Ariane Bankes
Otter Spotter
Island of Dreams: A Personal History of a Remarkable Place
By Dan Boothby
Picador 241pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
This is the story of an obsession. Dan Boothby enjoyed (or endured) a fatherless, gypsy childhood, and subsequently drifted for years before fetching up at the Kyleakin Lighthouse, off the coast of Skye, last home of Gavin Maxwell. It was Maxwell – that inspired but tortured writer – who was the lodestar of Boothby’s wanderings, the focus of his thoughts and dreams. For a boy brought up on the fringes of society, it is not hard to see why: Maxwell was the quintessential outsider, almost feral in his likes and dislikes and his love of the wild, notwithstanding his privileged background. The sanctuary he created at Camusfeàrna (in reality Sandaig), where he would hole up with his beloved otters and a series of young boys, has exerted a magnetic fascination for generations of would-be naturalists and fugitives from urban life.
It was the discovery of Maxwell’s Raven Seek Thy Brother that set the teenage Boothby on his fitful course. The final volume of the trilogy begun with Ring of Bright Water, it had at its dark centre a curse laid upon Maxwell by the poet Kathleen Raine, disappointed in her love for the writer. It was to this curse that he ascribed the grave misfortunes that subsequently befell him. Raven Seek Thy Brother was an elegy for a lost idyll, one
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
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger