Image: Courtesy of Dimitris Yeros DEREK TURNER is editor of The Brazen Head, and a novelist and reviewer, who writes for journals including Country Life and the Irish Times. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published in 2022 (Hurst) Fathers of Botany – Fossil Trees of Greece “We were searching…
DEREK TURNER is editor of The Brazen Head. He is also a novelist, reviewer, travelogist, and the author of the chorography Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire (Hurst, 2022). www.derek-turner.com. Twitter: @derekturner1964. Instagram: edge.of.england “Stilled legendary depth:It was as deep as England” ‘Pike’, Ted Hughes The plumber’s van’s been standing since the small hours At…
Arctic Elegies Peter Davidson, Carcanet, 2022, pb., 72pps. £11.99 DEREK TURNER feels impelled to look to the north There are poets associated with particular places, or special states of mind, but Peter Davidson has made a geo-poetical genre of his own, as celebrant of a cardinal point. His interests are wide-ranging, but magnetized in one…
Tumuli at Revesby in Lincolnshire Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry Various authors, edited by Alexander Adams, foreword by William Clouston, London: Bournbrook Press, 2022, pb, 55pps, £12.50 Bournbrook Press is an offshoot of Bournbrook Magazine, founded in 2019 to offer a “primarily British audience with traditionalist, socially conservative argument and entertainment”. This venture’s…
Field Notes: Walking the Territory Maxim Peter Griffin, London: Unbound, 132pps, hb., £16.99 DEREK TURNER admires a unique landscape artist Several years ago, when I was thinking about writing a book about Lincolnshire, I found a strikingly original Twitter account. Almost every day, the seemingly tireless Maximpetergriff posted pictures painted during or after apparently endless…
Photo: Derek Turner Green Albion – Restoring Our Green and Pleasant Land Various authors, Conservative Environment Network, 2022, 101 pages, free download DEREK TURNER welcomes a practical contribution to often overheated eco-arguments Environmental protection is conventionally seen as a ‘leftwing’ concern, because its most voluble advocates are often equally vociferous on what are dismissively called…
Gulliver’s New Travels: Lemuel Gulliver Collides with the 21st Century Guy Walker, self-published, 2022, 140pp, £4.99 DEREK TURNER is entertained by a clever updating of a classic Satire, often thought of today as a liberal genre, can also be a conservative art. Any writing that relies for its comical or scourging effects upon the discrepancies…
Bucentaur at the Molo, Ascension Day, by Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto) History of the Adriatic: A Sea and its Civilization Egidio Ivetic, Cambridge: Polity, 2022, hb., 352 pps, £25 DEREK TURNER wallows in warm world-historical waters The Mediterranean flows always through European awareness, Homer’s ‘wine-dark-sea’ and the Romans’ Mare Nostrum becoming ‘Our Sea’ too by…
Credit: Shutterstock DEREK TURNER pays tribute to grittily resilient S.E.8 Aircraft always overhead, trains pulling in and out, traffic backed up along the New Cross Road, pulsating rap from open windows, plastic bottles in the gutter, pigeons with fungus-eaten toes, gang tags on gritty walls, smells of exhaust, fast food, sweat and the shower-gel of…
The Man Who Conned the World: Victor Lustig Christopher Sandford, The History Press, 2021, 300pp, £20 DEREK TURNER is forced to admire a brilliant rogue Christopher Sandford is an acknowledged expert on the cultural history of the twentieth century, who has written to scintillating effect on subjects from the Rolling Stones to Arthur Conan Doyle,…