There is no hope for me. Twenty years of reviewing popularizing scholarly works in the humanities, chiefly the Greco-Roman classics, has done such damage to my temper that now, when I have in hand a book that demands almost unrestrained praise, I am (just as if the book were awful) skulking around my garden, pruning bushes within an inch of their lives and grinding my teeth about the pitiful state of literary culture in this country. Why did it take a high-bred Englishman to write an engaging, imaginative, yet learned book about Homer? Wasn’t there an American who could do it?
Guess not. Adam Nicolson is an Etonian and Cantabrigian and the fifth Baron Carnock, who has farmed his family estate. I’m not pulling your leg about him: His type was not extinguished in the Great War, and persists outside of the Ralph Lauren–sponsored fantasies of Downton Abbey. If it’s possible to summarize Nicolson’s expertise, he could be called deeply versed in the connections between place and literary heritage. Though his best-known book is God’s Secretaries (2003), about the making of the King James Bible, he began in 1981 with The National Trust Book of Long Walks and in all his travels never ventured far from a prismatic consideration of where we come from, how beautiful it is, and why we’re in essence still there.
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