Courtesy of Project Gutenberg

Edward B Taylor’s Anahuac, Mexico and the Mexicans, proved to be a thoroughly surprising read. Not only was this written in the late 1860s, but it was composed and expressed in apparently modern terms and modern language. Some of the attitudes might be old fashioned, and the concept of the noble savage keeps rearing its head, but the general feeling throughout was that here were travellers who brought minds open enough to be influenced. One wonders if most modern tourists are as flexible. And here was the United States to the north, just emerging from the Civil War, not yet the established world power it would be just a couple of decades later. On reflection, one is reminded of the rise and growth of China since its own, more protracted upheavals of the mid-twentieth century.

A Pushcart At The Curb is a set of poems by John Dos Passos. Its language is unremarkable, hardly poetic in places, but interesting, nevertheless.

Brief Diversions, Tales, Treatises and Epigrams by JB Priestley is what it says on the tin, and often embarrassingly straightforward. 

A History Of England Volume 1 by David Hume is enlightening, literally, from the period of enlightenment. Hume’s prose is wonderfully transparent, the clarity sometimes brilliant.

A revisit to Chekhov via Uncle Vanya recalls that evening in Scarborough that would have been, perhaps, in 1968 or 9, when one, being me, was revising for trial exams on holiday, when a production, no doubt directed by Alan Ayckbourn made such a strong and lasting impression.

Edward Potts Cheyney’s An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England made little of an impression.

Italian Hours by Henry James takes us on pretty well-known Italian sights. But is it possible for this particular author to express himself, albeit with a true talent for sentence construction, and notwithstanding his undeniable grasp of vocabulary, though sometimes rather mis-placed, I might say!, ever, despite his quest to communicate the immediacy of experience, to write a simple sentence?

And then a revisit to The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance by Bernard Berenson. I’ve not read that since I was a student, methinks. It’s still a work of astounding scholarship and perception, despite the fact that now I have seen much of the material he is describing at first hand.

Essays by David Hume range in their subject matter, but not in their quality, which is always superb.