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?
Author: richardsmyth
I'm a writer, journalist, editor, cartoonist and general freelance cultural janitor.
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.
New Humanist interview: Carys Bray
Carys Bray was born into a strict Mormon family in Southport, Merseyside. Her keenly anticipated first novel, A Song For Issy Bradley, tells the story of a Mormon family struggling to come to terms with the death of their youngest daughter, Issy.
The Guardian Country Diary: Nest raids by feral mink take their toll
The moorhen had tried again. My passing-by startled her out of her nest – a cup at the foot of a stand of fading yellow flag irises, not two metres from the lakeshore. Before I made an apologetic retreat, I took note of a single soft-spotted pale egg resting in the hollow. All being well, another five or six would follow.
New Humanist feature: Captive Audience
Sympathetic ear or religious recruiter – what’s a prison chaplain for?
Richard Smyth 