This collection of miscellaneous writings by Philip Larkin is a posthumous sequel to his excellent earlier collection Required Writing. As it mainly comprises pieces Larkin chose to omit from this earlier work, it is hardly surprising Further Requirements is not quite as good as its predecessor, but don’t let that put you off: this is still an excellent book.

Larkin writes intelligently, authoritatively, and with considerable wit. A few snippets I enjoyed:

• “I had grown up to regard sexual recreation as a socially remote thing, like baccarat or clog dancing, and nothing happened to alter this view.”
• “The influence of another poet is not primarily on the choice of words but on the choice of subject.”
• “I suppose than an actual reading of a poem by its author can be helpful: you can hear where he puts the stresses, whether he sounds ironic or flippant or serious. You go back to the text with a firmer grasp on what he meant. […But a] vocal rendering alone, particularly of a poem you're not familiar with, misses so much that the eye picks up naturally—punctuation, stanza-shape, where one is in the poem, how far from the end, that kind of thing.”
• (Quoting Cyril Connelly:) “Never praise; praise dates you … Remember that the object of the critic is to revenge himself on the creator”
• “It may be objected that one cannot derogate literature by calling it literary, but alas, one can. To be literary means to receive one's strongest impressions—one's subject matter—secondhand from literature instead of first-hand from experience, and to set it down in terms and styles that have already lost their freshness by being used by someone else instead of thinking of your own.”
• “Almost all translations seem to me condemned to be poetic zombies, assemblages of properties walking around with no informing intelligence or soul, unless the original poem can be digested in the imagination of it translator and used to produce a new poem.”
• “My objection to the genre [of poetry collections] is quite simply that they are not collections but selections. If one is interested in a poet one wants all his poems in the order they were published, not a selection according to his own idea of himself reshuffled to conceal how bad he was when he started, the whole with lots of alterations to suit the latest fashion in adjectives. Above all one does not want it tied up with new material. If I have the first six volumes, then to compel me to buy the bulk of them all over again in order to get the seventh is something for which, as Jack Tanner said, I know no polite name.”
• “Most people today, if asked to name the worst of the vices would pick Cruelty, and yet it was never one of the Seven Deadly Sins. In fact it is remarkable how the Deadly Seven have been assimilated into our society: Pride and Anger, true, are still regarded as suitable cases for treatment, but only in terms of psychopathology; Lust and Gluttony are flourishing industries While the rest have achieved political amalgamation and on occasion the responsibility of government.”
• “The only miracle worth talking about is immortality.”
• “in England the essay, as a literary form, is pretty well extinct. It belonged to an age when reading—reading almost anything—was the principal entertainment of the educated class; this called for a plethora of dailies, weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies, all having to be filled. And what filled them, a lot of the time, was essays—not critical essays, or polemical essays, but what Mr Epstein calls familiar essays: on not going to the movies any more, on forgetfulness, on books and their many properties, on letters one gets and the letters one would like to get.”

Like its predecessor, Further Requirements is a wonderful collection. Highly recommended.

The Age of Wonder describes scientific developments and attitudes between the end of the Enlightenment and the early nineteenth century: a period coinciding with the Romantic era.

Richard Holmes neatly defines his start and end points with two great voyages of discovery: Captain Cook’s first voyage to the southern oceans on HMS Endeavour with the future president of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, on board, and Robert FitzRoy’s second voyage to South America on HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin on board. The book, therefore, covers an era when science was beginning to become a proper profession, rather than a hobby for the well-to-do, and when the different scientific disciplines were beginning to differentiate themselves.

Holmes’s main aim is to explore how, during his chosen period, scientific developments influenced and were influenced by Romantic sensibilities. While Romanticism was to some extent a reaction against the mechanistic and reductionist scientific views of the Enlightenment, Holmes shows how Romanticism wasn’t entirely ‘anti-science’: Romantics and scientists were united by a sense of wonder of the natural world.

Sensibly, Holmes doesn’t try to give a complete history of science for the period. Instead, he concentrates on a few key individuals, all based in Britain: Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, and William and Caroline Herschel. But he does also make frequent references to other contemporary scientists and Romantic figures.

As well as giving plenty of coverage to William Herschel’s sister Caroline—an early yet overlooked woman of science—Holmes also gives a fascinating account of the balloon mania which swept across Europe following the first manned flights. But Holmes’s key revelation as far as this poetry philistine is concerned is just how much the Romantic poets, especially Coleridge, were fascinated by contemporary science, and how certain scientists, especially Humphry Davy, had poetic aspirations. The ‘Two Cultures’ were very much one in Eighteenth Century Britain.

The Age of Wonders is a fascinating read. Highly recommended.

However, when I tried to fit an official Kaweco Sport converter to allow me to use bottled ink, the converter wouldn’t fit down the barrel of the pen as there was a solid plastic barrier blocking it half-way down. There is no such barrier in my other two pens. Some online research revealed these converters are new, and some very old Kaweco Sport pens aren’t compatible. It seemed my new pen had come from old stock.

Other than the colour and the plastic barrier, my blue pen seemed exactly the same design as my two other pens. So, yesterday afternoon, I decided to try to hack a solution by drilling out the barrier. Plastic fountain pen versus power-tool: what could possibly go wrong?

…It was then that I discovered the plastic barrier was, in fact, the bottom of the free ink cartridge that I didn’t realise came with the pen.

Kaweco Royal Blue ink everywhere!

Inventing the Enemy is a hugely enjoyable collection of erudite essays on largely unrelated topics. As Umberto Eco explains in the introduction, he would have preferred to have entitled the collection Occasional Writings, but heeded his publisher’s concerns that the book needed a less boring title.

With the exception of one essay of little interest to anyone who doesn’t speak Eco’s native Italian, this collection contains a fascinatingly eclectic mix of subject matter. I particularly enjoyed the essays on the relativism and the various types of ‘truth’, not least for Eco’s dry observation, “the fact is different people mean different things when they talk of relativism”. I also very much enjoyed the pieces on epiphanies; St Thomas Aquinas’s views on whether human embryos have souls; and former incorrect hypotheses concerning geography and astronomy.

An excellent collection of occasional writings.

This book is the personal account of the year Joan Didion spent grieving following the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Dunne. During the same period, Didion also had to deal with the serious illness of their daughter, Quintana. She finished writing the book on the first anniversary of her husband’s death.

Didion's style is one of detached analysis as she retrospectively explores what was going through her mind at the time and tries to piece together the details of half-remembered events. Early on, she makes the important point that grieving is different from mourning:

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blow the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.

By the end of this remarkably candid book, perhaps as a result of writing the book, Didion seems to have managed to make some sort of transition from grief to mourning.

An astonishing book.

In this excellent follow-up to her excellent earlier book Islands of Abandonment, Cal Flyn explores different concepts of ‘wilderness’ and different cultures’ and movements’ relationships with it. In the process, she visits an assortment of different ‘wildernesses’, from the mountains of Nepal to the depths of the Caribbean, from the fiery wastes of an active Icelandic volcano to the icy shores of Antarctica.

This is a thought-provoking book which unashamedly raises more questions than it answers, not least, what do we actually mean by ‘wilderness’? and how can we best protect it?

Some of the questions Flyn raises are uncomfortable: Might big-game hunting reserves for the elite be a valid means of preserving wildlife? Is it right for well-meaning environmental policies to ignore the rights of indigenous people living in the areas concerned? Are current drives towards ‘rewilding’ the right way to go? Can enlightened scientific investigation of wild places have unintended negative consequences?

The Savage Landscape is an engaging, challenging book that causes you to question your own beliefs on how we define wilderness and how we might go about preserving what is left of it.

Highly recommended.

My journaling app tells me I’ve just extended my journaling streak to 99 days. No pressure there, then!

Seriously, though, I resent being gamified like this. I enjoy the idea of being consistent enough to write something in my journal for many consecutive days, but I’m damned if I’m going to have some stupid app make me fret about missing a day and going all the way back to zero!

I’m in half a mind to skip tomorrow deliberately just to remind it who’s in charge. (But I know I won’t.)

I rushed upstairs for my camera and kick-ass lens, then out into the garden, where I used the side of the compost heap as a makeshift tripod to capture a pretty nice photo. (As always when photographing the moon, I asked it to say cheese before I released the shutter.)

Whenever I look at the crescent or gibbous moon up close like this, I’m always astonished at the details revealed in the almost-shadow—the ​penumbra​—where light gives way to dark. I steadfastly avoid the overused ‘nature-writer’ adjective ​liminal​, but in the unlikely event I were ever tempted to apply it to some location, the moon’s penumbral zone would be the perfect place. Here is an astonishing border-zone between light and dark that reveals details far less visible on either side, namely the moon’s three-dimensional, pockmarked, meteorite-battered surface.

One thing I’m always reminded of whenever I look closely at the moon is Galileo’s wonderful set of wash-drawings of the different phases of the moon, as observed through his newfangled telescope in 1609. Galileo was not the first person to draw the moon with the aid of a telescope—that honour goes to Englishman Thomas Harriot, who made a far simpler sketch a few months before Galileo—but Galileo was a far better artist (and self-publicist) than Harriot. He brilliantly portraying the moon as a side-lit, three-dimensional object with a heavily cratered surface: a depiction that was at odds with the then prevailing Aristotelian cosmology, which claimed all heavenly bodies were permanent and incorrupt. I was intrigued by Galileo’s wash-drawings as a boy, having come across them in my Christmas-present copy of James Burke’s book of his TV series ​Connections—​a book which, alongside my following-year-Christmas-present copy of Joseph Bronowski’s book of his TV series The Ascent of Man (which also reproduced Galileo’s wash-drawings)​,​ is largely responsible for kindling my interest in the history of science. Many years later, I was thrilled to see Galileo’s original wash-drawings first-hand in a wonderful exhibition on Galileo in Florence.

Another thing I’m always reminded of whenever I look closely at the moon is photographing it through a large telescope on top of one of the science buildings at Durham University in early 1986. (I’m pleased to report I also asked the moon to say cheese on that occasion: my jokes might not be funny, but I am at least consistent.) The photographs were for my physics dissertation, in which I aimed to calculate the depth of a number of lunar craters based on the lengths of their shadows. Nowadays, to make accurate measurements, I would be able to zoom in on a digital image on my computer screen, but my photos were captured on 35mm black and white negatives which I had to insert into slide-mounts and project greatly magnified on to my college room wall so I could measure the shadows with a ruler. There then followed some complex calculations, which I didn’t really understand, having found the necessary equations in an astronomy magazine article, whose author kindly provided me with more details. To my astonishment, my crater-depth results proved to be in the right ballpark.

I first read Joan Didion four years ago, very much enjoying her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I enjoyed The White Album too, but less so.

The main problem I had with this collection was Didion’s over-use of journalistic rhetorical devices. She might have over-used them in Slouching Towards Bethlehem too, but I don’t recall noticing them at the time. By ‘journalistic rhetorical devices’, I almost certainly mean the techniques of ‘New Journalism’, of which Didion was a well-regarded and influential practitioner.

As I understand it, the New Journalism that arose in the late-1960s and early 1970s was an attempt to make journalism more engaging by embedding the journalist and their personal views and experiences at the heart of the story, and by employing clever imagery and rhetorical tricks, rather than reporting straight facts. Like many movements named by assigning the prefix ‘new’ or ‘neo-’ to the names of older movements, New Journalism’s appeal to novelty feels ironically dated. In trying to make formerly straight-talking factual reporting into something more personal and engaging, New Journalism has clear parallels with more recent developments in ‘Creative Non-fiction’—the name and concepts of which also give rise to serious misgivings.

Didion’s opening article, The White Album, after which the collection takes its name, is clearly an important and influential piece about late-1960s and early 1970s culture. I enjoyed it very much, although the first section was heavy going, leaving me wondering where on earth the piece was heading. I also particularly enjoyed the article In the Islands about several visits Didion made to Honolulu. Didion’s chosen subject matter is sometimes unexpected—and welcome for that—for example, her piece Holy Water on Californian water-management, and a similar piece, Bureaucrats, on Californian freeway traffic-management. There is some wonderful old-fashioned straight journalism in this collection.

As I say, where I have a problem, though, is in Didion’s over-use of new-journalistic rhetorical devices. Only so often can you read a repeated phrase before it starts to jar. Only so often can you read a repeated phrase before it begins to feel formulaic. Only so often can you read a repeated phrase before you begin to wonder whether it might be OK to skip to the start of the next paragraph. Only so often can you read a repeated phrase before it dawns on you that this new journalist is probably being paid by the word. Repetition is a useful literary device, but you can get too much of a good thing.

Similarly, Didion’s over-clever phrasing occasionally gets in the way. I felt this particularly in her piece The Women’s Movement. Didion clearly has some important criticisms to make about late-1960s and early 1970s feminism, but she buries them in over-complicated, difficult-to-parse language:

To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone “oppressed” to break them: every revolutionist is presumed to understand that, and also every woman, which either does or does not make fifty-one percent of the population of the United States a potentially revolutionary class.

In the same piece, Didion criticises contemporary feminists for having misplaced, under-ambitious priorities, but has little to offer as to what their priorities ought to be.

Another device that occasionally jars is Didion’s use of hyperbole. In particular, in the opening words of her piece At the Dam, she writes:

Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye. I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize, its pristine concave face gleaming white against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves of that rock canyon hundreds or thousands of miles from where I am. I will be driving down Sunset Boulevard or about to enter a freeway, and abruptly those power transmission towers will appear before me, canted vertiginously over the tailrace.

This is literary affectation. I don’t believe her. I don’t believe Joan Didion kept having flashbacks of the Hoover Dam years after seeing it. Joan Didion has a piece to write about the Hoover Dam, and she needs an attention-grabbing opening paragraph. But it’s too attention-grabbing—so much so that it makes you question either her honesty or her sanity. Either way, if she’s dishonest or insane, why on earth should you read on to find out what she has to say about that magnificent edifice?

Joan Didion was clearly an immensely talented writer. I have every intention of reading more of her work. But as someone with a strong preference for clear, precise prose, I’m sure I’ll remain wary of her occasional over-use of new-journalistic rhetorical devices.

I spotted this book on the table next to the one I’d gone to the bookshop to buy and, being a fan (and inexpert practitioner) of the essay form, bought it on a whim, vaguely recalling having enjoyed Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth, many years ago. As impulse buys go, it was one of my best: this is a fantastic collection of essays.

In her foreword, Smith advises different approaches her readers might take to tackling this diverse collection. Boringly true to form, I chose to read it from cover to cover, although I did abandon two of the essays half-way through as they weren’t working for me. I think Smith would be OK with that. Otherwise, I thought these essays were astonishingly good.

Smith writes clearly and unpretentiously on all manner of topics, many of which turn out to be far more interesting than you might expect. She writes on ethic and other cultural issues, art, music, the Internet, recently deceased writers, the craft of writing, politics, and a raft of other subjects. I particularly enjoyed her essay on the film Tár, a film I’ve watched and enjoyed several times, but which Smith clearly watched far more intently than I did. I also enjoyed her shorter essay on English rapper Stomzy’s headline act at Glastonbury, which I watched on TV, unexpectedly mesmerised, out of my depth culturally, but capable of recognising an astonishing performance.

What I perhaps most enjoyed about this collection, however, were Zadie Smith’s thoughts on the craft of writing:

When I got older and read philosophers like Wittgenstein and Russell and Fanon—or the essays of Virginia Woolf—it occurred to me that there are few thoughts so complex that they can't be expressed in clear, accessible prose. It's a discipline. You keep working at the sentence until it does exactly what you intended, no more and no less. I didn't use to write like that, and I still don't write with the clarity I'd like.

You and me both, Zadie!

I was delighted to discover Dead and Alive was not Zadie Smith’s first essay collection. I will certainly be checking out the others.

Highly recommended.

As with Melissa Harrison’s earlier novels, The Given World involves an ensemble cast of characters and explores their interactions with each other and the natural world. Unlike its predecessors, this novel contains no obvious central character or small groups of characters,although the events it portrays run in parallel with the final months of one of the characters.

The novel is set in the fictitious village of Lower Eodham in the valley of the River Welm—a clever choice of name for an area that is about to be overwhelmed. Something is not quite right—more than one thing. Things seem out of kilter. A sense of unease runs through the novel. Some people seem oblivious, others have some inkling but don’t see the bigger picture—and neither do we. Something is afoot. Things are changing. Some are taking their leave.

As you will have gathered, The Given World is a difficult novel to describe. As with Melissa Harrison’s earlier novels, I enjoyed it very much indeed.

Disclosure: Melissa Harrison is an online friend whose former podcast I briefly appeared in several years ago.

I read this book on the strength of Harald Jähner’s excellent earlier book Aftermath. Aftermath explored events in Germany following the country’s defeat in the Second World War; Vertigo explores events in the same country following defeat in the First World War, taking us through the years of the Weimar Republic to the rise of Hitler.

As with its predecessor, Vertigo is a compelling mix of political and social history, placing considerably more emphasis on the latter. It begins by exploring the struggle for power in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war; the unexpected establishment of the Weimar Republic; and how hyperinflation set in as the country struggled to pay costly war reparations.

After runaway inflation was curbed through a change in currency, many people sought certainty in conspiracy theories, clairvoyance, psychokinetics, stamp-collecting, Far-Eastern religion, naked bathing, herbal diets, arts and crafts, cults, free love, and other fads. The book explores artistic movements; the advent of female office workers; the growth of traffic in cities; dance culture, jazz and gigolos; amusement parks; cinema; naked athletics; clubs and veterans’ associations; gender identity; the 1929 Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression; growing dissatisfaction, especially among rural people, and its exploitation by the nascent Nazi party; the romantic desire of city-dwellers to return to the countryside; and the decline of newspapers and other ‘main-stream media’, and the rise of radio.

On the political side, Jähner describes German President Paul von Hindenburg’s initial ill-conceived concessions to the rising political Right; the subsequent rioting in Prussia; the Nazis’ increasing popularity in local and national elections; Hindenburg’s failed attempts to avoid appointing Hitler as Chancellor; and, once they had gained a political foothold, the phenomenal speed with which the Nazis abolished democratic institutions such as the free press, and destroyed the rights of Jewish people and other minorities.

The book ends with the constitutionally illegal establishment of the Enabling Act that allowed Hitler to make new laws without needing to gain approval from the German parliament. In a moving epilogue, Jähner describes the fates of many of the major and minor characters mentioned earlier in the book under the Nazi regime.

The parallels between events in Germany in the early decades following the First World War and international developments in our shining new post-truth era are patent and alarming. The Right is running rampant; political institutions are under attack; the news cycle is under the control of the algorithms of multi-billionaires; facts have become a matter of opinion; information sources are filled with bullshit; and all the wrongs of the world are being blamed on vulnerable minorities.

We live in depressingly familiar times.

I had a couple of encounters with my first ever Anglesey black guillemots. I first saw these wonderful birds in Lerwick harbour, Shetland in April 1985, and next/last saw them from a Holyhead ferry leaving Dublin in May 2022. But to see them from my favourite Anglesey rock was very special.

Then, on my final session on the rocks, I added a brand new species to my ‘life list’ of birds: a red-throated diver!

By a strange coincidence, I also added a new species to my life list on my final session on the rocks the last time I visited Anglesey, in September 2025. That time, it was an Arctic skua. Although I’d never seen one before, I recognised it immediately from its ‘jizz’, as it harassed a Sandwich tern into dropping the fish it had been carrying.

Both the red-throated diver and the Arctic skua were a long way off, so I only managed to take poor pictures. But they still count!

Inspired by this unplanned but surprisingly satisfying long-term project, on 30 August 2025, I took a photograph of a lichen near my favourite Anglesey rock. My intention was to re-photograph the lichen on subsequent visits to see how it changes over time.

Were lichens capable of perception and thought, they would think we humans live reckless, mayfly lives, being born, developing and dying in the blink of an eye. From our viewpoint, lichens seem to spend forever just continuing to be there: existing, but never changing. In reality, they’re getting on with the business of living their symbiotic lives, albeit at a far less hurried pace than we can perceive. It will be interesting to monitor my chosen lichen in slow-time.

When I first announced my lichen timelapse project, I compared lichen to coral atolls, which they superficially resemble, and which also form incredibly slowly. I subsequently came across two other lichen descriptions by women writers which pleased me immensely:

Photographs of the Crab Nebula taken fifteen years ago seem identical to photographs of it taken yesterday. Some lichens are similar. Botanists have measured some ordinary lichens twice, at fifty-year intervals, without detecting any growth at all. And yet their cells divide; they live.

–Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

–Elizabeth Bishop, The Shampoo

Lichens as nebulae, and as still explosions… I wish I could write as well as that!

Anyway, here are the photographs I’ve collected so far:

I’ve written about sitting on my favourite rock many times before. But in September 2023, I reported an alarming new development:

this year began with something of a shock. After unpacking, I immediately headed down to my favourite rock, only to discover it had moved! Only by about a metre, but a major geological event as far as I was concerned. The rock is—or had been—part of the limestone bedrock. But, since my last visit, it had become detached, I’m guessing during a winter storm, and had been shifted slightly inland. Sitting on my newly relocated favourite rock gave me an entirely different perspective on life. I wonder if it will still be there next year.

My favourite rock was indeed still there the next year—and the next. But when I returned last month, in April 2026, it had disappeared!

I was astonished. This was not a small rock, and, in all my years sitting on it, I had never come close to getting my feet wet by the rising tide. Whatever storm dislodged the rock and moved it a metre or so in 2023 must have been pretty impressive. But now it had gone entirely. I began to suspect foul play.

It took me a while to work out what had happened to my rock. In its absence, I took to sitting on the step in the bedrock created by its removal. Without wishing to be disloyal to my absent rock, I have to say this new arrangement worked even better than the old, as my new seat was a couple of inches higher, and slightly more comfortable—if rocks can ever be described as comfortable. Gazing out to sea being the priority, it was a couple of days before I noticed fresh scuff-marks on top of the step in the bedrock—a trail of scuff-marks, in fact, meandering across the surface. I followed the trail a good thirty metres, and there it was: my favourite rock, upside-down in a new home!

What kind of storm must have moved my rock so far, physically lifting it up a half-metre step and rolling it all that way across the bedrock!

For old times’ sake, I tried sitting on the relocated rock, but it just wasn’t the same: the newly upturned surface was less comfortable than the old; the view was less impressive; and, as I later learnt, the incoming tide now submerged the rock twice a day. But I was glad the mystery was solved and that natural forces and not foul play had been involved.

The geologist Charles Lyell showed how the physical world is slowly shaped by processes and forces we can still see in action today: wind and water, fire and ice. His disciple and friend Charles Darwin showed how similar processes and forces shape the living world.

So now I have a new favourite rock to sit on: the step in the bedrock next to where my former favourite rock used to reside. Bearing in mind my old rock’s new location, I won’t be at all surprised if it has moved again the next time I visit. I’ll try to keep tabs on it. Perhaps it will end up wedged among other nearby rocks and, covered by the sea twice a day, begin to take on limpets, barnacles and seaweed. That would be cool. Inevitably, my former favourite rock will continue to erode: like us (and everything else) rocks wage an ongoing, ultimately futile war against entropy. But I’m sure my old rock will outlast me.

Which is a thought I find surprisingly comforting.

Ever the gent, Sir David was quick to reply in the same spirit as our original letter, taking the opportunity to correct me on my grammar. (In my defence, I actually did mean best—as in, the best fish in the world.)

Today marks Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday. Many happy returns, Sir David. Thank you for inspiring so many people with the wonders of the natural world. And thank you for taking time to humour a couple of puerile, beer-drinking dickheads.

In 2007, an old woman’s stored possessions were sold in a foreclosure auction in Chicago. Among hoarded newspapers and other mementoes was a vast photographic archive. This book explores the story behind those photographs, amassed over many decades by an enthusiastic amateur photographer and children’s nanny, Vivian Maier.

The unearthed photographs were to become an internet sensation, and Maier is now seen by many is an important twentieth-century photographer.

Maier was a private, sometimes troubled individual whose story proved difficult to track down. The fascinating story Ann Marks has managed to unearth provides important background to Maier’s photographs, many of which are marvellous.

The artist, writer and critic John Berger was an excellent essayist. In this collection of essays written over several decades, he explores different aspects of art and culture, including a number of personal influences and reminiscences.

Among many other topics, Berger explores what artists are doing when they make a drawing; the differences between a novel and a chronicle; the influences on Romantic art; artistic reproduction and when artistic originals become property; and the generally bogus claim that painted portraits tell us more about the sitter than photographic portraits.

Berger was a Marxist, and a couple of these essays get a bit too political for my liking, but don’t let that put you off: Landscapes is an excellent compilation.

bookshop isbn="9781836743774" search="landscapes: john berger on art john berger"

Curtis McHale recently published a video entitled Read Later is Garbage in which he suggests your read-later app serves little purpose, only making you feel guilty. He’s now experimenting with saving articles directly to his (and my) preferred note-making app, Obsidian, but allowing himself to delete them without guilt if he hasn’t read and made notes from them within a certain time. Obviously, this new approach means he has to be more discerning in which articles he saves for reading later.

I actually quite like how my read-later process works. I’m already pretty discerning about the stuff I save to the app. In general, I only tend to save articles I think might make good newsletter links or are on topics already of particular interest me. Occasionally, I’ll also save articles on stuff I don’t already have notes on but which seem sufficiently interesting to maybe warrant a new note or two.

This weekend, working my way through my read-later list resulted in me making brand new notes on, among other topics:

• Milankovitch cycles;
• the so-called Little Ice Age, and a scientific paper on the Late Antique Little Ice Age;
• Pouyannian mimicry;
• Rob Crawford’s review of the book Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin;
• Cory Doctorow’s method for making notes for potential future books;
• David Todd McCarty on reclaiming his digital identity;
• an academic paper on Darwin’s relationship with the gardener John Scott;
• an old article by the now disbanded Darwin Correspondence Project on whether Darwin should be considered an early ecologist.

All these new notes logically fitted in with, and ended up being linked to, existing notes in my Obsidian vault. Indeed, that’s why I bookmarked the articles that inspired the notes in the first place: because they were on subjects that impinged and built on topics of interest to me that I’d already made notes about.

Like McHale, I do wonder whether I save too much stuff on my read-later app. To avoid overload, you have to be prepared to put in the triage and set aside time for serious reading. In effect, my process goes through a series of triage steps:

• I monitor my RSS feeds and social media for potentially interesting stuff, but only save individual articles to my read-later app if they’re too long to read immediately, or if I want to consider them later for inclusion in a newsletter;
• about once a week, usually at the weekend, I work though by read-later articles, ditching some and reading others;
• I make notes where appropriate on the articles I read. Sometimes these are proper source and/or topic notes in Obsidian; sometimes I simply record a link to the article in one or more appropriate ‘spark notes’. These are effectively collections of bookmarks on a particular topic of interest that I might possibly want to explore in more depth in future—but quite likely never will;
• I then either delete the original article in my read-later app, or file it there under an appropriate topic. This is the one step in my process I’m beginning to question: will I ever look at these filed articles again? Why not simply delete them? Anything of interest should already be in Obsidian by then. (That said, why not save them? Is it doing any harm?)

One thing I really enjoy about this process is, like this weekend, putting aside some in-depth reading time, sitting down and working my way through a collection of new articles on topics of interest to me. It’s like having my own bespoke newspaper or magazine. It makes you realise that, despite all the AI dreck and other crap out there, there’s still plenty of personally interesting new stuff on the internet, if you’re prepared to perform a bit of triage.

And, given you’ve put in the effort of filtering this stuff, it seems courteous to share it with people who might share your interests by means of social media, blog posts or newsletters.

Which I suppose is what I’ve been doing here.

See also: More of my posts on note-making

My dictionary says the noun associated with frantic is franticness. I don’t think this does oystercatchers justice: oystercatchers are in a permanent state of frant; they are frantic messes. Apparently, the collective noun for oystercatchers is a covey. But that’s rubbish. The collective noun for oystercatchers should be a frant: ‘a frant of oystercatchers sped by’. Frant ought to be a verb, too, related to the verb to rant, as in ‘a pair of oystercatchers franted on the rocks’.

Frant = frantic rant, or rant frantically. (Pass it on.)

Life Between the Tides is very much my kind of book: a wonderful blend of science, history and nature writing set in a particular locale: a bay on the west coast of Scotland. Adam Nicolson explores the complex ecological relationships between the often overlooked intertidal flora and fauna that keep local ecosystems ticking over.

This book contains many fascinating details about the seemingly inconsequential behaviours of different species, and the knock-on effects they can have in the local environment. It explores, for example, how sandhoppers migrate up and down the beach twice each day in sync with the local tides; the social hierarchies and jump-reflexes of prawns; how winkles respond to particular smells; how the shapes of individual limpets’ shells are affected by the zones they inhabit; how sea anemones’ clonal colonies work together; and how the instinct of small crabs to rise and sink in the water-column just out of sync with local tides helps them to survive to adulthood. Pleasingly, Nicolson doesn’t just explain these and other phenomena, but describes how we came to understand them through the observations and experiments of dedicated naturalists and scientists.

Considering its complex subject-matter, Life Between the Tides is an admirably clear read interspersed with some wonderful literary flourishes. I particularly enjoyed Nicolson’s detailed description of a crab eating a winkle, which immediately brought to mind Charles Darwin’s description of an earthworm taking a crap. And here is part of Nicolson’s admirable description of a humble prawn:

They are very nearly transparent, glass-beings, and can look like the specks that float in the surface of your eyes, semi-seen presences, with no more than a hint of inner organs glimpsed beyond the grisaille of their armour.

After completing my book On the Moor about the science, history and nature of my local moorland patch, I toyed for a while with the idea of a sequel based on my favourite stretch of Anglesey coastline (working title: On the Shore—see what I did, there?). In the end, I opted to work on my Darwin book instead, but Life Between the Tides is very much the sort of book I had in mind—albeit written in a different voice. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that I enjoyed it very much indeed.

Highly recommended.

Enough Said is the fourth volume of Alan Bennett’s diaries. As with its predecessors, it is funny, moving, occasionally outspoken, and not to be missed.

This volume is particularly poignant, as Bennett, who passes the age of 90 during it, makes no secret of his increasing frailty and increasing reliance on other people. Not that he seems to let such concerns get him down.

I wish more people published this sort of diary. But, if it were that easy, I suspect more people would.

Excellent.

On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects was the first book Charles Darwin published after On the Origin of Species.

Conscious of criticism that, due to lack of space, he had not gone into enough detail in Origin about how complex organs might have evolved from far simpler beginnings through the process of natural selection, Darwin uses this book to explore just that. He also makes a compelling case for cross-pollination being highly beneficial to orchids.

This book is hardly a page-turner in its early chapters, which comprise numerous meticulous anatomical descriptions of different orchid species. Later, however, the book comes into its own, exploring how orchids attract insects with large, sometimes false, nectaries. Darwin also suggests the orchids might also use colour and scent to attract these pollinators. He also describes how the enlarged labellum of many orchids, which acts as a convenient and conspicuous landing-pad for visiting insects, was formed by a merging and repurposing of the flowers’ lower petal and two of its anthers.

Darwin then discusses in detail an organ unique to orchids, the rostellum, explaining how it evolved from a repurposed stigma and, in a number of species, contains a touch-sensitive trigger-mechanism that deposits stalks topped with sticky bundles of pollen at very precise locations on the bodies of visiting insects. He also shows how, as soon as these stalks are deposited on the insects, they bend forward to align the pollen bundles with the pollen-receiving stigmas of the flowers subsequently visited by the insects.

Famously, when discussing a species of foreign orchid with a remarkably long, thin nectary, Darwin also predicts the existence of an as-yet-undiscovered species of Madagascan moth with a ten- or eleven-inch proboscis. Darwin’s bold prediction, later supported and further developed by his friend Alfred Russel Wallace, was mocked by more than one biologist, but, after his death, was proved to be correct.

As Darwin explains in the introduction to this book:

This treatise affords me also an opportunity of attempting to show that the study of organic beings may be as interesting to an observer who is fully convinced that the structure of each is due to secondary laws, as to one who view every trifling detail of structure as the result of the direct interposition of the Creator.

As was so often the case, Darwin succeeds magnificently.

I can’t remember how we made initial contact, but the author Neil Ansell and I have been online friends for several years. In late 2019, I finally got to meet him, and we took a short walk along a section of the Rochdale Canal. During our walk, Neil explained how his hearing has always been poor and continues to decline, meaning he struggles now to hear certain bird songs. I’ve thought about that conversation many times since, usually when listening to high-pitched, bordering-on-undetectable bird calls from the likes of goldcrests. I also think about it whenever I use the Merlin bird-song-detecting app, which often hears distant calls I didn’t pick up until the app drew my attention to them. As my ongoing but ultimately doomed battle against the entropy continues, I wonder how much longer I shall be able to enjoy such sounds.

In The Edge of Silence, Ansell sets out to hear a number of (mainly new to him) iconic British nature sounds while he still can. His wish list, which is mostly birds, includes ptarmigan, bitterns, red-throated divers, corncrakes, black grouse, snipe, puffins, storm petrels, and manx shearwaters.

At one point, Ansell reflects sentiments about the perversely comforting inevitability of entropy’s eventual triumph that I found uncannily similar to my own:

I find it curiously calming and reassuring to reflect that nothing really lasts, that all we really have is the ability to appreciate as fully as we are able whatever we have in this moment, in the here and now. Perhaps the most useful thing we can do is to try to ensure that others get the opportunity to experience the same wonders as we do.

We might not all ultimately end up enjoying the haunting cry of the great northern diver, or a night-chorus of the natterjack toads on my native Wirral, but Ansell’s lovely book does at least help us experience such wonders by proxy.

Highly recommended.

Disclosure: As this review makes clear, Neil Ansell is a personal friend. He also provided some cover blurb for my book On the Moor.

The island has become streaked in white over recent years: guano from a newly established gannet colony. Its waters are also the haunt of seals and dolphins. Local legend has it St Patrick was shipwrecked on the island on a return trip from Scotland to Wales. (Yes, whisper it in Ireland, but St Patrick was a Brit!) On a clifftop overlooking the island, the delightful church of Llanbadrig is also named after the Celtic saint.

In the book I’m currently writing, Through Darwin’s Eyes, I debunk a famous legend about St Patrick. After describing how the harebells of Ireland are genetically distinct from those of nearby Great Britain, having been literally isolated there by rising sea-levels as the glaciers retreated after the last glacial maximum, I go on to explain:

Many other species failed to make it across the land bridge from Britain to Ireland before the rising sea cut them off. There are no common, field or water voles in Ireland. No moles, common or edible dormice, field mice, or common shrews. Stoats made it across in time, but not weasels. There are no common toads or common newts in Ireland, and only one species of reptile: the common lizard.

Famously, there are no snakes on the island of Ireland. Legend would have you believe they were banished by St Patrick—a Briton who himself made the crossing to Ireland, albeit by boat. Other accounts say it was St Columba who did the banishing. Nice stories, but patently bogus. It was really the melting glaciers the Irish have to thank—or to blame—for their lack of serpents, and for their less diverse assortment of flora and fauna.

Campo Santo is a posthumously published collection of previously unpublished writing by the wonderfully enigmatic writer W.G. Sebald.

I have long given up trying to describe Sebald’s writing, which I very much admire. Like other commentators, I usually end up falling back on the only appropriate, somewhat unhelpful adjective Sebaldian.

If you enjoy Selbald’s other books, you’ll certainly love this one. It includes a number of chapters from what seems to have been an abandoned book on Sardinia, an exploration of the difficulties of writing about human catastrophes, and his thoughts on various writers, including Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Hermann Kasack, and Bruce Chatwin.

As you might expect, coming from the pen of Werner Herzog, The Future of Truth is an entertaining book with an idiosyncratic slant. Herzog explores what we mean when we talk of ‘truth’ and how to cope in our post-truth era of billionaire social-media moguls, deep-fake videos, and so-called ‘AI’ hallucination.

More than once, Herzog refers to an idea he calls ‘ecstatic truth’: a supposedly higher form of truth based on more than mere facts:

I have always insisted that you need stylization, invention, poetry, and imagination to locate a deeper layer of truth, one that can access a distant echo of something that can illuminate us, far beyond the reach of fact. My term for this is ‘ecstatic truth’.

This seems not too far from the perilous idea expressed by Albert Camus and others that ‘fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth’. I have a huge problem with this claim—by which, I mean I think it’s dangerous bullshit. That said, I enjoyed reading Herzog’s thoughts in this vein. He even describes some “interventions of mine into the realm of factuality”—including certain embellishments he made in his documentary films, supposedly to reveal some deeper layer of truth. I would argue such ‘interventions’ might be more accurately described as ‘inventions’. In fairness to Herzog, however, he does make it clear these embellishments should be made clear or should be patently obvious, and there are occasions when such in(ter)ventions are unacceptable.

Towards the end of this short book, Herzog offers a few thoughts on how to circumvent the mass of misinformation and lies now assaulting us. He has no sure-fire answers, but encourages us to read more books and to get out into the real world more, rather than doom-scrolling on our screens. Amen to that!

In this lively, well-illustrated book, Jenny Uglow traces a year in the life of the revered eighteenth-century country curate and naturalist Gilbert White, whose classic The Natural History of Selborne has never been out of print.

Uglow’s book is a pleasing mix of biography and nature writing. Sensibly, she doesn’t limit herself only to events in White’s life from her chosen year, 1781, allowing herself to travel back or forward in time to describe key events in the particular month in question, be they observations of the natural world, or events involving White’s extended family and social network.

My hero, Charles Darwin, was inspired by White in his youth, recalling in his autobiography:

From reading White’s Selborne, I took much pleasure in watching the habits of birds, and even made notes on the subject. In my simplicity I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.

White’s Selborne deservedly remains a classic of English literature. Uglow’s book provides useful insights into this fascinating gentleman.

Recommended.

I picked up my copy of this book in an excellent second-hand bookshop in Ludlow. It’s a surprisingly entertaining read, presenting selections of documents from acclaimed photographer Walker Evans’s personal archive, including scrapbook entries, lists, postcards, letters to friends, and articles for publication. Evans was an accomplished writer.

The commentary accompanying these extracts from Evans’s archive explores how, in his photography, “the timbre of the time was conveyed with peculiar authenticity through vernacular things”, as well as his knack for “grasping the essence from the detail”.

An unusual, thought-provoking book.

The latter half of the nineteenth century offers a fantastic figure, the art photographer, really an unsuccessful painter with a bag of mysterious tricks.

This brought to mind my pet gripe with so-called ‘literary non-fiction’ (or ‘creative non-fiction’, or ‘narrative non-fiction’, take your pick): that factual writing needs to borrow—and, by implication, be judged by—the conventions of fiction if it is to be seen as any good. Photographers are not unsuccessful painters, and factual writers are not wannabe novelists. (Well, not this one at least.)

I’m not saying that factual writers shouldn’t sometimes employ the same techniques as fiction (or photographers the same techniques as painters) but, when we do, they should be seen as useful factual-writing techniques, not factual writing somehow masquerading as fiction. Importantly, the factual writer shouldn’t feel compelled to use such techniques: there are plenty of other mysterious tricks available to us!

Literary conventions are all well and good, but we shouldn’t feel constrained by them. If enough of us feel sufficiently unconstrained, conventions will change. That said, in the introduction to his seventeenth-century masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton feels the need to apologise for a recent, regrettable literary development:

it was not mine intent to prostitute my muse in English […], but to have exposed this more contract in Latin, if I could have got it printed. Any scurrilous pamphlet is welcome to our mercenary Stationers in English, they print all, […]

and they print books
On whose pages a mere ape would scarcely shit

Compelled to write in English! The unreasonable, trendy demands of publishers, eh?

This book recounts writer and farmer John Lewis-Stempel’s one-year experiment farming rented arable land in a traditional way. His aim is to restore fertility and local native species by farming less intensively—and, presumably, to write a book in the process!

Such farming initiatives are to be encouraged—preferably through legislation and financial support—if we ever hope to undo some of the immense harm wreaked on our native flora and fauna by changes in agricultural practices during recent decades. But I have to question the worth of carrying out such an initiative for just a single year on somebody else’s land. I would have been more interested to read about a longer-term project.

That said, The Running Hare is an enjoyable read.

In my book On the Moor I have a bit of a rant about the West Yorkshire Pennines’ identity crisis. In particular, I bemoan the fact that people often confuse us with the Yorkshire Dales. I love the Dales, but they’re not like round here: all smooth white limestone; not dark, rugged millstone grit. Adaptations of Wuthering Heights are a particular bugbear: they’re always filmed in the Yorkshire Dales, North York Moors, or—God forbid!—Derbyshire Peak District; never where Emily Brontë actually wrote and set her masterpiece. Or, as I rant:

I mean, it’s actually here: Wuthering Heights. You can actually visit the place! Top that, Yorkshire Dales! In your face, North York Moors! Top Withins, it’s called. It’s just over there, beyond that hill. True, the building is nothing like the place in the book, and it’s a ruin now, but it’s very much the location Emily Brontë had in mind when she wrote Wuthering Heights. Or so they reckon. Her life-long friend Ellen Nussey said so, and she should have known. So that proves it. Case closed. You can walk there from the Brontë Parsonage at the top of Haworth Main Street, across the windswept, wuthering moor. Just like many thousands of Japanese tourists do every year—so many that there are signposts in Japanese. Just like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath did, inspiring poems by both. Sylvia, who wrote the better poem, was a talented draughtswoman, and made a wonderful sketch of the ruin. She was thrilled by the place. It’s indescribably atmospheric. Or so they tell me. I’ve never actually been there, of course. That sort of guff is for the tourists.

I then have a bit of a dig at those who misinterpret Wuthering Heights as a romance:

The story’s setting isn’t the only misconception people seem to have about Wuthering Heights. Take Heathcliff, for example: the great romantic hero. Really? Only if you’ve never actually read the book. Heathcliff is an utter bastard. Dark and brooding might be sexy to some women—although you rarely see it sought in the lonely hearts columns—but Heathcliff takes bitter and twisted to a whole new level. A sociopath, they would call him these days. A control freak. A man with serious anger-management issues. He hangs a spaniel, for Pete’s sake! Easy-going, with a GSOH, Heathcliff most definitely is not.

The fact that so many people see Wuthering Heights as a romance frankly astonishes me. It’s not a romance; it’s a train-wreck. A highly enjoyable train-wreck, I’ll grant you, but there’s absolutely nothing in there to warm the cockles of your heart—unless you have something against spaniels. I more than half suspect most people’s impressions of Wuthering Heights were formed through not listening closely enough to the lyrics of Kate Bush’s song. Listen again: (SPOILER ALERT) the woman trying to get in through Heathcliff’s window is dead! She’s a ghost. Read the book: Cathy’s body lies in the corner of a graveyard, surrounded by bilberry bushes. Yes, bilberry bushes. How West Yorkshire are those? You won’t find many bilberries growing in the alkaline soils of the Yorkshire Dales!

True to form, the latest cinematic misrepresentation of Wuthering Heights was filmed largely in the Yorkshire Dales. I’m sure North Yorkshire’s tourism officers must be rubbing their hands in anticipation of their Christmas bonuses.

Meanwhile, locals near the real-life Wuthering Heights continue their uphill campaign to prevent England’s biggest wind power-station being constructed on Emily Brontë’s beloved, under-appreciated, dark and rugged West Yorkshire moorland.

February is, without doubt, the crappiest month of the year: Christmas long gone, and still winter drags on! By February, it’s getting beyond a joke. As my friend Mary used to say, there’s a reason why they only gave it twenty-eight days.

Alongside February—although, technically, only one of them is—glum November and doleful January seem positively, well, positive. That’s quite an achievement. February must really suck to put November and January in any sort of positive light.

But not this year! This year, February is not going to get to me. I’m not going to let it win. This disconcertingly mild winter, I’m going to enjoy February or die in the attempt. Nothing spectacular. No special trips. Nothing like that. I’m just going to try to find and savour one or two things that aren’t quite so dire about this longest of months. Like the snowdrops under our cherry-tree, transplanted many years ago from my parents’ garden. My mum loved snowdrops and couldn’t bear the idea of my own garden being without them. They were her favourite flowers. I’m incapable of looking at snowdrops without thinking of my mum—not that I’d want to. Thanks, snowdrops! Thanks, February! Thanks, Mum!

…And then, this morning, on the first day of February, a pair of blue tits checking out the nest box in our Scots pine. A spot of pre-season house-hunting. They won’t be putting in an offer just yet, but a sign of things to come, I hope.

Consistent beyond reproach, as in previous years, this year’s slideshow contains 97 photographs.

The background music, Havana Brew, is also by Yours Truly. I don’t have an ounce of musical ability. Thank goodness for Garageband!

See also: Previous years’ video slideshows

In recent years, I’ve slowly been working my way through Austen‘s back-catalogue, one novel per year. This is to honour a drunken deal made with my sister-in-law four Christmases back. We’d been talking favourite authors down the pub and agreed to send each other some books to read. So she received some Kathleen Jamie, and I ended up with the Complete Works of Jane Austen. Not fair! I was DUPED!

(This, incidentally, would be the same Jane Austen who notoriously replaced my hero, Charles Darwin, on the back of the £10 note. That would be the same Charles Darwin £10 note that I actively campaigned for. I like my sister-in-law, but you can only push a disconcertingly handsome, mild-mannered brother-in-law so far.)

What can I say? So far (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma), Jane Austen has not been my cup of tea. It’s tolerable, but as a self-confessed fiction philistine, I have to say I find it rather Austentatious. Having watched and enjoyed an excellent TV documentary series about Austen earlier this year, however, I now appreciate the characters I didn’t like weren’t supposed to be particularly likeable, and that Austen was often trying to be humorous, rather than coming across as inadvertently humorous—which I guess tells you a lot more about my capabilities as a reader than hers as a writer. In my defence, I did admit to finding Emma more entertaining than Austen’s earlier efforts. Far, far more entertaining to me, however, were Austen’s unwitting double-entendres, which I’ve been texting to my sister-in-law every time I spot a new one:

”But, my dear, we must touch up the Colonel.”

—Sense and Sensibility

“She has a very good notion of fingering, though her taste is not equal to Anne’s.”

—Pride and Prejudice

she set off again in quest of her former acquaintance, and the evening was spent in the satisfactions of an intercourse renewed after many years discontinuance.

—Pride and Prejudice

Once fairly in the dockyard, he began to reckon upon some happy intercourse with Fanny

—Mansfield Park

Again, I fully appreciate deriving this kind of puerile amusement from her writing reflects far more on my lack of sense and sensibility than it does on Ms Austen’s universally acknowledged talents as an author.

One person who very much enjoyed Jane Austen’s writing, however, was none other than my hero and yours, Charles Darwin. During a six-month stay with the in-laws in Staffordshire in 1840, Darwin managed to get through a phenomenal amount of reading, including the likes of Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and some Shakespeare (rating Richard II as ‘poor’). He also polished off no less than three Jane Austen novels, recording them in his reading notebook as follows:

Mansfield Park. Sense & S. […] Northanger Abbey. Simple Story.

As book reviews go, it’s perhaps not the most informative, but I reckon the shrewd businesswoman Ms Austen would have been delighted to record the blurb “Simple Story—Charles Darwin” on the back of the next paperback edition of Northanger Abbey.

Hey, perhaps that should be my next campaign!

Happy birthday, Ms. A! With such a ringing endorsement from Charles Darwin, I must admit I’m now kind of looking forward to Northanger Abbey.

24TH OCTOBER, 2025

Hello.

Shortly before it ended a few weeks ago, Jen and I visited the Ice Age Art Now exhibition at Cliffe Castle in Keighley. The exhibition was to mark nearby Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture. The exhibits were on loan from the British Museum, whose new director used to visit Cliffe Castle as a boy.

The pieces were stunning. Here were exquisite horses, reindeer, ibexes, a wolverine and even a mammoth carved by hunter-gatherers on bone, stone and ivory in the inconceivably distant past, between 11,000 and 20,000 years ago. This was when the climate was far colder, long before the Neolithic Revolution and the advent of ‘civilisation’ in Mesopotamia. Art before civilisation: who’d have thought it?

Most of the exhibits on display were found in caves and rock-shelters in what is now France. Such finds are rare, but even rarer in Britain, whose northern climes were, as now, less conducive to human habitation. But there were a few British artefacts on display, including the oldest known works of art from both England and Wales.

It’s tempting—and pleasing—to think the people who made these wonderful artefacts might have numbered among our ancestors alive at that time. But recent analyses of ancient human DNA indicate almost no western-Eurasian hunter-gatherer DNA survived the subsequent Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. It seems the offcumden farming communities that later migrated from farther east mostly replaced these hunter-gatherers’ descendants, rather than merging with them.

One thought kept running through my mind as I gawped and snapped away at these prehistoric masterpieces: these people knew mammoths! These people shared their environment—their ecosystem—with Pleistocene megafauna. These people knew how mammoths moved, sounded, smelt and tasted. Just imagine. They were also intimately familiar with wild horses, reindeer and wolverines. They will have had their own words for all these creatures: words we shall never know.

The people who made these carvings were surrounded by rocks and the detritus of hunting, including bones, ivory and antlers. While it made sense to fashion these resources into useful tools such as hand-axes, fish-hooks and spear-throwers, their reasons for making art with them seem less obvious.

Archaeologists have a default explanation for any human artefact the purpose of which they can’t fathom: possibly ceremonial. Who knows, perhaps some of these pieces were indeed ceremonial—whatever that might mean. Or maybe they were teaching aids, or good-luck talismans, or simply fashioned out of boredom. But I prefer to think of them as being created for the sheer challenge and enjoyment of creating them: art for art’s sake. Which makes you wonder about all the other, more perishable art these people no doubt created. Did they daub pigments on animal hides, or tattoo their bodies, or festoon their surroundings with decorations? Did they tell tall tales and sing songs around the fire? They must have! But we only know about the stuff that’s survived, which means we no doubt attach undue significance to it. Not everything has to be either useful or possibly ceremonial; creating art for art’s sake is reason enough.

Whatever their reasons for making this art, I’m glad they did, and that some tiny fraction of it at least has escaped the entropy of the ages for us to enjoy in our more temperate geological epoch.

Some stuff I thought worth sharing

1. The problem with traditional writing advice
   A fascinating 90-minute video conversation with Robert Macfarlane about the craft of nature- and place-writing.
2. On not writing
   Say it ain’t so, Kathleen! My favourite writer, Kathleen Jamie, considers writing’s fallow periods.
3. Supereffable: mysteries of the Pearl manuscript
   On the only known manuscript of four English medieval poems—including Gawain and the Green Knight (see below)—which survived a catastrophic library fire in 1731.
4. How lichens are bringing stone to life and reconnecting us with the natural world
   Formed through symbiotic relationships, lichens don’t fit easily into the standard Linnaean classification system. This has led some researchers to consider alternative ways of seeing them.
5. In the blink of an eye: wild birds switch from sound to sight communication in noisy stream environments
   A new study suggests dippers start communicating visually besides noisy rivers.
6. Extreme drought contributed to barbarian invasion of late Roman Britain, tree-ring study reveals
   The ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’ of 367 CE was one of the most severe threats to Rome’s hold on Britain since the Boudiccan revolt three centuries earlier. New research suggests it might have been triggered by a series of summer droughts.
7. The master photographer you’ve probably never heard of
   A short video documentary on Chinese photographer Yang Yangkang’s work documenting Catholics and Tibetans over two decades.
8. When ordinary is a superpower
   On the importance of maintaining personal diaries in difficult times.
9. How to make a cover for the London Review of Books
   Artist Jon McNaugh takes us through the process of making a cover for the LRB.
10. Why the BBC’s Shipping Forecast still entrances people after 100 years
    There is something reassuringly British about the Shipping Forecast, which was first broadcast by the BBC in 1925.

Recent reading

‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ by Simon Armitage
An excellent alliterative translation of a medieval masterpiece which, as we have heard, narrowly escaped fiery entropy.

‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane
Rivers as living entities: preposterous animism or a useful metaphor?

Book update

It’s not just Kathleen Jamie who’s been going through a fallow period. There have been plenty of (mostly good) distractions from work this year, including lots of travel, with more still to come, so progress on Through Darwin’s Eyes has slowed considerably. But I hope and expect things to start picking up again soon.

Newsletters update

After a six-month hiatus, I also hope to resume sending out my newsletters more often. One problem that’s been nagging me is the overlap in the subject matter of my two newsletters (this Rich Text newsletter and my Darwin newsletter): they’re both largely about science, history and nature. I still plan to keep them separate, but will be referring to them more under the joint banner of my science • history • nature newsletters. Think of them as variations on a theme.

And finally…

Thanks as always for making time to read this newsletter. If you’ve enjoyed it, please spread the word.

Take care, and I’ll see you next time.

Richard

richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

Don’t worry: I haven’t been taken seriously ill; I’ve just updated my profile photo.

It turns out the old one was taken twelve years ago, when I was 20% younger and still retained my late-40s boyish good looks. My beard was more pepper than salt back then, as was my hair, which was considerably thicker than now.

I kept putting off updating my photo, worrying people might think I’d aged twelve years overnight. Actually, no, I was more worried they’d think I’d aged twenty-five years overnight.

I’m by no means a vain person, having little to be vain about, but I’ve tweaked the new photo to make it slightly less hideous. Nothing too drastic or misleading, you understand. My general rule with removing blemishes from photos is, if the aberration is something temporary that would no longer be there in a week or two, feel free to get rid of it. So I had no hesitation in removing an unsightly red spot near the tip of my nose. I also zapped a whole pile of dust from my spectacles and removed a stray beard hair that seemed to be emanating from my left nostril. And I trimmed a peripheral cluster of uncharacteristically dark moustache hairs that made it look as if a bluebottle was about to take up residence in my other nostril.

You’ll notice I’m not smiling in the photo. I wasn’t in the previous one either. I’m generally a very happy person with what I like to think of as an engaging sense of humour, so I smile a lot. But it’s a very unflattering smile. I put this down to my upper incisor teeth, the outer ones of which are smaller the most people’s. When I grin, these small incisors are dwarfed by the adjacent canines, which lend me a decidedly vampiric look. When I give a toothy grin, it looks for all the world as if I’m about to sink my teeth into your jugular. I’ve experimented with a tight-lipped smile, but, if anything, that’s worse: the resultant smirk makes me look like some sort of pervert. Not the sort of image I’m looking to promote. So straight-faced gaze it is.

But believe me, inside I’m smiling.

Somehow, we ended up in one of those windowless ballrooms-cum-dining-rooms-cum-conference-rooms you find in some of the larger hotels. The sort of hotel conference room in which I spent more hours than I care to remember in my previous career. The tables had been laid with tablecloths for the next meal, but there were still a couple of flip-charts on easels around the periphery.

We sat on a pair of faux-gilded dining chairs, where I committed the cardinal sin of politely enquiring how the author’s latest project was going. Ignoring my question, the author grabbed one of the flip-charts off an easel, laid it open on the table in front of us, and cracked open a thick blue marker-pen.

The important thing, the author began to explain (entirely in line with what I admire about their writing), is to make sure you describe your own feelings and emotions in your writing, even if you aren’t primarily writing about yourself. Anyone can write about a topic; only you can express what that topic means to you.

As they spoke, the author emphasised each point by scoring thick blue lines across the flip-chart. Expressing their ideas with a pen, as is appropriate for an author.

By now, a handful of other people had joined us at our table. They also seemed to be appreciating the impromptu advice.

Then I glanced back at the flip-chart and observed: “Oh look, you’ve drawn a lighthouse!” Which the author indeed had.

And then I woke up.

I’m not into Freudian bullshit, so don’t want to read anything into this dream. As a writer, I keep copious notes on subjects of interest to me, including my own thoughts on writing technique. Many of these notes reflect similar sentiments to those expressed by the author in my dream. Notes with lower-case titles such as:

• take a stance
• keep your writing personal
• don’t write yourself out
• factual writing need not to be neutral
• you’re the only person who can write in your voice
• strut your youness

This is sound advice, and I’m working on it. But something about receiving similar advice from an author I admire made it seem more important—even though it was only in a dream.

Recently, I’ve started writing random notes by hand in a hardback notebook, as if it were the nineteenth century or something. I find this a useful exercise to get my writing juices flowing. Immediately after waking from my dream this morning, I got up and made the above notes. Only after I arrived at this point did it occur to me that I was making these notes in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook. I speak hardly a word of German, but one word I have picked up, thanks to my notebook fixation, is Leuchtturm: the German for Lighthouse. How coincidental is that? But my current lighthouse isn’t blue; it’s green.

I half feel I should write to the real-life author to thank them for their oneiric avatar’s advice. But that would seem creepy. Instead, I think I’ll find a way to include them in the acknowledgements of my next book. And here…

Thank you, author!

For the non-technically inclined among you, all this means is:

• the site is more secure (for you and me)
• the addresses of all pages on the site now begin with https:// rather than http://

Despite the address changes, any old links from other sites should be forwarded automatically to the new addresses, as should any bookmarks in your browsers.

The old addresses for the site’s RSS feeds should also continue to work, but, if you want to update your RSS reader, the new combined feed address is:

https://richardcarter.com/metafeed.xml

I shall be making a similar upgrade to the Friends of Charles Darwin website shortly.

While in town, we also took in two exhibitions celebrating the work of veteran Bradford-born artist David Hockney. I’ve long admired Hockney for his continuing willingness to experiment with new media. Examples on display in Bradford included artwork produced on his iPad, ‘joiner’ photo-collages, and video collages.

The four video collages depicted a slow journey through Woldgate Woods in East Yorkshire in each of the four seasons. I’d enjoyed the snowy winter footage before, at an earlier exhibition in nearby Salt’s Mill, so it was a treat to see all four collages together. The videos were taken using nine cameras attached to the front of a car, each recording a different segment of a 3 x 3-screen moving collage. As it was physically impossible for the cameras to capture their recordings from exactly the same viewpoint, the resulting individual segments didn’t quite join up seamlessly, lending a disconcertingly three-dimensional feel to the collage. We perceive depth by looking at the world from two slightly different viewpoints: our two eyes. This was like having your eyes turned up to nine. The effect was mesmerising. Here’s a short video I recorded of the winter collage last year at Salt’s Mill:

Also on show in Bradford were a number of Hockney’s ‘joiner’ photographic images: collages of views assembled from hundreds of photos taken of individual details within the view. Again, I’d seen such images at earlier Hockney exhibitions, and a framed poster of one graces our living room wall. As a keen amateur photographer, it delights me that one of our most celebrated artists is prepared to experiment with what are, in effect, snapshots—the most popular and, I would argue, most important form of visual expression. As with the video images, but more so, these photographic ‘joiners’ are fragmented images which, despite the name, don’t quite join up. Viewing these images is like having your eyes turned up to several hundred. The almost pixelated result is spellbinding: you find yourself examining individual photos in detail, then zooming out again to see the bigger picture—examining the wood and the trees, so to speak.

Although the still images could all, in theory, have been taken from exactly the same viewpoint, like the video collages, they clearly weren’t. Unlike with the video collages, the joiner images were all captured with a single camera, which meant each of them was taken at a slightly different time. This sometimes added a temporal element to the resulting collage. In one of the joiners made in 1985, which depicted the outside of a former incarnation of the very building we were in, the same young woman was captured five or six times as she crossed the road and made her way up a side-street: the passage of time captured in a still image.

One of my favourite joiner images was made at Gordale Scar in the Yorkshire Dales—a place I’ve visited and photographed many times. While I was examining individual photos of small clusters of pebbles in this work, it finally dawned on me what these images remind me of: Hockney’s joiners, assembled from scores of smaller images, resemble the panoramic pictures beamed back to Earth by robots exploring the surface of Mars. And, just as parts of the Martian rovers themselves often appear in the bottom of the Nasa images, Hockney’s own feet appeared in the bottom of his Gordale joiner.

Despite many visits to Gordale over the years, I’ve never explored it in the level of detail Hockney has. His joiner images are a lesson in what it‘s like to pay close attention.

My other major birthday treat was a fancy new camera and ridiculously cumbersome but powerful lens. My old camera was fantastic, but camera technology has moved on apace since I bought it 15 years ago. I only had one day to try (and fail) to get my head round the new camera’s myriad features and settings before we set off for Anglesey, so was more than a little apprehensive I might end up taking some pretty inept photos. In the event, I did struggle a bit, but was delighted with the results:

Even before I ordered the new camera gear, I realised the new lens would require a change in approach. This isn’t the sort of lens you attach to your camera and walk around with all day hanging from your neck. This is the sort of lens you lug to particular places intending to take particular types of photographs—in my case, wildlife photos.

Whenever I visit Anglesey, I spend several hours each day sitting on my favourite rock, gazing out to sea, waiting to see (and photograph) what comes along. I did the same this trip, but it soon became apparent it was impractical to keep my camera and lens permanently in my hands. After a while, I discovered a useful way of cradling them in the crook of my arm like a baby when not in use, but, as with babies, my arm soon began to tire. So I took to storing the camera and lens in my camera bag, whipping them out whenever I thought something interesting was about to happen.

This enforced new arrangement proved a revelation. Counter-intuitively, not having my camera permanently in my hands made me far more relaxed about missing special shots. I soon learnt to accept I was occasionally going to miss stuff. I even learnt to laugh (admittedly, in addition to swearing) when it happened. The local Sandwich terns, in particular, seemed to delight in diving into the sea right in front of me whenever the camera was stowed away in the bag, while refusing to come near when it was primed and ready in my hands.

The other surprising revelation with the new camera was the display-screen on the back. Unlike the screen on my previous camera, this one rotates. This allows you to photograph subjects from awkward angles when looking through the eyepiece isn’t an option. It also allows you to turn the screen round to face the camera for protection when not in use. One morning, I forgot to rotate the screen from its protective position, and re-discovered the long-forgotten delight of taking photographs without ‘chimping’—that is, without immediately checking them on the rear-screen to see how they turned out. No instant check. No instant gratification. No instant dismay. It was like photography used to be in the pre-digital days.

It was an unexpected delight.

More photos from our trip →

2ND APRIL, 2025

Hello.

Philip Larkin begins one of my favourite poems:

I have started to say
“A quarter of a century”
Or “thirty years back”
About my own life.

It makes me breathless…

Six decades ago today, four young women went into labour in a brick-built, Victorian-era maternity home a few hundred yards from the River Mersey on the Wirral peninsula. Unfortunately, the home only had three birthing beds, so one of the young women, Brenda, had to give birth to her first child on some wooden boards hastily laid across the top of a roll-top, cast-iron bath. The trauma of such an ignominious introduction into the world was no doubt to blame for her son being such an ugly looking baby. But Brenda loved him:

At 08:45 BST this morning, I completed my sixtieth circuit around our local G2-class star. It’s ironic: I might not look a day over 59, but that is literally what I am. This afternoon, Jen and I shall be marking the occasion down the pub with beer and a crossword puzzle: ‘getting one down’ in both senses of the phrase. I shall also be pretending none of this is actually happening.

Sixty… It makes me breathless!

Some stuff I thought worth sharing

1. Remembering Nan Shepherd
   Writer Fraser MacDonald on his childhood encounters with the Scottish poet and nature writer.
2. The gift of the gab: did an iron age brain drain bring Celtic to Ireland?
   In one chapter of my book On the Moor, I wrote about the relationships between the so-called P-Celtic and Q-Celtic languages. As this piece explains, the rise of the precursor to the Irish language remains a historical mystery that linguists, geneticists and archaeologists continue to debate.
3. A day of street photography with Eduardo Ortiz (video)
   A well-regarded street photographer interviewed as he works.
4. Beyond Mesopotamia: Linear Elamite deciphered
   The story of how ancient silver vessels of unknown provenance held in a private collection provided clues to the decipherment of a mysterious ancient language.
5. Sebald Lecture 2024: Rowan Williams (video)
   My favourite former Archbishop of Canterbury delivers an interesting lecture on the challenges of translating poetry.
6. Plants more likely to be ‘eavesdroppers’ than altruists when tapping into underground networks, study finds
   A sceptical new take on the so-called ‘wood wide web’: do plants really transmit warnings to others when attacked by herbivores and pathogens, or are the other plants simply picking up on clues those under attack can’t suppress? • See also: Original scientific paper
7. Volcanic eruptions linked to Neolithic ‘sun stone’ sacrifices in Denmark
   Scientists have suggested ritual sacrifices around 4,900 years ago coincided with a large volcanic eruption that made the sun disappear throughout Northern Europe. • See also: Original scientific paper
8. Mammoth as key food source for ancient Americans
   Scientists have uncovered the first direct evidence that ancient Americans relied primarily on mammoth and other large animals for food. Their research sheds new light on both the rapid expansion of humans throughout the Americas and the extinction of large ice age mammals. • See also: Original scientific paper
9. Prophet of the past: blame it on Malthus
   A piece on Rev. Thomas Malthus whose ideas on struggles for diminishing resources as populations increase inspired Charles Darwin.

Recent reading

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie

Next week, we’ll be spending the first full week of my 61st circuit around the sun on the Isle of Anglesey: a place very dear to me, which I’ve been visiting since I was a foetus. I plan, as usual, to spend several hours each day sitting on my favourite rock, gazing out to sea, waiting to see what comes along. I’m also very much looking forward to re-reading Kathleen Jamie’s fabulous recent book Cairn: a collection of short pieces and a handful of poems she wrote to mark her own 60th birthday. I’m hoping it will help me put one or two things in perspective. As Jamie writes in one of her poems:

…there’s more days past than ahead of you
—now you can begin.

Thank you, Kathleen. Excellent call. Let’s go!

More book reviews »

Book update

As recently announced, I completed the one-and-a-halfth draft of my book Through Darwin’s Eyes at the end of January. Progress on the second draft has been slow but steady. I’ve revised the first six chapters, and have been pleasantly surprised at how little work they needed. It’s early days yet, but I suspect there might actually be the makings of a good book in there.

Let’s keep going!

And finally…

Thanks as always for making time to read this newsletter. If you’ve enjoyed it, please spread the word.

Take care, and I’ll see you next time.

Your ancient pal,

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

Grouse groused from the heather. A couple of curlew burbled in the fields below. Lapwings wooted along the skyline. A lone skylark sang for all he was worth from some invisible height.

Then we noticed a less familiar noise: a flat, wheezy piping call. Then came another in response, and another. Dozens of wheezy calls from all sides. I recognised them at once: if it sounds as if your own nostril is whistling when you know damn well it isn’t, look for golden plover! By the sound of it we were surrounded, but I couldn't spot a single bird. And then I thought to look up…

About a hundred golden plover were wheeling in V-formation high above us. They split and re-convened, dropping lower then climbing again. They turned this way and that, heading off into the distance, then returning to delight us with a low fly-by. As they banked in the sunlight, their pale undersides flashed in near unison like sequins on a disco-dress. The air was filled with their gentle calls, which I presume they use to keep in formation. It was a mesmerising experience.

I’d seen small flocks of golden plover above the Moor before, but nowhere near this number. I hope this might be taken as a good sign, but, more likely, we just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

23RD AUGUST, 2024

Hello.

When I was a kid, I read something that astonished me… In Argentina, the moon appears upside down.

I can’t remember whether I read this staggering factoid in some children’s encyclopaedia or in Look and Learn magazine, but I distinctly remember a painted illustration of a gaucho sitting on horseback beneath an upside-down full moon. I couldn’t get my head round such a concept. Why on earth would the moon be upside down in Argentina? Was it due to some local trick of the light, like mirages in the desert? The article didn’t explain.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I realised my misunderstanding. The moon didn’t appear upside down due to mysterious atmospheric conditions above Argentina; it appeared upside down because Argentina is in the southern hemisphere. It wasn’t the moon that was upside down, but the people who were looking at it.

Many more years later, in November 2000, I finally got to witness this topsy-turvy phenomenon for myself, standing outside a noisy video arcade in central Sydney, gawping up in delight at Australia’s downside-up moon.

I’m sure any Argentinians or Australians reading this will be quick to point out it isn’t their moon that’s upside down, but the moon in the northern hemisphere. It’s a matter of perspective. But I mention this childhood anecdote because, a few weeks ago, halfway through my sixtieth circuit around the sun, I read something else about the moon that really shouldn’t have astonished me quite as much as it did… The moon orbits our planet from west to east!

I can’t believe I wasn’t aware of this simple fact before now. I knew, of course, that the stars, sun and moon appear to move across the sky from east to west due to the daily rotation of the earth about its axis, west to east. And I knew that, while the inconceivably distant stars all appear to move across the sky together at the same speed, the moon crosses slightly more slowly—a phenomenon you can observe for yourself over the course of a night, or several nights. But it had never dawned on me that the moon forever lagging behind the stars in this way has to be due to its slowly moving west to east as it orbits the earth once a month. So, while it takes 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.0905 seconds for the earth to complete one rotation about its axis relative to the stars, it takes an additional 50 minutes or so for it to catch up with the moon. This explains why the moon appears to rise roughly 50 minutes later each day, and why the oceans’ tides, which are mainly caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, also rise and fall roughly 50 minutes later each day.

So now I know! (And so do you, if you didn’t already.)

What else haven’t they been telling me?

Some stuff I thought worth sharing

1. Peeping on Pepys
   The story of the long-running website PepysDiary.com, and of how Samuel Pepys’ famous diary found a new life on the internet.
2. The ‘wood wide web’ theory charmed us all—but now it’s the subject of a bitter fight among scientists
   The debate about the degree to which forests and fungi communicate raises the question of confirmation bias, says Sophie Yeo.
3. The Babylonian Map of the World (video)
   On the discovery, piecing together, and eventual interpretation of the oldest known map of the world. It’s a great story!
4. Hayward of the Dale
   Mary Wellesley on old terms used to describe women’s bodily parts and functions.
5. How this pen changed the world (video)
   The story of the Bic Crystal ball-point pen.
6. The evidence is mounting: humans were responsible for the extinction of large mammals
   The debate has raged for decades: was it humans or climate change that led to the extinction of many large animal species over the past 50,000 years?

Recent reading

The Accidental Garden by Richard Mabey

A lovely new book from the veteran nature writer about his two-acre garden in Suffolk, and the many organisms that have adopted it as their habitat.

More book reviews »

Book update

Work on my Darwin book slowed somewhat this spring and summer, partly due to my travelling more than usual. I recently completed a chapter inspired by a walk along the north coast of Anglesey last September, which was really an excuse to write about the evolutionary history of seals and porpoises. I have a couple more chapters planned, then the real fun should begin as I start wielding the knife, murdering my darlings, licking things into shape, and mixing metaphors to my heart’s content.

And finally…

Thanks as always for making time to read this newsletter. If you enjoyed it, please share it with your friends.

Take care, and see you next time.

Richard

richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

2ND APRIL, 2024

Hello.

…from the Yorkshire Dales, where we’re marking my latest in an alarmingly long line of birthdays. I’m not much of a fan of getting older, but I suppose the alternative is far worse—and it’s a great excuse to re-visit some favourite haunts.

Some stuff I thought worth sharing

1. The women who found liberation in seaweed
   How a shared love of algae got a community of women hooked on marine science.
2. Strike at the knee: Italy, 1943
   Despite not being particularly interested in military history, I found Malcolm Gaskill’s account of the gruelling Italian campaign of the Second World War absorbing—not least because of the quality of the writing.
3. Last summer, I went on a philosophical guided walk with local philosopher Paul Knights. In a recent post, Philosophy of Landscape: narrative, ethics, welfare, Paul explores how philosophy can help deepen and enrich our understanding and appreciation of landscape.
4. Geologists reject declaration of Anthropocene epoch
   After protracted, occasionally heated debate, the International Union of Geological Sciences has decided not to recognise a new geological epoch marked by our own species’ impact on the planet. But the term Anthropocene is unlikely to go away. For more analysis, see: Golden spike or no golden spike—we are living in the Anthropocene.
5. How did the Big Bang get its name? Here’s the real story
   Astronomer Fred Hoyle supposedly coined the catchy term to ridicule the theory of the Universe’s origins. 75 years on, it’s time to set the record straight. (True story, my great-aunt and -uncle, Lucy and Fred, once bumped into Fred Hoyle while visiting Jodrell Bank Observatory. They recognised him off the telly. Apparently, he was utterly charming, chatting happily with them at length.)
6. Einstein on the run: how the world’s greatest scientist hid from Nazis in a Norfolk hut
   How the physicist’s refuge from assassins on a British heath changed the course of history.
7. Maria Popova’s vivid life in the margins
   The writer and editor discusses 17 years of The Marginalian website, and her ‘compassion for consciousness’.
8. Collections: the journey of the Roman gladius and other swords
   It’s not just species that evolve; cultural artefacts can, too. This piece explores the evolution of the famous Roman gladius sword.
9. The end of species
   This excerpt from a new book explores the importance and difficulties of assigning names to species.

Recent reading

Buried: an alternative history of the first millennium in Britain by Prof. Alice Roberts

A fascinating read, exploring various funerary rituals observed in first-millennium Britain, and the ways in which we might interpret them.

More book reviews »

Serendipty-doo-dah!

I’ve written before about the unavoidably provisional nature of factual writing, of how you can never hope to write definitively on any subject, and of how new facts will continue to emerge. I take comfort from this: you can’t hope to cover everything about your chosen topic, so cut yourself some slack and get on with it!

My latest, spookily timely, example of new facts emerging came last month. In the most recent edition of my Friends of Charles Darwin newsletter, I wrote about an intriguing new study that finally seems to explain why moths and other night-flying insects are ruinously drawn to artificial lights. On reflection, I realised this would make an excellent topic to write about in my Darwin book. So I made notes on the scientific paper, linked in some other notes I’d made previously from other sources, did some more digging and note-making, and eventually put together a detailed chapter outline. As I sat down to start writing the chapter the next day, the very first post I saw on one of my social media feeds leapt out of the screen and slapped me in the face. It announced a new paper, published that very morning, describing how certain moths seem to be evolving to lessen the likelihood of their encountering artificial lights. It turned out the moths used in this study were the very same specimens that had been used in the paper I had mentioned in my newsletter. Furthermore, the person posting the social-media link to the new paper was one of the authors on both papers.

So, my chapter was out-of-date before I’d written a word of it! Which meant, of course, I had to read the new paper. Which led me down yet another research rabbit-hole. Which called for a complete revision of my chapter outline… Which, I’m glad to say, resulted in a far better chapter.

I can’t help feeling it would be a whole lot easier writing fiction!

And finally…

Thanks as always for making time to read this newsletter. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends.

Take care, and see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

9TH FEBRUARY, 2024

Hello.

I recently enjoyed Roland Allen’s entertaining book The Notebook: a history of thinking on paper (see Recent Reading below). One of my ideas for this year is to go a bit more ‘analogue’. I like the idea of having somewhere to potter with pen and paper, capturing passing thoughts and observations, playing with vague ideas, maybe producing the occasional fragment of text that might be developed further. Doodles might even be involved.

Almost two years ago, I treated myself to a gorgeous, long-coveted green leather notebook cover, ideally sized to enfold my notebook of choice, the hardback A5 Leuchtturm1917. But my perverse phobia of ruining notebooks by writing in them immediately kicked in, so my gorgeous notebook has been sitting unused on my desk ever since.

To overcome this ridiculous mental blockage, I began to collect quotes about analogue note-making from favourite writers and musicians. The idea was, once I’d gathered a few inspirational quotes, I could transcribe them with uncharacteristic neatness into my notebook as a way of breaking the ice:

I sat on a damp rock, took my notebook from my inner pocket, made earnest notes:
—Kathleen Jamie, Findings

Then there are the scores of notebooks, their contents calling—confession, revelation, endless variations of the same paragraph—and piles of napkins scrawled with incomprehensible rants. Dried-out ink bottles, encrusted nibs, cartridges for pens long gone, mechanical pencils emptied of lead. Writer’s debris.
—Patti Smith, M Train

I sat at a table near the open terrace door, my papers and notes spread out around me, drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order.
—W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

Notebooks out, plagiarists!
—Mark E Smith, The War Against Intelligence

It didn’t work, of course. My untidy transcriptions looked like a bunch of random quotations about note-making. So I reassigned that particular Leuchtturm1917 to some as-yet-unspecified future use, slotted a new one into my leather cover, and, after much agonising, on 1st January this year, finally scribbled down a few bullet-points about how I intend to use the notebook in future. I didn’t try to write anything profound—that was the whole point—but it was a start at least.

(I haven’t written anything in the notebook since, obviously, but it can only be a matter of time.)

Some stuff I thought worth sharing

1. Can your diary be a bestseller? (audio)
   Talking of notebooks, an interview with author Amy Liptrot on keeping a hand-written diary, turning it into two memoirs, and having one memoir turned into a film.
2. Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the scrolls!
   Thanks to high-tech scans, sophisticated software, and a lot of hard work, part of a scroll carbonised in the Vesuvius eruption on 79AD has finally been read.
3. Ancient steppe herders brought higher risk of MS to northern Europe
   A study of ancient DNA shows the bronze age Yamnaya people spread a gene that was presumably useful to them, but which carries an increased risk of multiple sclerosis in their European descendants.
4. Petrifying juices: fossilised
   On the history of fossils, how they were interpreted, how they’re formed, and how they’re looked after.
5. The story of a drum
   My mate science historian Thony Christie on a Vietnamese Đông Sơn drum that came into his family’s possession.
6. Science and history cannot afford to be indifferent to each other
   How scientists and historians would benefit from engaging more with one another.
7. Learning to see goldcrests
   Scotland-based Irish writer Chris Arthur’s charming essay on Europe’s smallest bird.
8. A sudoku secret to blow your mind (video)
   On the ‘Phistomephel Ring’, a hidden feature of all sudoku puzzles.
9. Shadows & Reflections: Kevin Boniface (audio-visual)
   For Kevin Boniface, 2023 was a year of plastic union jacks, decorative aggregates and golfing sweaters.

Recent reading

The Notebook: a history of thinking on paper by Roland Allen
An entertaining history of notebooks, their uses, and their users.

More book reviews »

And finally…

Thanks as always for making time to read this newsletter. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends.

Take care, and see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

5TH JANUARY, 2024

Hello.

Welcome to the relaunched Rich Text newsletter. Apologies for the extended break, but a lot of other stuff got in the way last year. For those of you receiving this newsletter for the first time, it’s the sibling of my Friends of Charles Darwin newsletter, with a bit less emphasis on Darwin, and more emphasis on science, history and nature, and my attempts to write about them.

Yesterday, I completed the first draft of a chapter about gannets for my book Through Darwin’s Eyes. I’ve never made a secret of the fact that, for me, the most enjoyable part of writing is the research. I love finding stuff out. But the research is the easy part. The hard work begins when you try to combine all the stuff you’ve found out about a particular topic into something that’s actually readable. It’s taken me a long time to realise that, rather than trying to cram all your research into a single piece of writing, it’s often best to leave one or two things out. Of course, in addition to improving readability, one other benefit of leaving things out is it leaves you with more stuff to write about on the same topic in future.

One surprising thing I learnt about gannets during my research—surprising, because I’ve photographed many gannets and never even noticed—is that they don’t have any nostrils. Evolution through natural selection has filled them in! This might prevent seawater being forced into the gannets’ lungs when they plunge into the sea from on high in pursuit of fish. Conversely, it might also prevent air from being forced out of the gannets’ lungs too quickly during the impact. Gannets lungs are connected to a system of internal air-sacks, like the air-sacks in cars, that provide protection as they hit the water. As is so often the case, biological features which seem clearly to be adaptations have more than one plausible explanation. But who says there need only be one explanation?

Some stuff I thought worth sharing

1. A national evil
   A surprisingly interesting article about goitres and other obscure medical conditions that once plagued Switzerland, how they were eventually cured, and how their cause went back as far as the last ice age.
2. On chestnuts roasting on an open fire
   The Christmas edition of Eleanor Konik’s newsletter about why biological blights are a big deal. (Eleanor uses the same note-making system as me, and puts it to excellent use writing articles like this one. I hope to start putting some of my own notes to similar good use in future editions of my newsletters.)
3. The only artist in the world to embed gold leaves in glass
   A fascinating video describing the development of a new craft from older disciplines. The section near the end where Japanese artist Yamamoto Akane describes numerous costly failed attempts as she experimented like a scientist, over and over again, to develop and perfect her new techniques is inspirational.
4. Against Voltaire, or, the shortest possible introduction to the Holy Roman Empire
   An excellent, light-hearted introduction to a subject I felt I needed to know more about (by which, I mean know something about): the Holy Roman Empire.
5. What whale barnacles know
   How barnacles on whales have, for generations, been recording details about their hosts and their ocean home.
6. My friend Thony Christie published a typically in-depth, profusely illustrated series of posts, Magnetic Variations, on the history of magnetism. It comes in four parts: I: Setting the scene • II: The Borough Brothers • III: Robert Norman • IV: William Barlow.
7. I’ve been hugely enjoying physicist Dr Angela Collier’s YouTube channel. Her low-tech videos are intelligent, well-informed and funny (especially if you skip the occasional technical bits when she encourages you to do so). For starters, I recommend her video-essays: The aliens will not be silicon • Dark matter is not a theory • Humanoid robots belong in the trash. But do check out her entire back-catalogue.
8. One of my favourite writers, Ronald Blythe, died age 100 last year. The Slightly Foxed podcast published a lovely tribute: Ronald Blythe: a life well written. (See also ‘Recent reading’ below.)
9. Dame Rosemary Cramp
   An obituary of the archaeologist who led excavations at the twin monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, home to the Venerable Bede. I attended lectures by Prof. Cramp while at Durham University in the mid-1980s. She was a daunting figure. I’ll never forget the time someone tried unsuccessfully to stifle a sneeze in one of her lectures, leaving everyone desperate (but too daunted) to laugh… until 30 seconds later, when Cramp could no longer stifle her own laughter. I was surprised to learn from this obituary what an interesting character she was.
10. Wood-Wide Web: do forest trees really ‘talk’ through underground fungi?
    Do popular claims about the ‘Wood-Wide Web’ stand up to scientific scrutiny? (Spoiler: Only partially.)

On my website

Some highlights from last year:

• LRB letter: ‘The reaction economy’
  I had a letter published in the London Review of Books on Charles Darwin’s use of photography in his book about human and animal emotions.
• Cocker, the walk
  In took a short walk with naturalist and writer Mark Cocker to admire the natural grandeur of a small wood on my local patch.
• ‘Lesser’ truth v artistic licentiousness
  In which I object to the suggestions that paintings are somehow more accurate than photographs, and novels more truthful than factual writing.
• Unpolished words
  Inspired by a YouTube video, it finally dawned on me that it’s not just ‘OK’ for the first drafts of your writing to be unpolished; in some respects, it’s a positive advantage.
• 2023: a year in photos
  My thirteenth annual video slideshow.

Recent reading

Next to Nature by Ronald Blythe
Pure comfort-reading: an anthology of pieces from Ronald Blythe’s long-running Wormingford series. It was published to mark the veteran country writer’s 100th birthday. Sadly, Blythe died a short while later.

More book reviews »

And finally…

Long-time readers of these newsletters will know I’d become increasingly unhappy with Twitter over the last few years—even before the narcissistic buffoon took over. Over the last year or so, we’ve seen social media fragment into a number of rival silos. I’ve been trying them all out (see links below), and will continue to use them, but my intention in future is to concentrate my efforts on communicating through my newsletters. So thanks for subscribing, keep watching this space, and, as always, please encourage your friends to subscribe if you think they’d like my stuff.

Take care, and see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

This note is intended for people who subscribed to either or both of my newsletters before December 2023. Those newsletters are:

• Rich Text: My personal newsletter celebrating science, history and nature writing, and related topics.
• The Friends of Charles Darwin newsletter: celebrating Charles Darwin and the grandeur in his view of life.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, both newsletters have been conspicuous by their absence during 2023. But moves are afoot…

• I’m bringing both newsletters out of hiatus, and am taking the opportunity to have a bit of a revamp.
• The service I previously used for sending out the newsletters (TinyLetter) is being scrapped, so I’m moving both newsletters and their existing subscribers to another service, Substack.
• Apologies, but by default you’ll now start receiving both newsletters—even if you’ve previously only subscribed to one. Unfortunately, I have no control over this—but you do…
• Obviously, I’d be delighted if you give both newsletters a try, but, if you click the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom of any of the newsletter emails, you’ll be able to indicate which of my newsletters you do and don’t want to receive in future.
• Please note: Although Substack allows authors to charge for newsletters, both of the above will remain free.

Thanks. It’s great to be back, and it’s going to be fun!

Richard
richardcarter.com
friendsofdarwin.com

28TH OCTOBER 2022

Hello.

Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned: it has been two monarchs and three Prime Ministers since my last newsletter. Although a staunch (UK) republican, even I had to admit the death of Queen Elizabeth II felt like the end of an era (whereas, Johnson replaced by Truss replaced by Sunak feels like the continuation of an error).

In the non-stop news coverage leading up to the queen’s funeral, it was claimed more than once that, when she waved, you always felt she was waving at you. On the one occasion my path accidentally crossed with that of Her Majesty, this was literally the case.

It happened 20 years ago. I was walking through the streets of Liverpool on my lunch-break, when I encountered a gathering of several hundred people holding union flags. I had forgotten the queen was due in town to mark her 50th (golden) jubilee. So I headed down towards the River Mersey to get away from the royalist mob. A minute later, a police car slowly rounded the corner, followed by an old Bentley without any number-plates. I was the only person in the street. I gawped in embarrassed astonishment as Her Majesty and Prince Philip looked directly at me, smiled, and waved. This was it: my big chance to make my mark; to raise a clenched fist and cry, “Power to the people!” But somehow my fist wouldn’t clench. Instead, the fingers and thumb on my raised hand began to wiggle back and forth in what I hope came across as a not-too-ironic return-wave.

When nice old ladies wave at you, it’s always polite to wave back.

Some stuff I thought worth sharing:

1. Making a medieval book (video)
   I love watching skilled craftspeople at work. Here, 60 hours’ work creating a medieval-style leather-bound book from scratch are compressed into 24 minutes. If you’d prefer to watch a much longer version, check out this playlist.
2. First known map of night sky found hidden in medieval parchment
   A fabled star catalogue by the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus, presumed lost, has been recovered through detailed scientific analysis of a palimpsest.
3. The Spirit of the Wetlands
   A long, moving piece by my friend Julian Hoffman about the drastic decline of Dalmatian pelicans in the Prespa lakes in northern Greece due to avian influenza.
4. Mutual entrapment
   As Neolithic people transformed prehistoric forests, they stumbled into an ecological trap… Although I wrote about humans’ ongoing maintenance of heather uplands in my book On the Moor, I’d never really thought of heather as a domesticated species before.
5. The simple secret of runway digits (video)
   Ever wondered how airport runways are allocated numbers? Me neither. This typically entertaining CGP Grey video spills the beans, taking several diverting diversions in the process.
6. How darkness can illuminate the insect apocalypse
   On our increasingly light-polluted planet, it’s possible nocturnal insects might have been evolving to avoid artificial light. But, as we use light-traps to count many of them, how do we know our insect-population estimates over the years have been comparing like with like?
7. Two-hundred years of Stendhal
   2022 marks the bicentennial of the pseudonym’s transformation from literary dabbler into one of the greatest novelists of the modern age.
8. Why 8 eyes are better than 2 (…if you’re a spider) (video)
   Why do spiders have 8 eyes? It’s a seemingly simple question with a surprisingly complex answer. (Warning: Be prepared to develop a soft-spot for jumping spiders.)

A few bonus links

Recent Reading

More book reviews »

And finally…

I’m planning to visit Cambridge soon on a mini Darwin pilgrimage. More of this, no doubt, in my next newsletter. Meanwhile, you might be interested in some sideline pieces I published recently about Charles Darwin’s note-making system, and some details of my own note-making ‘tagsonomy’. Those of a less nerdy nature might prefer the three pieces I wrote following my annual late-summer holiday in Anglesey about an encounter with dolphins and sitting on my favourite rock (parts 1 and 2).

Thanks as always for reading this newsletter—particularly if you’re a subscriber. In times like these, with the world’s richest narcissist and self-styled ‘free speech absolutist’ taking over Twitter, keeping in touch by email seems so much more sociable than so-called social networking.

Keep safe, and I’ll see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

1. Footprints on Merseyside beach shine light on biodiversity in ancient Britain
   Footprint beds on Formby beach reveal that the intertidal landscapes of Mesolithic Britain were hubs of human and animal activity for the first few thousand years after the last glacial period.
2. Now playing (Caught by the River) (video)
   A mesmerising video promoting the new track ‘Sister Rena’ by Lomond Campbell from the album ‘Under This Hunger Moon We Fell’.
3. Tutankhamun’s burial chamber may contain door to Nefertiti’s tomb
   Hidden hieroglyphics could suggest the king is buried within a much larger structure housing the Egyptian queen.
4. Increase in LED lighting ‘risks harming human and animal health’
   The transition to blue light radiation across Europe increases suppression of sleep hormone melatonin, say scientists.
5. Hunger stones, wrecks and bones: Europe’s drought brings past to surface
   Receding rivers and lakes recently exposed ghost villages, a Nazi vehicle and a Roman fort.
6. Ovule obsession, or: A life without ash
   Forester and pathologist Jim Pratt describes his growing obsession with, and love for, the ash tree, along with his concerns about the causes and implications of ash dieback disease.
7. ‘Zero scent’: could negative reviews of smelly candles hint at a covid surge?
   Research shows there is indeed a correlation between Covid cases and the number of reviews complaining that Yankee Candles don’t have a smell.

https://richardcarter.com/metafeed.xml

The old feed URL should continue to work just fine. But if you’re already subscribed to the feed, you might want to update to the ‘official’ version.

Apologies for any inconvenience. I’ll try to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

29TH JULY 2022

Hello.

I got up close to some truly fabulous birds on a trip to the RSPB reserve at Bempton a few weeks ago: gannets, guillemots, kittiwakes, gannets, razorbills, puffins, gannets, tree sparrows, and a barn owl (not to forget the gannets).

But the biggest birding surprise of quite possibly the decade came with the arrival of a magnificent male Lady Amherst’s pheasant in our garden. I dubbed him Ming (after the Chinese dynasty, not Flash Gordon’s arch-enemy). These birds, which were introduced from China by the eponymous Lady Amherst in the nineteenth century, are now said to be extinct in the wild in the UK, but there are still occasional sightings. I’m guessing Ming must be an escapee from someone’s collection. He hung around in our garden for a couple of weeks as he went through a moult, but we haven’t seen him now for three or four days. I’m not at all interested in chasing after rare birds, but to have one set up shop in our own garden was quite a thrill.

Some stuff I thought worth sharing:

1. ‘A truce with the trees’: Rebecca Solnit on the wonders of a 300-year old violin
   Made with all-renewable materials, this violin from 1721 reflects a time of magnificent culture—a global gathering from before the climate crisis. (I enjoyed this essay so much, I wrote a sideline piece about it.)
2. Today (2010) (video)
   In 2009, US artist Jonathan Harris began a project to take a daily photograph and post it to his website. It lasted for 440 days. This video shows the eclectic mix of photos in order, one per second, while Harris explores what he learnt from the project. (via Psyche).
3. Two weeks in, the Webb Space Telescope is reshaping astronomy
   In the days after the mega-telescope started delivering data, astronomers reported new discoveries about galaxies, stars, exoplanets and even Jupiter.
4. Cloud chambers and cosmic rays: the quest to unravel one of the most dazzling mysteries of the universe
   How experiments performed at high altitude in a balloon in 1911 revolutionised nuclear physics, and led to a Nobel Prize.
5. Who were the people of Stonehenge? (video)
   Famously, no one knows who they were, or what they were doing, but British Museum curators Jennifer Wexler and Neil Wilkin know better, taking us on a tour of their exhibition The World of Stonehenge.

A few bonus links

Recent Reading

More book reviews »

And finally…

My most successful day’s writing on my Darwin book this month resulted in a word-count of minus 652. There’s a lot more to writing than simply writing. In my recent review of the chapters I’d written so far (see newsletter 28), I identified one whose opening paragraphs were so cringeworthily awful that I simply had to do something about them. Cutting the crap can be remarkably uplifting. So perhaps I’d better stop right here…

Thanks for taking time to read this newsletter. As always, please forward it to any of your friends who might enjoy it. And if a friend forwarded this newsletter to you, perhaps now might be the perfect time to subscribe.

Keep safe, and I’ll see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

1. Origin of the world map
   Mythical creatures and mathematical precision met in the Catalan Atlas, a world map that fused Christian and Muslim knowledge.
2. Chance, choice, and the avocado: the strange evolutionary and creative history of Earth’s most nutritious fruit
   How a confused romancer that survived the Ice Age became a tropical sensation and took over the world.
3. Great auks and seal-headed men: a window into ice age Provence
   The Cosquer Cave near Marseilles astonished the diver who discovered it with its ancient depictions of sea and land animals. Now it has been painstakingly recreated.
4. The Maintenance Race
   The world’s first round-the-world solo yacht race was a thrilling and, for some, deadly contest. How its participants maintained their vessels can help us understand just how fundamental maintenance is. (Thanks to Dave W. for the link.)
5. Drone footage reveals hidden 17th Century garden
   The recent heatwave has parched grass lying over a formal garden, which dates back to 1699.
6. How ancient Roman souvenirs made memories and meanings
   Ancient Romans bought mementos to commemorate their travels. These speak eloquently of their world, if we care to listen.

1ST JULY 2022

Hello.

Earlier this week, I paid one of my regular visits to Salt’s Mill in Saltaire near Bradford. The mill and adjacent village are a World Heritage site, with the former textile mill having been converted into fancy shops and art galleries. The site is closely associated with the artist David Hockney, who was born in Bradford in 1937, and who has been extremely supportive of his hometown by exhibiting many of his artworks at the mill. I was there to see Hockney’s latest exhibition, A Year in Normandie, which comprises his biggest ever picture: a 90.75m frieze depicting the changing seasons in his French garden. The size and presentation of this piece was influenced by another artwork associated with Normandy, but most likely made in England, the Bayeaux Tapestry. Like many of Hockney’s recent pieces, A Year in Normandie was created on his iPad.

Here are some photos I took at the exhibition.

Hockney is an inspiration. He never stops trying out new ideas. A great draftsman and painter, he famously branched out into other media, producing wonderful photographic collages dubbed joiners. He later explored this idea further in video format. Nowadays, he churns out image after image on his iPad, many of which are wonderful.

Even at age 84, the secret is to keep experimenting, and to keep putting your stuff out there.

Some stuff I thought worth sharing

1. ‘A fragment of eternity’: the mesmerising murmurations of Europe’s starlings
   Photographer Søren Solkær has spent hundreds of nights capturing the astonishing flight patterns made by starlings. Note: It might not be obvious, but some of the images are amazing videos. To get them to play, you might need to click on them, or right-click and choose the ‘Play’ option.
2. Cracking the Cretan code
   The written language Linear B has been deciphered, but Linear A remains elusive. Can linguistic analysis unlock the meaning of Minoan script?
   See also: The ancient secrets revealed by deciphered tablets - When cuneiform was cracked, it gave us some astonishing insights into the ancient world.
3. Wet Plate Photography with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution
   A lovely video documentary about one man’s 10-year project to photograph all 238 RNLI lifeboat stations and their crews around the coast of the UK using a 170-year-old photographic process. The images are stunning.
4. Ten years sober
   My friend and near-neighbour Amy Liptrot’s characteristically brave, personal piece about being ten years free of alcohol.
5. Black death: how we solved the centuries-old mystery of its origins
   The Black Death evolved around Kyrgyzstan, according to interesting new research.

A few bonus links

Recent Reading

More book reviews »

And finally…

Even before being re-inspired by David Hockney this week, I’d recently begun putting more of my stuff out there on my website. I plan to keep doing this in future, in parallel with working on my Darwin book. So please keep checking out the latest posts on my Sidelines blog.

Thanks, as ever, for allowing me into your inbox, and for making time to read this newsletter. As always, please let me know if you have any feedback, and feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might enjoy it and want to subscribe. It’s always nice to gain new readers!

Keep safe, and I’ll see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

1. The swashbuckling, philosophical alchemist
   A typically well-researched, profusely illustrated piece by my mate science historian Thony Christie on Sir Kenelm Digby, ‘one of the most fascinating figures of the seventeenth century’.
2. Ancient DNA reveals secrets of Pompeii victims
   Researchers studying human remains from Pompeii have extracted genetic information from the bones of a man and a woman who were buried when the Roman city was engulfed in volcanic ash.
3. How do we solve the paradox of protection in Antarctica?
   The most protected place on Earth has become one of the most threatened—and threatening.
4. Supermassive black hole at centre of Milky Way seen for first time
   The Event Horizon telescope has captured an image from the turbulent heart of our galaxy.
5. Where science meets fiction: the dark history of eugenics
   Scientist and author Dr Adam Rutherford looks at how the study of genetics has been warped for political ends.
6. Tom Scott vs Irving Finkel: The Royal Game of Ur
   YouTuber Tom Scott takes on British Museum curator Irvin Finkel in the world’s oldest playable board game. (And what a fantastic game it is!)
7. Are you eating a credit card of plastic every week?
   (Spoiler alert: Nope!) A nice piece of sceptical investigation, showing how genuine scientific studies can be accidentally misrepresented in the re-telling.

29TH APRIL 2022

Hello.

I intended to begin this newsletter with some brief comments on a recent article about nature writing. But by the time I passed the 1,200-word mark, I thought my Sidelines blog might be a more appropriate place to share some thoughts on Nature writing’s ill-defined, thriving ecosystem.

Talking of word-counts, having reached 84,000 words in my Darwin book, I realised it was time to break my golden rule and re-read what I’d written so far. As I explained in another sideline piece, I’d reached the point where I could no longer see the wood from the trees, and felt the need to put my existing chapters into some sort of order. I saw this as an encouraging sign that I’m beginning to enter the endgame of my first draft. (The other good news was my completed chapters were better than I remembered.)

…I’ve just realised both the sideline pieces I linked to above contain the word cringeworthy. I hope this doesn’t speak volumes.

Some stuff I thought worth sharing:

1. Feynman’s Ode to the Wonder of Life
   A literally wonder-full animated prose poem adaptation of the words of Nobel science laureate Richard Feynman, read by Amanda Palmer, animated by Kelli Anderson, with renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma providing backing music. Fantastic. More details on the Marginalian website, from where I took this link.
2. Vikings shipped walrus ivory from Greenland to Kyiv, ancient skulls show
   The Vikings set up impressive trade-routes. New DNA evidence strongly suggests they traded walrus ivory hunted in Greenland or the Canadian Arctic as far as modern Ukraine.
3. How can ancient dental plaque help reveal the rise and spread of dairy pastoralism on the Eurasian steppes?
   I attended a course in scientific techniques in archaeology in the mid-1980s. As with the walrus ivory story above, I’m continually amazed how far such techniques have advanced. Thanks to analysis of his dental plaque, we can tell an Early Bronze Age man whose remains were excavated in the Caucasus had a diet heavy on dairy produce.
4. Doomed ship of gold’s ghostly picture gallery is plucked from the seabed
   Maritime archaeologists have recovered hauntingly personal daguerreotype photographs from a famous 1857 shipwreck off the coast of South Carolina.
5. Nasa’s Perseverance rover sees solar eclipse on Mars
   Science for the win! An astonishing brief video, captured by one of our species’ robots on Mars, of the moon Phobos passing in front of the sun. (The pedant in me feels compelled to point out this was technically a transit, not an eclipse.)

A few bonus links

Recent Reading

More book reviews »

And finally…

Thanks as always for allowing me to email you directly: with oligarchs in control of Facebook and now Twitter, I would far rather cut out the billionaire middlemen.

I continue to make minor tweaks to the format of this newsletter in an attempt to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. If you have any suggestions for improvements, or if you know of any similar newsletters I might learn a few lessons from, please get in touch—either by replying to this newsletter or via my contact form.

Keep safe, and I’ll see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

1. In Search of Troy
   It wasn’t just a legend. Archaeologists are getting to the bottom of the city celebrated by Homer nearly 3,000 years ago.
2. Autopsy on Adam & Eve - Objectivity 256
   A look at an incredible selection of paper instruments at the Royal Society.
3. Bats
   Quick facts about bat species from around the world. From egalitarian relationships to vitamin synthesis.
4. On Antibiotic Resistance
   Writer and general practitioner Gavin Francis on the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
5. Why birds migrate vast distances – and how you can help during their breeding season
   Birds are master navigators, negotiating journeys of thousands miles each year.
6. Dire straits
   A review of ‘Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan’ by Felipe Fernández-Armesto.
7. Most UK national parks deliver ‘negligible benefits’ for wildlife
   Report says land should only be classed as protected if wildlife is proved to be recovering over long-term.
8. The 50 best albums of 2021
   A list from the Guardian’s assorted music journos.

21ST MARCH 2022

Hello.

Thirty years ago today, my partner, Jen, and I became a couple. To mark the anniversary, this afternoon we finally made it official by entering into a civil partnership at the local register office. (If you’ve never heard of a civil partnership, it’s basically the same as getting married, but without any of the historical religious or patriarchal baggage.)

Famously, when brainstorming the Pros and Cons of getting hitched, the occasionally over-analytical bachelor Charles Darwin noted, on the plus side, that a wife would be better than a dog. Like my hero, I have a huge soft-spot for dogs, but unlike him, I know exactly what I’m getting myself into… After three decades with Jen, I can confirm without a shadow of doubt that she knocks poor old Fido into a cocked hat!

Decades… When did I start reckoning in decades?

Some stuff I thought worth sharing:

1. How a handful of prehistoric geniuses launched humanity’s technological revolution
   A new study suggests many key prehistoric inventions were one-offs. Instead of being invented by different people independently, they were discovered once, then shared.
2. Endurance: Shackleton’s lost ship is found in Antarctic
   The ship whose loss beneath the ice led to one of the greatest stories of escape from adversity has been found on the Antarctic seafloor.
3. We’re analysing DNA from ancient and modern humans to create a ‘family tree of everyone’
   How linking together genetic material from thousands of people, both modern and ancient, allowed scientists to trace our ancestors, and the history of our evolution.
4. Self on Sebald (audio)
   Twenty years after W.G. Sebald’s untimely death, Will Self pieces together the life and work of the writer.
5. Swallows opt out of migration
   Climate change has allowed a small number of swallows to alter their winter strategy, remaining in the UK instead of flying south. (Sounds like good news, but it really isn’t.)
6. What you need to know about comma splices
   Bite-sized punctuation advice from Charles and Emma Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter, also named Emma Darwin.

Recent Reading

More book reviews »

And finally…

Apologies for the brevity, but Jen and I are off celebrating at the moment. Thanks as ever for making time to read this newsletter. If you have any friends you think might like it, please forward them a copy, suggesting they might like to subscribe.

Keep safe, and I’ll see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

25TH FEBRUARY 2022

Hello.

A confession… For me, writing a book is mostly an excuse for finding stuff out. If, in the process, I actually manage to write a book others might enjoy, so much the better. But the fun part is the finding out, not the writing.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy the challenge of trying to distil a complex mishmash of ideas into a coherent narrative. The golden rule is, if I can’t explain a concept in straightforward language to an intelligent reader, it’s likely I don’t understand it well enough. The problem with this rule, of course, is it gives me the perfect excuse to go back and find out even more stuff.

A less enjoyable part of trying to distil my research is deciding which bits to leave out. I have literally hundreds of interlinked notes in my research app of choice. Not all my nuggets can make it into the book.

Last week, for example, I finally completed the first draft of a chapter about the evolution of the eye. As I neared the end of the chapter, I decided I needed to do some retrospective research about irises (the things in your eyes, obviously, not the flowers). In the process, I unearthed an interesting new study investigating why some animals have horizontal slits for pupils, while others have vertical slits. This sort of nugget would normally be a shoo-in, but I couldn’t sneak it into my chapter without making an unnecessary diversion in an already lengthy narrative. So I reluctantly filed the article away in my notes for possible future use. Then it occurred to me one good use for it would be to share it in a newsletter…

Some stuff I thought worth sharing:

1. Revealed: why animals’ pupils come in different shapes and sizes
   An interesting new study on the visual benefits of vertical and horizontal pupils.
2. ‘I wanted to put the sex into nature writing’
   My near(ish) neighbour and pal Amy Liptrot interviewed about her forthcoming memoir The Instant , which is out next week (you should all pre-order a copy, by the way). Amy recently tweeted the bombshell announcement that her brave and surprisingly uplifting debut memoir, The Outrun, is to be made into a film starring Saoirse Ronan. I literally w00ted!
3. Moths and bats have been in an evolutionary battle for millions of years—and we’re still uncovering their tricks
   Yet another example (see previous newsletter) of an interesting new story on a topic I’ve already written a chapter about for my Darwin book. I also spoke about this topic in a short bats podcast piece a couple of years back.
4. Have we forgotten how to read critically?
   A thoughtful article on how, thanks to social media, many readers treat every published piece of writing as a conversation opener, demanding a bespoke response. I’m tempted to contact the author to ask her to elaborate on one or two points.
5. Like a Flamingo: Viking Treasure
   A nice piece about the Galloway treasure hoard. It touches on a number of topics that interest me: the P- and Q-Celtic languages (as discussed in my book On the Moor), place names giving clues to history (ditto), ancient British peoples, St Cuthbert (who ought to be England’s patron saint), and Vikings. What’s not to like?
6. Bird Island
   A new essay on South African cape gannets (and humans) by top bird-man Tim Dee. I once spoke briefly with Tim. I remember our words as if they were uttered only yesterday: “Sorry, mate,” I said, getting out of his way. “Thanks. No worries!” he replied. One to file away for my autobiography, perhaps.

Recent Reading

More book reviews »

And finally…

Thanks, as always, for making time to read this newsletter. If you have any feedback, please drop me a line. And, if you have any friends you think might like it, please forward them a copy, suggesting they might like to subscribe.

Keep safe, and I’ll see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

28TH JANUARY 2022

Hello.

One of the dubious delights of writing nonfiction (or factual writing, as I prefer to think of it) is its undefinitiveness. Even if you’ve said everything that needs to be said on a topic, inevitably new facts emerge to make your former thoughts out of date, or, at the very least, in need of modification. The trouble is, if you keep going back to update your old stuff, you’ll run out of time to write new. Writing factual books can sometimes turn into the literary equivalent of painting the Forth Bridge.

Charles Darwin recognised this problem. He was an incorrigible tinkerer, updating On the Origin of Species no less than five times to cite more recent findings, to respond to criticism, and to remove the odd embarrassing passage. As he grew older, Darwin sensibly decided it was time to draw a line under his revisions. Six years before his death, he wrote to his close friend the Harvard botanist Asa Gray:

Lastly many thanks for your letter with the facts about Maurandia: what would I not have given for them when I was preparing the new Edit [of Climbing Plants]; but it is now too late, for I do not suppose I shall ever again touch the book. After much doubt I have resolved to act in this way with all my books for the future; that is to correct them once and never touch them again, so as to use the small quantity of work left in me for new matter.

I’m already starting to feel the same way, Mr D. New facts keep emerging with reckless abandon.

Last week, having worked all day on the latest chapter of my book Through Darwin’s Eyes—a chapter on how genetic variations in organisms occur at random, but how natural selection itself is far from random—I opened up my RSS feed reader for some light relief, and was immediately confronted with the following headline:

Study challenges evolutionary theory that DNA mutations are random

Give me a chance, for Pete’s sake! I haven’t even finished writing the chapter yet!

Fortunately, the new study didn’t require me to make significant changes to my planned chapter—although I did take the opportunity to insert a brief caveat that it’s possible genetic mutations aren’t quite as random as we thought.

I suppose I’d better finish this damn book before some bright spark proves the world really was created in six days after all!

Some stuff I thought worth sharing:

1. Selling my hair on eBay
   Selected entries from Alan Bennett’s 2021 diary, read by the man himself. The text is also available via the same link.
2. The Life-breath Songs: the people of Scotland’s nature poem
   Scotland’s Makar Kathleen Jamie introduces the People’s Poem project, and curates the three ‘filmpoems’ by artist Alastair Cook based on lines submitted by the public and developed by Jamie.
3. For a ray of hope in our damaged world, take a train to Epping Forest
   An interview with the Head of Conservation at Epping Forest, Jeremy Dagley, who clearly knows his stuff (and with whom I took many a train journey to and from school).
4. A wild affair: develop a passion for photography and nature
   Catching wildlife on film has taken Robin McKie from Shetland to Kazakhstan, but his photograph of a woodpecker in the garden of his London home gave him as big a thrill.
5. Granta magazine’s most popular essays of 2021.
6. My annual video slideshow for 2021.

Recent Reading

More book reviews »

And finally…

You might have noticed a slight change of format for this latest newsletter. I’ve tried to simplify things a bit. I hope you approve. But, as always, please feel free to send feedback.

Thanks for letting me into your inbox. With so much else out there clamouring at you, your attention is much appreciated.

Keep safe, and I’ll see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

10TH DECEMBER 2021

Hello.

Next Tuesday, 14th December, will mark the 20th anniversary of the untimely death of one of my favourite writers, the UK-based German emigrant W.G. Sebald. If you’ve read any of Sebald’s work, you won’t need any recommendation from me. If you haven’t, you’ll just have to take my word for it that you’re missing out. I won’t try to describe Sebald’s writing, as everyone else who does inevitably ends up resorting to the adjective unclassifiable. (You see—even I’m doing it!) I have, however, put together a page of links to my reviews of Sebald-related books, in case you’re interested. I particularly recommend the first three books on the list, which I consider to be masterpieces.

Some stuff I thought worth sharing:

1. Loss of ancient grazers triggered a global rise in fires
   A new study suggests the loss of prehistoric grazing species triggered a dramatic increase in fire activity in the world’s grasslands. (And, on a surprisingly related topic, YouTuber and author John Green explores why avocados still exist.)
2. Ten ways to confront the climate crisis without losing hope
   It’s easy to despair at the climate crisis, or to decide it’s already too late. Rebecca Solnit suggests how to keep the fight alive.
3. The problem so hard we had to invent new numbers
   A nicely explained video about the invention/discovery of complex numbers. Don’t be put off, even if you haven’t a clue what on earth a complex number might be: this video will give you some appreciation of the issues involved.
4. On Mistaking Whales
   A nice piece of nature/place writing in which historian Dr Bathsheba Demuth visits the Bering Strait.
5. An ancient solar storm has helped pinpoint when Vikings settled in North America. By a spooky coincidence, the answer turns out to be precisely 1,000 years ago this very year. The detailed new study in the science journal ‘Nature’ is accompanied by a handy animated video and podcast episode (In related news, another new study suggests the Vikings also made it to the Azores.)
6. Unfreezing the ice age: the truth about humanity’s deep past
   Archaeological discoveries are shattering scholars’ long-held beliefs about how the earliest humans organised their societies—and hint at possibilities for our own.
7. An audience with Richard Mabey
   A filmed conversation with veteran British nature writer Richard Mabey.
8. Jeff Young in conversation with Horatio Clare
   Jeff Young, the author of the wonderful Ghost Town, talks about a lost Liverpool with his friend, author and broadcaster Horatio Clare.
9. ‘Swish! Swish! Swish!’ by Patrick Leigh Fermor
   Dominic West reads Patrick Leigh Fermor’s piece about the olive harvest on the Mani peninsula in Greece, written in the 1950s but first published in 2021. (The text is also available via the link.)
10. Chess Network’s surname-less U.S. National Master, Jerry, has been providing excellent match-by-match, retrospective video analysis of the current World Chess Championship between the defending champion, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, and Russia’s Ian Nepomniachtchi. If you’d like to gain some appreciation of just how much better these chaps are at chess than you and me, this is a wonderful way to start. (Alternatively, some viewers have been known to make use of Jerry’s laid-back, dulcet tones to overcome insomnia.)

Recent Reading

More book reviews »

And finally…

Work on my Darwin book continues at a less-than-breakneck speed. But managing to continue without breaking your neck is a good thing, right? Recently, I’ve been diving deep into the evolution of the human eye: a subject on which, Darwin is forever being selectively quoted to give the impression he thought it could never have happened. Of course, he thought no such thing. Turns out the eye is such a useful organ, it has evolved many, many times.

Stay safe, thanks for subscribing, and I’ll see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

1ST OCTOBER 2021

Hello.

It’s October. How on earth did that happen? We just got to September and kept going, I guess. But suddenly there’s no denying it’s autumn. Earlier this week, it still felt like late summer here in Hebden Bridge. Then, at around 1pm on Wednesday, some switch was flipped, temperatures dropped, and a chill rain began to patter at the study window, accompanied by the tap and gurgle of the central heating system emerging from aestivation. It’ll be Christmas next, mark my words.

I’ve spent the last few months in deep research for my Darwin book, aided and abetted by the wonderful Obsidian app. I recently completed a chapter about Darwin’s religious views, and the first of a pair of chapters about the two decades it took him to get round to publishing his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. I used to think this was an extraordinary delay, but, at the rate I’m getting on with my Darwin book, twenty years is beginning to seem positively brisk.

Some stuff I thought worth sharing:

1. Conversation with Massimo Pigliucci (video)
   Despite his background in genetics and evolutionary biology, the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci hasn’t appeared much on my radar. I thought he came across as pretty interesting and engaging in this video, so I’ve added him to my watch list.
2. Spirituality is a brain state we can all reach, religious or not
   In the final chapter of my book On the Moor, I took great exception to the word ‘spiritual’ being used to describe the, to me, intensely physical sensation of connectedness with the universe that occasionally engulfs me. So I was intrigued by this article, which looks into the phenomenon from a neuroscientist’s perspective. (But, for the record, I still think the word spiritual misses the point entirely.)
3. An interview with Barry Lopez
   I only recently read the late Barry Lopez’s wonderful book Arctic Dreams. His final book, Horizon, sits near the top of my To Read pile. This December 2019 interview describes the background to Horizon, and includes some thoughtful ideas on writing.
4. The idea that trees talk to co-operate is misleading
   The romantic notion that trees, like humans, talk in order to co-operate could actually harm the cause of conservation, says plant ecologist Kathryn Flinn.
5. Unfamiliar Territories (video)
   A conversation between authors Ken Worpole and Patrick Wright. I very much enjoyed the latter’s The Sea View Has Me Again, and Worpole’s book sounds like one I ought to be looking into.
6. Book Review: Tamed by Alice Roberts
   I’m not just plugging this ‘deep dive’ book review by Eleanor Konik because it was me who tipped her off about Alice Roberts’ highly enjoyable book on domesticated species, Tamed. I read Tamed as research for my Darwin book. It was interesting to read the thoughts of someone interested in the same book for entirely different reasons, including speculative fiction world-building.
7. Diary: Wild Beasts
   A thoughtful piece by Fraser MacDonald about the politics of rewilding in Scotland. When 432 people own half of Scotland’s private rural land, rewilding can happen easily enough without local support. But disputes can also arise between different land-owners with different views on rewilding.
8. Living the (Cretaceous) Dream
   Author and naturalist Mark Cocker recently spent a week on the Yorkshire coast, appreciating creatures both great and small. (Like him, I also paid a recent visit to the fabulous gannetry at Bempton Cliffs.)
9. Light pollution from street lamps linked to insect loss
   Scientists say light pollution is a factor driving worrying declines in local insect populations. The full scientific paper is available here.
10. Sir Clive Sinclair: Tireless inventor ahead of his time
    The prolific inventor Sir Clive Sinclair has died. I first laid my grubby teenage mitts on a computer in 1981, when I borrowed my friend Carolyn’s Sinclair ZX-81 for a weekend. Within minutes, I knew I had to have one. I can honestly say the ZX-81, with its whole ‘1,000 bytes of memory’, was responsible for my subsequent 35-year career in I.T.

Recent Reading

More book reviews »

And finally…

With so much online stuff clamouring for everyone’s attention, thanks for making time to read this newsletter. I have a couple of ideas in mind as to how I might improve the format, but if you have any suggestions of your own, please let me know.

Keep safe, and I’ll see you next time.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram

2ND APRIL 2021

Hello.

When I was at secondary school, I would often remark, with complete confidence, that I would die of a heart-attack at 56. I think I must have thought I was being funny, talking so matter-of-factly about my distant, yet tragically young demise. How I wish I could go back in time and slap my teenage self across his glib, beardless chops.

Today, I hit 56. If there’s one thing I’m determined to do over the next 12 months—if for no other reason than to prove that young idiot wrong—it’s to make it all the way through. Either that, or die in the attempt.

Anyway, I thought I’d better send this latest newsletter out pretty damn smartly, just in case…

Some stuff I thought worth sharing

These go all the way to eleven:

1. The things I tell myself when I’m writing about nature
   Helen Macdonald gives some sound, ‘not-too-serious and also quite serious’ nature-writing advice.
2. ‘Viruses and man-eating tigers and predatory Asian hornets are all part of nature’
   Patrick Barkham interview the veteran British nature writer Richard Mabey. As a fan of both nature-writing and literary correspondence, I was intrigued to read Mabey is considering writing his next collection of essays in the form of letters, very much in the style of his hero Gilbert White. Sounds perfect.
3. The Wild Nearby
   My mate Julian Hoffman on how the wild wills its way into the most developed and unexpected of places.
4. The Royal Photographic Society archive
   The Royal Photographic Society Journal is the oldest continuously published photographic periodical in the world. This digital archive provides searchable access to all issues from the first, in March 1853, up to 2018. Best viewed in full-screen mode.
5. Perseverance Rover’s descent and touchdown on Mars
   We are a talented species. Nasa’s Mars 2020 Perseverance mission captured thrilling footage of its rover landing on Mars.
6. Emerging from a mussel shell
   Christina Riley tracks down the work of pioneering seaweed collector and artist Mary A. Robinson.
7. Iceberger
   A website inspired by a tweet. Draw icebergs and see how they would float. It’s totally addictive.
8. Right Up Our Alley
   Astonishingly skilful drone footage captured inside a bowling alley.
9. Lou Ottens, inventor of the cassette tape, dies aged 94
   Thanks for all the mix tapes. The Dutch engineer was also instrumental in the development of the first CD.
10. ‘I had to put the pen down, take a deep breath, have a little cry’
    Britain’s greatest guitarist, Richard Thompson, has finally written his memoir, covering a life-changing crash, and his fiery romance with his ex-wife and singing partner Linda Thompson.
11. Scientists may have solved ancient mystery of ‘first computer’
    Researchers claim a breakthrough in study of 2,000-year-old Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in the sea.

Recent Reading

More book reviews »

And finally…

After I’d made some encouraging progress on my Darwin book, things suddenly ground to a halt this month. I used this as an excuse to investigate a new(ish) software app designed to help people like me link and analyse their notes. I was hugely impressed.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for some low-cholesterol cake.

See you next time.

…I hope.

Richard
richardcarter.com

Places to follow me:
Website: Blog • Newsletter • Reviews • Moor book • Darwin book • RSS
Social: Substack • Bluesky • Mastodon • Instagram