There’s more to the lives of wild things than survival and death.
Category: Features
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.
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.
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?
Illustration feature: Gargantua and Pantagruel
It’s hard to imagine anyone less obviously in tune with the spirit of the scandalous Renaissance priest François Rabelais than William Heath Robinson.
PUSH Hockey feature: A Brief History Of Goalies
A goalie’s decisions are based on a welter of variables: what’s the surface like, who’s the attacker, where are my defenders and – not least – is this going to hurt?
Richard Smyth 