A Boswell of Baghdad

For some years E. V. Lucas had been sipping, beelike, at the four ponderous volumes of Ibn Khallikan’s Biographical Dictionary, the thirteenth-century Arabic collection of lives that Baron Mac Guckin de Slane put into English, and the long title essay is the honey he carried off. He treats the compiler, a Damascus judge, as a relation of Pepys and Boswell: a gossip who kept the small traits, and whose thousands of pages hold the vanity, learning and oddity of Baghdad’s poets, viziers and grammarians. British troops had entered Baghdad in March 1917, and the book followed that September. Behind the essay sit two runs of shorter papers from Punch and The Sphere, sixteen light, eight on the war, from a munition workers’ fancy-dress carnival to a French captain telling his men who will fall first.