Flights of fancy (and fact)

Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald, London: Jonathan Cape, 2020, hb., 261pps. £16.99 Helen Macdonald’s 2014 H is for Hawk, her searing account of a grief-charged relationship with a goshawk, soared into the literary firmament, the best book about a bird since T. H. White’s Goshawk of 1951 or J. A. Baker’s 1967 Peregrine. These articles on… Continue reading

The glossarian as moralist – review of Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane

THE GLOSSARIAN AS MORALIST Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2015, 387pps, hb, £20 Robert Macfarlane is one of the most lionized of contemporary British writers, somehow combining a Cambridge career with producing a celebrated sequence of unusually literate explorations of landscape. First was 2003’s Mountains of the Mind, about Occidental attitudes towards high places… Continue reading