David Sexton

From red giant to white dwarf

Richard Cohen, who was a publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder before moving to New York where he now teaches Creative Writing, is the author of one previous book: By the Sword: Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions (2002).

Richard Cohen, who was a publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder before moving to New York where he now teaches Creative Writing, is the author of one previous book: By the Sword: Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions (2002). This comprehensive history drew on his deep, personal knowledge of the subject, for Cohen was five times the British national sabre champion, selected for the Olympic team every time between 1972 and 1984. Its illustrations include a superb shot of the author flying through the air sideways, executing a ‘horizontal fleche’ against Dom Philip Jebb at Downside Abbey.

Chasing the Sun is even more ambitious. Cohen says that when he was working in publishing he wanted to commission this book, simply because he realised that he knew so little about ‘what, above all other things, governs our lives’, but he could find no author willing to undertake such a wide-ranging account. No sane author, perhaps. So now he has done it himself.

The sun is not a subject easily focussed. Since there would be no life on this planet without it, all life whatsoever can be pretty directly related to it —or to its absence (Cohen includes a chapter on ‘The Dark Biosphere’, life in the lightless depths of the oceans, although even this turns out to be partially dependent on light-driven eco-systems on the surface).

‘One lesson I have learned in writing this book is that the Sun gets into everything’, says Cohen in his Preface. This is, therefore, a book about everything under the sun. But it is not a valueless ‘cultural history’ of the kind that academics now write about anything from oysters to obesity. Chasing the Sun is much more like a latterday Anatomy of Melancholy, taking in whatever catches Cohen’s attention, from allusions to sun and shade in Lolita to the agonies of porphyria, from Tintin using a solar eclipse to outwit his Inca captors to the invention of Ambre Solaire suncream in 1936, from sundials to blondes.

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