The weight of the prevailing aesthetic – today favouring the brooding and sublime, the sensitive, the straight-faced – is as heavy as ever.
New Humanist feature: The Truth About Brainwashing
“Brainwashing” is, above all, a process. It’s not about telling people stuff that’s not true until they simply start to believe it. It twists control dials at a far deeper level than that.
New Statesman review: ‘Darker With The Lights On’, David Hayden (Little Island Press, 2018)
The framing of this debut collection by Dublin-born Hayden is insistently absurdist.
TLS review: ‘The Songs Of Trees’, David George Haskell (Viking, 2017)
For David George Haskell, the forest never really ends.
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.
Richard Smyth 