Lewis Jones

From head-shrinking to skull-seeking: a history of the severed head

<span style="color: #222222;">A review of Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, by Frances Lanson. A grimly amusing and possibly definitive survey of a disquieting subject</span> <span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial; font-size: small; line-height: normal;"> </span>

issue 15 November 2014
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  • Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

    Frances Larson

    Granta, pp. 317

A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently impossible duality… an intense incongruity’. History is ‘littered’ with such heads. Pilgrims visit them: the heads of St Peter and St Paul, for example, are thought to be in the high altar of the Basilica of St John Lateran.

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