Red Thread
Charlotte Higgins
(Jonathan Cape, 224 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • tel 020 7799 4064

To catch the thread – or clue, or clewe – of this exhilarating maze of a book is itself an exercise in navigation. It wanders far and deep into labyrinths past and present, venturing forward, turning back, retracing steps, returning to base, branching out anew. But we are in safe hands, for Charlotte Higgins marshals an astonishing range of material, and knows exactly where she is going with it, even if she teases the reader with her discursive, if wholly apposite, approach.

She opens her trail with the ur-labyrinth of Minos at Knossos in Crete, and the story of Ariadne saving Theseus by giving him a sword to kill the ravening Minotaur, and a length of red thread to find his way out of the labyrinth’s dank depths. The labyrinth at Knossos was built by Daedalus, and the idea that he was recreating the convoluted folds of his own brain in its design, making it a symbol of the imagination, leads us into a larger consideration of the construction of stories, and the myriad ways in which man has tried to make sense of the world.