Ruth Pavey, Deeper into the Wood

Like many other people during lockdown we had the extravagant idea of buying a bit of woodland. Nothing came of it: we realised that we would feel awkward buying a piece of land as strangers, knowing nothing about it, or who used it and might resent us, so we didn't do any more about it. … Continue reading Ruth Pavey, Deeper into the Wood →

The Good Books 2021

Here are the books that I enjoyed most in 2021. You can read about those I liked best in 2020 here. Biography/memoir/autobiography/history The Element of Lavishness, Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell was a Christmas present from 2020 that got shunted into the waiting room while I read her letters to and from … Continue reading The Good Books 2021 →

Isabella Tree’s Wilding and Tim Flannery’s Europe

These two books about European natural processes are curiously connected, though I had no suspicion of this when I bought them. I was obviously in the mood for a sustained period of browsing on ancient species ecology and the prospects for reversing the mass extinctions caused by people. Looking for hope in the face of … Continue reading Isabella Tree’s Wilding and Tim Flannery’s Europe →

The Countryside Companion

I found this pleasingly hefty but slim volume in The Beaufort Bookshop in Bath, two days after we'd moved (always check out your new city's second-hand bookshops). I do like old editions of nature books, and have a particular keenness for the post-Second World War period, when rationing could be bypassed by going to the … Continue reading The Countryside Companion →

Corncrakes on Coll: Kathleen Jamie’s Findings

This week's podcast scripts catch-up from Really Like This Book is a blissful swim through Kathleen Jamie’s book Findings. Like Robert Gibbings, she writes discursively, moving randomly but purposefully from one subject to another as the observations she’s making surface from her memory. Findings filled me a great desire to get on a boat to go whale watching, or climb … Continue reading Corncrakes on Coll: Kathleen Jamie’s Findings →

Oliver Rackham’s The History of the Countryside

Oliver Rackham is the subject of this week's Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up. He wrote a lovely and really rather long History of the Countryside, which came out in 1986. I gobbled it down with great enthusiasm when I first read it, because then I was working in archaeology, and was very much into … Continue reading Oliver Rackham’s The History of the Countryside →