“Glory of Spayne”

I started awake as the plane came into land. The cactuses along the edges of the runway suggested even to my stupefied senses that we were no longer in Birmingham. Distinctly un-English heat fell heavily on our heads and draped itself around our shoulders as we walked into the terminal below the giant, magic word,… Continue reading

Mountain rescue

James Hilton (1900-1954) was a bestselling novelist, responsible for Goodbye, Mr Chips and Random Harvest – and Lost Horizon (1933), the latter filmed twice, once by Frank Capra. Lost Horizon is little-read today, but is memorialised by Hilton’s place-name ‘Shangri-La’, which has passed into cliché as shorthand for any remote utopia. Tibet, with its awe-inspiring… Continue reading

Soldiers, once and always

Alfred de Vigny’s The Military Condition, first published in France in 1835, is a rare philosophical examination of the military experience. It’s aphoristic, lucid, mordant, and reflective – a tribute to the perennial nature of the professional soldier. Vigny (1797-1863) came from a noble family. His father was crippled by war, but nevertheless instilled in… Continue reading

Alliteration once and always

Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival – A Critical Anthology Dennis Wilson Wise (ed.), Lanham, Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2023, 407pps., US$65 The phrase ‘alliterative poetry’ immediately connotes archaism, and a literary tradition almost moribund since the mid-fifteenth century. University of Arizona academic Dennis Wilson Wise suggests that the form has been revived… Continue reading

Prince Harming

Spare, Prince Harry, London: Transworld, 2023, hb., 410pps., £28 There are times when English feelings for their royal family come close to obsession. Through all the tumults of England’s trajectory, its monarchy has formed an imaginative bond between Anglo-Saxon origins and today’s Kingdom – celebrated by its greatest writers, and extolled as an exemplar of… Continue reading

Empire state of mind

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning Nigel Biggar, London: William Collins, 2023, 480pps., $34.99 Ideologues are frequently performative, but sometimes they are simply pantomimic. One of today’s major stock villains is the British Empire – seen in melodramatic minds as a swaggering dastard, slashing through global history like Captain Hook in murderous search of Peter Pan and… Continue reading

From myth to mob-rule, and back

The Prophets of Doom Neema Parvini, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2023, pb., 227pps., £14.95 The West, it is said, is modernity, but if it is, there is melancholy at its core. Our most confident centuries have subsisted in the shadow of Rome – our Ozymandian awareness that the greatest powers must pass, and all empires will… Continue reading

Writing ruins

Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain Matthew Green, London: Faber, 2022, hb, 358pps, £20 An unknown Anglo-Saxon wrote The Ruin, a poem about Roman remains, which starts: “This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it / Courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying…” Ethnic inheritors took up this mordant tradition, especially after the… Continue reading

Refracted future

The Mirror, Tim Bragg, Sycamore Dystopia, 2023, pb., 292pps., £10 Ever since the ancients invented automata, writers have wondered about the implications for humanity, and ruminated about the nature of consciousness. The Industrial Revolution would spawn increasing concern about subservience to machines and “Satanic mills.” The Great War and then Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R…. Continue reading

The ghost coast

Adam ran his hand over his balding scalp. The dunes shimmered all around – expectant, empty of any movement except his, although he knew rare beetles trundled through rough grass, and he could hear toads, chirring contentedly somewhere amongst orchids and buckthorn. He couldn’t see the sea from here, but it would be far out… Continue reading