"What if this injustice were the very life of adventure? The man who puts his stake on the roulette board does not want justice, or his stake back unaltered. Justice for Christopher [Columbus] is a small shop in Genoa, or it may be a foot of wall in a Portuguese jail for fraudulent bankruptcy… Justice for Alexander is another dagger such as killed his father; for Casanova a horse-whipping, or a lifelong judgment of alimony. In this light, adventure is an excited appeal for injustice; the adventurer's prayer is 'Give us more than our due'." (pp96-7)

William Bolitho's Twelve Against the Gods would be an attractive read solely on its concept, but it is made even more compelling by its stylishness and the unapologetic delivery of its opinions. They don't make them like this anymore: slow but never boring – stately, rather; a book that assumes some decent level of education from its reader, rather than letting the class be held up by the slowest student; a polemic in the best sense of the word; a collection of journalism that has more flair and vigour than what passes for the name nowadays; a book with a cultivated taste, an awareness of objective standards, an unwillingness to let morality get in the way of a good story, and an appreciation of glory without glory-fetish.

Most people seem to have first heard about this book from the Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk, who rates it highly, but I first heard about it from one or two mentions in the writing of Ernest Hemingway (who was a friend of Bolitho in the 1920s) and – I believe – from another of my favourite writers, George MacDonald Fraser. It's taken me a long time to get around to reading the book, and I can't remember exactly where it was I heard Bolitho in relation to Fraser, but Fraser brings to life Lola Montez in his second Flashman book, Royal Flash, and I would be surprised if he hadn't drawn on Bolitho's book – Lola is one of his Twelve – in resurrecting her.

I mention this for two reasons. One, because the Hemingway recommendation gives a better sense of Bolitho's book than Musk's does. Musk's recommendation – from a tweet in 2016 – caused demand for the out-of-print book to spike dramatically, as wannabe tech entrepreneurs in Steve Jobs turtlenecks looked for their next 'edge'. This might lead you to believe the book is one of those 'leadership' books that are all the rage nowadays – a sort of 'ten lessons from Lincoln in the art of leadership' – when it is anything but. Rather, Bolitho writes about his twelve historical figures in the way Hemingway writes about Scott Fitzgerald or James Joyce or Gertrude Stein in A Moveable Feast – as characters he has known intimately.

This leads me to my second reason for mentioning Fraser's novels: though non-fiction, Bolitho's book is essentially a study of character. He takes twelve historical figures – Alexander the Great, Casanova, Columbus, Mahomet (Muhammad), Lola, Cagliostro, Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, Catiline, Napoleon III, Isadora Duncan and Woodrow Wilson – and speaks of them almost as though they were his close friends. In a way, they are – Bolitho is clearly well-read and erudite, and knows his stuff – but the closeness of the book to its subjects is compelling and original, neither journalism or history but a heady mix of both. Literary criticism of the story of life.

For a book subtitled 'The Story of Adventure', some of the Twelve chosen by Bolitho might seem strange at first – Woodrow Wilson or Casanova spoken of as 'adventurers' in the same tone as Alexander and Columbus? – but Bolitho wins you over on every count. "The life of an adventurer is the practice of the art of the impossible", Bolitho argues on page 177, before going on to point out how in society, "the possibilities of human life are impregnably walled, to an intolerable minimum, by natural law, by the clockwork of determinisms of all sorts – except just where the adventurer breaks through. Where common sense is horrified, where the sign 'impossible' is raised in warning, kindness or spiteful joy, there is your exit, exactly there, prisoner; there is the door of adventure."

Each of Bolitho's Twelve are chosen to illustrate one aspect of this broad concept of adventure, as opposed to merely conquest or exploration (though those too). These are "personalities, forces, with a faint taste of allegory in their compositions, which Fate, like a common dramatist, likes to put in her best pieces" (pg. 175); those who best example the contest between the adventurer and the social man which is fought in every human heart (pg. 14). And whilst Bolitho is, in my opinion, at his best when writing about Alexander or Columbus, he is convincing even on the examples who seem, at first glance, the most dubious, such as Wilson or Lola Montez. Even Isadora Duncan, the dancer, gives Bolitho an opportunity to write powerfully about art and its relation to nature. The book is never a gimmick in the manner of a modern 'leadership' book; there is an appreciation of nuance, and an adept, laissez-faire unpacking of the theme rather than seminar-like callbacks.

Even more impressively, there is no moral judgment; Bolitho is only fascinated by the breed. I was particularly grateful for this appreciation of the "manurial virtue" of historical figures because, as I write in June 2020, statues are being attacked and torn down in both Britain and America, and not only those of slave traders and Confederate figures but the likes of Churchill and Gandhi and Jefferson (and Columbus, one of the Twelve). In seeking to explain why this is wrong, I can do no better than to turn to Bolitho: "No true biography has the power of exciting imitation; only myth has ethical magnetism. Life, that winged swift thing, has to be shot down and reposed by art, like a stuffed bird, before we can use it as a model… personality has to be simplified" (pg. 171). We have the statue of Churchill not because he was an imperialist or because of Tonypandy or the Bengal famine, but because the myth of Churchill that the statue represents – principled and uncompromising opposition to fascism, even when your backs are to the wall – is worthy of imitation in the way that his biography is not. Ditto Jefferson: in biography, he is a slave trader; in history, which is partly myth – rooted, selective, footnoted myth – he is an articulator of human rights and of measured republican government. It might smell at times, but manure is good for the soil.

I did not expect to find such vivid contemporary utility in Bolitho's out-of-print essays from 1929 (my yellowed Penguin paperback from 1939 is now practically falling apart), but then again, I did not expect anything like as much as I got from this forgotten treasure-trove. Twelve Against the Gods is a unique work: literary, erudite, stimulating and personal, drawing power from each of its twelve subjects and yet remaining entirely Bolitho. The book is best read slowly – not only because of the wealth of ideas unpicked over its course, but because of the writing style. Some sentences admittedly lose the thread – the approach to sentence structure makes me wish Hemingway had been an influence rather than merely an acquaintance – but for every line that you have to re-read, there are a dozen to be savoured.

This is a writer who, when speaking of Lola Montez, tells the story of how she acquired her surname thus: "The instrument was some anonymous male, some vague attaché or officer met and used in love as the ship crossed the Equator, with no more personal importance than the tiny wandering spider the portentous female of the species beckons to her embraces to serve for an hour and then be eaten" (pg. 130). This is a writer who, writing this well, can also bring original, perceptive ideas and élan. Who can also bring to his pages the presence of Alexander and his like. Most books bring their subjects down to earth in order to assess them – those non-mythic biographies I mentioned earlier – but Bolitho does something rarer. He lifts the reader up to their height. ( )

Bolitho's prose is so infectiously zesty he could write about wallpaper and it would be interesting - writing about twelve of the most flawed, fascinating people in history, he's unstoppable ( )