The 30th October issue of Country Life carries my review of Edward Parnell’s Ghostland – British eeriness seen through a deeply personal prism. Perfect reading for the season (or any other time). The November issue of Australia’s renowned Quadrant carries my jumbo review of Philip Mansel’s brilliant Louis XIV biography, King of the World. Really… Continue reading
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Latest Irish Times review
David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea – review The 26th October 2019 issue of the Irish Times carries my review of David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea – his compendious and learned exploration of the separate and intermingling histories of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans from prehistory to today. An absorbing and useful resource for anyone… Continue reading
Stream of national consciousness
Mudlarking Lara Maiklem, Bloomsbury, 2019 The 1950 B-film The Mudlark tells of an urchin who ekes out an unpleasant existence scavenging the slimy Thames foreshore. He finds a coin bearing the head of Queen Victoria, and creeps into Windsor Castle to see the sequestered sovereign for himself. Through sheer goodhearted pluck, he succeeds where sophisticated… Continue reading
Territorial waters
The Way to the Sea Caroline Crampton, Granta, £16.99 The Frayed Atlantic Edge David Gange, William Collins, £18.99 Seawater pulses through the veins of our islands, the tang of open water reaching to the furthest points inland. Insularity has always been our destiny, determining daily life and deepest meanings even before Albion loomed out of… Continue reading
A million acres, six thousand years
The Fens – Discovering England’s Hidden Depths Francis Pryor, Head of Zeus, £25 ‘Very flat, Norfolk’ drawls a character in Noel Coward’s Private Lives – a supercilious condemnation of another character, and by inference all eastern England. Francis Pryor proves that while the Fens may be level, their gentle undulations and cubist planes hold stories… Continue reading
Living with Leviathan
The Last Whalers, Doug Bock Clark, Little Brown, 2019 Our relations with cetaceans have always been charged with danger and delight, represented by the extremes of Revelation’s “beast out of the sea”, and the frescoed dolphin-riders of Pompeii. Rare, huge, and unknowable, whales have traditionally been omens, or metaphors for improbability – “very like a… Continue reading
New review – Abandoned Sacred Places by Lawrence Joffe
My regrettably short review of Lawrence Joffe’s enjoyably evocative Abandoned Sacred Places in in the current (2 August 2019) issue of The Lady.
Staffordshire – ‘England in little’
Staffordshire – ‘England in little’ Arnold Bennett opens his 1908 novel Old Wives’ Tale describing the “natural, simple county” surrounding his Five Towns – a quiet countryside containing “everything that England has”, from hideous industry to Arcadian tranquillity. Staffordshire, he emotes, “is England in little, lost in the midst of England, unsung” – and all… Continue reading
New review – The Way to the Sea by Caroline Crampton and The Frayed Atlantic Edge by David Gange
Latest review The latest (10th July) Country Life contains my combined review of two absorbing books on watery themes – Caroline Crampton’s The Way to the Sea: Forgotten Histories of the Thames, her source-to-sea account of London’s river, and David Gange’s The Frayed Atlantic Edge, his account of a kayaking trip from Shetland to Cornwall
The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen
Gothic architecture The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen Introduced by Kevin Cramer, translated by J. A. Underwood, Penguin, 2018, 462 pps., £12.99 On 23 May 1618, Bohemian Protestants pushed two Catholic governors and their secretary through the windows of Prague Castle, in protest at the anti-Protestantism of Bohemia’s King Ferdinand, soon to be… Continue reading