Sara Wheeler
Shine On
Aurora: In Search of the Northern Lights
By Melanie Windridge
William Collins 308pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
The first time I saw the northern lights – soft green and yellow beams drawing across the sky like a curtain – I understood how the indigenous peoples of the Arctic came to associate them with the supernatural. Night after night I stood in the dark cold of Alaska’s Brooks Range and watched an unseen hand switch on the lights. An evanescence of strands rippled and flashed, and at other times bright bars marched in close-packed succession, transforming themselves at a set point into solid white lances.
In the pages of this book, Melanie Windridge sets out on a journey to see the lights – also known as the aurora borealis – in various places around and above the Arctic Circle. She does so both to explain what causes this extraordinary phenomenon and also to explore its
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
'Foreign-policy pundits, then as now, tended to lack subtlety, even if they could be highly articulate about a nation they did not like very much.'
Read Lucy Wooding's review of Clare Jackson's 'Devil-Land', which has won the @WolfsonHistory prize.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-view-from-across-the-channel
From the First World War to Evelyn Waugh: @DaisyfDunn takes us into the world of Oxford between the wars.
Generously supported by @Lit_Review
#CVHF #AmazingHistory #UniversityofOxford
'That they signify something is not in question. Yet how to interpret the symbols of a long-vanished society? What would the inhabitants of the 50th century make of the ubiquity of crosses in Europe?'
Hilary Davies on the art of the Lascaux caves.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/poems-of-the-underground