Jewels: A Secret History

A beautiful book. Reading it is, in fact, very much like dipping into a jewel box and pulling out curious and brilliant things, different each time but always fascinating.

Filled with eye-catching incidents and stories . . . Finlay's evidence glitters from every page.

Glorious . . . anecdote and information accumulate with marvellous abundance and a passionate sense of the fascination of jewels . . . a wonderfully generous gift

A fascinating and exhaustive travelogue . . . a prism through which the spectrum of history, geography and the sciences is refracted

As a first glimpse into the jewel trade, rich, ancient and bloody, it could hardly be bettered

Her skill, as in her previous anatomy of colour, is to thread together brittle facts and theories with her own self-deprecating travelogue, creating a compelling excavation of the pieces of earth we covet so much. Even if your budget is more Elizabeth Duke than Tiffany, this is an accessible treasure trove of knowledge and adventure.

Packed full of incident and anecdote and minutely researched, it's a compact history of some of our favourite bits of bling, a fascinating book, whether you read from cover to cover or just dip in here and there.

Because she focuses on people, whether Scottish freshwater pearl fishermen or Apache peridot miners, this is an engaging, glistening read. Because she always returns to the question of why jewels are valued, and how that value is upheld, it is also very thought-provoking. Finlay has a fine eye for curious facts . . . she writes crisply and well.