Dalrymple’s new book On the Ivory Stages has just been published and is available on all Amazon sites worldwide. On the Ivory Stages is in the same genre as These Spindrift Pages, in that it features Dalrymple’s thoughts on what he has been reading. As you probably know, Dalrymple can hardly read anything without having interesting thoughts about the writer, the ideas expressed, the larger historical context or something tangential. What from most writers would seem trivial or shallow often seems, in his hands, important and engrossing. There is no overall theme to the book, but it reads as a series of small and interrelated essays, and as always there is the sheer beauty of his writing.

To quote at length from one passage:

Steven Runciman’s three volume A History of the Crusades contains an implicit explanation of the attraction of books signed or dedicated by their authors, or once owned by famous or distinguished people. Runciman was a man who, without being a fully-fledged believer, was always interested in the occult and the paranormal, and he explains the development of the cult among early Christians of saintly relics:

Authorities such as Prudentius and Ennolus taught that divine succour could be found at the grave [of the early Christian saints], and that their bodies should be able to work miracles. Men and women would now travel far to see holy relics. Still more, they would try to acquire one to take it home and set it in their local sanctuary.

In the same way:

To stand where those that we reverence once stood to see the very sites where they were born and toiled and died, gives us a feeling of mystical contact with them and is a practical expression of our homage.

Surely the desire for signed or dedicated copies of books, or those that once belonged to the famous (or infamous), partakes of an attenuated form of this mysticism?

As it happens, my copy of this three-volume work is what is called an association copy, that is to say it was once in the possession of, or associated with, a person of some note. In this case, it was a man called Ian Samuel, of whom I had not heard before I bought the books (in Tunbridge Wells). The internet permitted me to trace him with ease, the inscriptions of the books being as follows: Vol. 1, Ian Samuel, Cairo, 1951; Vol. 2, Ian Samuel, Damascus; Vol. 3, Ian Samuel, Miswills House, Turner’s Hill, Surrey, Oct. 1954. I deduced from all this, correctly as it turned out, that Samuel had been a diplomat. I quote from the Daily Telegraph obituary:

Adrian Christopher Ian Samuel was born on August 20 1915 in Colchester and educated at Rugby and St John’s College, Oxford, where he read modern languages. Deciding on a career in the Foreign Service, he learnt Arabic to add to his French, German, Spanish and Turkish; his first postings were to Beirut, Tunis and Trieste. 

His career was interrupted by the war, and he became a bomber pilot. He sank a German submarine.

… a U-boat was spotted three miles away. Despite heavy anti-aircraft fire from the surfaced submarine, he dived from 2,000 ft and dropped depth charges. His rear gunner saw the U-boat heel (sic) over and submerge. Then, as Samuel circled above, the submarine reappeared with the bows at an acute angle. He attacked again, and U-169, which had left Kiel to join a Seewolf group, sank vertically with all hands.

It is a tribute to the horrors of war that Samuel must have rejoiced at his success. Such is the effect of war on mentality, no doubt here with justification. Still, when one thinks of the men drowning in their steel tube… 

And there follows a description of the rest of Samuel’s vivid life with other interesting tangents.

You can buy the book here in the US or here in the UK — or use your own country’s Amazon site.