Andro Linklater

Not even the Akond of Swat in all his whoness, whyety, whichery and whatage could compare to the enigmatic, whimsical mask of deconstruction that purports to be Alasdair Gray. He was a student of the Glasgow School of Art and a quondam painter, but is he an artist? He wrote the 1980s magically realist novel Lanark, but is he a novelist? He was famous, but is he a success? Is this book fact or fiction or a gallimaufry of jottings? He asserts on the copyright page, his ‘moral right’ as Gray to be its author, but inside passes himself off as an American millionairess, a cake, an algorithm and a critic.

The pictures display a man moulded out of pure grade testosterone — a broad-shouldered figure, a face lined and pouched with sensuality, a nose to buttress a cathedral, and ice-grey, challenging eyes. The words reveal something different — a calculating, feline intelligence, self-absorbed, avid for attention, and entirely ruthless in pursuit of its prey. The combination of these qualities makes General Sir Mike Jackson’s autobiography utterly compelling. Not since Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery in the 1940s has any head of the army been better known to the public or aroused more passionate love and loathing within the service.

Armadillos dig, that’s what they do best, but the three-banded variety from South America — and anyone brought up on the Just So stories will know this already — can also curl up like a hedgehog, and protect its back with layers of leather armour- plating. So the heroes of Malvinas Requiem, a band of Argentine deserters who dig themselves an underground hiding-place from the horrors of the Falklands war, are bound to call themselves ‘dillos’. To convey the flavour of their fight for survival, as Brits grapple with Argies for control of the islands, there is one other fact, or fiction, about the armadillo that needs to be known. To get it to uncurl, according to a human dillo, ‘you grab its tail like a starting-handle, and shove your thumb up its arse.

With apologies to Antic Hay, if you can have biography and biology, why not biosophy? Or biolatry, biotomy, bionomy and biogamy? The need for these neologisms is prompted by this extraordinary childhood memoir which combines adolescent intensity with a search for salvation, a hot glorification of life with its cold dissection, and the trade and eventual marriage of two separate existences. Apart from its beautiful writing, what stamps Seminary Boy as a classic story of growing up is the kaleidoscope of perspectives it offers on the mystery of being. The narrative concerns the first 17 years of John Cornwell’s life during the 1940s and 1950s when he was sent to boarding-school, technically a minor seminary, to be prepared for life as a Roman Catholic priest.

He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. ‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’ So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, ‘They are merely conventional signs!’ As The Hunting of the Snark suggests, what gives rise to a map is an absurd logic best appreciated by a mathematician like Lewis Carroll. The problem that cartography seeks to solve is also the one that drove painters to experiment with perspective and cubism: how best to represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface.

This is the most dazzling era in astronomy that human history has ever known, but for all the attention it commands it could be the dullest. It seems almost routine, a swiftly forgotten news item at best, to see images of Mars beamed back from the planet’s surface or to have a comet’s content analysed by fragmenting its surface with a rocket. The astonishing construction of a space station circling the earth is of such little interest, it is wholly obscured by anxieties about the Shuttle that serves it. The seven-year, 2.2-billion-mile, inch-perfect flight of the Cassini spacecraft to examine Saturn’s moons registers only slightly more than the discovery this summer of 30 million new stars in the Milky Way by the Spitzer infra-red space telescope.

The names reverberate like a sustained drumroll — Victory, Royal Sovereign, Téméraire, Colossus, Mars, Bellerophon — an overture heralding the violence that will erupt when the warships drifting slowly downwind finally break into the crescent line of the French and Spanish fleet. At midday on the 21 October, the first massive broadsides are fired, smoke obscures the scene, and, when it clears three hours later, 19 enemy ships have struck their colours, another six will shortly be taken or wrecked, and Admiral Lord Nelson lies dead. In the two centuries since, it is less the strategic significance of Trafalgar that guarantees its fame than the operatic tragedy of the hero dying in the moment of victory.

In 1892 Frank Hall, who was building a road for the Imperial British East Africa Company, decided to punish some local Masai for obstructing his work. He raided their village with a force of 150 men armed with rifles and a machine-gun, destroyed their huts, took their cattle, but felt dissatisfied at only killing five of them. ‘It is almost impossible to get at them to exterminate the lot,’ he wrote apologetically to his father, ‘though they get some pretty hot lessons occasionally for they are always shot like dogs when seen.’ A couple of years later, he improved his score by slaughtering almost 100 from a community that failed to provide the food he wanted. Out of such violence was born the colony of Kenya.

It was no fun being captured by pirates. Hanging from the yardarm or walking the plank was the least of your worries. According to Alexander Exque- melin’s eye-witness account in Buccaneers of America: Amongst other tortures then used, one was to stretch [the victims’] limbs with cords and at the same time beat them with sticks and other instruments. Others had burning matches placed between their fingers, others had slender cords twisted about their heads, till their eyes burst out of their skull.

In 1961 the anthropologist Richard Mason was exploring a river in southern Amazonia when he was ambushed by a hitherto unknown tribe of Indians, later identified as the Panar.