MAN'S VARIETY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 800, 19 November 1954, Page 13

MAN'S VARIETY

DIVERSIONS OF HISTORY; Allan Wingate, English price 15/-. ‘THIS is a collection of fifteen papers — pleasantly illustrated — originally published in History Today, to which Peter Quennell contributes an introduction. Much of the material is interesting, but because it ranges in time from the Minoan civilisation to Queen Victoria's relations with the Irish, and geographically is just as little a unity, it inevitably gives an impression of a certain scrappiness and eccentricity, But let us be thankful for what it does offer us. Of the contributors, Arthur Waley is probably the most considerable literary figure (some of the contributions are not conspicuously well-written), and J. M. Thompson the most eminent historian. Nearly all these essays throw new light on some corner of history or act as a corrective to received ideas.

ft gives one, for some reason, a cosy feeling to find that King Mark did not have his seat at Tintagel but elsewhere in Cornwall, near Fowey, and that Tristram (whose tombstone has been identified) was probably his son. The friendship between John Locke and Queen Anne’s Mrs. Masham, the seafaring civilisation in ancient Crete with its surprisingly excellent plumbing and aristocratic immodesty in dress, and the 15th Century private war of the Berkeleys and the Talbots which indirectly helped to preserve the former from the massacres of the Wars of the Roses, all these were worth uncovering. The essay of strongest direct interest to New Zealand readers will be the account of the fraudulent Carrbbean colonising venture of the adventurer Gregor MacGregor, "Prince of Poyais," in the early eighteen-twenties. It helps to explain the British Government's attitude to the blandishments of Edward Gibbon Wakefield 15 years later.

David

Hall