Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets by Dorothy Armstrong
“This book is about the relationship between carpets and power,” says Dorothy Armstrong, a historian of material culture. While the most sumptuous carpets have been made by weavers who were invariably anonymous, illiterate, poor, young and female, they have journeyed across the globe “in the slipstream of powerful warriors, colonists, missionaries, intellectuals, merchants and industrialists”.
Examples she chooses for her fascinating alternative history cover 2,500 years and a geographical span from Japan to California via the weaving heartlands of the “stans” of Central Asia. They survived in a frozen Scythian tomb, stitched into the armour of a medieval Japanese samurai and in the Lutheran churches of Transylvania. Each has a story. Armstrong’s account of the unshowy carpet clinically designated “9-67” in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, for example, touches on Egypt’s Mamluks, Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, the Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim and a Scottish shipping merchant – yet little about it can be definitively proved. Here, as with all her carpets, she retrieves something of the history so long trodden underfoot.
By Michael Prodger
Orion, 368pp, £30. Buy this book
The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir by Edmund White
Edmund White is now 85 and the gay sexual desire that has been the consistent theme of his fiction, memoirs and biographies for more than 50 years remains undimmed. In this “sex memoir”, his third foray into autobiography, he reviews his life through its sexual encounters. It is not a chronological account but a back and forth, an approach he justifies by noting that “desire does not obey any timetable. When we masturbate we flash from one memory to another,” and here he takes the same onanistic approach.
He parades the “neural traces” of past lovers and times – stirrings and frottage in the 1950s Midwest, the HIV crisis with its death knell “he got Aids and died”, a five-stroke encounter in a botanical garden in Málaga – some are matter-of-fact hook-ups, others unexpectedly bittersweet. White’s frankness can be startling and at times stomach-churning (his description of having crabs is repulsive) but he can be poignant too: never more so than when describing a failed attempt at heterosexuality with a girl called Becky who for years wondered if their “romantic fiasco” was her fault until she read two of White’s gay novels.
By Michael Prodger
Bloomsbury, 256pp, £20. Buy this book
Under a Metal Sky: A Journey Through Minerals, Greed and Wonder by Philip Marsden
Tin, copper, iron, silver and gold: these are the metallic building blocks of our physical realm. Without iron we wouldn’t have the railways or the phones in our pockets. Without copper we would miss a tiny element on which the human body depends. Without gold there would be no money. Philip Marsden’s new book is a love letter to these key resources hidden within rocks and buried beneath the earth.
Each section of the book takes in a new material, delving into its history and evolving relationship with people and land. Though metals form the basis, Marsden casts his net wider to look, for example, at peatlands in the Netherlands; these boggy marshlands may hold the secret to tackling climate change. Under a Metal Sky is a gracefully meticulous book, full of lyrical nature writing and didactic memoir. Accompanied by a lively cast of characters – from heavy-metal obsessed miners in Austria to the copper-loving poet William Blake – Marsden takes the reader on a tour of our metallic history. He finishes where he started, in Cornwall, his home county, whose windswept cliffs have a long and turbulent relationship with tin and copper mining.
By Megan Kenyon
Granta, 352pp, £20. Buy this book
Beartooth by Callan Wink
Callan Wink, hatchet-chinned, lives in Montana, where he works as a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone river. And that’s just the author. The characters of Wink’s highly readable second novel are Thad and Hazen, two young Montana brothers, whose faces are “made for the weather, for looking into it”. The house they have shared their whole lives has a saw mill, and they make a living as loggers. But that living is precarious, and the forests contain much richer quarry, if you’re willing to break the law. As the brothers face losing their house, the ominous “Scot” offers a high price for any elk antlers they illegally collect. Thad decides they can smuggle the goods out of Yellowstone with an ancient logging method: by floating them down the river.
The book is at once thoroughly wild and thoroughly intimate. The modest poetry of Callan’s prose does justice both to the beauty of the wilderness and to the complexity of the brothers’ relationship. For all their 26 years together Thad has been responsible while Hazen has been impulsive. But an injury from the antler escapade leads both to discover new things about themselves, and each other.
By George Monaghan
Granta, 256pp, £14.99. Buy this book
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[See also: Bridget Jones’s hollow feminism]
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This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation