Book review: ‘The Gallows Pole’ by Benjamin Myers

18th-century Yorkshire meets the Sopranos: intrigue, betrayal, murder, and revenge in the Calder Valley.

Book review: ‘At Hawthorn Time’ by Melissa Harrison

An extraordinary modern rural novel.

Newsletter No. 13: Bramblings!
bramblings · wheatears · Mary Beard · Beaker folk · Meera Sodha · recipes · John Tyndall · Eunice Foote · religion · Ben Myers · Austin Kleon · Walter Benjamin · giant sloths · Shetland · Neil Ansell · Charles Darwin
Newsletter No. 12: Unspeakable things beneath the shrubs
Mark E Smith · Alan Bennett · Carl Linnaeus · Ronald Blythe · human evolution · flu epidemics · Great Exhibition of the North · Charles Darwin · insects · introverts · Virginia Woolf · John Tyndall
Newsletter No. 11: Penguin eggs and yetis
Sir Thomas Browne · Saturn · penguin eggs · heroes of science · evolution of languages · nature books · dna barcoding · periodic table · Alice Roberts · geology

Book review: ‘Dispelling the Darkness’ by John van Wyhe
Voyage in the Malay Archipelago and the discovery of evolution by Wallace and Darwin.
Book review: ‘Victorians Undone’ by Kathryn Hughes
Tales of the flesh in the age of decorum.
Book review: ‘In Patagonia’ by Bruce Chatwin
Wandering about Patagonia with no clear plan in mind.
Book review: ‘Heligoliand’ by Jan Rüger
Britain, Germany, and the struggle for the North Sea.
Book review: ‘The Ascent of John Tyndall’ by Roland Jackson
A long-overdue biography of the Victorian scientist, mountaineer, and public intellectual.