Saviours of souls: the heroism of lifeboat crews
Helen Doe’s moving history of the RNLI celebrates the volunteers who, over the centuries, have risked their own lives for those in peril on the sea
Seeing the dark in a new light
Even in the deepest mineshaft we’re surrounded by light we can’t see, explains Jacqueline Yallop, drawing on quantum physics to help dispel ordinary night terrors
The life of an Exmoor stockman reads like bloody-knuckled rural noir
Through her interviews with the exuberant countryman ‘Tommy’ Collard, Catrina Davies provides a vivid picture of nature in the raw
A poet finds home in a patch of nettles
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal
There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…
Another fallen idol: the myth of Ferdinand Magellan debunked
Ferdinand Magellan’s fame was largely undeserved. Horatio Clare sees the explorer cut down to size
Feathered friends
Unusually for a book about nature, the species in question, in this lucid story of the relationship between birds and…
A whale of a time with Albrecht Dürer
Great books make genres jump. It happened with W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which looked like a travelogue, claimed…
The problem with pills: The Octopus Man, by Jasper Gibson, reviewed
Having a breakdown? Try this pill, or that — or these? Built on the 1950s myth of a chemical imbalance…
Heated debate over Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition
How refreshing in a time of general sensitivity to find a book intended to infuriate and debunk. Welcome to the…
Man’s first instinct has always been to return to the sea
Travelling the Indus valley late in the third millennium BC you would have been awed by two Bronze Age megacities,…
Bitten by the cold: the strange attraction of polar exploration
‘We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of…
The facts – and fiction – of piracy
Avast there, scurvy dogs! For a nation founded on piracy (the privateer Sir Francis Drake swelled the exchequer by raiding…
The scandal of American shipping – incompetence, venality and shocking safety standards
‘We are globalisation,’ a senior executive at the shipping company Maersk told me. ‘We enable it, and we have questions…
Leeches, bats and toxic sap in Borneo’s Eden
Eton turns out prime ministers of various stripes and patches, but it also forges fine explorers. It seems to prepare…
The 280-mile walk that made Bach who he was
It was in his organ loft at Arnstadt that I began my acquaintance with Johann Sebastian Bach — with JSB,…
The worst things happen at sea
This horrifying and engrossing book could scarcely be improved upon. In this age of HRHs Harry, William and Kate-led openness…
Formidable black talons…
I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising —…
Which came first — the bowerbird or the egg?
What is it about birds? They are the wild creatures we see most often, their doings and calls a daily…
Charles Foster: ‘I need to be more of a badger’
Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That…
In and out of the drink
‘If I were to go mad,’ Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, ‘It would come…
