Tag: History

Aug 17 2026

Book review: Symbols and Allegories in Art by Matilde Battistini

My next review is of Symbols and Allegories in Art by Matilde Battistini which I discovered is part of a series: Guide to Imagery which looks interesting. I found this book by searching because I was interested in understanding more about allegories in art. I knew from watching various TV programmes that there was more to paintings than their surface appearance.

Symbols is divided into an introduction, and four sections on Time, Man, Space and Allegories, each of which describe twenty or so items. Each entry describes the linguistic and mythological origins of a term and is illustrated with at least one painting or sculpture with parts of the artwork labelled. Sometimes subsequent pages show more related artworks with labels.

Most of the paintings are from the Medieval and Renaissance periods but there are some artworks from the 19th and even 20th century. I think they are all from Western Europe presumably the allegorical language elsewhere is different.

Allegorical content in artworks evolved over time, in the Medieval period it was very much about good and evil, focussed around the Christian faith. Much of the iconography of early Christian art was based on earlier mythology. During the Renaissance there was a greater direct focus on Classical themes and mythology. Later the use of allegories was codified into documents – it was a pity not to see references to an example of this. Within Christian iconography there is an evolution from the Medieval period.

I think this book is intended for the somewhat expert in art history, it doesn’t talk about why allegories appeared in paintings and who made art for whom.

In many cases the paintings helpfully contain the word “allegory” in the title, so the reading is not as blind as you might think.

Since there are a limited number of sections each section is quite broad, so the section on time includes seasons, months, times of the day, ages of man and the world and items representing the flow and circle of time.

The Seasons appear early in the book and are a good illustration of how sets of things are represented allegorically. The seasons are associated with different phases of human life birth (spring), maturity (summer), decline (autumn) and death (winter). They are also associated with animals (ram, lion, bull and snake) and gods (Zeus, Helios, Dionysus, and Hades) in Greek mythology. Seasons can also be represented by women, we can identify which season by their headwear – Spring is represented by a woman with a crown of flowers, Summer with a crown of wheat stalks. More widely figures are recognised by the objects they hold or are close to, Saturn for example is shown as an older man carrying a scythe or hourglass.

The section on man contains entries on key biblical figures like Christ, the Virgin Mary, Eve, the Trinity, angels and Satan. As well as a range of monsters of different types. There are also what seem like miscellaneous entries on eggs and mirrors. The idea of the Trinity was created in 325AD at the Council of Nicea; angels only gained wings in art in the 4th century AD and that the iconography of the Virgin Mary derives from earlier gods such as Artemis and Isis. I was interested to learn that haloes come from Indo-Iranian deities via Roman and Byzantine emperors before reaching Christianity.

One of the pictures for the Monsters entry is Piero di Cosimo’s, Perseus Frees Andromeda which features members of the Medici family – a hidden meaning not otherwise covered in the book.

The section on space covers the astronomical (sun, sky, cosmos, moon), the earthly (garden, mountain, forest, tree) and the religious (Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Limbo). Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed in 1321, is cited a few times as a source for depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Limbo. The representations of Hell stabilised in this period.

The final section on “Allegories” is a bit different from the others, it covers items like The Senses, The Virtues, The Vices but there are rather fewer items than in the earlier sections but each is illustrated by more examples. Love is included in this section where we learn the parrot is a symbol of lust! Young women represent the cardinal virtues: fortitude, prudence, justice and temperance and the theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. The cardinal virtues derive from ancient Greek philosophy whilst the theological ones are medieval.

I must admit this book got me thinking about data. Is there a global database of paintings? How often does “allegory” appear in the title? And the somewhat off-topic question of what fraction of the paintings made in any particular period / place survive?

I found this book interesting and readable although I was expecting more on the framework into which allegorical depictions lay. The parent series definitely seems worth a look.

Jul 30 2026

Book review: A History of Railways in 100 Maps by Jeremy Black

Bookshops are dangerous places, I visited one and came away with A History of Railways in 100 Maps by Jeremy Black! It is a book my dad would have loved.

A History of Railways is approximately A4 format, as well as an introduction it contains eight chapters. The first six of these are chronological and named: Origins, Spreading the New Age (1860-85), Geopolitics and War (1885-1918), Alongside Road (1919-39), War and Air Challenge (1939-70), and Rail Developments (1970-present). It finishes with chapters on “Facing the Future” and “Rail and the Collective Imagination”. Each chapter contains a series of maps, typically they are shown with a facing page of text, occasionally there are two maps associated with a piece of text.

The style of presentation, as a hundred individual maps, makes it a little difficult to pull together themes, although the chapter introductions help with this. Britain features repeatedly but the coverage is global, and Britain’s representation is just a result of the early start made on railways in the country.

The format of maps evolved over the years, as technology improved. Surveying, mapping and printing had developed through the 18th century, prior to the railways, in part to support the creation of turnpike roads and then canals as well as prospecting for minerals for the developing Industrial Revolution. A recurring theme is that the maps rarely present terrain, simply connectivity. Early maps made to promote new lines often featured indications as to what resources (mineral or agricultural) were produced in the areas through which the railway passed. Occasionally there were innovations in presentation, such as using line width to encode freight volumes. In the 20th century novel pictorial formats appeared – advertising for leisurely rail travel.

In Britain railways were not centrally planned but there was oversight via parliamentary act – other countries went for centrally planned systems. Initially many railways were designed to link the production of materials with ports. Railways powered the Industrial Revolution, enabling heavy raw materials to be transported at low cost, and the timely distribution of goods produced. Railways drove the expansion of cities allowing goods, raw materials and people to be brought in daily over significant distances. In Britain rail freight increased more than 10-fold between1850 and 1912. Night travel become more important with signalling improvements.

As the railways grew globally Britain was central in terms of technical know how but also in terms of financing. In different countries the rise of the railways was driven by different commodities – in Uruguay it was beef, in Chile nitrate fertiliser and again linking material production to ports was central.

Prior to the rise of air travel and to a lesser extent car travel, the railways were also associated with luxury enabling pastimes like skiing. I was surprised to learn that the Orient Express service was a locomotive with just three carriages.

In most countries there was a diversity of competing rail companies as the railway systems grew. During the early 20th century there was a tendency for these to merge, many turning out to be uneconomic despite the promises of their developers. This accelerated later in the century as railways declined due to competition from road and air travel.

War features in two chapters, the railways have been central to war for a long time – for troop mobilisation and also to move supplies. During the American Civil War the Union rail network was far more developed than that of the Confederacy which helped them to victory. They are critical even now in Ukraine, for example. In addition to existing railway infrastructure specialised railways were built to support fighting in the trenches during the First World War.

Railways suffered in the post-war periods, typically they had been degraded by attacks and lack of investment during war and then after the war investment was hard to come by. In Britain the 1926 General Strike took a lot of freight off the railways, never to return. Road offers access at all points on a road for low or zero cost. Road vehicles were much cheaper and required limited training. After the Second World War air travel started to take passengers from rail, particularly in Australia, the US and Canada.

In response railways switched to diesel and electric drive reducing costs somewhat but there were widespread managed decline projects such as that of Beeching in the UK. I was surprised to learn that, despite this, American rail freight is quite successful and where they exist passenger services are not doing badly.

There are still grand new rail projects under way such as in Spain, for example, where a high speed rail system is seen as a counter to regional separatist movements. In Asia China’s belt and rail projects are looking to span the continent (despite shipping freight being cheaper). There is a project linking the Baltic states whose existing rail systems focussed on Moscow rather than each other. Delhi is expanding its suburban rail system. In the England HS2 is much reduced largely because it is costing £85 million per kilometre rather than the £13 million per kilometre typical in continental Europe a disparity arising from the large number of tunnels and viaducts built to mitigate local opposition. The COVID pandemic has also led to a 10% reduction in passenger traffic in the UK changing the economics of new railways.

The final chapter of A History of Railways is on various fictional maps and games based on the railways including a map of Sodor, Thomas the Tank Engine’s home island.

This is a beautiful book, the scope is very wide and thus a bit shallow but it provides an interesting overview of the history of railways through vignettes rather than a sweeping narrative.

Jun 01 2026

Book review: Horses by Ludovic Orlando

My next review is of Horses: A 4,000-year genetic journey across the world by Ludovic Orlando (translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan).

It is a product of the work that the author did as the leader of a team of scientists and archaeologists on the evolution of the domesticated horse. The core of this work was to sample horse remains over a wide span of time for DNA to identify where horses were domesticated and how they evolved over time. The book is scattered with vignettes of the scientists and archaeologists with whom he collaborated.

There are eleven thematic chapters, covering the origin of the domesticated horse, the origins of horses in different parts of the world, mules, and horses in different periods of time.

It is worth remembering that a little over 100 years ago horses were economically critical, an outbreak of equine flu had a huge impact on the US economy in 1872/3 since much transport of goods and people was by horse. Indeed the severity of the Boston fire is attributed to the inability to move water pumps because of a lack of horses. Globally the number of horses has declined to around 60 million since the end of the 19th century when it was probably around 75 million but against the background of a human population that has tripled in that time.

The genetic work shows that the origin of the domestic horse is relatively recent – dating to 4200 years ago in the Volga-Don valley bordering the Caspian Sea north of the Caucasus – very close to the part of Ukraine that Russia has recently invaded. All modern horses are descended from this domestication with the exception of the wild Przewalski’s horse which are descended from an abortive earlier domestication in the Botai culture of Northern Kazakhstan. Here the horse had been domesticated a little earlier , approximately 5000 years ago, as evidenced by archaeological remains, but no trace of these horses is found in modern horses (aside from the Przewalski’s horse). Prior to the genetic work the location of the domestication of the horse was uncertain, options covered central Europe and Asia, as well as the Iberian peninsula. It was believed that Przewalski’s horse represented a truly wild horse. Orlando covers pre-domestication horses in a separate chapter but does not go into the textbook evolution of the horse from eohippus.

The domestication of the horse relatively recent compared to other animals. Genetically domesticated horses have two key differences from their wild ancestors, they are more docile and have stronger backs.

Once domesticated the horse spread rapidly across Eurasia, there is a chapter here on whether the Indo-European language group spread simultaneously with the horse but the evidence is that agriculture and language spread before the horse was domesticated but that there was an acceleration around the time of its domestication. Orlando suggests that the key feature of the horse was its ability to carry loads, and that drought in the cradle of its origin drove the migration. It had previously been proposed that the horse had spread via its use in raiding and war-fighting.

Genetics are central to the whole book but don’t really get a consolidated explanation anywhere, I suppose because the details are quite technical and for the reader the key thing is the outcome – for example measuring relatedness and identifying the function of genes which have been selected by breeding. I was curious to learn of the ambling gait for horses, and its origin in a single gene, DMRT3. This is found is specific breeds such as the Icelandic Horse, Peruvian Paso and the Tennessee walking horse. I found the text descriptions of gaits confusing but there are plenty of videos online illustrating the ambling gait, it looks unusually smooth at faster paces.

As soon as humans start domesticating horses the population of horses starts to rise dramatically, human breeders break the rules of the equine social order which greatly increases the breeding capacity. The control breeders exert is even more marked nowadays in the breeding of racehorses. They all have the same notional birthday (1st January in the northern hemisphere) which means that there is a benefit to arranging the birth of foals as close after this date as possible since horses are raced very young and classed by age.

I found the chapter on modern racehorses a bit depressing, the death and injury rates for racehorses particularly in the US is high. Furthermore, genetic defects are persisted deliberately because they confer an advantage in racing the young horse.

There is a chapter on mules, once highly regarded and prestigious both for their “hybrid” vigour and also and their relative scarcity – mules are infertile so they can only be bred directly from donkeys and horses. They were particularly popular with the Romans for use in carrying goods. Also mentioned is the kunga a donkey-onager cross highly valued by the ancient Egyptians.

The chapters on different times and places focus on what we might be able to say about the characteristics of horses from that time or place, so we learn that Medieval war horses were surprisingly small, and that paler horses declined in numbers after the 5th century. The exception to this is the horse in America where the question of whether any of the horses in US have an ancestry outside that originating in Europe – the answer is that they don’t although Orlando talks about their being more work to do in this area.

The book finishes with a chapter on cloning. I was surprised to discover that Argentina seems to have taken the lead on this, cloning polo horses – it has been rather more successful than I expected.

In the epilogue Orlando talks about learning to ride at the age of 42, after he had done the majority of the work in this book!

May 15 2026

Book review: The Historical Atlas of the Celtic World by John Heywood

My next review is of The Historical Atlas of the Celtic World by John Haywood, bought in the same spending spree as Ancient Rome Infographics by Nicolas Guillerat, John Scheid and Milan Melocco. The two books are from the same publisher, Thames & Hudson, and were promoted together but they are quite different. I have to say I prefer this book, the graphics are less varied but the story comes through more clearly than Infographics.

The Historical Atlas is divided into 3 parts: The Continental Celts, The Atlantic Celts (Britain and Ireland) and The Modern Celts. Each part starts with a few pages of introduction followed by double page spreads on a range of topics – often a date range for the action is included. Typically these spreads will comprise a map, and some photos or diagrams. Overall it is a well-illustrated book.

The Celtic World is defined by Celtic languages including languages from Gaul (France), Italy and the Iberian peninsula that have long gone extinct. It once spanned central and Northern Europe, from the North of the Iberian Peninsula, across Northern Europe (including the Great Britain and Ireland) all the way to the Black Sea. Genetic evidence suggests origins as far back as 6000BC but the first archaeological evidence goes back to 800BC with the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures. Now all that remains is Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany and Galicia in North West Spain – largely as a result of a revival of Celtic culture starting in the 18th century.

In terms of settlements, hillforts were popular across the Celtic world, as well as oppidum – fortified lowland towns. The British were nearly unique in preferring roundhouses over rectangular buildings found in the rest of Europe. In the North East of Scotland brochs (fortified towers) and duns (small forts) were popular in the later ancient period (500BC-200AD). It was only as the Roman Empire expanded that parts of the Celtic World started to urbanise.

Trade was long a feature of the Celtic World, going all the way from Ireland into the rest of Europe. As contacts with the Roman Empire increased, local Celtic leaders developed a taste for luxury goods. In exchange Romans took chain-mail, barrels, shipbuilding techniques and legionaries helmets from Celts – the Celts were not technologically backward.

Druidism was an important part of Celtic culture, it was not popular with the Romans since it purportedly involved human sacrifice, although it might be wise to take Roman writings on Celts with a pinch of salt – they were trying to justify invading them.

The first written records of Celts date to 600BC by which point they dominated Western and Central Europe. They sacked Rome in 390BC, and made in-roads into Greece for 20 years from 300BC amongst other invasions to the East, these rarely left any archaeological record. The Celtic civilisation was not centralised in the manner of the later Roman Empire, it was a looser confederation with a shared culture rather than power. This meant that when the Roman Empire expanded it was faced largely with smaller battles against isolated tribes and leaders rather than facing off against another empire.

The Roman’s took over the Celtic kingdoms as they started to centralise, failing in Germany where this centralisation did not really occur. The Roman’s invaded Gaul in the 50BCs, with a brief foray into England, which was not successfully invaded until 43AD. Roman dominion largely wiped out the Celtic languages of mainland Europe, although some culture survived. In Britain the South East became increasingly Romanised and urbanised, further to the north and west life continued largely as before.

When the Roman Empire fell Celtic culture did not make a great revival across continental Europe with the exception of Brittany which retained independence from France until 1532. Great Britain fell into its “Dark Ages” with the departure of the Romans, ultimately invaded by the Anglo-Saxons. Ireland, on the other hand, flourished – driven by Christianity and a system of monasteries that stood in for more traditional urban conurbations. The Irish went on to conquer the Picts in Scotland in the 9th century, so Scotland has an Irish origin. Wales had largely been subjugated by the English king, Edward I in the late 13th century. The Reformation triggered the English to take over Ireland, where they had long had a foothold. Later they would push into Scotland during the Jacobite Rebellion with this the Celtic countries disappeared.

However, in the 18th century a Celtic revival started, perhaps originating in the identification of the Celtic language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707. It fitted with the Romantic idea of the noble savage, and also a desire by the people of Wales and Scotland to make themselves distinct in the newly united kingdom. Celtomania was a Europe-wide movement. The revived Druidism is a modern invention, we know close to nothing of the original Druidism. There was a further Celtic revival in the 1970s. Haywood is somewhat negative about the existing Celtic languages, seeing only Welsh as having a growing future.

I found this an interesting overview, it covers a great deal of time and space with many relatively small players. The double page spreads with maps help make this manageable. I think I was most surprised by the extent of the ancient Celtic world, and the influence of Ireland in the Early Middle Ages.

Apr 30 2026

Book review: King of kings by Scott Anderson

Another result of browsing in a bookshop, this review is of King of kings: The Fall of the Shah and the Revolution That Forged Modern Iran by Scott Anderson. For readers of the future – this review was written in April 2026, two months into the what is currently called the “2026 Iran War“.

King of Kings covers the run up to the Iranian revolution in 1979 mainly focussing on the 1970s and ends with the release of the American Embassy hostages in January 1981. The acknowledgements talk about the aim of the book being to capture the Revolution from the point of view of those involved through interviews with them. The book was published in 2025 and those interviewed are in their late seventies and older now.

I think it is inevitable that the focus is on American participants – Anderson specifically calls out Michael Metrinko and Gary Sick as key contributors. Sick was a member of the National Security Council under President Carter, and was the principal White House aide focused on the Persian Gulf. Metrinko was the US consul in the Iranian city of Tabriz in the run up to the Revolution and was one of the US Embassy hostages. However, Anderson also spoke with the Shah’s Queen, Farah Pahlavi who is still alive.

From the revolutionary side, those surrounding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the spiritual leader of the revolution – there is relatively little. Ebrahim Yazdi, one of his closest advisors, gets a chapter and is referenced throughout the book.

King of kings is divided into three parts: the first titled “Towards a great civilisation” provides some background on Iran and the Shah – leader of Iran from 1953 until the 1979 Revolution; the second “The Unravelling” covers the build up to the revolution, mainly in 1978 and “Downfall” covers the revolution itself from the end of 1978 through to the return of the US embassy hostages in January 1981.

The Shah claimed a dynasty for Iran going back 2500 years, in fact one of the key events in the early part of this book was an extravagant celebration of this anniversary at Persepolis. Iran lay at the collision point between the the expanding British and Russian Empires in the 19th century, oil was discovered in 1908 and largely signed away to the British by the ruling Qajar dynasty. During the First World War Iran was a battleground for Russian and German forces, in the process 2 million Iranians died. In the Second World War Iran sought an accommodation with Germany which worked fine until Russia and Britain joined forces to invade Iran; they deposed Reza Khan, the Shah’s father in 1941 and installed him (Mohammad Reza) as monarch.

In the post-war period the country was governed by the Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh who introduced a range of social reforms, and nationalised the oil industry much to the chagrin of the British and Americans who deposed him in a CIA backed coup in 1953 re-instating Mohammad Reza as an absolute monarch.

The Shah ran the country as a dictatorship although he introduced a large set of social reforms in his 1963 White Revolution which upset more conservative Muslims such as Khomeini.

Iran as a country became very wealthy very rapidly in the seventies as a result of the Shah nationalising the oil industry, and OPEC starting to exert itself (1973 is a key year here). At the same time the US essentially entirely opened up arms sales to Iran and the Shah was a very willing customer. But the wealth was very unevenly distributed, Iran urbanised rapidly bringing many young men into cities not prepared for them. These young men were often conservative from a religious point of view.

There had long been opposition groups in Iran but they were subject to arrest, violence from the secret police (SAVAK) or, like Khomeini, exile. Khomeini had been living in Iraq but Saddam Hussein was becoming increasingly unhappy with his presence and he fled to France in October 1978. This turned out to be a fortuitous move because he was much more able to hold court with Western journalists there with his lieutenants he was able to present a (completely fake) moderate face.

It’s difficult to pinpoint a point at which the revolution started, Iran is a Shia majority country and offers a wide range of dates for public displays of mourning which could be readily repurposed to rioting. This started happening with increasing frequency and surprising precision from the start of 1978 following a government sanctioned news paper editorial attacking Khomeini. Precision because very particular businesses and institutions were targeted by well-disciplined rioters. I think this is part of the story is missing something, it seems clear there was significant organisation on the ground of the revolutionary forces and there is no real indication of Khomeini being very actively involved in this.

The Revolution, when it came, followed the departure of the Shah from Iran on 16th January 1979 – having installed Shapour Bakhtiari as Prime Minister – an opposition leader of long standing – with a view to arranging a moderate post-revolutionary government. Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran on 1st February 1979. Outside of Iran he had been making moderate noises but on his return to Iran he resumed his theocratic radicalism, sacking the recently installed Prime Minister and adding his own. The army mutinied in favour of Khomeini’s forces. A number of senior figures from the previous regime were summarily executed within a month of Khomeini’s return. He then set about making a constitution that handed power entirely to clerics (and ultimately himself).

There was possibly a space for a more moderate government but that ended with the US embassy hostage crisis and the US’s botched rescue attempt. The Embassy had been invaded by radical university students and it is not clear whether Khomeini had sanctioned the attack but in any case he supported it once done. Also unclear is whether Ronald Reagan’s campaign team had influenced the Iranians to delay the release of the hostages – it seems very plausible – they were released on the eve of Reagan’s inauguration. Interestingly the Revolutionary Iranians were keen to do arms deals with the Americans since they had a large quantity of US military hardware and needed consumables resupply.

Anderson’s conclusion regarding the Revolution was that the Shah seemed strangely inert as the revolution approached, attributing this to him being a dictator but not of the sufficiently brutal, bloodthirsty type to put a stop to opposition. In common with all dictators he ended up surrounding himself with people that only agreed with him. I can’t help thinking his deteriorating health played a role – he died at the age of 60 in 1980 having fled Iran in January 1979, he had been fairly seriously ill for several years but kept it secret even from his wife.

The US was almost completely oblivious to the tide rising against the Shah, very few of their embassy staff spoke the local language (Farsi) and they were discouraged from speaking to any sort of opposition to the Shah. They were also doing good business with Shah for military hardware, and saw him as a moderate bastion and ally in the area. As the revolution unfolded the institutions of the US government were fairly actively fighting each other.

I found this gripping reading, partly because of its current relevance but also because it is well written. It is clear that the American focus does not capture the internal workings of the revolutionary forces very well but I suspect that is still a hard problem even now, for Middle Eastern writers.