Diana Athill
All Things Bright & Beautiful
Claxton: Field Notes from a Small Planet
By Mark Cocker
Jonathan Cape 238pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
The naturalist Mark Cocker lives in a Norfolk village called Claxton, where most of what he chronicles in this book took place. I spent my first twenty-five years in a nearby village, and loved my place as intensely as he loves his. What’s more, I believed that I knew it intimately. I am now ashamed of myself. The ‘Claxton Parish Species List’ appended to Cocker’s text explains why. It runs to 1,108 items. This awe-inspiring list is presented under a number of headings: Fungi, Vascular Plants, Bryophytes, Lichens, Flatworms, Slugs and Snails, Millipedes, Spiders and Relatives, Dragonflies, Bugs and Relatives, Butterflies and Moths, Birds, Mammals, and so on. Never again will I claim to know a place ‘intimately’.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings