Tag Archives: Book review

Asia, Books, Britain, China, History

Book Review: Imperial Twilight

DARK TRUTH OF THE OPIUM WARS

THE Opium War began in 1839 in which the British and Chinese faced one another. It was a one-sided affair: The Royal Navy was the most powerful military force in the world, while the Chinese possessed weaponry that was centuries out of date.

The Chinese were reduced to desperate measures. One commander hatched a plan to strap fireworks or pyrotechnics to the backs of monkeys and catapult the poor primates onto the British ships in the hope that they would blow up their powder magazines. In the event, nobody could get close enough to launch the monkey bombs at the enemy.

The war was the end result of a decades-long, often fractious relationship between China and Britain, characterised by misunderstandings and ignorance on both sides.

Eighty years earlier, in 1759, there was only one British national, James Flint, who knew how to speak and write in Chinese. His attempt to present a petition to the Chinese emperor on behalf of the East India Company ended with Flint imprisoned for three years and the man who had taught him Chinese decapitated.

In 1793, Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing, bearing gifts from King George III including telescopes, a planetarium and a hot air balloon. The Emperor announced that they were “good enough to amuse children”. Macartney left Beijing having achieved little.

It was trade that finally brought the two nations together, but there were, unfortunately, two kinds.

One consisted of legal commodities such as cotton, silks and tea. The other was in opium, which the East India Company smuggled from India into China, where demand was high.

The two countries had very different attitudes to opium. In Britain, the drug was legal and sold by apothecaries and tobacconists. There was even a tonic for teething babies called Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup.

But China’s growing addiction problem was devastating its cities. Opium was illegal and punishments for using it grew even harsher.

The war was precipitated by the Imperial commissioner Lin Zexu, who confiscated vast amounts of the drug and threw it in the sea. (He wrote a prayer to the god of the sea apologising for his defilement of the waters.)

Charles Elliot, the chief superintendent of the British in Canton, sent a furious dispatch to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, demanding military action. Some months later Elliot got what he wanted.

The Opium War was not the British Empire’s finest hour. The Times newspaper described it as “nothing less than an attempt, by open violence, to force upon a foreign country the purchase of a deadly poison”.

But the twilight of Stephen Platt’s title was not that of Britain’s empire. It was China that was in decline – and worse was to come. Now that China is once again one of the world’s great powers, knowing the history of its relationship with the West becomes ever more important. Platt’s book makes a scholarly, but enjoyable, contribution to that knowledge.

– Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt is published by Atlantic for £25

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Arts, Books, Environment, Nature

Book Review: Buzz

NATURE

Buzz

Bees are brilliant and a much-needed species. And it’s thanks to wasps from which they evolved.

DO you know what Aristotle, George Washington, Leo Tolstoy, Sherlock Holmes and Scarlett Johansson have in common?

If you didn’t you might be surprised to hear that they were (or are) all beekeepers.

This lively, engaging book shows the human fascination with bees has deep roots. Stone Age art, from Africa to Europe and further afield to Australia, depicts honey-hunting expeditions. People kept bees before they tamed horses. The Hittites imposed fines on anyone caught stealing from hives. The Greeks had honey taxes.

Bees have long been central to our eating habits. “It’s often said,” Hanson remarks, “that every third bite of food in the human diet relies upon bees.”

He includes a table of 150 crops which either need or benefit from pollination by bees. They range from apricots to tomatoes and turnips.

Mead, brewed from honey, is one of mankind’s oldest tipples. People have been drinking it for at least 9,000 years. The ancient Chinese downed a version laced with rice and hawthorn berries; the Celts preferred theirs flavoured with hazelnuts.

The Mayans of Central America went one better and produced hallucinogenic varieties, spiked with narcotic roots.

Bee products have also proved invaluable in traditional healing. Of 1,000 prescriptions in a 12th-century volume entitled The Book Of Medicines, more than 350 made use of them. Honey was thought to be a remedy for everything from hiccups to a low sperm count. Beeswax could be used to treat loose teeth, aching testicles and sword wounds.

It’s little wonder that bees figure prominently in various mythologies. In some Greek myths, the god Zeus was raised by wild bees who fed him on nectar and honey. In cultures across the world, the buzzing of bees was interpreted as the voices of departed souls.

Bees are certainly remarkable creatures. They evolved from wasps. The first unequivocal bees appear in the fossil record about 70 million years ago. There are now around 20,000 different species around the globe.

Their antennae tune into chemicals which signal everything from potential meals to potential mates. Their wings can flap more than 200 times a second. One species of bumblebee can hover at elevations higher than the peak of Everest.

Bees, of course, evolved in tandem with the flowers on which they feed and which in turn depend on them to spread their pollen. In one sense, the colours of flowers reflect the nature of bees’ eyesight.

The prevalence of blues and golds in flowers is no chance matter. These shades fall right in the middle of a bee’s visual spectrum. On remote islands where there are few, if any bees, flowers are drab and colourless.

The development of scented flowers is also interwoven with bees’ ability to sense them. As Hanson puts it, “The fact that bees prefer odours we find worthy of poetry, counts as one of nature’s happier accidents.”

Plants need to attract bees to help them pollinate. They have devised any number of cunning strategies to do so. Some include caffeine in their nectar to get bees addicted to visiting them.

There are varieties of orchids which mimic the body shapes and scents of female bees to lure lustful male bees towards them.

The behaviour was recorded in the 19th century but prudish naturalists, including Charles Darwin, were puzzled. They thought the bees were attacking the orchids. They didn’t realise that they were actually trying to have sex with them.

 

BEES are now big business, particularly in the U.S. For a price, honeybees are sent by truck around the country, so farmers can improve bee-dependent crops. More than 10 million bees can be on a single truck.

Much publicity has been given in recent years to the alarming decline in bee numbers – so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Hanson acknowledges the concerns, but he is ultimately optimistic about the future. He is also a charmingly enthusiastic bee fanatic and his book is delightful to read.

– Buzz by Thor Hanson is published by Icon for £16.99

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Arts, Books, Legal, Literature, Scotland

Book Review: Conan Doyle For The Defence

SCOTLAND: TRUE CRIME

Fox

Conan Doyle For The Defence by Margalit Fox

Intro: How the creator of Sherlock Holmes unravelled a real murder and deeply troubling miscarriage of justice

ON JANUARY 25, 1925, a prisoner was released from Peterhead jail. Concealed beneath his dentures, so the prison authorities could not find it, was an urgent note from a fellow convict.

It included a message for one of the most famous men in the world – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Oscar Slater, the man who sent the message, had already spent 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

In 1908, an 82-year-old spinster, Marion Gilchrist, was living in a large flat in a prosperous neighbourhood of Glasgow. On the evening of December that year, her maid popped out to buy a newspaper. She was gone for just 15 minutes, but when she returned she found her mistress bludgeoned to death.

“Miss Gilchrist,” reports Margalit Fox in this gripping account of the murder and its aftermath, “had been beaten so savagely that autopsy photographs depict a face that looks as though it had never been human.”

Oscar Slater, whose real name was Oscar Leschziner, was born in Germany in 1872. He had lived in New York, London, Paris and Brussels as well as Glasgow. He moved in a dodgy underworld of chancers and semi-criminals, but he had no record of violence.

There was not a single link between him and Miss Gilchrist. Almost certainly, he had never heard of her before he was accused of killing her.

Unfortunately, the police were looking for a suspect. In Slater – a gambler, a foreigner, a Jew and a less than solid citizen – they found an ideal candidate.

His pawning of a brooch similar to one stolen from Miss Gilchrist brought him to their attention. It was not Miss Gilchrist’s brooch but this scarcely mattered. The police wanted him found guilty. In what Conan Doyle later called “a disgraceful frameup”, they made sure he would be.

Witnesses had seen a man leaving the scene of the murder.

In an identity parade, dark-haired, olive-skinned Slater was placed among 11 pale, pink Scotsmen. As a journalist later wrote, it was “like attempting to conceal a bull-dog among ladies’ poodles”. Unsurprisingly, the witnesses picked out Slater.

All evidence in Slater’s favour was either ignored or suppressed. At his trial, the judge gave a summing-up that was outrageously biased against him.

He was found guilty and sentenced to death. He had always been fascinated by machinery, but Slater surprised his warders by taking an interest in the gallows that was being constructed to hang him.

However, he was not to become too intimately acquainted with it – his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

In the words of a writer at the time, he was “held to be too guilty to be released, yet not guilty enough to be hanged”.

It was at this point that Conan Doyle became involved. With his big build and walrus moustache, he looked more Dr Watson than Holmes. But, Conan Doyle had a track record for reversing miscarriages of justice. Using observation and logic like his world-famous creation, he had already cleared the name of George Edalji in as bizarre a case as any Holmes had faced.

 

AN ANGLO-Indian solicitor living in the Midlands, he had been convicted of a series of animal maimings. Conan Doyle demonstrated that the man could not have been responsible.

Conan Doyle’s first efforts for Slater were unsuccessful and the convicted man continued to suffer in prison for years. Margalit Fox quotes extensively from his moving letters to his family back in Germany, which show he was very far from the unfeeling monster that had been described in court.

When Conan Doyle received the tiny note from the dentures in 1925 (it still exists in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow), he was inspired to try again. Times had changed, and Slater had so obviously been the victim of official dishonesty and incompetence that finally, after 18 years inside, the work of Conan Doyle and other supporters had its reward.

Slater was released from Peterhead prison on November 14, 1927. The rest of the story is not always a happy one.

Conan Doyle and Slater, who only met once face-to-face, fell out over money.

Slater was granted compensation of £6,000.

Conan Doyle thought he was honoured-bound to reimburse some of his supporters’ expenses. But Slater didn’t. The two men never communicated again.

And after 20 years of freedom, Oscar Slater died at his home in Ayr in 1948.

Nobody knows for certain who killed Marion Gilchrist. The only certainty is that it wasn’t Oscar Slater, who suffered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Scottish legal history.

Margalit Fox’s engrossing book brings his case back to vivid life and highlights the part played in it by the creator of the world’s most famous detective.

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