It’s the dizzying transitions of scale that best characterise our complicated relationship with insect lives.

I find myself telling my children: ‘Daddy’s doing his peregrines.’

There is as much of Blythe in the writing here as there is of the natural world of Wormingford.

This was never likely to be, in any sense, a critical biography.

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.

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.

Something is wrong in the Robert Macfarlane Extended Universe.

When the most prestigious prize in nature writing appears unable or unwilling to recognise and reward good writing for its own sake, the perception of nature writing as literature is diminished.

Even before this spring is done with we can say that the genre is unlikely to furnish a richer reading experience than Greenery this year.