Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast by Charlie Connelly

Not your usual travel book, for this book revew posting.

Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast by Charlie Connelly

The Shipping Forecast, for those who’ve never heard of it before, is the maritime weather report for the British Isles. Broadcast four times per day, for many years it was essential to the safety of commercial shipping and fishermen, who would be out in freezing, dangerous seas with very little forewarning of changes in wind speed and direction or the possibility of severe weather beyond the horizon. There’s a very strict reporting pattern that must be followed — for example, the entire forecast must be read clearly and carefully at dictation speed, and it cannot exceed 350 words. Nowadays, with GPS systems and advanced weather-tracking techniques, the Shipping Forecast is not so much a matter of life-or-death as it was in years past. But Charlie Connelly, the author of Attention All Shipping, thought that this aspect of nautical history was worth a more in-depth exploration…and decided that within the space of a year, he would visit (or at least cross through) every single region mentioned in the broadcast.

Connelly breaks up his book into chapters by region, beginning with ‘Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire’ and ending with ‘Trafalgar’ (which until is only mentioned during the 0048 report). Since several of the regions are entirely water, the bulk of the book consists of Connelly’s experiences in icy Scandinavian coastal villages, where the weather is inhospitable and the cost of a beer is exorbitant. (Connelly’s complaints about the costs of alcohol grow a trifle irritating after a while, but then again you have to give him credit for travelling to a number of godforsaken locations where alcohol might’ve made things slightly more bearable.) There are some truly moving sections in the book, particularly one where Connelly visits a station of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, an entirely volunteer-funded and volunteer-run organisation that has saved countless lives in treacherous seas around Britain. And you can’t help but feel sorry for him (or savour a little schadenfreude) at his recollections of gut-wrenching seasickness as he attempts to travel through gale-force winds on his way from one region to another.

If you’ve grown up listening to the soporific drone of ‘Forties, Cromarty, Forth’, then you’ll enjoy reading about one man’s journey through a Radio 4 institution. And even if you’ve never heard the Shipping Forecast before, it’s still a good travel book that’s definitely off the beaten path.

Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics by Matthew Parris

Another quasi-politician’s memoirs? Don’t worry — I’ll run out of them one of these days.

Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics by Matthew Parris

The subtitle of Chance Witness is a very good indication of former MP and newspaper columnist Matthew Parris’s approach to his autobiography. He never claims to be one of the in-crowd in the political circles in which he moved for a time. Most of the time, he claims, it was only through chance that he ended up where he was — for example, he attributes his selection as a Conservative MP in the 1980s primarily to the fact that he once leapt into the freezing waters of Thames to save a drowning dog. (It apparently swung the vote of the selection committee, which was wavering only slightly in his favour.) Yet a fair number of key events in his life weren’t entirely left to chance…unless you consider that there was an element of chance in the fact that at a fairly young age he realised he was homosexual.

The trouble with most autobiographies I’ve read usually revolves around the fact that quite a lot of people simply haven’t led lives which really lend themselves to the kind of prolonged navel-gazing that autobiographies demand. More often than not, what starts out interesting and full of vivid detail can often devolve into a virtual laundry list of ‘people I have known’ and ‘places I have been’ and ‘what it all means to me’. Or conversely, an autobiography which becomes quite fascinating in the later chapters devoted to adulthood requires a long and arduous slog through page after page of the author’s reminiscences of memorable bowel movements from his/her childhood. (Or something along those lines.) But as far as autobiographies go, Chance Witness generally doesn’t suffer much from the occasional tedious bits that tend to pepper the pages of similar stories. Put it down to Parris’s long stint as parliamentary sketch writer for the Times, a job that requires the writer to be succinct and clever with words and ruthless about fitting as much information as possible into a restricted space. If anything, there are places where the narrative seems to have been cut short, though in such a way that the marks of the authorial scissors aren’t readily apparent.

Chance Witness has much to recommend it, not least of which is Parris’s thought-provoking account of his time as a MP in the 1980s, when his sexuality wasn’t so much an open secret as it was a carefully-circumvented predicament. He talks quite frankly about his experiences ‘cruising’ on Clapham Common in the days before London’s gay community truly existed, including a horrific account of a incident where he was savagely beaten by two men while crossing the Common one evening…and the shame he felt when he lied to the police and to the press about where and why he was attacked. Yet Parris manages to strike a decent balance when discussing his sexual orientation in relation to his life: he doesn’t try to pretend that it has overshadowed or affected everything he’s ever done. Chance Witness is quite interesting to read almost for that reason alone, even if there’s much else to recommend it.

Collected Poems 1945-1990 and Collected Later Poems 1980-2000 by R.S. Thomas

A good friend of mine initially piqued my interest in the poetry of R.S. Thomas, but I never seemed to be able to find a copy of his works when I was looking for one. Yet in one of those happy coincidences that seem to happen most often when I’m book shopping, I was poking through the poetry shelves in Daunt Books when a minor book landslide nearly sent several volumes toppling onto my head. After a moment’s flailing, I stemmed the book-fall…and the book I ended up using to hold back the deluge was the collected poems of R.S. Thomas. I couldn’t just leave it on the shelf after all that, could I?

Collected Poems 1945-1990 and Collected Later Poems 1980-2000 by R.S. Thomas

Ronald Stuart Thomas was a Welsh clergyman who spent his working life in a number of rural parishes, and much of his poetry centres on religion, rural Wales, and the exploration of Welsh national and cultural identity. He was a fervent proponent of the Welsh language and Welsh culture, not least because he grew up speaking English and regretted the fact that he only came to learn Welsh as an adult. His outspoken views occasionally sparked controversy, most notably when he publically praised the arsonists who destroyed English holiday-homes in Wales in the 1980s. And there is a good deal of anger and resentment in his poetry, as well as frustration and sadness, as shown for example in the opening lines of ‘The Old Language’:

England, what have you done to make the speech
My fathers used a stranger to my lips,
An offence to the ear, a shackle on the tongue
That would fit new thoughts to an abiding tune?

It borders on cliche to describe his writing style as ‘flinty’ or ‘bitter’, but it’s a very apt description. The crisply lyrical quality of his poetry makes it wonderful to recite aloud, and its memorable sound and images even inspired a bit of gentle parody by another excellent Welsh poet, Harri Webb. They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but I think parody runs a close second at times.

The first Collected Poems isn’t the complete corpus of Thomas’s work. His Collected Later Poems covers his last five collections of poetry, and also includes several poems and fragments that he had written but not published before his death in 2000. There are a few points that bear mentioning with regard to this second collection. ‘The Echoes Return Slow’, the first section of the book, is an autobiography done in short snatches of stream-of-consciousness prose followed by brief poems. These later poems seem to have a more religious turn than those from his earlier collection. Most of the poems have a strongly Christian theme, musings on man’s relationship with God and how to make sense of religion and faith in a world where both are often tested. Compared to the first collection, there are certainly fewer rants (so to speak) about the decline of Wales and Welsh culture and language. And though I enjoy Thomas’s writing style, with its alternating crisp tones and slow, languid musings, I have to say that I prefer the poems of the first collection. Thomas’s poetic voice comes through more strongly, I think, in his writings about the Welsh people. But both volumes are collections of moving and thought-provoking poems by a very remarkable poet, and I’m glad I have a nice compact collection of his work.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick

I may actually make a post that isn’t a review one of these days, but at the moment I doubt that anyone wants to read my ramblings about the Liberal Democrats’ leadership race. So I’ll set that aside for now in favour of something a little less topical.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited by Isaac Kramnick

The Age of Enlightenment is a name commonly given to the philosophical and intellectual movements in Europe and in the American colonies during the eighteenth (and early seventeenth) century. A list of contributors to the ‘Enlightenment’ would have to include a remarkably diverse group of thinkers and writers who debated any number of philosophical, political, and social topics, many of whom disagreed vehemently with the writings of others. Whether it’s the pamphlets of Thomas Paine or the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot, Mary Wollstonecraft denouncing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opinions on the education of women or Edmund Burke ‘reflecting’ on the French Revolution, Immanuel Kant’s critique of pure reason or the sheer prolific fury of just about anything written by Voltaire, the Enlightenment writers put their emphasis on reason, rational thought, scientific analysis, and the study of natural law in relation to the individual and society. The idea was to move away from irrationality and superstition (which some of these writers, though by no means all of them, attributed in part to the tyranny of organised religions) and towards a more unified framework for how the world operated. This intellectual framework helped form the basis for classical liberalism, democracy, and capitalistic thought — and by extension, formed the philosophical underpinnings of the American and French Revolutions.

The Portable Enlightenment Reader is a set of texts taken from the writings of the Enlightenment’s most notable philosophers, grouped by subject and topic and pulled together into a single volume. The texts chosen for this portable edition are, I’d have to say, a fairly good selection. All of the big names of the time period are there — Locke and Rousseau and Hume take up a decent amount of space, and the selections are usually long enough to provide a taste of the topic without taking up too much room. The idea in a book like this is to give the casual reader a sense of how each of these writers wrote and what they wrote about. For example, if you’ve ever wondered whether Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is worth reading, then the selection provided in the Portable Enlightenment Reader may give you a sense of whether you think you’d like to try to tackle his prose.

Not all of the selections are weighty philosophical treatises or explorations of history. There’s a downright smutty snippet from John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, a work of erotic fiction billed as the memoirs of a ‘woman of pleasure’ — indicative of the interest that the Enlightenment writers took in the definition, understanding, and pursuit of pleasure. There are some noteworthy perspectives on the early women’s rights movement, including a short passage written by Thomas Paine that reflects on the unfortunate state of women as he saw it. The tail end of the Enlightenment saw some consideration on the nature of the slave trade and the position of the ‘Negro race’ (as many writers called it) with respect to white Europeans. The book as a whole is meant for dabbling — a means of tempting the appetite, as it were. Now that I know where to start from, the Portable Enlightenment Reader has given me a solid basis for continuing my reading of the works of writers who helped shape Western thought at a crucial moment in Western history.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault

Here follows my first attempt at reading and reviewing Foucault, completed earlier this year. Not a bad effort, I think, for a first attempt.

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault

Before the early 19th century, European ideas of crime and punishment tended to involve very public displays of the power of the monarch and the power of the state against the offending individual. Nowhere was this tendency more evident than in the spectacle of public executions. Those convicted of murder, piracy, counterfeiting, or other notable capital crimes would be taken to a public place for hanging or decapitation, and certain kinds of crimes warranted particularly gruesome punishments. In England, for instance, until 1790 the official punishment for women convicted of petty treason — a wife who killed her husband or a servant who killed her master or mistress — was burning at the stake. The mass hangings of convicts were public spectacles, with public processions, viewing stands set up for spectators and an almost festival-like atmosphere on the day. For those who did not receive the death penalty, the prisons that existed were more like enforced stays in squalid communal housing, with very little distinction drawn between the treatment given to first-time and habitual criminals, as well as those who were clearly mentally ill. And yet in a relatively short space of time, the horrific public executions and communal prisons gave way to quiet and concealed executions and the far more orderly and regimented system of modern prison life, a trend that continues into the present day. Social historians tend to point to the writings of progressive reformers who advocated a more dignified and humanitarian approach to the punishment of offenders. But a more in-depth look at the history of the prison provides an alternate viewpoint — one that has less to do with purely humanitarian concerns and far more to do with the desire to establish a greater sense of control over society and those who would consider violating its laws.

In Discipline and Punish, social theorist Michel Foucault directly confronts and challenges a number of existing ideas surrounding the prison reforms of the late 1700s and early 1800s, and even into the twentieth century. By looking at the evolution of justice systems (focusing primarily on France), he suggests that the shift away from public executions and towards the idea of incarceration and reform within prison walls was a means of reframing the image of the power of society over the individual. Public executions often had the effect of making a criminal into a public martyr, and the ballads and broadsides printed for the common people did less to condemn the crime and more to glorify the criminal. By shifting the focus of justice into the prison and out of the public eye, authorities would have more direct control over the lives of those who had violated the norms of society.

Foucault compares prisons to other collective corrective organisations — convents and monasteries, military barracks, schools (both the regular kind and those formed for charity children or juvenile offenders), lunatic asylums and hospitals, workhouses for the poor, and even the large factory complexes of the early Industrial Revolution — and finds the common threads of common discipline, constant surveillance, enforced work and education, and strict adherence to an internal hierarchy in all of these institutions. The idea of correction and reform has shifted society’s focus from the individual’s body (i.e., the brandings, tortures, and hangings carried out on offenders) to the individual’s mind and soul. This shift in focus, Foucault claims, has not had the reforming effect that the authorities would hope. Instead, it has actually encouraged and refined criminal activity and behaviours.

Discipline and Punish is a very dense text, and I had to look up a summary outline of the book more than once or twice as I read to be certain that I was following the premise of his argument. In the end, I think I managed to follow Foucault’s line of reasoning, though I know I would have to go back and read this over again in smaller fragments to get all of the nuances and points that he makes in the text. But as an analysis of the creation of the modern prison and its effects on the changing nature of crime and criminality in modern society, Discipline and Punish adds to the powerful argument that others have made as well — the prison system, as it stands, is not as successful at punishing crime and disciplining offenders as we might like to think. And it’s a bit refreshing, in a way, that Foucault doesn’t actually offer possible ’solutions’ to this quandary.

The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

I have to admit, I picked up this book because of its title. It sounded oddly provocative, and I wanted to see if it would be a polemic thinly disgused as a historical study. (It happens far more often than you might think, believe me.)

The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman

The basic premise of Charles Freeman’s book might not go over so well with those of the Christian faith. He claims that the early Christian church played a pivotal role in stifling many of the intellectual traditions that had developed over the centuries, beginning with the ancient Greeks. The Greek gods seemed to operate at a distance from humanity, allowing the separation of faith and belief from reason and the scientific method. This degree of separation, and the Greeks’ attempts to make sense of it, gave rise to many crucial developments in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and other rigorously intellectual disciplines. But as Christianity grew from a small cult following into a greater religious (and later political) movement, the early Christian leaders did their best to paper over the cracks in their doctrine by stifling dissent and debate, imposing a religious orthodoxy that helped to crush the practice of free and open philosophical debate that had been inherited from the Greek world. The attempt to hammer out a comprehensive religious doctrine from a mishmash of conflicting sources is the central narrative of Freeman’s book, and it’s fairly clear that while he understands why events happened as they did, he isn’t entirely happy about it.

Truthfully, I almost don’t feel qualified to pass judgement on this book. There is a lot of information here, covering nearly a millennia of history (and ancient history, at that). What is more, my knowledge of Christianity and basic Christian doctrine is general at best — and decidedly based in a nonreligious perspective. I feel as if I don’t have enough background knowledge to go through and challenge some of the points Freeman has made in his book even if I wanted to. But I did find his historical work fairly convincing, particularly with regard to the development of Christianity from its roots as an offshoot of the variations on Judaism found during the Second Temple period. I was also pleasantly surprised by his organisation and writing style, and then when I started getting into the meat of the book the sheer amount of information crammed into the pages caught me and held me fast. Fortunately for other less-informed readers such as myself, Freeman has given his audience a slew of excellent footnotes to go through and form their own conclusions. I think I may have to do some further digging on my own.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

First, a bit of introduction to Penguin Books’ ‘Great Ideas’ series. Penguin selected twelve writers whose works span the ages of Western civilisation (from Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger to English journalist George Orwell), and printed special editions of each author’s best known work or a representative sample of the same. I’ve picked up a few of them, and here are my thoughts on one of the first volumes in the series.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

From around 160 to 180 CE, Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius spent much of his time engaged in military campaigns and skirmishes against various people on the edges of the Roman empire. While on these campaigns, he began to write down his thoughts on ways in which he could improve his life and his way of thinking. His Meditations are regarded as classic examples of Stoic philosophy and spirituality, with a focus on moderation and self-reliance. In modern times, the word ’stoic’ has taken on a somewhat negative quality — to be ’stoic’ is to be dour and joyless and fatalistic, possessed of a stiff upper-lip and a squared jaw and an immobile brow. But the Meditations present a far more agreeable face of Stoic philosophy, emphasising balance and inner peace and common sense…and a rather refreshing belief in the power of human reason.

It’s true that the Mediations repeat the same general ideas many times over, slightly reworded each time. Yet these reflections compiled over the course of many years, and each different way of looking at an idea is a reflection of Marcus Aurelius’s thoughts at the time. It makes more sense to read a few pages at a time, or a few thoughts at a time, and come back later and read a little more. The Meditations are a fine introduction to Stoic philosophy and to the works of one of the most enduring philosophers of Roman times, and in a slim and compact volume they’re nice and portable, perfect for picking up when you have a few moments to spare — much in the same way as Marcus Aurelius wrote them down.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

I wasn’t planning to post another Umberto Eco book review so soon, but with new material coming out on this book’s primary subject, I simply couldn’t resist.

Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

When you’re an editor at an Italian publishing house that’s essentially a glorified vanity press specialising in occult and esoteric literature, you’re bound to read some (or rather, many) manuscripts that would be best filed under the term ‘crackpot.’ Whether the subject at hand happens to be those pesky Freemasons who keep poisoning the wells, or incontrovertible proof that the Knights Templar are alive, well, and plotting with the Soviets, the BBC, and a reincarnated Joseph of Arimathea to find the Holy Grail and take over the world…well, even conspiracy theories can get boring if you read enough of them. So three editors — an academic researcher named Causabon, an eccentric writer named Belbo, and a numerology enthusiast named Diotavelli — decide to have a little fun with what is otherwise a fairly dull job.

Their plan (which they later refer to as ‘the Plan’) is very simple. They will pull random ideas and statements from their piles of crackpot manuscripts and start to weave them together as carefully as possible. Belbo even has a computer program that is capable of shuffling the ideas around in random patterns, which the three men can then use to keep coming up with increasingly fantastical connections between seemingly unrelated incidents. The basic idea behind the Plan is to rewrite world history as one massive conspiracy theory, involving the Knights Templar and a mysterious power source greater than an entire atomic arsenal. It’s a game, and an intellectual challenge, and a way to stave off the boredom of their work. But when the Plan they create out of nowhere soon starts to take on a life of its own, the three men get increasingly caught up in the nonsensical story they’ve bashed together. And they will soon discover that there are more than a few people out there who are eager to believe in the greatest conspiracy theory of all time — and will do anything to ensure that the Plan comes to fruition.

Foucault’s Pendulum, first and foremost, isn’t a reference to philosopher Michel Foucault. It’s a reference to the physics experiment designed by French physicist Léon Foucault; specifically, the one located at the Musée des arts et métiers in Paris. That said, the book does for the suspense thriller what Eco’s The Name of the Rose did for the period detective story: it faithfully follows all of the standard elements of the genre while simultaneously giving you a crash course in world history, classical and occult literature, crosscultural studies, and heaven knows what else besides. It’s by no means an easy book to read — I freely admit that there were entire chapters where names and literary references were completely lost on me and I had to piece together the characters’ train of thought as best I could — but Eco does a fine job explaining the crucial plot points and information in a way that doesn’t make it sound as if he’s talking down to the readers. And while I didn’t find the characters as engaging as those in The Name of the Rose, they’re still carefully drawn and interesting to follow. The story takes time to unfold and set up, and the Plan isn’t introduced until almost two-thirds of the way through the book, but the build-up is absolutely necessary to give the reader a sense of place in the story and a slightly more distanced perspective on the madness that brings the plot to its conclusion.

Perhaps the most important point that Eco makes in this book about conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theories (no matter how small at the outset) are by their very nature insidious, all too adept at getting under your skin and completely skewing your view of reality. Even the three editors are not immune to the power of conspiracy theories, even though they are fully aware that they’ve made the whole thing up as part of a silly game. As Causabon notes bitterly, on reflection, ‘I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.’ There’s a very clear warning in that comment, one that I definitely had to keep in mind as I read this book — and one which I have a feeling I’ll keep in mind for some time to come when looking at historical and literary connections.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Slipping a bit of historical literature into the book review list today.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

The Name of the Rose is, to put it in crudest terms, a murder mystery. The story begins with the investigation into the death of a Benedictine monk, and the corpses of more of his brethern begin to pile up over the course of the novel in a way that would shock those who are used to a more genteel kind of murder mystery. (From my extensive reading of the more formulaic examples of the genre, any more than three corpses tends to strain the story; most authors shy away from mass bloodshed and would prefer to confine themselves to one or two victims.) But The Name of the Rose is more than just a simple murder mystery — it is practically a history lesson in the schisms of the mediaeval Church, a discourse on the nature of heresy and the purpose of the clergy, and a fictional but still factual rendering of the bloody conflict between temporal and spiritual power in Europe in the early 14th century. Furthermore, the story takes place in an abbey that is essentially a massive library, a veritable temple of books and a home to those who jealously guard knowledge like dragons on a mountain of gold. Everyone in the story is a little bit crazy over books, some more so than others, and the books play their own part in the drama. Since I very much enjoy books, history, and murder mysteries, I think it safe to say that this book had my full attention from the start.

The tale is told by a aged Benedictine monk, Adso of Melk, as a recollection of past events — in the story, he is a young man barely into the cloister, serving as an apprentice and as the Dr Watson to the Sherlock Holmes-like figure of English Franciscan monk William of Baskerville. As the story progress, William uses his skills of deduction and logical reasoning to investigate a number of mysterious goings-on at the abbey, many of which appear to be connected to the knowledge that is hidden in the innermost depths of the abbey’s labyrinthine library. And as the body count increases at a pace that both startled and intrigued this reader, William begins to learn that someone has (or believes they have) a very good reason for ensuring that the secrets concealed in the library remain secret…for there are those who wholeheartedly believe that death is not too small a price to pay to ensure that God is not mocked.

The Name of the Rose is a small masterpiece of literary complexity, because there are so many plot points and twists and turns to follow (both for the characters and for the reader) that at times it seems as if the story will never end — and that is by no means a bad thing. Having had this book recommended to me by many people, I picked up a copy in anticipation of a long stretch of time when I could read uninterrupted. I’m very glad I did, because if I had had to keep stopping and starting it and trying to pick up where I’d left off, I think I wouldn’t have enjoyed it half as much as I did. It demands a lot of concentration and attention, but the story is well-worth the effort put into reading it. I certainly learned a lot from reading it, and I have a feeling that it will take at least another two or three full re-reads before I can fully appreciate all of the work that Eco put into it. As far as murder mysteries go, The Name of the Rose stands well apart from the vast majority of its kind.

Metro Maps of the World, 2nd Edition by Mark Ovenden

I freely admit to being something of a trainspotter. Not in the sense that I write down engine numbers in little books, but in the sense that I admire the organisation involved in the smooth running of public transportation. I do hope that this review doesn’t make me sound a complete anorak.

Metro Maps of the World, 2nd Edition by Mark Ovenden

I’m fond of maps, and the development of maps and map design. The ways in which we display information intended for public use is a particularly fascinating subject, bringing together all kinds of aspects of semiotics, information management, graphic design, and overall aesthetics. So Mark Ovenden’s Metro Maps of the World sets my heart a-fluttering in a way that rather defies its status as a book that seems to be meant for display on a coffee table.

The book shows the development of underground/metro systems in cities all over the world, and more specifically, the development of their mapping systems. Due reverence is paid to Harry Beck, the Englishman who revised the way that metro maps were created — instead of showing how the London Underground lines really looked to scale with a London street map, he simplified the design into a cleaner, more readable format that is more of a diagram than a proper map. (Here’s an image of Beck’s revised Tube plan from the early 1930s; compare it to one of the pre-Beck maps.) But Metro Maps of the World covers more than just London. Ovenden’s book compiles historical maps of the world’s major metro systems, from the Moscow Metro to the New York City subway, from Berlin’s U-bahn to Tokyo’s TRTA/TOEI system. There are sections in the book devoted to smaller systems that are no less intricate in design, as well as metro systems whose construction is still being planned.

Gorgeously illustrated and rich in detail, Metro Maps of the World is utterly fascinating to anyone who has attempted to navigate the metro system of a major city. And if you plan to visit any major city in the near future, the book might also be terribly useful from a practical standpoint. Better to get an idea of how the maps work when you’re still at home, after all — it certainly beats standing in front of a metro map and feeling panic rising in your stomach when you realise that you’ve no idea how to get where you want to go.