Book of a lifetime: The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn

From The Independent archive: Bettany Hughes delves into the history of Millenarianism

A depiction of the Second Coming of Christ from Greece circa 1700 (Public Domain)

One year, my mother inherited £500. This was a princely sum. My parents put the money towards a tiny, flint-faced cottage on the Kent coast. Their hope, a regular injection of sea air into the lungs of our urban childhood. And indeed religiously, every holiday and half-term, we would wind our way down (fewer motorways then) to the seaside town of Hythe.

The routine was simple. Long walks to the fishing beach, illicit trespasses with knee-high boyfriends onto the nearby firing range, icy dips in the Channel, wrap up warm, then read by the fire or al fresco. I must have made it through well over 500 books on that stony stretch of coastline. The view was British down to the last cast-iron lampost and Cornish-wafer ice cream, but the miles I covered in my head stretched beyond thousands.

When I was 15, I borrowed (permanently) from the school library a disintegrating copy of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. I’d never gone abroad, but Cohn’s tightly printed pages sang of an exotic European world. This was a history book – of the best kind. Investigating the Millenarian fantasies of the Middle Ages, Cohn uncovered a landscape where emotion and attitude were more powerful than high politics. I devoured the tales of flagellants and choreomaniacs, who whipped or sang themselves into frenzies of eschatological expectation.