‘It would be nice to have something like this at home,’ Pierre S du Pont, the owner of Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania, wrote after a visit to the famous sixteenth-century Villa d’Este in Italy in 1910. As a scion of the du Pont chemical dynasty, he had the funds to do just that, creating what […]
‘Encourage the creepers.’ This was the American garden designer Charles Platt’s advice on low-maintenance lawncare to his client William Gwinn Mather, president of the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, in 1933, at the height of the Depression, when even plutocrats felt the need to tighten their belts. Or adjust their braces, or whatever it is that plutocrats […]
This exceptional book is billed as garden writing, but it is garden writing only in the sense that Moby-Dick is a treatise on whales. There is no need to have the slightest knowledge of or interest in horticulture to be enchanted by it. The author calls it ‘this blackbird’s nest of cobwebs and sheep’s wool’, […]
I have to confess that I have not come across anything quite like this book masquerading under the guise of garden history. It recounts the creation of the gardens at Kenilworth Castle by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and those at Theobalds by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and is billed with Hello-style hype as ‘a […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm