The Guardian Country Diary: the heather is a burnt burgundy, the grass yellowed

The moors are a tinderbox, parched and crisped by weeks of dry summer heat.

New Statesman review: ‘Signal Failure’, Tom Jeffreys (Influx Press, 2017)

Railways, like Romans, prefer to take the direct route. Tom Jeffreys, trekking on foot from London to Birmingham along the putative course of the HS2 high-speed line, is more of a rambler.

BBC Wildlife feature: Happy Planet?

There’s more to the lives of wild things than survival and death.

TLS commentary: Plashy Fens – The Limitations Of Nature Writing

Gilbert White’s Natural History Of Selborne (1788) has been regarded since its publication as a landmark text in British nature-writing. Does it still cast a shadow? Do the nature writers of the past decade owe White a debt?

The Author essay: Like A Good Christmas Cake

Is the creative process nothing but a lot of rot? Well, in a way, maybe it is.

The Guardian Country Diary: Ears strained for a mad Highland grouse

To me, at least, the Highlands dishes up its treats in small portions.

TLS commentary: How British Is It?

“For centuries we have prized the same prejudices”, the vicar of an isolated Warwickshire village told H. V. Morton in 1926, “and we have grown up as naturally as my currant bushes out there. We were, you see, locked up here together with our fields and our imaginations.”

TLS commentary: Man-made Wilderness

Wildcat and pine marten roam the forests; hawthorn and rosebay willowherb choke the country pathways. Fox and falcon flourish, flocks of rooks darken the fields, and beaver build in the upland waterways.

New Statesman review: ‘The Great Soul Of Siberia’, Sooyong Park, trans. Jamie Chang (William Collins, 2016)

There is more than one way to lose yourself in a forest. Keeping still – “as still and quiet as a tree” – will do the job as surely as stumbling mapless into the wild, to judge from Sooyong Park’s deceptively intense account of filming endangered Amur tigers in south-eastern Siberia.