To honour a drunken deal made with my sister-in-law several years ago, Northanger Abbey is the fifth Jane Austen novel I’ve read in five Januarys. A deal is a deal.

What can I say about Northanger Abbey that I haven’t already said about Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma? Well, unlike its predecessors, I suppose it is mercifully short. But it’s still the same basic plot: a bunch of privileged people going to balls, and a heroine agonising about things she really shouldn’t be agonising about and eventually hooking up with some wonderfully suitable bloke she hardly knows.

I have to say, Northanger Abbey got off to a pretty bad start with me. In describing our heroine, Catherine Morland, in the opening paragraph, Austen writes:

Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard…

I think I speak on behalf of all Richards, respectable and otherwise, when I say, Knob off, Miss Austen!

I read somewhere Northanger Abbey is supposed to be a satire on young women whose over-impressionable imaginations are stimulated by reading the wrong kinds of novels. I can see why this might make an amusing theme for a novel written and set in the late-eighteenth century, but it didn’t do anything for me. In fact, that element of the story seemed rather silly. I couldn’t help thinking this posthumously published novel was only put out because it was by a popular author with a large existing fanbase hungry for more. The end, in particular, seemed very rushed, as if even Jane Austen was getting a bit fed up with it all.

Not my cup of tea, but, if you like Jane Austen’s other stuff, you’ll probably like this.

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

I first learnt of American artist Joe Brainard’s I Remember in Wendy Cope’s essay collection Life, Love and the Archers, in which she recommends using Brainard’s ‘I remember’ idea as a way to get the writing juices flowing. I later also encountered the same book in Brian Dillon’s In the Dark Room. So, when I saw this cult classic had recently been re-released, I snapped up a copy.

Brainard’s brilliantly simple idea was to write a memoir of random recollections in which each short, usually single-sentence paragraph begins with the same two words: I remember.

It’s a brief but entertaining read, mixing memories of humorous and historic events, friends and acquaintances, sexual encounters, old jokes, commercial products, and other random paraphernalia. I have no idea why, but my favourite of these reminiscences was:

I remember when fiberglass was going to solve everything.

A fun book.

The title of this excellent collection of essays is a metaphor for one of its running themes: so-called revolutions tend to be incremental, rather than entirely unexpected one-off events. Nobody can see accurately into the future; when we look back at historical improvements in people’s lives “around gender, nature, race, and the rest”, most were equally unseeable beforehand, even though they might now seem (wrongly) to have been almost inevitable. There is cause for neither optimism nor pessimism about what the future might hold; the best we can do is continue to work towards what we want to achieve and hope things will turn out for the better—even though it’s unlikely they will turn out exactly how we envisage. Although the road ahead might not be clear or straight, keep taking steps in the right general direction and, occasional setbacks notwithstanding, we can hope eventually to help make a better world.

Despite my occasionally tendency towards cynicism, I found myself liking this line of reasoning a lot: the future is not preordained, so there’s no excuse for not trying to improve the world in your own way.

No Straight Road Takes You There is a surprisingly positive book to be enjoyed in a surprisingly negative time.

(On a personal aside, I was delighted to discover the first essay in this collection was one I’d previously read on the Guardian website and had enjoyed so much that I’d written an enthusiastic post about it.)

Rebecca Solnit is one of those writers with a knack for putting new slants on familiar ideas, challenging your preconceptions and, at times, making you amend your own views.

The uniting theme of this excellent essay collection is how the world will be improved for all (not just women) when, it is to be hoped, it is no longer geared towards the concerns of certain (but by no means all) men.

The title essay of the collection, which is credited with inspiring the word mansplaining (although Solnit doesn’t like the term) begins with a humorous party anecdote which Solnit develops into a wide-ranging exploration of the undermining of women’s credibility. Other topics Solnit explores include how same-sex marriages create an opportunity—seen by some as a threat—to challenge traditional gender roles within marriage; and the importance in coining suitable terminology when campaigning against issues that harm society. But, to me as a factual writer, the standout essay in the collection was Solnit’s New Yorker article Woolf's Darkness about the need to embrace uncertainty, rather than covering it up with overconfident, comforting certainties.

Highly recommended.

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.

I’m a sucker for books of correspondence. I’ve only read one of the late Bruce Chatwin’s books, In Patagonia, which I very much enjoyed, so I looked forward to reading his letters.

I have to say, I didn’t particularly like the Bruce Chatwin who emerges from his letters. He comes across as rather selfish and restless, albeit evidently having immense charisma. But the letters themselves are of great interest, showing an unusual and gifted writer trying to get his head around the writing process.

I’ve read Catch-22 several times over the years. The book’s title has entered the English language to describe a paradoxical situation from which the person in it cannot escape. The book’s anti-hero, Yossarian, a US Airforce bombardier in Italy towards the end of the Second World War, is told all he needs to do to be excused taking part in future missions is ask to be excused on ground of insanity, but there’s a catch, Catch-22: asking to be excused from missions that endanger one’s life is the act of a sane person, and sane people cannot be excused on grounds of insanity. As Yossarian himself observes, “That’s some catch, that Catch-22”.

The book’s eponymous catch adopts a number of guises within Joseph Heller’s satirical masterpiece, which is populated by a host of mostly insane characters whose stories unfold in wildly non-chronological order, and which grows increasingly darker as the book progresses. None of which description gives any impression of how this remarkable book somehow hangs together.

The Gifts of Reading is an essay in the form of a booklet. It’s about the joys of giving and receiving books. Appropriately, I received my copy as a gift from a friend. It’s a nice read.

All proceeds from the sale of this book are donated to the charity Migrant Offshore Aid Station. So why not buy a copy and give it to someone who enjoys reading?

As the accompanying blurb states, Jesus Christ Kinski is a novel about a film about a performance about Jesus. It concerns events surrounding controversial German actor Klaus Kinski’s 1971 one-man show in which, following heckling and jeering from the morally outraged crowd, Kinski launched into an off-script ranting attack on the audience in what seems to have been a major psychotic episode. This element of Myers’ story is written in the second person from Kinski’s increasingly demented point of view.

Between Kinski rants is a second tale of an unnamed West-Yorkshire-based writer bearing an uncanny resemblance to Benjamin Myers who is obsessively trying to write a novel about Klaus Kinski throwing a wobbler live on stage when he is supposed to be working on a different sort of novel entirely.

Given its unconventional subject-matter, I was surprised to find myself enjoying Jesus Christ Kinski very much indeed. It’s a short novel, which I read in a single sitting.

Recommended.

Disclosure: I live near Benjamin Myers and have met him on several occasions. We also follow each other on social media.

I picked up my signed copy of Prof. Alice Roberts’s Domination on the Bradford leg of her UK tour promoting the book. I very much enjoyed the show—and the book.

In this book, Roberts explores how the Christian Church rose to prominence in the wake of the Roman Empire.

The book begins by exploring early ‘Celtic’ Christianity in and around the Atlantic Archipelago (i.e. Great Britain and Ireland and associated smaller islands). Roberts investigates how local churches and monasteries maintained Roman traditions (e.g. in education), with many church leaders coming from high-status local families. She also explores the connections between early churches in Wales, Ireland, Devon and Cornwall, and Brittany, especially regarding the cults of saints. (In those days, any important church leader tended to become a saint; it wasn’t yet necessary to obtain approval from Rome.)

Roberts then moves on to Brittany, showing how local bigwigs adopted church roles, thereby preserving their privileged statuses as the Roman Empire gradually withdrew from the area. Formerly public buildings such as basilicas and bath-houses were repurposed for Christian activities. When the (already Romanised) heathen Visigoths invaded, the new local ecclesiastical elite often managed to assume useful roles under the new regimes, it being more convenient for the invaders to maintain previously tried-and-tested administrative structures than to implement new ones.

Roberts then considers the influential figure of Emperor Constantine, questioning the extent of his Christian credentials, as well as some of the pious legends surrounding him. His support for the upstart religion seems to have been the result of political pragmatism, rather than religious devotion. By insisting that different Christian factions resolved their differences at the Council of Nicaea, Constantine unintentionally created a Church ‘brand’—a brand that subsequently became what was, in effect, a franchised business with its fingers in many pies: "a huge collegium that helped to protect [members of the middle classes’] jobs, prospects and income".

As with all of Alice Roberts’ books, Domination is a fascinating and entertaining read.

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

As part of a not particularly concerted effort I’ve been making to get ‘into’ poetry, I thought an anthology of prose poetry might be right up my street.

In his introduction, editor Jeremy Noel-Tod defines the vague, oxymoronic term prose poem as ‘a poem without the line breaks’, going on to quote Coleridge’s distinction between prose and poetry: ‘prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in the best order’. From what I could gather, prose poetry is prose with poetic pretensions. Or simply prose that someone has decided to label ‘prose poetry’.

I can’t say I enjoyed this anthology. While it contained a fair number of pieces I took pleasure in (albeit simply as ‘nice prose’), the majority did nothing for me, with many striking me as needlessly obscurantist. I also did not agree with Noel-Tod’s entirely reasonable decision, for the sake of saving space, to include only fragments of numerous prose poems: if something is worth anthologising, it seems to me, it should be quoted in its entirety.

As I say, there is some nice prose in this anthology, but what made it enjoyable was the fact it was good prose, rather than good ‘prose poetry’ (whatever the term might mean).

This is a delightful modern translation of the classic 14th-century Middle-English chivalric poem by an unknown author. Simon Armitage’s approach is to remain true to the stylistic spirit of the original, rather than being constrained by a more literal interpretation. In particular, this means his translation is packed with alliteration on almost every line. While this might sound weird to modern readers, it retains much of the style of the original, and, once you get used to it, is remarkably compelling.

If you’ll pardon my less compelling alliteration, the poem tells the tale of a dreadful deal made in the court of King Arthur and the subsequent search by Gawain for a ghostly Green Knight to fulfil a foolhardy oath. There is errantry and feasting, hunting, butchery and seduction, and a final show-down in a mysterious green chapel.

I’ve written before of my delight at the unflattering namecheck received in this famous poem by my native ‘wyldrenesse of wyrale wonde þer bot lyte /
þat auþer god oþer gome wyth goud hert louied’, which Armitage renders far more comprehensibly as:

in the wilds of the Wirral, whose wayward people
both God and good men have quite given up on.

Nothing new there, then.

This is a wonderful translation. Do check it out.

Planning a long-overdue trip to Italy, a wonderful country I’ve visited several times before, I thought it was about time I brushed up on the history of the country. This was just the book I needed.

Ross King’s short history of il bel paese takes us from the mythical accounts of the foundation of Rome through to the Covid-19 epidemic. There is the Roman Republic and subsequent Empire, Celts, Greeks, Etruscans, and Goths. There is decline and fall, then the rise of city states in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. There is Enlightenment and eventual Unification. There is war and a brief dalliance with Fascism. King moves the story along at just the right pace, occasionally slipping in not-strictly-necessary but fascinating details, such as the fact that the Roman Colosseum was not named on account of its size, but because is was built next to a Colossus statue of Emperor Nero.

An excellent short history of an excellent country.

This short book can easily be read in a single sitting. It comprises a thoughtful memoir-cum-essay on the city of Bologna, and of an enigmatic uncle, both of which John Berger was clearly fond. It’s an enjoyable—albeit very short—read.

…Oh, in case, like me, you were wondering: a ‘tenda’ is an awning. Red ones commonly shade Bologna’s windows.

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!

In this book, Iain Sinclair, his daughter and film-maker Grant Gee travel through Peru in the footsteps of Sinclair’s great-great-grandfather, Arthur Sinclair. Over a century earlier, Arthur wrote a book about an expedition he had jointly led on behalf of a UK-owned company that aquired large tracts of Peruvian land as part of a deal to write off Peruvian national debt.

The Gold Machine is an exploration of colonialism, capitalism and Catholicism, and the harm they do to the environment and to indigenous and other local peoples.

As anyone familiar with Ian Sinclair’s style will expect, this is not a straight, factual account, but interweaves folklore, psychogeography and occasional flights of fancy. As they will also expect, it’s a terrifically entertaining read.

Thanks to my sister-in-law for buying me this book. She and I have a thing about bookshops, so she thought I’d like it. She was right.

Bibliomaniac tells the story of writer and comedian Robin Ince’s tour of 104 independent local bookshops to promote his latest book. In the process, he seems to buy almost as many books as he sells.

I was surprised at how many of the shops mentioned I had already visited, but there were plenty of new ones to add to the list. Unbeknown to my sister-in-law, I actually attended one of Ince’s bookshop gigs, at the Book Case in Hebden Bridge. I got to chat with him briefly afterwards about Charles Darwin (obviously) and Richard Feynman.

An entertaining read.

In The End of Enlightenment, Richard Whatmore explores why, after considerable initial success, the Enlightenment project was seen to have failed by a number of contemporary figures, including David Hume, Shelburne, Catherine Macaulay, Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Although some of these people differed politically, there seems to have been broad agreement that Enlightenment ideals had been gradually superseded as individual nations' policies and activities began to be steered by commercial interests intent on expanding markets through war or imperialism. In addition, having initially been supported by many proponents of Enlightenment, the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution and the subsequent rise of Napoleon Bonaparte were to put many off the idea of Enlightenment, one outcome of which was the rise of Romanticism.

Reading this book, I was constantly conscious of the parallels between the end of the Age of Enlightenment and our current political climate. Indeed, as Whatmore states early in this book:

Our predicament today is very much like that of the eighteenth century in the sense that they too saw themselves to be on the edge of a precipice. If the fall came, civilization would end, liberty would be lost, poverty would abound and new forms of slavery would arise. The eighteenth century was not the origin of our present discontents, but the parallel is clear and important.

A grand vision brought down by commercial interests: a sobering read.

Map of a Nation is an account of the military survey of Scotland (1747–1755) and the subsequent first trigonometrical mapping of Great Britain and Ireland by what would become the Ordnance Survey.

The surveys were carried out primarily for military and (in Ireland) taxation and administrative purposes, although some of the men involved clearly saw producing such maps as tying in with the spirit of the Age of Enlightenment.

Similar surveys were being carried out in France at around the same time, so the two teams collaborated briefly to take measurements across the English Channel. This allowed them to measure the difference in longitude and latitude between the bases of their two different co-ordinate systems in Greenwich and Paris, thereby allowing them to merge their previously incompatible maps.

The account contains short biographies of a host of characters, and some walk-on parts by the likes of Sir George Everest and William Wordsworth.

Recommended.

In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin likened how we might classify organic species to how we might classify human languages—by genealogical descent:

It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, had to be included, such an arrangement would, I think, be the only possible one. […] The various degrees of difference in the languages from the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and modern, by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue.

Proto explores how the members of one major group of the world’s languages, the Indo-European languages, relate to each other through common descent from a hypothesised shared common ancestor, Proto-Indo European. It explains how linguists, geneticists and archaeologists have worked together—sometimes in disagreement—to piece together groups subordinate to groups in a large family tree of living and extinct languages encompassing tongues as apparently diverse as ancient Hittite (a member of the extinct Anatolian group of languages); Sanskrit, Urdu, and Persian (Indo-Iranian languages); French, Latin and Romanian (Italic languages); Welsh, Manx and Irish Gaelic (Celtic languages); Old Prussian, Polish and Russian (Balto-Slavic languages); and Yiddish, Gothic and English (Germanic languages).

The book explores how these and many other languages all descend from a language spoken by a small group of people living near the Black Sea around 5,000 years ago. It describes how, as the descendents of these people spread and diverged, so did the languages they spoke, sometimes mixing and merging with other languages encountered on the journey.

The book is particular good at explaining how this family-tree of languages was gradually pieced together from a multi-discipline mix of clues concerning cultures (physical artefacts), peoples (genetics) and the languages themselves. It’s a fascinating read.

I bought this book partly on the strength of a number of rave reviews, including this YouTube video by someone I follow online whose opinions in related topics I respect. I also bought it because of its title: the idea of performing tiny experiments in your work and personal life appealed to me. It still does.

But this book wasn’t for me. It’s written well enough, but, as with most of the small number of productivity books I’ve read, I couldn’t help thinking there was an awful lot of padding in there, and the book’s key messages could easily have been summarised on one side of an index card. There were far too many anecdotes and not enough detailed discussion of the practicalities of performing the suggested tiny experiments.

But, as I say, the book has received rave reviews, so knock yourself out.

Although I wouldn’t have got on with the late Philip Larkin when it came to politics, nor with his selfish treatment of the women in his life, the person who comes across in his poems and letters seems, on the whole, an intelligent, thoughtful, likeable chap. So, when I saw this collection of his essays in an excellent second-hand bookshop in Carlisle, I snapped it up. It comprises mainly previously published opinion pieces, book introductions and reviews, with a few jazz-column articles thrown in at the end for bad measure.

In my limited experience, good poets also tend to be excellent prose writers. It’s a precision thing: precision and economy. Reading this excellent collection reinforced that view. Once again, Larkin comes across as a thoughtful, mostly likeable writer. He was less gloomy than his reputation, with a dry sense of humour. His opinions occasionally took me by surprise and made me question my own views—if, indeed, I’d ever considered such topics. This book was one of the most enjoyable new reads I’d had for a long time. (Apart from the handful of jazz pieces, obviously, which I wasted no compunction in skipping.)

Of particular interest to me were Larkin’s views on poetry readings by the poets themselves, either as live-readings or recordings. Although he made a small number of recordings himself, he was generally against them on the grounds that such readings would inevitably be seen as the definitive interpretations of the poems. He thought readers should be left to come up with their own interpretations:

Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much—the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go your own pace, taking it in properly; hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing ‘there’ and ‘their and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his own personality between you and the poem, for better or worse.

I was also intrigued to read Larkin’s thoughts on the accessibility of poetry:

For, leaving aside the question of their respective poetic statures, it was Eliot who gave the modernist poetic movement its charter in the sentence ‘Poets in our civilisation, as it exists at present, must be difficult,’ and it was Betjeman who was to bypass the whole light industry of critical exegesis that had grown up round this fatal phrase by demonstrating that a direct relation with the reading public could be established by anyone able to be moving and memorable.

This collection also contained a number of wonderfully phrased one-liners that gave me food for thought, and sometimes made me laugh out loud. For example:

• Being happy doesn’t provoke a poem.
• Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
• Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like.
• I count it as one of the great moments of my life when I first realized one could actually walk out of a theatre.
• Sometimes I think, Everything I’ve written has been done after a day’s work, in the evening: what would it have been like if I’d written it in the morning, after a night’s sleep?
• I often wonder if I was shy because I stammered, or vice versa.
• I remember saying once, I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
• I’ve never been much interested in other people’s poetry—one reason for writing, of course, is that no one’s written what you want to read.
• It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of poems that only you can write.
• Henceforth the poems [in his collection The Whitsun Weddings] belong to their readers, who will in due course pass judgement by either forgetting or remembering them.
• when spoken poetry’s mentioned, all my antiquarian rage boils at the thought of the legions of pre-1928 tenors and sopranos we preserved when nobody thought to record, say, Hardy or Lawrence.
• [Stevie Smith] has also written a book about cats, which as far as |I am concerned casts a shadow over even the most illustrious name.

Required Writing is required reading.

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.

This was the fourth time I’d witnessed such an eclipse. The first time was when I was at university in Durham in the 1980s. The second time was in Taormina, Sicily in 2006. The third time, ten years ago, like today, was from our driveway in Hebden Bridge:

The Taormina eclipse was the most memorable because it was the most unexpected. Jen and I were sitting drinking coffee in a cobbled square when we noticed a number of locals gazing up into the sky. Correctly concluding an eclipse was taking place, we managed to improvise a pinhole eclipse-viewer using the hole in my hat and our copy of the Guardian newspaper:

When I say the Taormina eclipse was unexpected, I obviously mean it was unexpected to us. That eclipse, like all the others, had been confidently and accurately predicted by the sort of scientists who predict these things. Had the predicted eclipses not occurred bang on schedule, and had the scientists’ data and calculations subsequently been re-checked and found to be free of errors, the science would have been wrong, and we would have had to re-think our understanding of the universe. But the predictions proved accurate, so chalk up four more for science!

Had this morning’s correctly predicted clouds not obscured the eclipse, however, we wouldn’t have had to re-think our understanding of the universe. The weather is far more difficult to predict than eclipses. Meteorologists tend only to predict the percentage likelihoods of particular weather-events occurring. Hopefully, these predictions will become more accurate over time as the meteorologists amass more and more data, try to learn from their mistakes, and tweak their models. Chalk that up for science too!

But as for recent headlines like these (which I’m not going to dignify by providing links)…

• 2 zodiac signs will likely receive luck and abundance during a partial Solar Eclipse 2025
• The solar eclipse in Aries is happening—find out what it means for your zodiac sign!
• Love Horoscope for each Zodiac Sign on March 29
• With the eclipse in Aries on March 29, stark truths will be revealed

…if the ‘predictions’ made in such articles proved inaccurate, will the people who still believe in this nonsense feel compelled to re-think their understanding of astrology? Or will the people who made them try to learn from their mistakes? Somehow I doubt it. That’s not how pseudo-science works.

In which case, chalk up four more for bullshit!

In truth, there’s still a final chapter to write, but, as that chapter will tie together a number of strands from the earlier ones, I long ago decided I wouldn’t write it until all the other chapters had gone through at least their second drafts.

This first draft took far longer to write than it should have. One of the problems I have as a writer is an inability to sign off first drafts of individual chapters. First drafts are supposed to be crap: their sole purpose should be to get some stuff down on the page for you to hack to pieces in later drafts. But I struggle to do this, always making the best stab I can at a ‘finished’ product—even though I know damn well it’s no such thing.

There’s only one good upshot from this misplaced perfectionism (for which, read tinkering): my completed first drafts are much closer to what more sensible, more prolific writers might count as their second drafts. So why don’t we split the difference and call it my one-and-a-halfth draft?

As far as I’m concerned, working on the next draft of the book is where the fun starts. It’s at this stage that I can start linking individual chapters more closely together, emphasising recurring themes, incorporating new ideas and information that came to light since I completed particular chapters, and tightening up my prose without mercy. Excluding references, the book currently runs to just over 100,000 words: plenty of room for some judicious pruning.

How do I feel about Through Darwin’s Eyes as it stands? As someone who loves reading, and who holds good writers in awe, I find it almost impossible to read my own words without finding them hopelessly wanting. But I need to keep reminding myself this is just the one-and-a-halfth draft. And as one-and-a-halfth drafts go, my gut feeling is there’s a pretty good book in there somewhere, trying to get out.

So why don’t I get stuck in there and try to liberate it?

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

The background music, Gui-tardigrade, is also by Yours Truly. I don't have an ounce of musical ability. Thank goodness for Garageband!

See also: Previous years’ video slideshows

Last month, I finished reading the final (30th) volume of the monumental Correspondence of Charles Darwin. This collection comprises all know surviving letters both from and to Charles Darwin from his childhood to his death, age 73, in 1882. Complete with meticulously researched editorial footnotes for every letter, and also available in its entirety free online, the work carried out by the now disbanded Darwin Correspondence Project will, it is to be hoped, set the standard for how such projects ought to be carried out in future.

Owning, and actually reading, Darwin's complete correspondence had been a bucket-list item for me ever since I heard of its existence back in 1993. I immediately ordered the first eight volumes, which were all that had been published at the time. These books do not come cheap. My local bookshop was so delighted with my impressive initial order that they opened early, letting me in through the back door so I could load the heavy books into the boot of my car. I ended up buying almost all the subsequent volumes from the same bookshop. Look after your local bookshop, and it will look after you!

I devoured the first eight volumes of correspondence, which covered Darwin's childhood; his education at Edinburgh and Cambridge universities; and his five-year voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle. Darwin then spent a few years in London, publishing his research from the Beagle voyage, building his reputation as a man of science, and first devising his (r)evolutionary theory of evolution by means of natural selection. He married his cousin Emma Wedgwood, they started a family, and moved a short while later to their forever home, Down House, in Kent. Darwin went on to spend twenty years amassing evidence in support of his theory and fleshing out many of the details. In parallel, he spent eight years studying barnacles, thereby establishing his credentials as a systematist (classifier of species). Then Darwin received the shock of his life in the form of a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace on the distant Malay archipelago. It looked as if Darwin was about to be scooped! In response, Darwin rushed to publish his theory, first in back-to-back papers with Wallace (who, far from home, knew nothing about his letter to Darwin being published), then in the most important book in the history of biology, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Volume eight of the correspondence saw Darwin dealing with the initial post-publication feedback of Origin, working on and publishing a second edition, making new allies, urging some critics to keep an open mind and just look at all the phenomena his theory seemed to explain, and politely agreeing to disagree with others in whom he saw no hope of converting.

And that was it: I had reached 1860, and run out of volumes to read. Talk about cliffhangers! There was nothing I could do but wait for the rest of the correspondence to be published. Which ended up taking a very long time…Another three decades, in fact!

As the years passed, I collected each new volume as it came out. Well, I say I collected them, but it was usually my partner, Jen, who bought them for me: what better birthday or Christmas present could there be for the Darwin nerd in your life? New volumes came out slowly at first, one every two or three years. I did the maths and concluded, at the rate the books were being published, there was a good chance I might not live long enough to own the full set. But I continued to collect each new volume, without actually reading any of them. I’d decided I didn’t want to read the remaining correspondence piecemeal. If I was ever going to read it, it was going to be a Darwin box-set binge-read.

And then, in late 2022, the Darwin Correspondence Project announced the final volume would be published the following spring, so the project would be closing down. To mark the occasion, Cambridge University Library (where the project was based) put on a special expedition about Darwin’s correspondence. So of course I went! I was even lucky enough to meet and chat with a couple of the project team, and share a few beers with one of them.

As the new year approached, knowing I would finally own the full set on my birthday in April, I decided it was time to finally start reading the remaining correspondence. So, on 1st January 2023, I began what I dubbed my Daily Darwin project, in which I would try to read at least ten pages of Darwin’s correspondence every day (excluding the rare occasions I was away from home). And, uniquely for my New-Year’s resolutions, I’m proud to say I stuck to this one, not missing a single day! Over the next twenty-three months, I steadily worked my way through the last twenty-two volumes of Darwin’s correspondence—and I loved every minute of it!

I read as Darwin continued work on his long-planned (but never finished) ‘big book’ on species, of which Origin was only supposed to have been an ‘abstract’ (large chunks of this unfinished work were eventually incorporated into other books). I read as Darwin researched and wrote on domesticated species; experimented and wrote on plant pollination by insects; suffered protracted ill-health; devised his own (very wrong) hypothesis of inheritance; and researched and wrote about human descent, sexual selection, and human and animal emotions. I read as Darwin fed all manner of substances to insectivorous plants; explored cross- and self-fertilisation in plants; and brilliantly explained why flowers of the same species sometimes take on different physical forms. I read as Darwin took delight in his first grandchild; researched and wrote about the life of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin; investigated movement in plants; and explored the importance of the humble earthworm in the formation of soil. And, in the correspondence’s final letter, which brought me close to tears, I read Emma Darwin breaking the news of her beloved husband’s death to his best friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker.

For many years now, I’ve insisted by far the best way to get to know Charles Darwin is to read his correspondence. I stand by that claim. So, what did I come to appreciate better about my hero after my box-set binge-read? Too much to write about here, for sure, but how about a few bullet points?

In no particular order, Charles Darwin:

• was a genuinely pleasant, modest human being;
• had a gentle, self-deprecating sense of humour;
• lived to work, resenting any time spent otherwise—including holidays;
• had a tendency towards project scope-creep;
• used the postal system to network with hundreds of different people, sharing ideas, and gathering and sharing information;
• had a knack for charming people into providing him with information, even when it involved considerable new research;
• practised theory-led observation;
• loved a ‘fool’s experiment’;
• disliked public controversy, avoiding it whenever practicable;
• was quick to acknowledge his own ‘blunders’;
• was confident his views on evolution, sexual selection, and the great age of the earth would ultimately prevail.

It felt strange not reading any Darwin, the morning after I completed my Daily Darwin project. But it also felt good not to have broken the sequence in my two-year binge-read. I took plenty of notes as I read each volume, publishing detailed reviews of each one as I finished it (see below). I just wish I’d had the same note-making process in place when I’d read the first eight volumes all those years ago. Which I guess gives me the perfect excuse to return to them some time.

…But not just yet. I think it might be time to catch up on some much-neglected, non-Darwinian reading!

The reviews

(Click a cover to read my review.)

Sheffield is a cool city. UTB!

More photos from our trip

We had an excellent time, enjoying some excellent food, and some retail therapy. In places, Hull reminded me of my favourite city, Liverpool, at the other end of the M62.

Of course, being tourists, we had to visit one of Hull’s main tourist attractions, The Deep, a huge multi-storey aquarium, which was even more impressive than I’d expected. Here’s a short video I made during our visit, complete with aqualung sound FX.

We were based in a grand Victorian hotel in Buxton. I last visited the town as a 16-year-old schoolboy, but had almost no recollection of the place. It’s a town with a lot going for it: impressive 18th- and 19th-century architecture, loads of restaurants, an excellent second-hand bookshop, and an excellent brewery tap, all set among some wonderful scenery. If only the weather had been better! We met some local friends for a couple of beers one evening during a torrential downpour. Minutes after the friends had left, we were forced to abandon pub as water came flooding into the bar. The steps back up to the hotel were a waterfall.

The following day, we took a trip out to a local beauty spot at Dovedale. The downpour the previous night meant the river was high, necessitating a detour around a nearby hill. But it was a delightful autumn walk in stunning landscape.

Here are some photos from our trip:

More photos from our trip

…Oh, yes, and we also paid a visit to the local park:

OK, so definitely not the most spectacular photo of the aurora borealis you’ve ever seen, but I don’t care… I SAW them! (So did pretty much everyone else in the UK by the sound of it.)

Aurora had been confidently forecast—chalk another one up for science!—and I’d been out for a look a couple of times earlier in the evening, but, as always, no joy. I thought there was nothing happening this time either, but then I noticed some pale white wisps materialising above the Plough. They drifted slowly westwards, looking for all the world like a high-altitude hail-storm. But there were no clouds above them, so definitely not hail. Then I thought I detected a hint of red, and then suddenly, there they were in glorious, albeit dim, Technicolor. I was astonished at how moving cynical-old-me found the experience.

It was all thanks to a G5 (i.e. extreme) geomagnetic storm that occurred over the weekend of 10–13 October 2024. The Northern Lights are usually green in colour, but these were predominantly red, skirted by some green. The red colour only occurs during especially intense solar activity, appearing higher in the atmosphere than the green, above 240km.

So, that’s one off the bucket list. (Although I wouldn’t at all mind seeing them again sometime soon.)

Last year, I was concerned at not having seen any razorbills or sandwich terns. I’m relieved to report, there were plenty on show this year. Indeed I’ve never seen so many sandwich terns outside the breeding season. I only saw one grey seal this year, but there were Rizzo’s dolphins, gannets, shags and cormorants, gulls, guillemots, turnstones, oystercatchers, curlews, herons, little egrets, buzzards, rock pipits, a few late swallows and house martins, ravens, choughs, linnets, and limpets.

Perfect!

More 2024 photos from Anglesey

Wipe out! The jackdaw—deliberately, it looked to me—suddenly cut way too close to the wind, spinning sideways, then backwards, coming to an instantaneous mid-air stop. At the risk of mixing my sporting similes, it looked as if it had performed the corvine equivalent of an [ice] hockey stop, or a skier’s powder-spray parallel stop^*. It had used the medium it was travelling through to stop on a sixpence.

Having lost all its air-speed, the jackdaw dropped like a stone, but immediately twisted about into a new glide, and repeated the handbrake turn, its feathers billowing out like a parachute. Again, it plummeted, immediately recovered, and repeated the same manoeuvre. Then it tumbled into another glide and headed off downwind. In all, the triple manoeuvre must have lasted all of three seconds.

Have you ever watched an animal and been convinced you knew exactly what was going on in its head? Well, I was immediately pretty damn sure I knew what that jackdaw had been up to, and, as I have form for sharing my bat-shit crazy hypotheses about members of the crow family, I see no good reason for not sharing this one…

I think that jackdaw was very deliberately getting the strong wind to blow through its feathers the wrong way in an attempt to dislodge any dirt and parasites lodged deep within them. I appreciate this sounds fanciful, but birds sun-bathe, dust-bathe, and bathe in water—or, to put it more poetically, use fire, earth and water—to rid themselves of parasites; it seems only appropriate they should also use the other classical element, air, to pull off the same trick. Wind-bathing, so to speak.

So, there you have it: another bat-shit crazy hypothesis about crows. Like last time, I’m putting out there in the interest of science communication. If this one also fails to land me a Nobel Prize, there really is no justice in this world.

* With thanks to my winter-sportsy sister-in-law, Mòmö, for the winter-sportsy terminology.

Unearthed during my ‘Daily Darwin’ reading this morning:

From Patagonia I brought home some ostriches a gunaco, & from the Rivers Plate, Uruguay, & Parana, a great many animals, comprising some ostriches [i.e. rheas], a Capybara & a little jaguar. The mother attacked me & followed me up a tree, in self defence I was obliged to shoot her but saved one of the cubs from the gauchos.–– Since then he has been my almost constant companion following me abt. like a dog altho’ of an enormous size being now 2. years old. I only yesterday took him to the Zoological Gardens, much to my regret, but he was growing so big that it was not safe keeping him longer at large. I have mentioned this fact to prove how these animals can be tamed by kindness as completely as a dog.––

—Florence Dixie to Charles Darwin, 4 November [1880]

…No, no, no!! I am most definitely not going to disappear down yet another so-called ‘research’ rabbit-hole!

(That said, Lady Florence Dixie does sound like the sort of larger-than-life character someone ought to be researching a book about. Here’s her Wikipedia entry.)

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

I’d booked us a room at The Crown, which, not entirely coincidentally, is one of the hostelries at which W.G Sebald stays in his marvellous, enigmatic book The Rings of Saturn. It is in his room at The Crown that Sebald—or, perhaps I should say, the narrator with an uncanny resemblance to Sebald—falls asleep while watching a TV documentary about Roger Casement. It is in the bar of The Crown that he falls into conversation about the wine business with a Dutchman named Cornelis de Jong. And it is in the restaurant of The Crown that he notices ‘the grandfather clock, with its rising and setting sun and a moon that appears at night’. Jen and I did not turn on the TV in our room during our stay, but we did fall into conversation about crossword puzzles with a Welshman in the bar, and, I was delighted to note, there was indeed a grandfather clock ticking away in the restaurant—although the sun and moon mechanisms seem to have been characteristic Sebaldian embellishments.

While we were in town, Jen and I also visited a couple of other locations that feature in Sebald’s book: the wonderful Sailors’ Reading Room, where Sebald leafs through various documents, including a 1914 military logbook; and Gun Hill, where he gazes out on the ‘German Ocean’ while recounting the 1672 naval battle of Sole Bay. I was pleased to discover the Reading Room now has a small cabinet dedicated to Sebald and the documents he consulted there.

When I showed my dad some of my Southwold photographs, he expressed surprised at how I’d managed to go on a seaside holiday and take a whole bunch of photos without a soul in them. I hadn’t even noticed. I think I must have been unconsciously channelling the late Herr Sebald, who had a melancholy knack—although I prefer to think of it as fortuitous—for finding himself in curiously deserted landscapes.

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

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

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

See also: Previous years’ video slideshows

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