Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Navigator of the North

Bering: The Russian Discovery of America

By Orcutt Frost

Yale University Press 330pp £19.95 order from our bookshop

PUBLICATION BY YALE University Press has become a guarantee of literary merit as well as scholarly excellence. Orcutt Frost’s scholarship is irreproachable. But how does work so judicious, so scrupulous, so reticent, so resistant to sensation and artifice, contrive to be so gripping? This is the formula historians crave: a rattling read, without sacrifice of academic austerity.

Literary Review

Feb 2004

Categories

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

A Polymath’s Progress

They Mistook Kenya for the Home Counties

False Starts

Ruling the Waves

A Voyage Round His Father

Glory Be to Cod

Water World

All They Could Eat

Handing over the Keys to Paradise

Novel Arguments

From the Black Sea to Xinjiang

Down by the Sea

Bringing Back the Booty

Crops and Cavemen

Hittites & Misses

It’s Not Just Kirikiti

Will It Be All Right?

In Aleppo Once

Our Man In Spain

The Alchemy of Exile

Carving Up A Continent

Hemispheres of Influence

Reality Entertainment

Liquid Assets