Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World by Kathryn Hurlock
Humans of every religion and none have made pilgrimages since ancient times: for example, the sacred mountain of Tai Shan, 300 miles south of Beijing, has a history of worship dating back to the Neolithic period. Pilgrims sought – and seek – the help of gods, saints and spirits for protection on journeys, spiritual healing or cures for physical ailments, to give thanks, or perhaps to make a political statement.
In Holy Places, the historian Kathryn Hurlock takes the reader on a journey around the world to sites of pilgrimage well known (Mecca, Jerusalem, Rome) and more obscure: Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland, or Chichén Itzá in Mexico, where the Maya appeased the gods of the weather with human sacrifices. Some are ancient – such as Delphi, where the ancient Greeks consulted the oracle – others, such the tomb of Evita Perón in Buenos Aires, Argentina, more modern. Despite her book’s subtitle, Hurlock doesn’t impose an all-encompassing theory to draw together and explain these disparate sites, but Holy Places is all the more interesting for it, as an account of the huge variety of human practice and belief over millennia.
By Pippa Bailey
Profile Books, 464pp, £22. Buy the book
What Art Can Tell Us About Love by Nick Trend
When in love, or when looking for it, we turn instinctively to music, poetry and films. But, contends Nick Trend, whose previous book was Art Firsts, we would do better to look at paintings. While the walls of galleries are thick with love lessons in passion, devotion and pain, they are not confined to the canvas but are in the relationship between the painter and his or her subject too.
So if we want to know what enduring love looks like, we need only turn to Rubens’ pictures of his wife, Helena Fourment; for can’t-live-with-them-or-without-them attraction, there is Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s tangled relationship; while Francis Bacon and the doomed George Dyer exemplify raw passion. Trend spans the amorous range, from the unrequited and secret entanglements to love triangles and serial lovers, and his selections are illuminating not just about the paintings that grew from these charged circumstances but also about the states they describe. Whether it is Sandro Botticelli depicting Simonetta Vespucci, the unattainable woman he worshipped, as the titular figure in his Birth of Venus, or Man Ray painting his former lover Lee Miller’s disembodied lips floating in the sky, art, Trend elegantly demonstrates, is love’s preservative.
By Michael Prodger
Laurence King, 208pp, £18.99. Buy the book
The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History by Selena Wisnom
How is this for an outlandish claim: “More than half of human history is written in cuneiform.” I don’t need to tell you, of course, that cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system of the Ancient Near East, the earliest known writing system, used from around the Bronze Age to the beginning of the Common Era. Apparently, only “a few hundred people on Earth can read it”. What an oversight!
A new book, The Library of Ancient Wisdom, by Selena Wisnom unearths all of the secrets held by the script: from the civilisations’ attitude to war and gods to the common thread of all of humanity – pestilence. It’s a tome. But then again, there is more than half of human history to wade through here, if we are to take the book’s premise at face value. No time to query what it means for one language to hold “human history”, as though such an unwieldy concept can be reduced to the extant printed word. But specious historiography aside, The Library of Ancient Wisdom is a handy guide to the Ancient Near East for the cuneiform-lite readers in your life.
By Finn McRedmond
Allen Lane, 448pp, £30. Buy the book
Cry When the Baby Cries: A Graphic Memoir by Becky Barnicoat
As a corrective to decades of misty-eyed depictions of motherhood, modern writing about pregnancy and childbirth now tends to skew toward more “honest” and “unflinching” accounts. In reality, so many of them paint motherhood as wholly brutal and totally joyless that you might struggle to understand why anyone would even bother with the whole production.
A new book by cartoonist Becky Barnicoat (a New Statesman veteran) finds the perfect balance. A graphic memoir that recounts her foray into motherhood – from her first pregnancy via IVF through to the birth of her second child and the miscarriage of her third – Barnicoat’s depiction is by turns bloody, sweet, bleak and joyful. Throughout the body horror and anxiety and social upheaval, she makes it clear how grateful she is to be a mother. Yet there is nothing treacly or hackneyed here. Her account is intimate and granular, recounting sleep-deprived feelings so fleeting it’s almost astonishing she remembered them at all. (I had completely forgotten how much I too loved my post-Caesarian catheter.) It is also very, very funny.
By Megan Gibson
Jonathan Cape, 288pp, £25. Buy the book
[See also: Our overdiagnosis epidemic]
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This article appears in the 12 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Why Britain isn’t working