As so many of us have now merged into the ultra-slow lane of life, and are spending greatly increased amounts of time meditatively getting to know both the domestic as well as natural worlds around our respective domiciles to a level of detail far more exhaustive and refined that we ever previously contemplated, I’ve been trying to bring attention to new and forthcoming books that might best fit with such revisions to our lives.
Focusing on the natural history of the British Isles, Mr. Eatherley takes up the search for the stories behind some of the “endless succession of animals, plants, fungi and other alien lifeforms” that have taken to calling the Isles home over the past centuries, and indeed, facing up to the reality that it’s now “often hard to work out what actually is native, and what is foreign.” (There’s a larger metaphor in there somewhere…)
It was two o’clock in the morning. Having just arrived in England mid-afternoon of the preceding day, I was severely jet-lagged and just drifting off to sleep in a farm-field facing room of the Berkshire countryside hotel that would be my lodging for the first half of my stay in the UK. Suddenly, out of […]
Mark Avery’s most recent Sunday Book Review takes up a new work by Guy Shrubsole that seeks to answer a very pressing modern question indeed: “Who Owns England?”