A Cold Spell: A Human History of Ice
Max Leonard
(Bloomsbury, £20)
SLIPPERY stuff, ice. Metaphorically, one ‘breaks ice’ —a phrase from Plutarch, via Shakespeare—to start social intercourse, but one’s response to the resulting company can be ‘icily’ disdainful. It’s a marvellous substance when clunking in cube form in a G&T, but hell when a sheet on the A49. Ice is cold, yet on the skin burns. Scientifically, ice is a bit of a conundrum, being a solid that floats upon its own liquid form. At least, it is perplexing until you see the useful diagram on page 85: the crystalline structure of ice is regular, airily spaced tetrahedral lattices. Water is an absolute prop-forward cluster ruck.
‘Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation,’ wrote the ever quotable Thoreau in (1854). This extraordinary, complete and utter history of the human experience of the cold stuff is confirmation, nowhere more so than the author’s citing of, the
