Posted inWords
A Winter Walk Around St Ives
My eyes lighted on something dark, in the distance, on the beach. Coming closer, I saw it was a dead porpoise. Mouth frozen in a smile, skin radiating a silvery…
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Aurochs and Auks: Essays on Mortality and Extinction by John Burnside
This book is not an easy read. This is probably as it should be, given the subject material – the death of the individuals, species and the planet, and the…
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The Ghost in the Garden by Jude Piesse
In her wonderful book, The Ghost in the Garden: in Search of Darwin’s Lost Garden, author Jude Piesse observes that gardens have the unique distinction of being created by people as…
Posted inWords
Deliverance
For days there had been no signs of human life. Pine forests shrouded in snow and half-frozen lakes glittering in the sun stretched into an unspoilt Canadian wilderness. It was…
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The Turkish Embassy Letters
To say these are a collection of the best letter writing of the eighteenth century really would be understating the importance and brilliance of The Turkish Embassy Letters. A collection…
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Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes
In Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, he remarks that the permanence of a mountain seems to structure our understanding of the natural world, thereby conditioning the eye…
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A Thing of Beauty
I’d been looking forward to reading Peter Fiennes’ new book A Thing of Beauty since its first mentions on social media, having read and reviewed its wonderful predecessor Footnotes (2019,…
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The Five Acre Forest
Everyone has their own idea of home, and what home entails, for Trish Nicholson that idea came to the realisation on a sand dune in New Zealand, thus buying and…
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The White Birch
Edgelands, not the ones where concrete and vegetation intersect, but the ones where culture and nature face each other in the mirror. A major thread in Tom Jeffrey’s new book,…
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Light Rains Sometimes Fall
One of the many things that have amazed me in the world is traditional Japanese art and architecture, I’ve always been fascinated by how intertwined buildings and bridges have become…