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Time Song by Julia Blackburn

DOGGERLAND DREAMTIME Time Song, Julia Blackburn, Vintage, £25 Something in East Anglia encourages spectral visions, deep thoughts about time. The 14th-century seer Julian of Norwich dreamed of submarine realms, going …downe into the see-ground, and there I saw hill and dalis green, semand as it were moss-begrowne, with wrekke and gravel. In 1658, Sir Thomas Browne published… Continue reading →

Museum of Lost Art by Noah Charney

MISSING MASTERPIECES The Museum of Lost Art, Noah Charney, Phaidon; £19.95 If art is largely illusion, as the theorists claim, then how much more illusionary is art that no longer exists? Extant artworks elicit complex considerations of perspective, proportion, reality and temporality—yet, strangely, so can extinct or missing ones, their absence a presence, a virtual reality Kunstkammer… Continue reading →

Animal: Exploring the Zoological World – introduction by James Hanken

 A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BESTIARY Animal: Exploring the Zoological World Introduction by James Hanken, London: Phaidon, 2018, hb., 352 pages, £39.95 Any volume examining ‘humankind’s fascination with animals’ can only hope to be a conspectus, but Animal is unusually ambitious and thoughtful, handsomely produced and with an introduction by a Harvard zoologist. It ranges far and… Continue reading →

The Secret Lives of Colour by Kassia St. Clair

COLOURFUL TALES The Secret Lives of Colour Kassia St. Clair, John Murray: London, 2016, hb., 320pps. History can be refracted through countless prisms – cultural, economic, environmental, ideological, moral, national, racial, religious – but one has been oddly unexplored, despite being not just obvious, but ubiquitous. That prism is colour, an element that suffuses every… Continue reading →

Beauty seen, beauty sought – Beauty by Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh

BEAUTY SEEN, BEAUTY SOUGHT Beauty, Stefan Sagmeister & Jessica Walsh, Phaidon: London, 2018, hb, 280pps “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” Keats effused in Endymion – “Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.” His 1818 poem about the shepherd so handsome he was beloved by immortals was poorly received, and Keats… Continue reading →

The Matter of Manners – In Pursuit of Civility by Keith Thomas

THE MATTER OF MANNERS In Pursuit of Civility – Manners and Civilisation in Early Modern England Keith Thomas, Yale: New Haven and London, hb., 457 pages Among the Bodleian Library’s celebrated Douce Collection of arcana,  incunabula and later works is an instructional manuscript of circa 1350, which contains the first-known written English expression of what… Continue reading →

Enlightenments – Little Demon by Michael Wilding

ENLIGHTENMENTS Little Demon, Michael Wilding, Melbourne: Arcadia, 2018, 260 pages, $29.95 Captain Cook named Cape Byron for ‘Foul-Weather Jack’ Byron, the adventuring Vice-Admiral who sailed past the easternmost point of the Southern Land in 1764, part of that endless English outpouring that shaped today’s topography. The weatherbeaten Enlightenment navigator, for whom beaches were only important… Continue reading →

My Country Life review of Animal: Exploring the Zoological World

The 7 November issue of Country Life carries my short review of Animal: Exploring the Zoological World (introduction by James Hanken, published by Phaidon) – “Animal captures admirably two interlocking intoxications: the thrill of ever-expanding zoological knowledge and the sheer joy of looking at animals, which look right back and into us in challenge and… Continue reading →