Lost Worlds

Paintings vanish, animal species die out, manuscripts go missing, cities sink beneath the water, and ideas once considered eternal simply stop existing. Entire libraries of learning and whole collections of hidden knowledge have slipped away. Michael Bywater argues that what a society is and what its people know both rest on the traces of what came before, and that our identity owes as much to what we have lost as to what we keep.

The book takes the form of an alphabetical glossary of the vanished, a collection of absent oddities. Rather than a random assortment of facts, it links these losses into a connected picture of everything that is no longer with us. Bywater writes a regular column on lost worlds for the Independent on Sunday and teaches at Cambridge University.