Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that made the Modern World Chris Moss, London: Old Street, 2026, hb., 364pps., £25 In his classic 1902-1904 Collecteana, folklorist Vincent Stuckey Lean cites a proverb which has since passed into cliché – “Lancashire thinks today what all England will think tomorrow”. Travel writer Chris Moss’s task in this highly… Continue reading
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Potatoes and their pathologies
Rot: A History of the Irish Famine Padraic X. Scanlan, London: Robinson, 2025, 340pps., hb., £25 Sometimes great matters can turn on – vegetables. Ancient civilization was founded on the ‘simple’ discovery that grasses could become grains, reliable and storable – allowing the emergence of fixed ‘Fertile Crescent’ cities with rulers and philosophers. But vegetables… Continue reading
Musica universalis
The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds across Landscapes and Imagination Michaela Vieser & Isaac Yuen, London: Reaktion, 2025, 175pps., hb., £14.99 “In the beginning was the Word” – but aeons before that ancient imperative there were other aural commands, within ourselves, rumbling in the gulfs of the earth, and echoing across the universe…. Continue reading
The West Turned Upside-Down
How the World Made the West Josephine Quinn, Penguin Random House, 2024, hb., 572pps., $20 I first saw this book in the window of Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. I was struck – although not surprised – by how logically out of place it was, surrounded by the handsome architecture of old intellectual England. Written by… Continue reading
Ten Days in Provence
At some time during my teens, I came across a science-fiction story by Michael Moorcock, featuring a certain ‘Dorian Hawkmoon,’ an adventurer of a distant future who existed in a post-apocalyptic version of France’s furthest south. My memories of the book (maybe books – Hawkmoon was a recurring character in Moorcock’s ‘multiverse’) are hazy in… Continue reading
Portrait of the artist as a young novelist
The Naked Spur Alexander Adams, London: Exeter House, 2025, 304pps., pb., £14.93 (Amazon) In 2007, a burned-out young British artist arrived in Berlin from London. He rented a frigid apartment in the worst district of the city, and subsisted on coffee and chocolate while he hammered out the draft of a novel ‘inspired’ by his… Continue reading
Anglo-apocalypse
Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group Rebecca Gransden, London: Tangerine Press, 2025, 93pps., £15 This powerful novella is set in southern England, following some vaguely described disaster, which is causing everything to collapse, and everyone to flee in panic. “There’s something spreading up from the far south east,” one man ‘explains’ to protagonist Flo… Continue reading
Thomas Elyot and self-government – why the rulers of realms must also govern themselves
“Wo is the coutrey, where the ruler is wanton” Sir Thomas Elyot, The Bankette of Sapience Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?-1546) is remembered as an eminent English humanist, and pioneer in the use of English instead of Latin for literary purposes. He was a copious and earnest scholar who strove mightily to “augment our Englyshe tongue”[i]… Continue reading
Samuel Pepys – maker of the Navy, shaper of Stuart England
Many people throughout history have kept diaries of some kind, but I suggest that Samuel Pepys is, as the Encyclopædia Britannica puts it, “the greatest diarist of all.” Pepys’ 1.25 million words on the period 1660-1669 is not just a unique record of a formative and hugely interesting period in English life, but a ground-breaking… Continue reading
#Mediterranean Refugee Crisis 2015
“The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today” James Joyce, Ulysses On watch –In a long slow timeless washReflux of freighted watersSlim frigates ride –Grey grace the warping waves bestrideAnd fall and rise again like GreeksUpreared on dolphins(That classic life still breathingLike a soul trapped in a ribcage.) Our SeaFloats palaces and palm trees –Towns sick with age,… Continue reading