Sweetness & Light

"If Crane’s leather bound tome is like a textbook, Hattie Ellis’ Sweetness & Light is like a storybook—a fluid and lyrical history of bees and honey and their significance in human culture, covering everything from the use of mead as an aphrodisiac to the passion for collecting insects among a newly urbanised Victorian middle class, and Muhammed Ali’s special penchant for pollen (he thought it boosted his energy). Richard Mabey, one of my heroes, describes this book as richly informative, and beautifully written, and I think he has it just about right. I’m no historian, and don’t always find it easy to integrate lots of information at once—my brain just doesn’t seem to work that way. So during the writing of my own book I was greatly helped by Sweetness & Light and others like it (Claire Preston’s Bee and Bee Wilson’s Story of the Honeybee and Us among them), which became like launchpads for diving off into other things. I’d go a little way with Ellis, come across something that caught my eye, then jump sideways into Pliny’s Natural History , or Aristotle’s Complete Works , or Crane’s World History , or the letters of seventeenth century natural historians. It might seem quite a strange way of doing research, but for me that action of swimming out and coming back seemed to work quite well."