"If you had the spyglass, you could see anything in the world. If you had the spyglass, there was nothing from which you couldn't glean information. It had mesmeric power over the people. It had been created by a king who gave it to his daughter, to be used for the strangest of courtships. If you wished to marry her, you had to achieve only one thing. You had to disappear. You had to become a magician of the invisible." In this excerpt from his new book, Martin Shaw, a celebrated storyteller, draws on myth and metaphor to direct our gaze away from the screen and toward the wonder of the world.
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