Spice: The history of a temptation by Jack Turner, HarperCollins, £25, ISBN 000257067X Reviewed by Roy Herbert
THIS is a hugely enjoyable book, written with erudition, style and wit. Jack Turner is the latest to visit the spice trail, and here we have it with all its adventures and explorations, brutality and comedy.
It’s a tale punctuated with famous seafaring names: Magellan, who died on a search for the spice islands; Vasco da Gama, who sailed round the Cape of Good Hope to find a way of transporting spices that avoided the bottleneck of importing them through the Middle East; and Columbus, the radical thinker who…
