After many months of being confined to Kindle, I am pleased to say that A Modern Journey is now available again in hard copy A Modern Journey
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New review – John Lewis-Stempel’s Still Water
Still Water – The Deep Life of Ponds by John Lewis-Stempel My short review of John Lewis-Stempel’s engaging, informative and salutary Still Water – The Deep Life of Ponds is Book of the Week in the current issue of The Lady (21st June).
Forthcoming review – Still Water by John Lewis-Stempel
My short review of John Lewis-Stempel’s Still Water – The Deep Life of Ponds will be in the 21st June issue of The Lady – a book that will be savoured by all lovers of daphnia, duckweed, frogs, irises, lilies and moorhens
My review of Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Underland’
My review of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland My short review of Robert Macfarlane’s absorbing and intelligent Underland is in the 7th-20th June issue of The Lady – not online, but in all the shops today. The book wasn’t always comfortable reading for semi-claustrophobes like me (I don’t even care for lifts), but it’s often good to force yourself… Continue reading
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