline Drive, Virginia, and back. It took two weeks — one at the beginning of the summer and one at the end — and I clocked over 900 miles and 100,000 feet of climbing. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time. I loved it and will never do it again. Cycling is an ideal way to experience a landscape. You feel the ups and the downs. Walking has a pleasure of its own, but with cycling you can experience an entire region — in all its subtle variety — in a single day.

We are traveling through a shower of Greek anniversaries, triumphant and calamitous. Last year marked the 25th centenary of the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC, when 300 Greek warships defeated a Persian armada four times larger and ended the Persian empire’s expansion into Europe. This year marks the bicentenary of the beginning of the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman empire in 1821, which resulted in the first European nation-state to be founded on the Enlightenment values of the American Constitution. Next year will mark the centenary of Greece’s defeat in Asia Minor in 1922, which ended the modern Greek state’s aspirations to absorb all the lands where Greeks lived and had lived since antiquity, an event still referred to as ‘the catastrophe’.

Thirty-two years ago, the young Nicholas Crane, who would go on to become one of England’s most esteemed television geographers, set out to woo a young woman by spiriting her off to the unfailingly romantic landscape of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi. The couple spent their high-altitude idyll walking the hills in hobnail boots, making river passage in dugout canoes and boarding a Quito-bound steam train through the Andes, run by the estimable Empresa de Ferrocariles Ecuatorianos. Their journey had its moments: at one stage both parties were to be found at 13,000 feet, crusted with ice and huddled overnight from the gales inside a pair of plastic trash bags; they then got themselves lost for a while among a wilderness of huge and very active volcanoes.

In 1791, Isaac D’Israeli, father of future prime minister Benjamin, published his most famous work, the Curiosities of Literature, a collection of freewheeling mini-essays on whatever literary topics happened to tickle their author’s fancy: ‘Titles of Books’, ‘Noblemen Turned Critics’, ‘On the Custom of Saluting after Sneezing’, ‘Cicero’s Puns’. One of its joys is its capaciousness — completely unsystematic, yet seeming somehow to touch a little on everything. The book is long, but the essays are rarely more than a couple of pages, sometimes less.