Antarctic Atlas: New Maps and Graphics That Tell the Story of a Continent Peter Fretwell, Particular Books, 2020, 208 pages, £35 Strata. William Smith’s Geological Maps Foreword by Robert Macfarlane, Thames & Hudson, 2020, 256 pages, £50 ‘Tis the season of complacency, when we sit in warmth and shiver vicariously with Mary and Joseph out… Continue reading
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Times of Troubles
Say Nothing – A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland Patrick Radden Keefe, London: William Collins, 2019, pb, 511 pages In May 1169, an Anglo-Norman expeditionary force landed in Wexford to help the King of Leinster subjugate a revolt – an episode mythologised as inaugurating eight centuries of English oppression of Ireland…. Continue reading
Sowing the seeds of future farming
A Small Farm Future Chris Smaje, Chelsea Green, 2020, 297 pages Chris Smaje is almost certainly the only sociologist-turned-farmer in Somerset, and probably in England. This unusually ecologically-aware agriculturist hopes the sobering effects of COVID can encourage global radical rethinking that can reset society by restructuring rurality. More of us now see the fragility of… Continue reading
Mediterranean refugee crisis
“The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today” James Joyce, Ulysses On watch – In a long slow timeless wash Reflux of freighted waters Slim frigates ride – Grey grace the warping waves bestride And fall and rise again like Greeks Upreared on dolphins (That classic life still breathing Like a soul trapped in a… Continue reading
Looking at the looker-on
10,000 Not Out – The History of the Spectator 1828-2020 David Butterfield, London: Unicorn, 256 pages Everyone has seen The Spectator. Few other journals have cut such a dash through history and culture, and no others have lasted as long. Contributing editor David Butterfield has immersed himself to excellent effect in the magazine’s billion-word digitized… Continue reading
Innocence and experience
Humankind – A Hopeful History Rutger Bregman, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, 463 pages, £20 Humankind opens in evangelical style – This is a book about a radical idea. An idea that’s long been known to make rulers nervous. An idea denied by religions and ideologies, ignored by the news media and erased from the annals of… Continue reading
The Spanish mission
Conquistadores – A New History Fernando Cervantes, Allen Lane, 2020, 487 pages Christopher Columbus stands surrounded by traffic at the corner of Central Park, dwarfed by the beetling buildings of Broadway and Eighth. Yet his statue still draws eyes and imaginations, an emblem of all the Americas – Italian trailblazer for the “New Spanish”, carrying… Continue reading
‘History’s’ victims
Small Men on the Wrong Side of History – The Decline, Fall, and Unlikely Return of Conservatism Ed West, London, Constable, 2020, 426 pages The story of conservatism since 1945 has been one of failure wrapped up in frequent electoral success. While anatomising this oft-noted conundrum, Ed West outlines excellently the intellectual and stylistic differences… Continue reading
Eager for beavers
Bringing Back the Beaver Derek Gow, London: Chelsea Green, 2020, hb, 208 pages, £20 Conservationists are frequently criticised for focusing on glamorous species at the expense of others equally important, but unluckily uglier – pandas rather than pangolins, birds rather than bats, and monkeys rather than mole-rats. Europe’s frankly lumpy largest rodent, the European beaver,… Continue reading
Robinson Crusoe revisited
The Shortest Way With Defoe – Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel Michael B. Prince, University of Virginia Press, 2020, 328 pages, £26 Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel Journal of the Plague Year has been much read recently, for obvious reasons. Cognoscenti have always read Roxana and Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, while… Continue reading