I had not thought much about spiders until I read Maria Tatar’s Arachnomania; now I can think of little else. I even watched a film mentioned in the book – Eight-Legged Freaks. It was awful, though it did bring home how very scared people can be of spiders, especially large ones. But, as Tatar shows, spiders are also part of human history and culture; and they really are different. I use fly sprays to get rid of insect intruders. I would never now use them against arachnids as well.

Tatar was first drawn to spiders by the Covid pandemic which locked us all down. It was then she discovered that the eight-legged freaks offered the possibility of ‘finding a model for survival and creativity in times of seclusion, darkness and gloom’. They are, as we shall see, paragons of survival.

Darwin was thrilled by the spiders he saw on his world voyage and sent a box full of them back to Cambridge

The author is an 81-year-old American academic, born in Germany. Her learning is formidable and at times weird. She notes that, like spiders, we make webs – notably the World Wide Web, which showed us how to ‘transform our own solitary havens into hives of productive activity’. Like us, spiders are busy creatures; they are also creative, especially when it comes to webs. And they are worldwide.

Their webs are astoundingly complex, tough creations that trap their food. The world’s spiders apparently eat 400-800 million tons of insects a year. But it is the process of weaving their webs that captures the human imagination. They draw luminous threads from their bodies and, for Tatar, this is ‘what it is to be an artist in the idealised form, that for centuries dominated our thinking about creativity’.

Spinning is also a primeval human craft. It is traditionally the work of women, and the Spider Woman appears in ancient stories as well as modern books and films. In Dr. No, James Bond cannot cope with spiders. He ‘breaks into a sweat when we see him struggling to keep control when a tarantula crawls up his arm’. I’m with 007 there – big, hairy, monstrous tarantulas are all that’s worst about arachnids.

J.R.R. Tolkien seems to have agreed when he wrote The Lord of the Rings. He said that spiders were ‘the particular terror of northern imaginations’, and, to demonstrate, he created the nightmarish female spider Shelob. The Black Spider, a German novel published in 1842, was rediscovered by the Nazis, who decided that the book was about the lives of rural folk and demonstrated their ability to defend their country against foreign invaders.

This is not simply a western fascination. We are told: ‘In Borneo, some tribes revere a spider that spins a huge web over the world and uses insect larvae to feed a tree that produces human beings from its leaves.’ Spiders are recruited to sustain many mythologies and religions.

By now you may be wondering what on earth this book is about. Spiders, of course – but there is much more to it than that. In one sense it is a brilliant cultural creation of a world wide web that really does connect us all. For example, three new species of spiders were found in Brazil in 2023. Their discoverers called them Kirk, Spock and McCoy, characters from the TV series Star Trek. Culturally we are one with the arachnids.

In another sense, it is a celebration of scientific genius. Charles Darwin is one of Tatar’s heroes. He was thrilled by the spiders he saw on his voyage around the world on HMS Beagle and sent a box full of them back to Cambridge. They had to be seen to be believed. E.B. White, the author of Charlotte’s Web, clearly shared Darwin’s fascination, writing: ‘Once you begin watching spiders, you haven’t time for much else… The world is really loaded with them.’

But I think Arachnomania is really about what it is to make a work of art and experience joy in the process. Tatar, in old age, is pulling together all her disciplines – folklore, German literature and mythology – in an attempt to form a perfect expression of herself. Towards the end, she quotes George Eliot in Middlemarch: ‘It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight – in art or anything else.’ Those words, Tatar says, are relevant, because her spider book brought her ‘a form of delight that is not just ephemeral’. This makes perfect sense. Arachnomania is a slow read, but it is well worth it.