The Book of Iona
Edited by Robert Crawford, Polygon, £15
When Samuel Johnson visited Iona he launched into a grandiose meditation on how travel was good for the soul. “To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish, if it were possible,” he reflected. Far better to submit to your destination’s charms and revel in its history: “Whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings.” In one of his most famous lines, Johnson declared that “ man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona”.
