Author Patricia Nicol reveals a selection of the best books on: Gold

The BBC’s latest Sunday night drama, The Gold, concluded last night. I am delighted a second series has been commissioned.

It began with the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery, with six men breaking into a warehouse near Heathrow intending to steal £1 million, and instead stumbling upon gold bullion worth approximately £26 billion.

But how to move that amount of gold? One of the nuggets relayed is that any gold bought in the UK since 1984 is likely to contain traces of Brink’s-Mat bullion.

The show is rich in period detail, but something else it conveys effectively is gold’s power to dazzle; to make maddened dreamers of even the most grounded.

Eleanor Catton¿s Booker-winning The Luminaries is set amid a gold prospecting town in 19th-century New Zealand

Eleanor Catton’s Booker-winning The Luminaries is set amid a gold prospecting town in 19th-century New Zealand

Eleanor Catton’s Booker-winning The Luminaries is set amid a gold prospecting town in 19th-century New Zealand. When Scot Walter Moody arrives in Hokitika, Thomas Balfour quizzes him about his prospecting plans: ‘You’ve dreamed it — kneeling in the water, sifting the metal from the grit!’

‘I suppose,’ answers Moody, ‘that I’ve dreamed of what comes afterwards; that is, what the gold might lead to … what it might become.’

That seems the dream that drives treasure-hunters: that gold, refined, will deliver wealth and status.

H. Rider Haggard’s swashbuckling imperialist adventure stories (King Solomon’s Mines/She) were written during the scramble for Africa.

H. Rider Haggard¿s swashbuckling imperialist adventure stories (King Solomon¿s Mines/She) were written during the scramble for Africa

H. Rider Haggard’s swashbuckling imperialist adventure stories (King Solomon’s Mines/She) were written during the scramble for Africa

Wilbur Smith, a 20th-century heir, mined the colonial era, too, notably in his series about the gold-mining Courtney dynasty, launched with When The Lion Feeds. His more modern take on the brutality of mining, especially in apartheid-era South Africa, is his 1970 novel Gold Mine.

That all that glitters is not gold is a lesson learned by George Eliot’s Silas Marner. After being wrongly accused of robbery and shunned by his community, the linen weaver moves to the countryside where he leads a solitary life. His only comfort is the gold he has earned.

When it is stolen, he is distraught. But after an orphaned child comes into his life, Silas feels he has been blessed with something greater. These are tales worth valuing.

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