Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Bloomsbury, £25)
FELIPE FERNÁNDEZ-ARMESTO is that rare phenomenon: a genuine polymath who never comes across as a know-all. Readers of The Critic will know him as the magazine’s food columnist, in which capacity he attains the heights of culinary connoisseurship. Indeed, he has written a history of food, among many other subjects. He can be unnecessarily hard on vegans. But he also tells us how to make Napoleon’s Corsican comfort food — potatoes and onions fried in olive oil — more palatable. The dish is, of course, vegan.
Felipe’s literary style is similar: he segues from baroque ornamentation to sublime simplicity in a single paragraph. He embraces the minutiae of cartography or seamanship with as much enthusiasm and as light a touch as the vasty deeps of Braudel’s longue durée or Ranke’s Weltgeschichte.
Like me, Felipe was an undergraduate at Magdalen