The healing power of Grasmere
Following in Wordsworth’s footsteps, Esther Rutter finds new self-confidence and happiness in the entrancing surroundings of Dove Cottage
The clock is ticking fast
Our own actions have created the toxic prison in which we now live, says Peter Frankopan, and the future looks terrifying. Adam Nicolson can only agree
The spirit of beauty
Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with…
Rocks of ages
There has been an argument recently on Twitter about how to do nature-writing. Should it involve the self? Should it…
Searching for the sublime in deep dark holes
Edmund Burke, as a young Irish lawyer in 1756, first made the distinction between beauty and sublimity. Beauty for Burke…
Fishing for meaning in vanished Doggerland
Somewhere deep in the water-thick layers of Time Song, Julia Blackburn says, funnily, that in Danish, ‘the word for book…
Spirits from the vasty deep…
‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays…
Perils of the Pacific
In the great Iberian empires of the 16th and 17th centuries, a career was already avail-able in global administration not…
A Mile Down: David Vann’s memoir of a disastrous career at sea
When the novelist David Vann was 13, his father — a difficult, unhappy dreamer in his thirties, constantly in dread,…
Poetic injustice
‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ Richmond Lattimore asked in the foreword to his own great translation of the Iliad…
For blackberry, read BlackBerry
It is not only archaic or dialect terms in natural history we’re now missing in everyday speech, says Adam Nicolson. Soon children won’t even know what a dandelion is
The rough end of Europe
Michael Pye appears out of his depth in a cold, grey sea in the mists of time, says Adam Nicolson
