Gillian Darley
Under the Volcano
Vesuvius: A Biography
By Alwyn Scarth
Princeton University Press xxpp £24.95 order from our bookshop
Any biography of Vesuvius is bound to be an open-ended affair. The story of this shifting, threatening mountain, rising so blithe and sublime above the Bay of Naples, is a long one of which we know very little. The earliest descriptive evidence is frustratingly epigrammatic, depending on the scant remarks of classical poets, historians and geographers and only amplified with Pliny the Younger’s two famous letters, looking back in memory but with crystalline clarity on the events of AD 79 after a thirty-year interval.
Alwyn Scarth is an academic geologist who has written extensively on volcanoes, and this ‘biography’ is a careful, textbook record of Vesuvius, taking its chronology of the major recorded eruptions largely from eyewitness accounts. Scarth devotes a great deal of space to the 1631 eruption, which took place
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Clayton’s book may be unusual in that she avoids the British biographical tradition of combining amateur psychoanalysis with elevated gossip. But it is perfect on its own terms.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/she-carved-her-own-way
'Wilson’s target is less a straightforward biography than a sifting of Lawrence’s legacy for what remains urgent and alive, the aim being to shed its infernal baggage in search of an abiding paradise.'
@nemoloris on a new life of D H Lawrence.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/sex-was-a-mystery-to-him
'One of the gloomiest, most depressing and yet most gripping crime novels I have read in a long time.'
@NJCooper_crime reviews new books by @JaneCaseyAuthor, @FrankRGardner, @gregbuchanan, @AuthorSJBolton, @ajaychow, @adeleparks, @PGJonesVenice and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/may-2021-crime-round-up