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
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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
Deptford dreaming
Aircraft always overhead, trains pulling in and out, traffic backed up along the New Cross Road, pulsating rap from open windows, plastic bottles in the gutter, pigeons with fungus-eaten toes, gang tags on gritty walls, smells of exhaust, fast food, sweat and the shower-gel of the highly made-up, high-heeled woman who just clicked by oblivious,… Continue reading
Book learning
The Madman’s Library The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History Edward Brooke-Hitching, Simon & Schuster, 2020, 255 pages, £25 Books are, Edward Brooke-Hitching notes, ‘the emblem of civilization.’ The earliest books were used to establish and uphold authority – administrative, legal and taxation powers, dynastic legitimacy, moral, political and religious order. Great… Continue reading
The enigmas of islands
Phantom Islands – In Search of Mythical Lands Dirk Liesemer, trans. by Peter Lewis, London: Haus Publishing, 2019, £14.99 Dirk Liesemer is a writing Wandervögel, an epistolary inheritor of the romantically- imagined movement that flourished in Germany between the late nineteenth century and 1933. The ‘wandering birds’ took their inspiration from medieval myths, and made… Continue reading
Apparitions and appropriations
‘The dead shall look me through and through’ Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H. As a boy, I read excitedly about the Egyptian Rooms at the British Museum, where night watchmen reported unexplained drops in temperature, feelings of being watched, and, on at least one occasion, a terrifying apparition of a bandage-clad mummy with contorted… Continue reading
A Modern Journey again available in hard copy
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
Dr. Johnson in Scotland – An Englishman in his Near Abroad
DR. JOHNSON IN SCOTLAND – AN ENGLISHMAN IN HIS NEAR ABROAD Samuel Johnson was nearly sixty-four when he made an unexpected journey. One day in 1773, the internationally-renowned lexicographer, essayist, poet, and novelist, who somehow combined being one of the great thinkers of Europe with being a personification of bluff Englishness, suddenly switched his great… Continue reading
John Aubrey – remembrancer and forward-thinker
JOHN AUBREY – REMEMBRANCER AND FORWARD-THINKER John Aubrey, My Own Life Ruth Scurr, London: Chatto & Windus, 2015, hb., 518pp, £25 Just as English painting is renowned for portraiture, so English letters have been illuminated by some of the greatest biographers ever to burnish world literature. After Boswell, the best-known is John Aubrey (1626-1697), whose… Continue reading