Podcast review – Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams
Listening time: 15 minutes. It’s about a quarter of a century since I first read this moving and...
The mule and the mare
Listening time: under 3 minutes
Grossman writes with great empathy of animals and their experiences. Here an Italian...
On hearing Beethoven for the first time
Listening time: 4 minutes. A favourite quotation from a favourite novel, Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely...
War wounds
Listening time: 4 minutes.
Among the warm-hearted and even funny accounts of people they met in the Soviet...
Podcast review – Adam Nicolson’s Sea Room
Listening time: 19 minutes. Having inherited, at the age of 21, the Shiants, three small islands east of...
My publisher, falsely so called…
Listening time: under 3 minutes.
I loved this drawn out account of Thoreau's dealings with a publisher wanting...
Of pens and pencils
Listening time: under 3 minutes.
This is a charming account of negotiating communist bureaucracy at the height of...
On living forever
Listening time: 2 minutes. This long and winding quotation enchanted me to the extent that I wrote it out...
The happiest time of life
Listening time: 3 minutes. A beautiful description of the sheer, unbounded joy of being alive in a small...
Podcast review – Molly Peacock’s Paper Garden
Listening time: 12 minutes. This is a biography of an artist written by a poet. It's also a...
Cocktails in Kiev
Listening time: 2 minutes. On their travels to the Soviet Union in 1946, John Steinbeck and Robert Capa...
Three in one
Listening time: under 4 minutes. One of the finest pieces of prose I have read in a long...
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