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On Marshy Ground

Fraser MacDonald: Fen, Bog and Swamp, 15 June 2023

Fen, Bog and Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis 
by Annie Proulx.
Fourth Estate, 196 pp., £16.99, September 2022, 978 0 00 853439 4
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... spade for skinning the fibrous sward that contains the growing biota of the bog (sphagnum moss, heather, grasses and sedges), which is carefully relocated at the bottom of the bank so it can continue to grow. This skinning of the turf separates the living from the dead. Beneath the growing skin lies the mass of decaying plant matter accumulated over the ...

Not Very Permeable

Colin Kidd: Rory Stewart’s Borderlands, 19 January 2017

The Marches: Border Walks with My Father 
by Rory Stewart.
Cape, 351 pp., £18.99, October 2016, 978 0 224 09768 0
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... explore the borderlands on foot, in the hope of finding some essence of Britishness in the region James VI and I had described as the ‘navel or umbilic of both kingdoms’. While Stewart set out on his quest with undisguised polemical intent, ‘to show that there were no permanent differences between England and Scotland, between my cottage in Cumbria and ...

Havering and Wavering

Blake Morrison: Colm Tóibín’s ‘Long Island’, 6 June 2024

Long Island 
by Colm Tóibín.
Picador, 287 pp., £20, May, 978 1 0350 2944 0
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... Guest at the Feast’). Cush is where Eamon Redmond, a judge, retreats every summer in The Heather Blazing (1992); where the Devereux family gather in The Blackwater Lightship as Declan is dying of Aids; where Nora Webster used to spend time with her husband, Maurice, until he died and she was forced to sell up. Cush is a site of freedom and ...

‘Where’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’

Michael Dobson: 17th-century literary culture, 11 September 2008

Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 
by John Kerrigan.
Oxford, 599 pp., March 2008, 978 0 19 818384 6
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... for places where farmhouse bed and breakfasts cowered beneath looming ridges of wet, windswept heather, where there were ample supplies of fiddle music, and where every fishing village and handicrafts exhibition promised another souvenir linen tea towel. Sometimes it was Cornwall; sometimes Scotland; sometimes Wales; and sometimes it was the long drive ...

Standing on the Wharf, Weeping

Greg Dening: Australia, 25 September 2003

The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia 
by John Gascoigne.
Cambridge, 233 pp., £45, September 2002, 0 521 80343 8
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Looking for Blackfella’s Point: An Australian History of Place 
by Mark McKenna.
New South Wales, 268 pp., £14.50, August 2002, 0 86840 644 9
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Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia 
by Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths.
New South Wales, 253 pp., £15.50, October 2001, 0 86840 628 7
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The Land Is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia 
edited by Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges and Jane Simpson.
Pandanus, 304 pp., AUS $39.95, October 2002, 1 74076 020 4
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... were put on the Memory of the World Register (the list of documentary heritage launched in 1997): James Cook’s journal of the Endeavour, written in his own hand; and the Edward Koiki Mabo Papers, the record of Eddie Mabo’s landmark case before the High Court, which gave legal recognition to the fact that indigenous land ownership existed before European ...

Diary

David Craig: Scotland Changes Again, 20 December 1990

... the moor at Culloden, skirting the plain where long low humps in the coarse grass and stunted heather cover the skeletons of the 1100 Highlanders killed in that April hour of 1746, each clan with its name chiselled into a monument like a rounded milestone – Clan Chattan, Clan Cameron, Clan Stewart. Firs stand about like dark angels. The place seems to ...

Diary

Mary Wellesley: The Wyldrenesse of Wyrale, 26 April 2018

... But the same is true of manuscripts.Cotton may not have known what he had. His librarian, Richard James, labelled the manuscript: ‘Vetus poema Anglicanum in quo sub insomnii figmento multa ad religionem et mores spectantia explicantur’ (a poem in old English explaining many religious and moral topics using the figure of the dream). It was not until the ...

What sort of man?

P.N. Furbank, 18 August 1994

The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Vol. I: 1854-April 1874 
edited by Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew.
Yale, 525 pp., £29.95, July 1994, 0 300 05183 2
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The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Vol. II: April 1874-July 1879 
edited by Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew.
Yale, 352 pp., £29.95, July 1994, 0 300 06021 1
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... reason that many people who actually knew him, including someone with so good a judgment as Henry James, found him utterly charming. The charm, if one thinks of it, must have lain in a kind of innocence, the insouciance of a born talker. He may have been all the bad things I have called him, but unaffectedly so and without calculation; if he was ...

The German in the Wood

Emma Tennant, 6 December 1984

... had been like. I said I wanted to go up to the Fairy Ring. For I’d had the fairy stories of James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd read to me and he’d written of this wood, where it was dangerous to go most of the time, and especially to the Fairy Ring. The toadstools, a pale, hideous necklace of poison round the thick, mossy neck of the Ring, had been ...

The Story of Joe

Craig Raine, 4 December 1986

The Orton Diaries 
edited by John Lahr.
Methuen, 307 pp., £12.50, November 1986, 0 413 49660 0
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... And yet. The diaries begin with his mother’s funeral in 1966. Leonie Orton, Joe’s sister, told James Fox of the Sunday Times: He nearly had mother out of her coffin ... He was picking her head up. ‘What’s all this brown stuff?’; ‘try and get her rings off.’ I said: ‘I don’t want to.’ He said: ‘I do.’ He wanted to see her feet, he was ...

A Million Shades of Red

Adam Mars-Jones: Growing Up Gay, 8 September 2022

Young Mungo 
by Douglas Stuart.
Picador, 391 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 5290 6876 4
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... January Before’. In January, Protestant Mungo becomes involved with a young Catholic called James. In May, he is entrusted by his mother to the care of a couple of men she met at Alcoholics Anonymous, who undertake to show him the wild beauty of Scotland, and to teach him to fish. If this novel was your only source of information you would assume that ...

Wrecking Ball

Adam Shatz: Trump’s Racism, 7 September 2017

... black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a ...

Against the Same-Old Same-Old

Seamus Perry: The Brownings, 3 November 2016

The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 21 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 432 pp., $110, April 2014, 978 0 911459 38 8
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The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 22 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 430 pp., $110, June 2015, 978 0 911459 39 5
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Robert Browning 
edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan.
Oxford, 904 pp., £95, December 2014, 978 0 19 959942 4
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Browning Studies: Being Select Papers by Members of the Browning Society 
edited by Edward Berdoe.
Routledge, 348 pp., £30, August 2015, 978 1 138 02488 5
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... unmemorable space of which he recalls just the one luminous detail: For there I picked up on the heather And there I put inside my breast A moulted feather, an eagle-feather – Well, I forget the rest.No one else can do a throwaway ending as well as Browning: often his best poems close like that, as though slipping out of poetry and back into the life that ...

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
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... and the City (1998-2004), another early HBO hit, the crew duct-taped Kristin Davis’s stand-in Heather Kristin to a gynaecological chair while the director and actors were away from the set, made crude comments about her body and took Polaroids of her. ‘I wanted to rip the tape off and run screaming out of Silvercup Studios,’ she said. ‘Instead, I ...

Public Works

David Norbrook, 5 June 1986

The Faber Book of Political Verse 
edited by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 481 pp., £17.50, May 1986, 0 571 13947 7
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... interests produced a potentially subversive treatment of republicanism in Sejanus: but he became James I’s court poet, and Paulin deals fairly brusquely with Jonson as a conservative monarchist. He is represented here by ‘To Penshurst’, with a gloss based on Raymond Williams which criticises the poem for concealing its politics behind apparently ...

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