A Training School for Elephants by Sophy Roberts
In 1879, shortly before the 1884 Berlin Conference let loose the “scramble for Africa”, King Leopold of Belgium, the most brutal of the colonial overlords, came up with a scheme to give him an added advantage. He shipped four Asian elephants and their mahouts from India to the east coast of Africa and marched them inland to use them as teachers in a training school for African elephants – which then existed in a population 20 to 30 times larger than today. He wanted to turn the indigenous animals into all-purpose beasts of burden in the effort to open up the continent’s interior.
The travel writer Sophy Roberts came across this forgotten story by chance and quicky understood that alongside its picaresque historical oddity it also contained themes that still resonate today: “racism, resource extraction, wildlife extinction. The long tail of empire…” Although these ideas are embedded in her book – an elegant mixture of history, reportage and travel writing – she has a light touch and never slips into righteous didacticism. Rather, following in the elephants’ footsteps, she discovers that they left an indelible folk memory behind them.
By Michael Prodger
Doubleday, 432pp, £22. Buy the book
Eric Ravilious Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries introduced by Alan Powers
The cult of the painter-designer Eric Ravilious is not of long standing. For decades after his death at 39 in 1942 on war service, his name was kept alive by friends and adherents but flickered only intermittently in the public consciousness. One of the factors in the reappraisal that has taken place over the past 20 years is the handsome stream of books that has emerged from the estimable Mainstone Press, marked by a calibre of design that would have delighted Ravilious himself.
This new volume is a compendium of observations by critics, commentators and friends who judged Ravilious’s work as it emerged. Among the 30 or so pieces – both long and short – are his Times obituary; reflections on his lithographs by John Piper; thoughts by Osbert Lancaster on his distinctiveness; reminisces by his lover Helen Binyon and friends such as Peggy Angus and Olive Cook; and essays and prefaces for early exhibitions of his work. Taken together they amount to a poignant tribute, the mood of which was summed up by Noel Carrington: “An artist who dies in his prime is naturally the cause of much grief to his contemporaries for they cannot but think of what is lost to the world.”
By Michael Prodger
The Mainstone Press, 144pp, £30
Humans: A Monstrous History by Surekha Davies
In 2014, the historian Surekha Davies attended a conference about how societies might prepare for the discovery of extraterrestrial life. She felt the panel, who were speaking in terms of pathogens and weapons, were missing something far more human: how would we respond to the idea we are not alone in the universe?
Humans: A Monstrous History aims to tell the history of humanity through the way it has defined itself: against what it is not, against monsters. Davies’ monsters are not all Frankensteins and vampires, but any being that has the “capacity to challenge or transcend ideas about typical bodies or behaviours”. Humans documents the curious ways we have thought about who counts as human throughout history, from Pliny’s belief that extreme environments created monstrous people to the 18th-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’s four subtypes of humans. Most significant for our time, however, are Davies’ thoughts on nation states – the way ideas about race and birthrights are used for dark political ends – and on how AI might end up monstering us.
By Pippa Bailey
University of California Press, 336pp, £25. Buy the book
Hiding Mengele: How a Nazi Network Harbored the Angel of Death by Betina Anton
More than Hitler himself – a full characterisation will probably forever elude the novelist, the historian and the psychohistorian – it is easier to narrativise his lunatic lackeys, men whose violence was unleashed by Nazism. “Doctor” Josef Mengele, a man of such evil he was nicknamed the “Angel of Death”, is one such character. In the film The Boys from Brazil, Mengele is played by a suave Gregory Peck, but beyond any single story, he is an antagonist of history itself. Not content to oversee the charnel houses of Auschwitz, Mengele used people to advance his sick pseudo-anthropological enquiries, experimenting on twins, people with dwarfism and anyone with physical abnormalities.
But, upending any narrative convention, he received no punishment for his crimes. It is his 34 years of postwar freedom that form the bulk of Betina Anton’s new book. She traces Mengele’s path from aspiring scientist in 1930s Germany to fugitive among the German-speaking communities of South America, eluding the clutches of the Israeli secret service and freelance Nazi hunters alike. It is a non-fiction thriller that chases one of the most fascinating but morally outrageous threads of the 20th century.
By Nicholas Harris
Diversion Books, 383pp, £16.99. Buy the book
[See also: From Edmund White to Philip Marsden: new books reviewed in short]
Content from our partners
This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone