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Features essays, in which, the author pursues the fugitive traces of the past. In this title, the author, looks at subjects ranging from a murder-case in Renaissance Rome to the disappearance of Jim Thompson in 1960s Malaya, from the remnants of a lost Shakespeare play to the last days of the poet-boxer Arthur Cravan in a Mexican fishing port.
Book Details
Publisher:
ALLEN LANE
Publication Date:
01-Dec-2011
ISBN:
9780713994940
Guardian review
Traces Remain by Charles Nicholl review
PD Smith the guardian Fri 08 February 2013
In the preface to this wide-ranging collection of 25 essays and reviews written over nearly as many years, the historian and biographer Charles Nicholl admits that he has always found "the details of history more interesting, or anyway more evocative, than the larger perspectives of history". There is plenty of evidence here of the success of this approach, from his article on the wonderfully footloose 17th-century English travel writer Thomas Coryate's "Last Journey" (which took him on foot from the Holy Land to India where he died in 1617), or how a case of "fornicating Frenchmen" heard before the Middlesex Sessions in 1613 informs our understanding of Shakespeare, to his account of the disappearance of American businessman Jim Thompson in Malaysia in 1967 (an "unresolved and somehow spooky" case). Whether it is quirky handwriting in an archival manuscript ("I feel a kind of wonder at the tenacity and toughness of old documents") or what was on Leonardo da Vinci's shopping list (eels and apricots), Nicholl has the unerring eye of a fine historical detective.