James Hamilton-Paterson
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea…
Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City
By Mark Adams
Text Publishing 306pp £10.99 order from our bookshop
There is a certain set of topics New Scientist calls ‘fruitloopery’ that experience tells us should be avoided at all costs. The older we become, the more glumly certain we are that we have heard it all before, whether it’s UFOs, Bigfoot, psychic phenomena or even just plain old homeopathy. Atlantis is firmly on this list and a book subtitled ‘My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City’ duly provoked a sigh as I opened it. Yet three hundred-odd pages later I am moderately glad to have read it, because Mark Adams proves sceptical, engaging and even informative in his exploration of this hoary old myth. As to whether his quest was obsessive before he began it is another matter. His account can easily be read as a genial excuse for racking up air miles as he shuttles about the world interviewing a collection of kooks and academics, nutters and scholars.
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'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553
'The authors do not shrink from spelling out the scale of the killings when the Rhodesians made long-distance raids on guerrilla camps in Mozambique and Zambia.'
Xan Smiley on how Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/what-the-secret-agent-saw