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It was in his organ loft at Arnstadt that I began my acquaintance with Johann Sebastian Bach — with JSB, with the young man, with the writer, the fighter, the lover. After the great walk of his in 1705 that we would follow, and after his return trek in February 1706, he would be caught
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This horrifying and engrossing book could scarcely be improved upon. In this age of HRHs Harry, William and Kate-led openness about our mental health, I declare an interest: diagnosed as cyclothymic, and having known more than two attacks of depression and hypomania in the past 30 years, I would have been disqualified from passage as
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I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising — but reading David Cobham’s Bowland Beth: The Story of an English Hen Harrier I felt it again strongly. Your nature writer now has a hungry market, keen and generous publishers and a shelf in the
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Thanks to Henry Williamson and Gavin Maxwell I have spent hours in the company of otters, though I have only seen two. The first was harried, fleeing towards us along a shoreline, apparently pursued by spirits. From The Otters’ Tale I now know that was a period, the late 1980s, when the otter was heading
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If photographs of ‘the deal in the desert’ made you queasy — you remember, Tony Blair and Muammar Gaddafi shaking hands for the cameras in 2004 — imagine how you would have felt if you were in exile in London and your father under torture in Gaddafi’s cells at the time. Now Blair is not
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What is it about birds? They are the wild creatures we see most often, their doings and calls a daily reassurance that humans are not isolated in our sentience. They descend from the first reptiles, while we come from the first mammals. Across a gulf of evolution we contemplate a parallel life which has evolved
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Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That genre has given us riches on the language of landscape, the redemptive power of goshawks and the lives of fields, rooks, butterflies et al. We are wealthier for the movement, but in none of many
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‘If I were to go mad,’ Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, ‘It would come as no surprise at all.’ One surprise of this book is its sanity, which is remarkable, given Liptrot’s beginnings. We open, unforgettably, with her parents passing each other on an island runway. Her mother is
