The Animal’s Companion – People and their Pets – a 26,000-Year-Old History Jacky Colliss Harvey, London: Atlantic Books, 2019 The author starts this ambitious book with a redhaired man and his red setter wearing matching bandanas and sunglasses, who made her wonder why so many of us feel so impelled to allow unutterably alien animals… Continue reading
Date Archives → January 2020
Europe, from Cretaceous to Anthropocene
Europe: A Natural History Tim Flannery, London: Allen Lane, 2018, 346 pages, £20 Seen from space, much of nighttime Europe blazes with light, evidence of industry, urbanism, and an existential restlessness that has long impelled Europeans to impose modernity on themselves and the world. Australian palaeontologist-ecologist Tim Flannery, amongst much else author of The Future… Continue reading
The bounding, boundless main
The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans David Abulafia, Allen Lane, 2019, 1,050 pages, £35 David Abulafia’s 2011 The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean set a standard in Middle Sea scholarship, charting a course from 22,000 BC to today, combining careful detail with epic sweep. This dazzlingly ambitious companion-piece looks… Continue reading
Gloucestershire’s genius loci
Down in the Valley: A Writer’s Landscape, Laurie Lee, Penguin, 2019 Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie (1959) is a classic of English rural writing, lauded for its evocation of Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley in the early 20th century, and the last days of an intensely-experienced, millennium-old way of life. This slender but well-conceived volume revisits some… Continue reading