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 world has become a toxic prison – and a volcanic winter lurks on the horizon
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
In the footsteps of the Romantic poets
Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with…
Geology’s dry, rocky road
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…
The most gripping sea-catastrophe writing I have read outside Conrad
When the novelist David Vann was 13, his father — a difficult, unhappy dreamer in his thirties, constantly in dread,…
A new translation of the Iliad
‘Why do another translation of Homer?’ Richmond Lattimore asked in the foreword to his own great translation of the Iliad…
Fizmer, feetings, flosh, blinter - enjoy these words and forget them immediately, advises Adam Nicolson
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 Edge of the World: deep subject, shallow history
Michael Pye appears out of his depth in a cold, grey sea in the mists of time, says Adam Nicolson
