Tom Fort

Anglers & Demons

The Salmon

By

William Collins 360pp £25 order from our bookshop

G.E.M. Skues: The Man of the Nymph

By

Robert Hale 304pp £25 order from our bookshop

The salmon is, as Michael Wigan puts it neatly, ‘natural royalty’ – but only among fish. Irredeemably cold-blooded and scaly, it does not qualify for the sentimental adoration bestowed on badgers, seals, hedgehogs and so on. Apart from a few anglers, ichthyologists and tender-hearted pescaphiles, no one cares much about fish. If they did, the ecological and welfare horror story that is industrial salmon farming would have been outlawed long ago.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • The entertaining Howard Jacobson is in conversation with Prof John Mullan at the Queen’s Park Book Festival on Sund… ,
    • 'A modest and retiring man, Thompson spent his life describing apple varieties and recommending the best – Ribston… ,
    • 'Macfarlane is a poet with the instincts of a thriller writer, an autodidact in botany, mycology, geology and palae… ,
    • 'Some scholars attribute Shakespeare’s pre-eminence to four centuries of propaganda and not to the fact that Hamlet… ,
    • RT : We would appreciate any retweets ,
    • We've just stumbled on a gem from the LR archive. The emoluments page from May 1995, in which one reviewer asked to… ,
    • Unlike Mary Shelley's monstrous creation, Jeanette Winterson's Frankenstein-inspired novel feels 'barely alive', sa… ,
    Follow Us