A saga of Sievekings

The magnificent if notoriously snobbish novelist Anthony Powell was so obsessed by family trees and breeding that he even took a keen interest in the work of Professor Steve Jones, a snail geneticist. He’d have been fascinated by the present book, which inevitably makes you think of the nature-versus-nurture debate as it follows the almost embarrassingly talented Sieveking family over 500 years or more; they are also of interest to readers of this magazine because they produced former editor Paul Sieveking himself, a seminal figure in the history of Fortean Times alongside founding editor Bob Rickard.

Georg Heinrich Sieveking, born in Hamburg in 1751, was a merchant, maths prodigy, polymath and Freemason who wrote a paean to freedom that was still used in anti-Nazi broadcasting in 1939. Karl Sieveking became “Ambassador Extraordinary to Brazil”, while Amalie Sieveking distinguished herself as a teacher and a pioneering cholera nurse, and Edward Sieveking, also medically inclined, became a doctor and in due course physician to the British royal family.