A story first published in The London Magazine in 2024.
Category: Uncategorized
Review essay: ‘Breaking Kayfabe’, Wes Brown (Bluemoose, 2023)
Nobody in this business tells it quite like it is, perhaps because there is no it. It’s kayfabes all the way down.
Review: ‘Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You’, Jon Moses and Nick Hayes (eds.)(Bloomsbury, 2024)
Only part of this book has to do with where people are allowed to go; the rest concerns what they do – and how they think, feel, engage, respond – when they get there.
BBC Future essay: Coal mining created community and culture. Can clean energy do the same?
It was dirty and dangerous, but coal mining also cultivated pride, companionship, and art.
The Fence article: Under the hammer
I met some pagans in Nottinghamshire. They were… problematic.
Aeon essay: Folk music was never green
Don’t be swayed by the sound of environmental protest: these songs were first sung in the voice of the cutter, not the tree.
Fleet Lane: a novel
A new novel of surgery, sex and madness in Georgian London. Free to download!
Verso essay: People of the soil
We are shaped by our landscapes. They might be green or grey, wide-open or built-up, they might be here or there or anywhere, we might not have chosen them, we might not love them, we might not even like them, but they shape us, no less than we have shaped them.
Short story: ‘An Oologist’s Orkney Journal’
A short story written in 2022 for BBC Radio 4.
Richard Smyth 