Get lost

When Boris Johnson resigned recently he automatically gave up his right to use Chevening House in Kent, bequeathed by the Earl Stanhope for the use of a person nominated by the prime minister, traditionally the foreign secretary. I think I’m right in saying that when she first came to office, Theresa May attempted to get Boris to share the place with David Davis and Liam Fox, but to no avail, which was surely a sign of things to come. Among its many attractions and allurements — 115 rooms, a boating lake, all the other usual country-house trimmings — Chevening has a magnificent maze, planted by the 4th Earl Stanhope, to a design by his great-grandfather, Philip Stanhope. One can easily imagine Boris during his powerless years in power, wandering among Chevening’s ancient yew hedges, trapped like the Minotaur. According to Adrian Fisher, the world’s leading maze-designer, we’re living in a Golden Age of mazes. He would say that, wouldn’t he — he’s built more than 700 of the things all over the place, from Denmark to Dubai, including mirror mazes, hedge mazes and tiny little run-your-finger-along-the-line mazes; but there’s undoubtedly something about the now that seems to suggest the maze, a place where we are lost and wandering, unable to see a way ahead, disorientated, discombobulated, confused and confined. The maze is a useful symbol for our current crisis. It’s a symbol for just about everything else too. Like a couple of overexcited, lost children on a school trip to Hampton Court, Charlotte Higgins and Henry Eliot bump into each other continually in two new books about mazes, which between them cover every aspect of the history and possible meaning of the maze, from Greek myths to Freud and Borges and back again. In Red Thread: On Mazes & Labyrinths, Higgins, the chief cultural commentator for the Guardian, has produced a serious, substantial, scholarly and yet also highly personal book about mazes.