The History of England’s Cathedrals Nicholas Orme, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024, pb, 306pps., US$27.95 As an amateur student of British history, my shelves creak with books about the Church in England, and the Church of England. Central in all these accounts, and unmissable in townscapes from Cornwall to Northumberland, are England’s world-renowned cathedrals… Continue reading
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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
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
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