Culture

Walk over Lord Foster’s wobbly bridge from St Paul’s and you will see, squashed between Tate Modern and the reconstructed Globe Theatre, a three-storey house that, according to an inscription, is where Sir Christopher Wren stayed while building the cathedral. Alas, the legend, acceptable in the 1940s when the words were put up, no longer holds water. The house was not built until 1710, long after Wren had a use for it. But the story that Gillian Tindall weaves in this book is no less fascinating for an absence of grand characters — in many ways it is the better for it. The house becomes a window through which the reader can view eight centuries of the busy, everyday riverside life which shaped this now voguish quarter of London.

South African doctors have a very good reputation. The excellence of their medical training is matched by the breadth of their clinical experience. For example, a young South African doctor in surgical training in Britain often has more practical experience of bullet wounds than the boss who is teaching him; or such, at any rate, would have been the case until quite recently, when inner-city surgeons started to treat the victims of drug and gang wars. Jonathan Kaplan is a South African surgeon who has eschewed the conventional career that was clearly within his reach for that of a volunteer surgeon to the war zones of the world. He puts his life in danger to save the injured and maimed, who are often very poor into the bargain (the poor are easier to hit than the rich).

Finland, 1902. The Russian empire controls the country — has done for nearly 100 years — but a resistance to Tsarist rule is gaining strength and volume. In Helsinki, revolutionary discussion is turning into action; in the country, Swedish Finns are comfortable as the ruling class. The House of Orphans is the name given to an orphanage which lies in a town surrounded by forest, to the north-west of Helsinki. It is here that 14-year-old Eeva was taken from Helsinki after the death of her father. Two years later she is sent to work for the local doctor as his housekeeper. To Dr Eklund’s surprise and fascination Eeva is much more than she appears: ‘They’d taken her away and tried to make her into an orphan, but it hadn’t worked. She was still Eeva.

It’s irrelevant, I know, but I can’t help wondering what it was like living with D. J. Taylor while he was writing this opus. It’s so steeped in Victoriana and (as Taylor acknowledges) in the fictional worlds of Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope and co. and it’s so big that I picture him emerging into the 21st century maybe just once a week, on a Sunday. If you want to opt out of the 2lst century and hark back (oh, it’s catching!) to an era of gas lamps and legal clerks scuttling about the grimy streets of London, while the squire sits in his country estate with a stuffed bear in his study and a statutory mad woman in his attic, then this is for you.

This book covers all the trees that now live or have ever lived: what they are, how they function, how they grow, their relation to environment, plants, animals, and the human species. It is full of curious information, traditional and recent: there are fascinating new developments in long-familiar stories, such as the part played by parasitic worms in the symbiosis between figs and fig-wasps. The author is a distinguished journalist and scientist. His book is a brave attempt to boil down a huge amount of detail for the general reader. I am reminded of Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, which inspired my youth. However, like all tree writers, he seems unable to avoid errors and exaggerations (‘the tree must compete through every second [of its life]’).

Henry Cockburn (1779-1854) was a Scots advocate, Solicitor-General in the reforming Whig government of 1832-41, later a judge, contributor to the Edinburgh Review and author of delightful, posthumously published memoirs and journals. A considerable figure in the Edinburgh of his time, he is commemorated in the Cockburn Association, one of the earliest conservation societies, founded in 1875. He has been the subject of an admirable biography by Karl Miller, while his impersonation by the actor Russell Hunter in a one-man play, Cocky, revived interest in him 30 years ago. But I suppose he is little known in England, though a few will know of him as the great-great-grandfather of both Evelyn Waugh and the Marxist journalist Claud Cockburn.