On June 2, 2015, two metal-detector hobbyists aware of the area’s heritage, George Powell and Layton Davies, drove ninety minutes north of their homes, in South Wales, to the hamlet of Eye, about four miles outside Leominster. The farmland there is picturesque: narrow, hedgerow-lined lanes wend among pastures dotted with spreading trees and undulating crop fields. Anyone fascinated by the layered accretions of British history—or eager to learn what might be buried within those layers—would find it an attractive spot. English place-names, most of which date back to Anglo-Saxon times, are often repositories of meaning: the name Eye, for example, derives from Old English, and translates as “dry ground in a marsh.” Just outside the hamlet was a rise in the landscape, identified on maps by the tantalizing appellation of King’s Hall Hill.
Powell, a warehouse worker in his early thirties, and Davies, a school custodian a dozen years older, were experienced “detectorists.” There are approximately twenty thousand such enthusiasts in England and Wales, and usually they find only mundane detritus: a corroded button that popped off a jacket in the eighteen-hundreds, a bolt that fell off a tractor a dozen years ago. But some detectorists make discoveries that are immensely valuable, both to collectors of antiquities and to historians, for whom a single buried coin can help illuminate the past. Scanning the environs of King’s Hall Hill, the men suddenly picked up a signal on their devices. They dug into the red-brown soil, and three feet down they started to uncover a thrilling cache of objects: a gold arm bangle in the shape of a snake consuming its own tail; a pendant made from a crystal sphere banded by delicately wrought gold; a gold ring patterned with octagonal facets; a silver ingot measuring close to three inches in length; and, stuck together in a solid clod of earth, what appeared to be hundreds of fragile silver coins.
Who knew that the postmodern Armageddon would feel quite so peaceful? On a bright autumn morning, as the pandemic’s second wave rolls in, the streets of Westminster are quieter than on a Sunday dawn. Here, the British state and its offshoots—the public bodies, the think tanks, the charities—normally throng and hum. But the state and its appendages are working from home, so you enter Tate Britain from a near-deserted riverside where a solitary leaf-collector blows autumn into piles. Once inside, in the Tate’s new exhibition of works by J.M.W. Turner, crisis and catastrophe explode in ecstatic vortices of light and shadow, blaze and mist. Two centuries ago, emergencies really acted up.
Cities are not only made from bricks and mortar, they are built out of institutions, and the governing structures that formed Edo were from the outset intimately tied to the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate, which was toppled in the mid-19th century during Japan’s Meiji Restoration. In 1862, the heavily armed samurai compounds were abandoned, and by 1870 the networks of beggar-spies who once policed the city had been replaced by gendarmes in crisp serge uniforms. It is not just Edo’s urban fabric that has disappeared but also a whole social order, and with it an entire mentality.
Luckily, there are other ways to visit this vanished city. Possibly no other country in the world possesses as rich an archive of early modern sources as Japan, nor as rich a tradition of writing fine-grained urban history.
In his latest books, Horowitz — long admired for creating the television series “Foyle’s War” and “Midsomer Murders,” as well as the Alex Rider spy thrillers for young people — showcases a cleverness and finesse that even Dame Agatha might envy. “Moonflower Murders” resembles a super Mobius strip, interlacing multiple degrees and levels of fictiveness.
C.J. Cooke’s new novel, The Nesting, ticks all the boxes of a satisfying thriller, but it’s more than just a safe bet for a good read on a dark and stormy night. Cooke’s thought-provoking depiction of the sinister side of motherhood and Mother Nature adds depth to the book’s fast-paced, gripping plot and amplifies its eerie atmosphere.