Wreckers: Disaster in the Age of Discovery by Simon Park
According to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, the discoveries of America and a passage to the East Indies by Columbus and Vasco da Gama were “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind”. What wasn’t recorded quite so diligently were the disasters, privations, deaths and sheer haplessness that accompanied the 16th-century voyages into the unknown. In this rollicking but reflective account of those early sorties, the Oxford historian Simon Park presents an alternative view of the “action-hero version of history”.
Wreckers is about the mariners who ended up “kidnapped, stranded, abandoned and betrayed” in the pursuit of personal wealth and national glory and of the numerous attempts at colonisation that failed. Park is an adroit storyteller and makes the most of his picaresque stories, such as that of the German explorer Hans Staden, taken captive by the Tupinambá people of Brazil who kept him in a state of permanent fear with threats of eating him, and Martin Frobisher, who sought the North-West Passage but returned defeated with nothing more than a hold full of rocks. Empire-building, says Park, was not “unstoppable” but uncertain.
By Michael Prodger
Viking, 368pp, £25. Buy the book
The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare by Daniel Swift
Walking down London’s West End, it’s hard to imagine the capital without a single theatre. But theatre-less London did exist – until 1576 when the city’s first ever playhouse was erected in Shoreditch. Daniel Swift’s The Dream Factory traces the remarkable history of the aptly named playhouse, the Theatre, thanks to numerous litigations associated with the family behind it – the Burbages.
Without James Burbage and the Theatre two significant parts of the history of theatre would be missing: Shakespeare and the Globe. Shakespeare began his writing in the Burbages’ playhouse. It was here that A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet were written, and the son of James Burbage, Richard, is thought to have inspired many well-known Shakespearean characters. Deftly navigating social politics, the plague and preachers wishing for the Theatre’s downfall, Swift tells its history in the most original way. The Burbages’ dramatic life truly was well suited to their industry.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Yale University Press, 320pp, £25. Buy the book
38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands
Calle Londres intersects Calle París in central Santiago. Once a place of the elite, it was revitalised by cultural and political figures in the mid-20th century. Calle Londres 38, after which the bestselling author Philippe Sands’ latest book is titled, was an unassuming house – until the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Under Pinochet, Londres 38 was turned into the detention and torture centre of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA).
Sands’ 38 Londres Street is a gripping blend of memoir, investigative journalism and courtroom drama, with a narrative spanning decades and thousands of miles. It includes his own involvement as a barrister for a human rights organisation during the 1998 arrest of Pinochet in London, and his discovery of personal links to those affected by the dictator’s regime and to the murders of Walther Rauff, the Nazi behind the gas vans used to kill thousands of Jews. Speaking to lawyers involved in Pinochet’s later trial, Chileans affected by DINA’s torture and disappearances and those who knew Rauff (after he settled in the city of Punta Arenas), Sands convincingly makes a connection between Pinochet’s regime and the Nazi in exile. Most importantly, he shows why the dictatorship must not be tucked away into the past.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 480pp, £25. Buy the book
The Fall of the House of Montagu by Robert Wainwright
On 24 January 2017, Alexander Montagu, the 13th Duke of Manchester, was sentenced to prison in Nevada for a melange of offences. He served 14 months in jail. Shortly before he committed a burglary, in 2016, he made a visit to his ancestral seat, Kimbolton Castle, and visited the family crypt, where his father and grandparents are buried. He was only a guest, however: the estate is now the home of a public school.
“How did it come to this?” you might ask, and if you did Robert Wainwright is your man. His new book closes with Alexander’s sorry tale, the most recent tragedy in the decline and dissolution of a family first granted land by William the Conqueror. In some ways the story is typical: financial troubles thanks to mounting death duties; American heiress wives imported to maintain solvency; the eventual sale of the estate in a changing postwar landscape. But the Montagu story provides enough diverting specificities – bankruptcy, gambling dens and colonial exile – to make this a dramatic and pathos-inducing read.
By Nicholas Harris
Allen & Unwin, 352pp, £22. Buy the book
[See also: Joan Didion without her style]
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This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall