Search Results

“... old decaying trees. Shred them.’ These modest and largely neglected works are the subject of Rebecca Bushnell’s unstintingly interesting book. She writes with great sympathy and quiet wit about the mixture of empiricism, magic and popular lore in the manuals, and tells the story of the way they were superseded by the apparently more scientific ...”

“... When​ we were students, a friend of mine discovered that he could trump anything anybody else said by using the word ‘tragic’. If someone said he needed a new pair of glasses or was thinking of joining the civil service, the two terse, dismissive syllables were enough to bring the conversation to a halt. ‘Tragic’ is a powerful, semi-sacred word, and the artform it names, like all sacred phenomena, is hedged about with prohibitions ...”