David Horspool

The poet and the polymath: two 16th-century Portuguese travellers

Edward Wilson-Lee examines the world through the eyes of Luís de Camões and Damião de Góis, and finds their views very different

Portrait of Damião de Góis by Albrecht Dürer. [Bridgeman Images]
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  • A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Versions of Global History

    Edward Wilson-Lee

    William Collins, pp. 25, £352

In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He recognised that the bustling scene – black-robed clerics, bargaining merchants, black porters and children teasing a monkey, played out on a wide boulevard in front of a colonnaded row of slightly rickety houses – was Iberian, but could be no more precise.

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