Nick Richardson

Early in​ The Enchanted Wood (1939), the first of Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books, the three main characters – Jo, Bessie and Fanny – make friends with a ‘small elf’ called Silky, who lives on one of the lower branches of the Faraway Tree. In the recent film adaptation, The Magic Faraway Tree, Silky is a big fairy who feels insecure about her size. She wishes...

The alchemist​ in his laboratory was a popular subject for Dutch painters of the 17th century because it allowed them to show off their skill with light. Mattheus van Helmont’s A Savant in His Cabinet, Surrounded by Chemical and Other Apparatus, Examining a Flask (1670s), one of the splendid plates in Philip Ball’s introduction to alchemy, depicts an alchemist at work,...

Alchemical engraving by Raphael Custos (1650).

Part​ of the magic of grimoires resides in the word itself: ‘grim’, with its aura of frost and severity, opening onto that chasmic vowel, a playground for demons. Exactly when or why manuals for conjuring spirits came to be known by this name is unclear, but the convention was well established in Europe by the Middle Ages....

Some​ of M. John Harrison’s books have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the...

The​ end of the world has always been nigh. The ancient Assyrians, nearly five thousand years ago, expected it to arrive any minute. Tenth-century Christians thought it would come in 1000, 17th-century Christians in 1666, Cotton Mather in 1736, Charles Wesley in 1794, Mother Shipton in 1881, Pierre Lachèze in 1900 and Jim Jones in 1967. The end of the great plague of 2020 may be in...