Author: Oliver Nicholson

Being brought up in a family with three doctors gives one an odd outlook on life. It was not just the anatomy textbooks, with their foggy monochrome photographs, that rubbed shoulders with the wildflower guides and J.B. Priestley novels in the family library. Nor was it only the medical advertisements that came in triplicate by each post, some embellished with color photographs of lurid lesions, others appealing to the more cultural proclivities of the medical profession. I recall a whole series of advertisements for a preparation called Cetiprin, each adorned with a frameable brass-rubbing of a medieval man-at-arms encased in chain mail and plate armor and labeled, “Pity the Plight of the Ancient Knight without Cetiprin.” Cetiprin was meant to cure incontinence.

The most lasting impression was made by Father’s stories of medical school at Edinburgh before the First World War. There was the one about him and his dissecting partner taking a small packet of rare roast beef into the dissecting room. (“George, stop eating the corpse.”) But the most memorable was the tale of the fracture by contrecoup.

One day the body of a sailor was fished out of the Firth of Forth, just north of Edinburgh. It was duly brought to the Royal Infirmary, but no next of kin came forward to claim it. This left the professor of anatomy feeling conflicted (or maybe it was morbid pathology, the medical specialty where no patient ever answers back). The cause of the seaman’s demise was a textbook example of a certain sort of head injury, what is called (as was explained with the sort of professional detail enjoyed by small boys) a fracture by contrecoup: The contusions are on one side of the head, but the break in the bone of the skull is on the other.

The professor wanted this head for his teaching collection. After some weeks, he could wait no longer and had it severed and pickled, consigning the rest of the body to a respectful burial. As luck would have it, the following week the next of kin made contact—auld Jock had been lost at sea, they wondered maybe if … The professor thought fast. He would not want to deprive the bereaved of the chance to see their relative; on the other hand, he did not want to get into trouble. He had the head laid out under a sheet with a decapitated tailor’s dummy extended below it. The next of kin were led in. Gingerly, the professor drew back the sheet to show the face: “Aye, indeed, that’s auld Jock, he was a guid man … ” They turned and began to leave. The professor started a sigh of relief. They turned: “Professor, may we see the little finger of the left hand.” Well-concealed consternation. The professor drew himself up to his full height (was he not the heir of Lord Lister, pioneer of antiseptic surgery, of Sir James Young Simpson, promoter of chloroform anesthesia): “No,” he said in oracular tones and a mild court-Scots accent, “you may not see the little finger of the left hand.”

What stuck in my mind was less the immense dignity of professors (not easy to sustain when what you profess is Latin), but the notion of contrecoup. This sense of unintended consequences became a word to live by. Sometimes, says Charles Williams, it is necessary to build the pyre in one place so that the fire from heaven may descend in another. If you teach people about the history of the Near East in the sixth and seventh centuries, they will be less likely to foul up the modern politics of that fouled-up region.

Sancerre is a white wine that works by contrecoup. It is made from the Sauvignon Blanc grape in the Loire region of western France. Take the 2004 vintage of Justin Monmousseau (available around here for less than twenty dollars). The nose is sweet, not sugary, and yeasty like spring flowers. The taste is overpoweringly—but not unpleasantly—acidic, with acrid overtones like the smell made by Boy Scouts when they strike fire from flints. It is the acid that deals the contrecoup. It promotes salivation (sorry to be so anatomical), but what you taste is not just sourness, it is the fresh sense of flowers that you met first in the smell. This Sancerre is as much an idea as a wine. Drink it with simple things, like salad or good goat’s cheese, but perhaps not with rare roast beef.

Take a piece of paper and write on one side: “The statement on the other side of this page is untrue.” Then turn the piece of paper over and write the same thing on the other side. Then apply for a tenure-track position in a university philosophy department, where they will tell you that this is called the Cretan Paradox and has been puzzling people ever since the sixth century B.C., when a Cretan called Epimenides said “Cretans, always liars.”
What underlay this reputation for mendacity were the tall tales the people of Crete used to tell in antiquity about the immortal gods. Zeus, Greatest and Best, they claimed, had been born on their island and they had concealed him from his divine father Kronos (who wanted to eat him) by doing war –dances ’round his cradle whenever his infant wailing threatened to betray his whereabouts. As Greek myths go, that was unremarkable. What bothered people was the Cretans’ further claim that Zeus had also died on the island and was buried on snow-capped Mount Ida, in a tomb marked by the inscription ZAN KRONOU—Zeus the son of Kronos. So much for immortality.
Even in more recent times Crete seems an island larger than life. Take the tales about Cretan resistance to the German occupation during World War II told by an older generation of classical scholars, some of whom shared the tough life of the Cretan andartes, sleeping in caves and shepherds’ huts, scragging German soldiers, and breakfasting on ouzo. A fine film from the 1950s tells one such tale. Ill Met by Moonlight relates in atmospheric monochrome how a posse of Cretan partisans and a pair of young British officers kidnapped a German general as he drove home to his headquarters one spring evening in 1944, then led him through the mountains to a motorboat that carried him to Cairo and a lengthy stay as a guest of His Britannic Majesty. (It is good sometimes to see a film that does not suggest that the war was won by the unaided efforts of John Wayne.)
Both of the British officers involved wrote accounts of this operation. One of them, Patrick Leigh Fermor, described how, in a pause on the trek across the island, the general looked up at the peak of Mount Ida and spoke sotto voce lines the Roman poet Horace had written about the distant view of mountains seen from Rome in the days before pollution: “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte.” (You see how Mount Soracte stands, bright white with deep snow.) One of his captors completed the quotation. “Ach so, Herr Major,” said the general. “For a long moment,” wrote Leigh Fermor, “the war had ceased to exist.”
What put me in mind of all this was a good-hearted red wine from Crete called Kretikos. It is bottled by the well-known Greek firm of Boutari and the 2005 vintage may be had around here for as little as ten dollars. This is one of those pellucid wines that make glass shine from the inside out; its crimson color is not unlike that of Pinot Noir. At first, the center of the taste also recalls the sweetness of Pinot Noir, bracketed here between a fine initial bite and a pleasantly tannic aftertaste. Revisited after a day or two, the sugars have been absorbed, but the wine retains fine muscular strength.
Whatever philosophers say, truth is seldom pure and never simple. The essential truth about this wine is that, like the great red wines of Bordeaux, it is a blend of two varieties of grape. The Mantilaria, widely planted in the isles of Greece (where burning Sappho had her fun) is relatively low in alcohol, high in tannin and a pleasing ruby hue. The Kotsifali grape is more characteristically Cretan; the wine it makes has more sugar and alcohol, and can go a little brown ’round the edges, like aged claret. They make a happy marriage.
This Cretan wine would taste good with all sorts of meat. It happened to be Easter time when the party that kidnapped the general arrived on Crete to make their preparations. The shepherd they were with selected a lamb, and it was expertly roasted on a spit. They drank quantities of wine—drawn from the barrel, not bottled by Boutari—then lined up colored eggs and used them for target practice: “Christ is risen!” Bang … “He is truly risen!”… Bang. Good wine tells no lies.

I have often thought that the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia should be the patron saints of Minnesota. Never mind that they are most likely mythical; they can stand for all the other martyrs the Romans executed in the first three centuries A.D. And the myth is certainly appropriate to our chilly state.
The Forty, it is said, were Roman legionaries serving on the Empire’s Euphrates frontier in what is now eastern Turkey when they were given the command to offer sacrifice to the Roman gods. When they refused, they were ordered to stand out in the middle of a frozen lake ’til they changed their minds. One of them did actually give way, legging it to the shore and then to a nearby bathhouse, which had been fired up by the detachment’s commanding officer in order to provide an allurement to apostasy. He promptly exploded. And the bathhouse keeper no less promptly ran out onto the ice to make the number of martyrs back up to forty. What then? Crowns, of course, descended from heaven onto the martyrs’ frozen heads, to the accompaniment of unearthly music and the crashing applause of the first-night audience. Martyrdom on Ice: If Minnesota doesn’t like the title, you could try it on Broadway.
An appropriate saintly patron is also apparently being sought for the Internet. The heavenly protector of Al Gore’s invention will probably be Saint Isidore, bishop of Seville in southern Spain in the early seventh century, and compiler of a work that swiftly became the medieval equivalent of Wikipedia. The Internet and Isidore surely deserve each other; Isidore’s Etymologies are replete with secondhand information, difficult to navigate, and often inaccurate. While the Internet …
What Isidore says about wine, for instance, is a characteristic blend of the derivative, the unpalatable, and the obvious. He alludes to Falernian, the famous sweet white wine from ancient Campania, which he had read about in Roman authors like Horace but is hardly likely to have savored himself. Beverages he is more likely to have actually sampled sound rather less pleasant—for instance, Oenomelum, a sickly syrup compounded of wine and honey.
But then, just as you give up on him, Isidore displays a gem of genuine interest. He mentions the wines of Gaza, carried from the Holy Land as ballast in the ships bringing pilgrims home from Jerusalem. This is interesting because archaeologists find the distinctive, dumpy flasks that held Gaza wine at excavations of post-Roman sites all over Western Europe. In fact, they find them as far away as the southern coast of England, where grand beach barbecues seem to have greeted the arrival of merchant ships coming from the eastern Mediterranean. It is good when the written story fits the physical facts. In fact, Gaza wine is important as evidence that Mediterranean trade long survived the end of the Roman Empire, until the Arab invasions swept through the lands east and south of the Mediterranean, reaching, within a century of his death, southern Spain where Isidore had lived and written.
Funnily enough, Isidore has nothing to say about the wines of his native Spain. It seems that they were no better publicized in the seventh century than they are now. That may be why they are such an excellent value when you do find them.
Try, for instance, the 2004 vintage of Protocolo, which costs less than seven dollars hereabouts. This wine comes from the high plains of La Manchuela in the bottom right-hand corner of Spain, an area with extremes of climate that the Forty Martyrs would have found familiar. The color is a deepest red, like the workers’ flag (which shrouded oft our martyred dead)—this area was a stronghold of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. The grape is the Tempranillo, the variety made famous by Rioja, but Protocolo is innocent of the turpsy oak associated with those famous wines. This is a well-balanced and fruity wine with a firm scrunch in the center of the taste. This was pleasing with a piece of steak and tasted just as good with pasta. One can imagine it accompanying paella. At that price one could even mull it with suitable spices. If you do, be careful not to boil off the alcohol (there’s plenty). Anything to keep winter at a distance.

Heaven knows the European Community (or whatever they are calling it this week) fails to warm the cockles of the English heart. (How would you like life in Minnesota regulated in detail by a bloated bureaucracy, living on expense accounts in a foreign land?) But one of its pleasanter side effects has been a scheme of international town-twinning—“Partnerstädte in Europa,” the bumper stickers call it. Sometimes the partnerships between cities in different countries are rather elegant. Oxford, for instance, is twinned with Leiden, seat of the oldest university in the Netherlands.
Indeed, sometimes these seem to be matches made in heaven rather than in Brussels. The committees responsible have been rather kind in twinning the small town I come from in southwest England, Tiverton in Devon, with Chinon, an even smaller town on a tributary of the Loire River in western France. I am not sure what we did to deserve this good fortune. Although Tiverton is more than twice its size, Chinon has by far the more distinguished history. It was a stomping ground of Joan of Arc, Rabelais, Cardinal Richelieu, and King Henry II of England. Tiverton was a place where the medieval Earls of Devon stayed to hunt stags; it then grew into an industrial center that did very nicely thank you in the early modern cloth trade—solid and lovely—but not the scene of great romantic deeds.
In fact, the only thing I can think of that the two places have in common is that each has a twelfth-century castle that towers high over a river. Tiverton Castle, though, preserves little from the Middle Ages. The Parliamentary armies captured it during the English Civil War (a lucky cannon ball broke the chain holding up the drawbridge) and they did not leave a lot standing.
The remains of Chinon Castle, on the other hand, are massive. And its origins were royal—it was built by Henry II of England (who was also Count of Anjou). Connoisseurs of cinema will know it as the setting for The Lion in Winter, where Peter O’Toole, impersonating Henry II in robes remarkably ragged for a monarch, trades swift Stoppard-like repartee with Katherine Hepburn posing as a rather unregal Eleanor of Aquitaine, “that fertile and fateful female,” as my old tutor used to call her. The only hint that the characters in this film are anything more than spoiled celebrities is a long shot near the beginning showing the castle massive and mysterious from across the water. Shakespeare did royalty better than this. (So did Helen Mirren in The Queen.)
The wines made around the two towns are not really comparable, either. Tiverton lies on the same latitude as the Moselle River. So there is every reason it should produce good wine, but I have never seen our local Yearlstone vintages for sale in the United States. The Loire Valley, on the other hand, produces more different sorts of wine than anywhere in France. They range in flavor from the Granny Smith bite of Muscadet to the dark mysteries of red Saumur. After a hot summer, Rosé d’Anjou comes somewhere in between—light, fruity, and refreshing.
Try a delightful rosé made just upstream from Henry II’s crenellated residence. Charles Joguet’s Chinon Rosé 2005 (just over sixteen dollars hereabouts) is made wholly from Cabernet Franc grapes, the same variety used to make red Saumur, but for the rosé the juice is taken from the must (the crushed grapes) before the skins have had time to color it much. The result looks just like the pink juice of mountain-ash berries as one boils them down to make rowan jelly, the perfect foil for roast lamb or venison. The wine also has the same sequence of tastes that you find in rowan berry juice—fruit followed by delicious, long, waxy bitterness. Think pink grapefruit without the acid, but with a little tingle in the taste. This wine drunk with a venison paste would have revived a royal palate jaded by a difficult day inventing the Assize of Novel Disseisin; with appropriate charcuterie, it might refresh a Brussels apparatchik after hours in committee-making regulations about straight bananas. And for us, in the dark time of the year, it could fuel an entire dinner party, from smoked salmon through rack of lamb to a baveuse wheel of Brie. Vive les Angevins.

After twelve happy years in Oxford, the happy year I spent in Cambridge was a far greater culture shock than (several years later) coming to Minnesota. The first thing I learned was that in Cambridge, it is not polite to be rude to people. If you say, “I read your book; what a lot of rot,” they think you mean it, acute sense of humor failure occurs, and you will have offended against the precept that “a gentleman is one who never gives offense unintentionally.”

But there is something about Cambridge books I never entirely understood: It is the emblem that the grandest offerings from Cambridge University Press bear upon their title page. Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained to me why scholars consulting The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire or an edition of Epistulae ad Familiares should encounter—up front, close and personal—an oval embracing an etching of the upper half of a naked woman displaying, for universal cynosure, what the novelist Thackeray refers to as “famous frontal development.”

For the learned, Cambridge University Press provides a cryptic clue. Around the oval run the words “Hinc Lucem Et Pocula Sacra,” which my third-year Latin class would render rightly as “Light and Holy Drinks From Here.” If this is an allusion to the excellence of Cambridge college port, I could not possibly disagree; port is one of the more splendid of the superficial similarities between the two ancient English seats of learning. But I fear it is a reference to the famous frontal development. The literal translation of alma mater is, after all, wet nurse; an alumnus is one who has imbibed in the way that nature intended from a lady not his natural mother. (Thackeray indeed was a Cambridge alumnus.) The holy drinks may be on the university, but they are strictly nonalcoholic. Pity. Who wants learning when there is a possibility of port?

Port rhymes with thought. Unlike the great wines of Bordeaux, port does not absolutely demand that you switch your mind on while drinking it, but, like an intelligent woman, it does furnish substantially more pleasure if you give it your thoughtful attention. Thought requires information. The best place I know to find out painlessly about the finer points of wine is Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine. A magnificent new edition, just out, is a must this Christmas for the oenophile who has everything. From the rosé-tinted pages of front matter to the tables at the end (did you know that Kyrgyzstan produces 951,000 U.S. gallons of wine a year? Rather a lot for a mostly Muslim land), this is a riot of delicious information. You can savor swift pen portraits of famous connoisseurs, such as Robert M. Parker Jr., whose system of scoring wines numerically has been “easily and delightedly grasped by Americans familiar with high school grades,” and Hugh Johnson. You can grieve over phylloxera, wonder at the possible taste of the Roman wine coolers described by Pliny, or come to grips with the difference between Ruby and Tawny, Vintage and Late Bottled Vintage port.

And while you are about it, sip a glass of Fonseca ten-year-old Tawny Port, available hereabouts for a little over $30 (about half the price of The Oxford Companion to Wine). Tawny port lacks the rich, oily glory of vintage port, but it lacks also the rich, oily price. It needs none of the TLC, cellaring, or meticulous decanting without which vintage port—the product of a single outstanding year, long-matured in dusty bottles—is simply wasted. Tawny port has aged in wood but does not taste of it. The color is comparatively light; there is a whiff of grappa in the nose followed by fruity sweetness. On the palate there is warmth, a good grip, and a lingering pleasantness. Go on, have a second glass.

It would be genial to savor this port after dinner. Or, let us be honest, to keep it behind the filing cabinet for those long, cold Minnesota Saturdays when inspiration is frozen, when you stare, snow-blind, at a blank computer screen wondering how best to use the next precious moments of research time, when even the title page of The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire has ceased to please. Put it on a billboard: Fonseca, freeing the ice floes of the scholarly imagination since 1822. Hinc vere lucem et pocula sacra.

If you go down to the woods south of London, you may be in for a big surprise. Not the teddy bears’ picnic—that seems to be what a good many urban folk seem to expect in the countryside these days, as though farms were all film sets and the animals, a collection of animated stuffed toys. (Was it a wish for revenge on his father that inspired Christopher Robin Milne to sell the rights for Winnie-the-Pooh to Disney? Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Christopher Robin is getting even …)

The surprise is something quite unforeseen a generation ago. In the 1980s, English farmers, fed up with the agricultural policies of the European Union, spotted that consumers were no less fed up with the way that pork sold in supermarkets tended to taste more and more like blotting paper. Their response was to domesticate and rear wild boar, with exceedingly palatable results. Inevitably, though, some of the boar found their way out into the wild, where they ensconced themselves most successfully with their litters of little stripy piglets in woodland less than an hour from Gatwick Airport.

Though more than a hundred of the animals were let loose last Christmas when the fencing around a farm near my family home was cut by animal-liberation fanatics, I have yet to meet a boar in the wild. But I have read the description of pig-sticking in India by the British cavalry officer Francis Yeats-Brown in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, and the speed and ferocity of the aroused boar sound terrifying. Boar are almost the weight of a Harley-Davidson and even quicker off the lights. The Yeats-Brown prescription is to stand your ground, with the spear out in front of you, so that the boar impales himself thoroughly; otherwise, you will get crushed and then rootled by the same sharp tusks that do such a thorough job of carving up farmers’ fields. Naturally, the Yeats-Brown sporting ethic requires that you “honour while you strike him down, the foe that comes with fearless eyes.” No wonder Yeats-Brown was one of the earliest western devotees of yoga. And no wonder it’s illegal to introduce the European wild boar to Minnesota.

The French, though, have always had wild boar, and nowhere more so than in the Loire Valley, southwest of Paris. Many of the grand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chateaux along the river were built as hunting boxes for the nobility of the Ancien Régime. I don’t know if they still hunt the boar with hounds through the forests there. They certainly hunt deer in a musical and stately manner, a style that makes English fox hunting seem like a mad cross-country dash. As one might expect in wooded country, hound music is highly prized, and the solemn playing of the hunting horn is taken very seriously, especially to honor dead quarry.

The Loire Valley also produces a greater variety of wines than any other part of France. Most of them are white; the area is quite far north. But let me commend a red, the 2004 vintage from the lieu-dit Les Poyeux in the appellation Saumur-Champigny. This wine is made from the Cabernet Franc grape (an ancestor of the better-known Cabernet Sauvignon) and is available locally for around $15 in a bottle embossed with the old French Royal Arms. It is powerful stuff; drink it slowly. It improves with acquaintance and would improve even more with keeping. The color is on the red side of bituminous; the initial nose is almost nonexistent except, perhaps, for a whiff of alcohol. There is less fruitiness in the initial flavor than I found in the highly concentrated vintage from the baking hot summer of 2003. What is interesting, though, is the way that the concentrated tannins in the center of the taste open out level by level, unfolding successive, refreshing bitternesses and leaving a lingering, tingling aftertaste.

This is wine that demands your attention; it comes with fearless eyes. Honor it with the sort of fully flavored food you might eat with a Côtes du Rhône: venison roasted with a bitter cocoa glaze, well-hung wild boar, or a juicy sirloin with lots of horseradish. Your patience should be rewarded.

Of all the depressing novels I know, Jude the Obscure takes the prize for sustained doom and gloom. Don’t let the film mislead you; it is far too pretty. All those authentic Victorian sets (not to mention the delightfully authentic Kate Winslet) undermine the exposition of Jude’s law, that Sod and Murphy were incurable optimists, because if anything can go wrong it will, particularly when something might seem just for once to be going almost right. It is not Jude one loses patience with; it is his creator, for being so beastly to him. No wonder the nineteenth-century public hated it.

Jude is a country lad with an ambition to study at the University of Christminster, so he starts to teach himself Latin. He swiftly discovers that there is no one-to-one correspondence between English and Latin words, that a foreign language is not simply an alternative set of vocabulary but a wholly different way of putting thoughts together (something that the users of Internet translation services have not always understood). With characteristic determination (doomed, of course), Jude sets about the systematic exploration of Latin grammar and syntax.

I was thinking of Jude’s experience the other day while being lectured by one of those well-fed wiseacres who like to tell us there is no point learning foreign languages because soon everyone will know English. “What can he know of English who only English knows?” I muttered to myself, sotto voce. Those who do not take the trouble to study languages end up like the Monsieur Jourdan in Molière’s Le Bourgeoise Gentilhomme, who is amazed to learn that what he has been speaking all his life is prose.

More to the point, foreigners who learn English do not ipso facto stop talking Foreign. They may know English, and so understand what we tell them. They can say in English what they would like us to hear. But heaven knows what they are muttering about us in the privacy of their own tongues. I wonder how many people in Washington speak Farsi or read Shi’ite theology (though I have it on good authority that at the time of the Tehran Embassy hostage crisis in 1979, the State Department had a computer programmed to simulate the presumed mental processes of the Ayatollah Khomeini). The trouble with my well-fed wiseacre was that the voice he most liked the sound of was his own.

The swiftest method of learning Foreign is, they say, the Horizontal. It usually involves one-to-one tuition and is, in general, employed only in those colleges and universities that have a hearty appetite for protracted and expensive litigation. That said, I know someone who learned French in six weeks by adopting a suitably unclothed and recumbent posture, though the fact that he had come straight from twelve months learning Coptic in an Egyptian monastery may have whetted his whistle. I must say I have not tried it myself, and if I had, I would not be saying.

Wines, too, have their characteristic syntax. Let me introduce you to a red wine that certainly speaks French. It is the 2004 Côtes du Rhône from the well-known Burgundy shipper Charles Thomas (pronounced, of course, Sharl Tomah in the manner of Peter Sellers asking for a rhoom). It is available hereabouts for not much more than ten dollars.

This wine is constructed not in the languorous language of Proust, pursuing evanescent flavors of madeleine and fancy tea down long, convoluted corridors of memory. Rather, like Edith Piaf, it combines sweetness and husky pungency: “No, nothing of nothing. No, I not regret nothing, neither the well which one has done me, nor the bad, all this is for me well equal” (perhaps something does get lost in translation). The initial fruit leads to the tannins at the center of the taste with the inevitability of a well-made sentence. The weather has a lot to do with it; 2004 was not as spectacularly hot and dry as 2003, which produced astonishingly concentrated wines all across France. In 2004, it rained in August. The result is a wine that has both charm and a mind of its own—and plenty of alcohol. Taken with steak frites, it might even put you back on your feet (even if Hardy and his President of the Immortals knock you back down in the very next chapter). Santé!

One of the unsung pleasures of a summer weekend in an English country house is the short shelf of books left in the spare bedroom for the entertainment of guests. If you are out of luck, the row of volumes on the bedside table consists of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, Regency bodice-rippers by the likes of Georgette Heyer or, worst of all, copies of the Watchtower.

A few years ago, every spare bedroom I slept in seemed to boast a copy of Jessica Mitford’s American Way of Death. One could see why one’s kind hosts might not want this gripping volume in a room that they used regularly themselves. It is an entertaining but distinctly macabre exposé of the trade practices of undertakers in the Eisenhower era. Once one has read it, one never forgets the T-shaped layout of the ideal coffin showroom and the methods used to steer mourning relatives toward the most expensive coffins. These, one is told, should be placed in the right-hand arm of the T (because research has shown that wanderers lost in the Antarctic are likely to go round in right-handed circles, like waste water in an antipodean plughole). Some of Miss Mitford’s revelations about embalming are unlikely to induce slumber. I am sure it is all very out of date nowadays. And anyway, she was a Communist.

But the greatest find I ever had was a thriller by John Buchan called The Courts of the Morning. John Buchan was a prolific producer of literate light literature in the decades before and after the First World War (he died as governor general of Canada in 1941). Critics have considered his heroes literary ancestors of James Bond, but actually the contrasts are more instructive. There’s precious little technology (though it is occasionally handy that Sir Archie Roylance is an early aviator).

Unlike the sybaritic Bond, Buchan’s Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot are quietly public-spirited. Though True Love sometimes comes to the surface, there is no sign of Miss Pussy Galore and her bathykolpian avatars; Buchan is the only thriller writer I know to have been an enthusiast for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

Perhaps Bunyan also affected Buchan’s genius for evoking landscape. The grand, green hills around Erzerum in Eastern Turkey provide spectacular scenery for the dénouement of Greenmantle, a yarn about Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot using charm and intelligence to foil an Islamic uprising in the darkest days of the First World War. What stuck in the mind from the weekend I spent with The Courts of the Morning was certainly the landscape where the tale unfolds. The core of the story is a miners’ conspiracy in the province of Gran Secco (Big Thirst).
Quite how Sandy Arbuthnot got embroiled in it has long evaporated from memory, but the sense of him speeding up and down the west coast of South America, plunging into deep valleys in sight of snow-topped mountains to deploy his diplomatic skills lingers in the mind like a sweet smell.

I cannot recall what he drank while he was achieving all this. After all, I had to read fast; it would have been tacky to miss meals and tackier still to let the volume find its way into my suitcase (not a temptation for a reader contemplating the grim revelations of Miss Mitford). But there was surely wine to be had. Already in 1933, Viu Manet, nowadays one of the largest wine concerns in South America, was taking advantage of the alternating sea breezes and dry air from the Andes to grow grapes in the temperate vales of Chile.

Since I first met them in England some thirty years ago, Chilean wines have improved massively. Let me commend to you the Semillon made by Viu Manet, a sweet white wine which can be had in half-bottles hereabouts for around twelve dollars. Sweet, but not too sweet, not Bourbon or embalming fluid, lighter than the great French dessert wines of Sauternes that are made from the same sort of grape. Think of it as last-of-the-summer wine, sipped solitarily on the front porch in early evening sunshine, surrounded by the scent of cut grass (so much more pleasing than the sound of grass being cut). Take it with a plain biscuit (OK, cracker) and the kind of light reading whose heroes impart a vicarious sense of mighty deeds achieved. This Semillon might even soothe you into the unjustified conviction that your summer was not entirely wasted. In Chile it is spring.

It is a drear thought that if you can remember the Pudding Shop on the north side of Divan Yolu in Istanbul you must be well into middle age. “Those were the days, my friend,” the Seekers sang, “We thought they’d never end, we would be young for ever and a day.” As the Roman poet Horace said, eheu fugaces, alas, the fleeting years.

Divan Yolu had been one of the grand-processional avenues of Byzantine and Ottoman Constantinople. Between its marble colonnades, purple-robed emperors and their retinues passed ceremoniously from the circular Forum of Constantine to the great Church of the Holy Wisdom.

By the 1970s, it was distinctly dingy. A small Ottoman mosque still broadcast the call to prayer over a crackly public address system, just about audible above the geriatric gearboxes of nose-to-tail Turkish taxicabs. Across the road there were inexpensive kebab shops, the sort of places where you might spot the management replenishing the mineral water bottles from the tap. The upper stories of these eateries were crumbling hotels whose small-bore plumbing pipes had not been designed with western lavatory paper in mind—the blockages and bursts caused by inconsiderate guests smelt awful. So much for the Romantic East.

The Pudding Shop stood in the center of this heterogeneous parade. The puddings were puddings in the American sense, little bowls of dairy glup, with or without rice. The clientele was long-haired youth from all over the western world—what the Turks called hipi (Turkish spelling is relentlessly rational). On one wall there was a notice board on which people advertised for traveling companions to go with them eastward: Persia-Afghanistan-India-Kathmandu.

The Hipi Route to the Mystic East (farther east than the Romantic East) would be impassable today. It finally died at Christmas 1978 with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. But thirty years ago, it was a long, thin line stretching across Asia, drawn by folk inspired by a lust to know what cannot be known. You saw them, always in groups, hanging around the bus stations at Erzurum and Tabriz, wild-eyed, thin from inanition, sometimes begging, often clutching paperback selections from the Buddhist Scriptures.

For all their preoccupation with spiritual traditions, the hipi seemed quite uninterested in the Christian and Islamic heritage of Turkey and Persia as they passed through. The poet Peter Levi, who recounted his own adventures in Afghanistan in The Light Garden of the Angel King, found them remarkably unenterprising people. You seldom saw the hipi anywhere except in the places where they all congregated—the Pudding Shop in Istanbul, Nasr-i Khosrow in Teheran.

It is odd too that a movement of free spirits with lofty spiritual aims has left so little in the way of literature. I can think of no bahnbrechend, or groundbreaking, spiritual odyssey recording the hipi Drang nach Osten. That is not to say that their travels had no consequences. Many decent people in the Near East had never seen westerners in the flesh before the hipi passed through. Heaven knows what effect they had on the lands they traversed.

True, they were not guilty of building vulgar concrete tourist hotels, but their practices and appearance were scarcely such as to commend the West to those who in the next decade were to animate the Muslim moral re-armament of Persia and Afghanistan.

There were other folk who frequented the Pudding Shop. They were going in the opposite direction. These were not etiolated seekers after truth; they were beefy blond Australians, big men for whom the shish kebabs of Divan Yolu, one felt, were slim pickings. The destination to which they were working westward was the area of London around the Earls Court tube station, then known as Kangaroo Gulch. Their idea was to see the world before they went home to settle down. They were no better informed than the hipi (“Who were these Byzantine guys?”), but their bluffness was refreshing.

You might find similar genial refreshment in a bottle of Lindemann’s Reserve Merlot, a warm-hearted red wine from the southeast of Australia, available around here for less than twelve dollars a go. This is a rich round wine, compounded of equal parts of Merlot and sunshine, with spicy touches derived from the oak barrels it matured in and fine plummy flavors that will, if you are not careful, have you uttering the broad, relaxed vowels of the Antipodes. It would go well with kebabs. And you do not need to traverse all Asia to get it.

No one ever added more acreage to the Roman Empire than Julius Caesar (the Roman geezer). Until his time, Roman territory in what is now France was the relatively narrow sliver along the Mediterranean coast that is still called Provence, precisely because it was the original Roman province. In ten years Caesar took over all Gaul, and had even paid a couple of visits to the closest of the islands in Ocean, where he found a lot of hairy warriors wearing nothing but woad (blue dye made from a plant like the indigo): “Woad’s the stuff to show men / Woad to scare your foemen / Boil it to a brilliant hue/ Then rub it on your back and your abdomen.”

Of course there was one village in Brittany which even Caesar could not subdue, the one inhabited by the tough little cartoon warrior Astérix and his oversized friend Obélix, who can eat a whole wild boar at a sitting and makes his living (when he is not beating up Romans) delivering the massive stone obelisks used in Gallic religion. The secret weapon of mass destruction the villagers use against the Roman invader is a magic potion brewed by the local druid Panoramix (yes, they all have silly names). Drinking it makes Astérix mightier than Popeye; Obélix was dropped in a vat of it when he was a baby. Apparently there is to be an Astérix film in time for the next Olympics, in which nos héros will compete against a legionary called Gluteus Maximus (very humerus) and there will be a lot of earnest stuff about the morality of magic potions. Odd how morality can spoil a joke.

Perhaps one can forgive Caesar for not referring to this determined center of resistance in the rather po-faced narrative he composed concerning his conquests. What is harder to credit is the account he provides of Gallic wildlife. There are, he says, three sorts of deer in Gaul. One sounds like the unicorn, except that its horn has a branchy tip, like an antler (all right, maybe he had seen a stag in summer after only one of its antlers had fallen off). One is the auroch, a mighty ox which the Gauls were accustomed to catch by the same unsporting method Winnie ille Pu used to capture heffalumps—the auroch is extinct but is known from archaeology. But it is the elks which make one wonder. Elks, according to Caesar, have no knees, so they sleep standing up and leaning against trees, and when they fall over they land on their backs with their little legs wiggling in the air. If you want to catch one, you find a tree that an elk is likely to lean against and you cut halfway through it; you then lie in wait ’til an elk sidles up and goes to sleep, at which point Pif, Paf, Boom (as Astérix says when he biffs a Roman legionary). If you believe this, I have a magic potion that might interest you.

Well, actually I have. It is white and comes from the broad land south of Bordeaux called Entre-deux-Mers. The name is Verdillac—all those French names ending in -ac (Cognac, Cadillac, Carnac) are pre-Roman—and the 2004 vintage, made by the old established firm of Armand Roux, may be had locally for around ten dollars.

A skillful blend of (mostly) Semillon with Sauvignon Blanc, this is very easy to drink. Semillon is the grape variety used to make the great golden dessert wines of Sauternes (I think of dreamy glasses of Chateau Rieussec 1976 sipped in my misspent youth). What the Semillon imparts here is not sweetness, but a pleasing douceur, an almost oily mildness which kicks in just before the aftertaste; some people would call this the taste of melon, but it is more interesting than that. The Sauvignon gives the wine its central grit—the taste you get from the red frilly bits next to a peach stone—and there is an aftertaste which recalls the scent of elderflowers in high summer.

Chilling this wine too much would kill some of the cleverly constructed taste. Roast elk or braised auroch would overpower it. But drinking it with grilled chicken should make you grateful that the Romans brought to Gaul the cultivation of the grape. Astérix and his friends did not know what they were missing; “Ô vive lui, chaque fois / Que chante son coq gaulois.”