In 1960, after a climbing accident in North Wales, Al Alvarez’s broken leg was set so badly that over the next thirty years all the cartilage in his ankle gradually wore away. By 1993, aged 63, this hard man of letters could barely hobble to the foot of a rock face, so he reluctantly gave […]
The applicant sounded hopeful in his letter to the noble lord: If your honour pleases to build a small hut as a hermitage near your honour’s house in a wood with a high wall round it your honour might hear of a man to live in it for seven years without seeing any human creature […]
The diary is a difficult form. If it is truly a diary, a great deal of it will be boring even to the diarist, which is why so few people manage to keep one going. The genuine diary of a remarkable person can, of course, make good reading if intelligently edited, but a diary written […]
It’s tough being a nature writer. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, you’re openly ridiculed or else lavished with the tenderness reserved for the soft-headed, your crabby handwriting filling journal after journal with minute observations concerning the machinations of every critter within range. You’re stuck in the middle of the intellectual world, too. Not quite […]
It’s a pretty good story. Sometime around 1837 a wandering German émigré named Robert Schomburgk, who had managed to convince the Royal Geographical Society to hire him as an explorer, reported finding an enormous and spectacular species of water lily deep in the Guiana jungle. Of course Schomburgk was not the first European to spot […]
A Manx Shearwater was ringed as a three-month-old chick in its Welsh nest burrow. Fourteen days later the same bird arrived, unaccompanied by any of its kin, in its species’ usual winter quarters off the coast of Argentina, some 8,000 kilometres away. ‘An individual bird may repeat that same oceanic journey, back and forth, 100 times’ […]
‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’ Thus wrote Henry David Thoreau, in Walden; Or, Life in the Woods, […]
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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