Book reviews: Lost Perth | Lost Perthshire | Lewis in History and Legend | Savonarola

Michael Kerrigan reviews the latest additions to the literary world

Lost Perth

by Jeremy Duncan

(Birlinn, £14.99)

Rating: ****

“Much better than the Riviera,” was Sir John Everett Millais’s assessment of the view, as he looked north from Perth’s old bridge on a bright winter morning in the 1880s – even if he was looking away from the “Fair City”, and the scene behind him wouldn’t have been so picturesque. Jeremy Duncan doesn’t mind: his “lost Perth” was a place of trade and industry, bustling and grimy, a centre for everything from glass-manufacture to fishing, as well as more exalted pursuits: the 1770s produced a 23-volume Encyclopaedia Perthensis to rival Britannica. Perth has got off lightly in the postwar planners’ blitz – and a good deal of what’s been “lost” need not be mourned. But it’s still a shock how radically things have changed, and bittersweet to see it all summed up in this intriguing guide.

Lost Perthshire

by Ann Lindsay

(Birlinn, £14.99)

Rating: ****

Ann Lindsay’s quest à la recherche du Perthshire perdu takes her through a land of contrasts, mystic and mundane. Whether it be haunted houses or hydroelectric schemes, Roman remains or raspberry-picking, old cinemas or salmon: it’s all grist to her mill. (As, for that matter, are the bone-mills that once made a macabre form of fertilizer.) From Pictish times to the present; from the last wolf to the first railways – and beyond – Perthshire’s past is affectionately covered here.

Lewis in History and Legend

by Bill Lawson

(Birlinn, £10.99)

Rating: ****

“As for the inhabitants,” noted one Captain Dymes, who passed through Steornabhagh in 1630, “theire languadge is a kind of bade Irish”. Luckily, Bill Lawson makes a more tactful guide. Though not himself a native, over decades now he’s naturalised himself in the Outer Hebrides to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine anyone knowing the islands better than he does. His lively approach to the “history and legend” of Lewis does distinguish between the two but at the same time it recognises how closely they are intertwined. And not just with each other but with the individual experience.

Savonarola

by Donald Weinstein

(Yale, £25)

Rating: ****

Savonarola certainly knew how to find the Florentine conscience. A merchant offered 20,000 ducats for the luxuries a frightened citizenry had heaped on the Dominican doomsayer’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” in 1497. Along with ivory chessman, cosmetics, and scientific instruments, there were such fripperies as Dante and Petrarch’s works. Symbolically, Savonarola sent the Renaissance up in flames. Yet his fulminations are as much a part of his era as Michelangelo’s statues; Weinstein’s scrupulously researched, finely balanced life is both a complex portrait of a fascinating figure and of a uniquely and creative time.