In the preface to this wide-ranging collection of 25 essays and reviews written over nearly as many years, the historian and biographer Charles Nicholl admits that he has always found "the details of history more interesting, or anyway more evocative, than the larger perspectives of history". There is plenty of evidence here of the success of this approach, from his article on the wonderfully footloose 17th-century English travel writer Thomas Coryate's "Last Journey" (which took him on foot from the Holy Land to India where he died in 1617), or how a case of "fornicating Frenchmen" heard before the Middlesex Sessions in 1613 informs our understanding of Shakespeare, to his account of the disappearance of American businessman Jim Thompson in Malaysia in 1967 (an "unresolved and somehow spooky" case). Whether it is quirky handwriting in an archival manuscript ("I feel a kind of wonder at the tenacity and toughness of old documents") or what was on Leonardo da Vinci's shopping list (eels and apricots), Nicholl has the unerring eye of a fine historical detective.
From a 17th-century fornicator to a missing 1960s businessman, these snippets of real life never made it into the history books
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