Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s 1813 novel, Memoirs of Prince Alexey Haimatoff, purports to be the reminiscences of a Russian of mysterious, probably royal, parentage. Hogg (1792-1862) wrote on antiquity for both the Edinburgh Review and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but is mostly remembered today as Shelley’s first biographer. They had been friends at Oxford, from which they… Continue reading
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Parnassus, and patria
Sunk Island, Holderness. Image: Paul Harrop. Wikimedia Commons Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry Various authors, edited by Alexander Adams, foreword by William Clouston, London: Bournbrook Press, 2022, pb, 55pps, £12.50 Bournbrook Press is an offshoot of Bournbrook Magazine, founded in 2019 to offer a “primarily British audience with traditionalist, socially conservative argument and… Continue reading
Forgetting the past, forging the future
Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties Peter Hennessy, Penguin, 2020, 602 pages, £12.99 Lord Hennessy’s Winds of Change is the last in a trilogy covering the years 1945 – 1965, during which Britain helped win a war but began to lose an empire, and everything altered. The preceding volumes – Never Again: Britain… Continue reading
Heart of the island nation
A Man of Heart Liam Guilar, Swindon: Shearsman Books, 2023, pb., 197pps. The state of modern poetry can be a cause of acrimonious arguments, with critics reprehending poets’ loss of interest in craft, opacity of meaning, and the burgeoning of often McGonagallesque political verse. Liam Guilar demonstrates that at least some modern poets reverence their… Continue reading
Island queendom
The Britannias: An Archipelago’s Tale Alice Albinia, Allen Lane, 2023, hb., 512pps., £25 Islands always intrigue, hovering on the horizons of our imaginations – seen according to lights as territories to be taken, ancient redoubts, repositories of secrets, even loci of lands of youth. Where there are no islands, we often imagine them – Plato’s… Continue reading
The prices of freedom
Obedience is Freedom Jacob Phillips, London: Polity, 2022, pb., 172 pages, £13.55 Johannes Brahms had a personal motto, frei aber froh (‘free but happy’), which features famously as the note sequence F-A♭-F in the first movement of his Third Symphony. He adopted this cheerful philosophy as a jovial riposte to his friend, the violinist Joseph… Continue reading
The imperial imperative
In the Shadow of the Gods: The Emperor in World History Dominic Lieven, London: Allen Lane, 2022, 500 pps. hb., illus., £35 In the battle for precedence between the ‘great man’ and more ‘inclusive’ views of history, an account of emperors across centuries and cultures feels like a defiant assertion of the older school. Cambridge… Continue reading
Forgotten landscapes – fens in history and imagination
Twenty-five years ago, when I first started thinking about living in Lincolnshire, I kept coming up against strange preconceptions. People I talked to often seemed to have peculiar ideas about what the county was like – how it looked, how difficult to get to, how isolated it was, how unsophisticated it must be. But not… Continue reading
A poet’s pole position
Arctic Elegies Peter Davidson, Carcanet, 2022, pb., 72pps. £11.99 There are poets associated with particular places, or special states of mind, but Peter Davidson has made a genre of his own, as celebrant of a cardinal point. His interests are wide-ranging, but magnetized in one compass direction – towards ‘Norths’ geographical and conceptual, Norths as… Continue reading
The world in motion
Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape Cal Flyn, William Collins, 2021, pb, £9.99 In our era of ecological Angst, many are desperately seeking strategies to mitigate human damage, but Scottish writer Cal Flyn suggests a holistic new way of seeing these problems – one that is simultaneously haunted, and hopeful. She writes often… Continue reading