Katherine Rundell is editor of The Book of Hopes, an anthology of stories and pictures for children. Her own books for children include, most recently, The Good Thieves. She began her series of animal studies for the LRB in 2018. They have now been published as a book, The Golden Mole and Other Living Treasure, with illustrations by Talya Baldwin.
Before Anne Boleyn laid her head on the executioner’s block, she bent and wrapped the hem of her dress around her feet. She thereby ensured that, if in her death throes she were to spreadeagle her legs, the crowd would not see up her skirt. It was a gesture at once gracious and gruesome, and the verse that Sir Thomas Wyatt (probably) wrote on the occasion from the Tower of London is...
From my window I can see the Shard. Today there are helicopters, flying low. A man driving a van stops at the lights and sticks his whole torso out of the window, right to the navel, and twists to look up. Six women are climbing the Shard, to protest against the expansion of drilling for oil in the Arctic. Their mission-statement is written in the vernacular of Hollywood disaster movies: ‘1 skyscraper. 6 women. No permission.’ The Shard juts up at the mid-point of Shell’s three offices; the tallest building in Europe, it is the closest thing to ice-climbing that London can provide. I walk to the Shard. Everyone along Borough High Street is moving with their faces turned up, and the people who stop to watch have the faces that children wear at the circus. The sun is in everyone’s eyes. In the hour I am out, I see three pairs of people collide.
I first encountered King Solomon’s Mines in the children’s section of a public library in Harare. Most of the books smelled of water damage and many had been taken out so rarely that the last ‘return by’ stamp pre-dated Mugabe and decimalisation. I was working through shelves of books about horses and morality tales written by women who manifestly did not like children,...
In the last few years, I have fallen in love with brick. I carry in my head a taxonomy of drainpipes and cement and scaffolding; I’ve become, in the last decade, a night climber. A while ago I climbed up the side of Battersea Power Station, up the great smoke stacks, to look at the world as it lay below. It’s the largest brick building in Europe, and I wanted to see it before it disappeared. It’s easier than you would think to get onto the walls of Battersea. You shin up a lamppost and drop down over a wall and there’s the power station, huge and already part dismantled, lying like an upended dinosaur.
Saki existed in a perfect storm; every element of his circumstances contributed to the lunatic clarity of his imagination. The necessity for secrecy in his romantic life perhaps made it natural for him to write obliquely, to use tigers and wolves and pigs to talk about sex and death and social climbing. Living a half-hidden life, he was a man who saw the hidden wildness of things. His short stories burst with the possibilities of a world in which strangeness is bone-deep.
Katherine Rundell has been writing about endangered animals in the LRB since 2018. Her new book, The Golden Mole, gathers those essays and new pieces into a bestiary of unusual and underappreciated creatures.Katherine...
The realisation that one might be show-offy in a good way is among Donne’s chief bequests to English literature, a salutary corrective to the 16th-century cult of Sidneian sprezzatura. The embrace of...
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