Standing up for Nature
This book is one of a series of Little Books which are little books but they pack a big punch. They will remind many readers of Observer books because they are a similar size, but don’t let the small dimensions make you think that these books are lightweights. Not at all. This volume (I will…
This book is one of a series of Little Books which are little books but they pack a big punch. They will remind many readers of Observer books because they are a similar size, but don’t let the small dimensions make you think that these books are lightweights. Not at all. This volume (I will…
This is a very good book and a much needed antidote to the confident prognostications of doom and gloom. Sometimes I think it is slightly over optimistic, because the future does strike me as pretty worrying, but without hope for a better, or at least less apocalyptic, future, then there is little incentive to take…
It’s difficult being English, and Caroline Lucas has written a helpful book for the English to find their way and for the Irish, Welsh and Scots to cut us all a bit of slack. Being English is not necessarily being a racist skinhead with a cross of St George tattoo. What is the left…
This book is one of a series of Little Books which are little books but they pack a big punch. They will remind many readers of Observer books because they are a similar size, but don’t let the small dimensions make you think that these books are lightweights. Not at all. This volume (I will…
Kathleen Jamie is Scotland’s National Poet or Makar, and this book is a collection of personal notes, prose poems, micro-essays and fragments. The idea is that they are arranged here like the stones of a cairn. I was slightly nervous that this might be too ‘literary’ for me – but it wasn’t. Here are…
Mushrooms are fascinating for so many reasons, but not the least of them is that you can eat many of them with relish but if you eat some of them they may constitute your last meal. And so a book nudging you towards picking and using mushrooms has to be pretty strong on the warnings…
Now, as you might know, Chris Packham is a mate of mine but let’s be clear, he does know his birds, although like the rest of us he does make mistakes. Ask him (no don’t, please!) about the bird squashed on the road that he thought was a [I’m not going to tell you] which…
I liked this book very much. It is written by someone about my age (slightly older) who has travelled to many of the same places as I have at similar times of his life but I don’t think you would have to have been in Oxford, the Camargue or the Coto Donana at those times…
I’m not a massive supporter of the cult of youth as I feel it’s a stage of life that is best grown out of. But this book, from this young (early 30s) man, is a joy. Really! The author is enthusiastic about his job as a ranger at the National Trust’s site of Wicken Fen…