Short cuts

Edward Colston was tipped into Bristol’s harbour; Robert Lee was graffitied; King Leopold II was set on fire; even Hamilton removed its statue of the British naval commander it was named after. In 2020, following George Floyd’s murder and Black Lives Matter protests, many statues faced the chop. In FALLEN IDOLS (Headline, $37.99), UK historian Alex von Tunzelmann finds out why a dozen, including Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Cecil Rhodes, were put up and why they were toppled. Statues are not a record of history but of historical memory, which is always contested, she says.

How did New Zealand’s flora and fauna become so peculiar? We have no land mammals other than bats, few reptiles or amphibians and most of our critters, insects and plants are found nowhere else. We have plenty of birds, although significantly fewer since humans arrived. Our native forest is more like rainforests in Australia and South America. Even our rocks are continental crust rather than volcanic, part of the mostly submerged Zealandia. Terry Thomsen’s thorough and readable THE LONELY ISLANDS: The evolutionary phenomenon that is New Zealand (New Holland, $39.99), years in the researching, has plenty of answers.

King Henry VIII ordered the houses of people in quarantine to be marked with white poles topped with clumps of straw. In Venice in the 1500s, reminiscent of Wuhan in

2020, infected people were sometimes boarded up inside their homes. Yet, as Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley note in UNTIL PROVEN SAFE, on Kindle but out in October (Picador, $44 hb), many flee as soon as a quarantine is threatened, negating its effect. In this fascinating history, the authors track the past and future of isolating the sick from the well and suggest quarantine is likely to increase rather than again fade away. l