The Greatest Show on Earth: A History of the Circus by Linda Simon

(Reakiton Books), 2014
296pp., £29 hard, ISBN 978-1-78023-356-1

The pantomime and the circus have long held a special place in people's imagination. Dazzling, clamorous and exotic, both are culturally evolving theatres of the improbable and impossible. From the days of travelling troupes of acrobats and jugglers to the grand spectacle of the Cirque du Soleil, the circus has exerted an indelible fascination and running away to join the circus has always had a special allure. In this book, Linda Simon asks why we long to soar on the flying trapeze, to ride bareback on a spangled horse or parade through city streets in costumes of glitter and gold. Why also have artists and writers repeatedly and often obsessively taken the circus as their subject? The Greatest Shows on Earth takes us from eighteenth-century hippodromes in Britain to intimate one-ring circuses in nineteenth-century Paris, where artists, such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso, were enchanted by aerialists and clowns.

The circus especially in individuals such as P. T. Barnum, James Bailey and the enterprising Ringling Brothers were important places for entrepreneurial innovation linking advertising to spectacle and audiences. The author also considers the contemporary transformations of the circus, from the whimsical Circus Oz in Australia to New York City's Big Apple Circus. Central to the book is the importance of circus people, whether trick riders and tightrope walkers, sword swallowers and animal trainers, contortionists or clowns, in creating the sensational, raucous, titillating and incomparable world of the circus. The book is beautifully and extensively illustrated, rich in historical detail and full of colourful anecdotes. It's a great read.