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“... fiction. What she dreamed of escaping to is hard to say. One of the problems faced by Richard Mabey in his biography of Thompson, Dreams of the Good Life, is that Lark Rise to Candleford and its sequel, Heatherley, which wasn’t published until 1979, are almost the only sources we have. By the time she came to write them, the intervening ...”

“... hellish’ onset of night as a black pall lowered without the reassuring interval of dusk. Richard Mabey stands admirably within this tradition, not only as a naturalist and writer on British flora and fauna, but as an expert on inner and outer weather: his Nature Cure (2005) records a bout of severe depression and a re-emergence two years ...”

“... and letters’ mode. There has been no recapture in the round of the man himself. Now Richard Mabey has repaired this deficiency. He has been back to such records as survive (and there are more of these, it appears, than we have been accustomed to suppose); he has read, or read afresh, everything of White’s that has found its way into ...”

“... Beechcombings is a very different book from Woodlands, and rather suffers from the comparison. Richard Mabey’s intention is to use a series of ‘discursive essays’ to build up ‘a brief history of the narratives we’ve constructed about trees over the past thousand years to make them accessible, useful, comprehensible and obedient’, and to ...”

“... books by writers such as Peter Davidson (The Idea of North), Nan Shepherd (The Living Mountain), Richard Jefferies (Nature near London), J.A. Baker (The Peregrine), Jacquetta Hawkes (A Land) and Roger Deakin (Waterlog). It’s interesting that all these were connoisseurs of nature rather than workers with it or in it. Macfarlane’s accounts of them have a ...”

“... country’s ‘90 per cent’ losses reported by the press are too high. The naturalist and author Richard Mabey believes that resistance in the Danish ash population is 5-10 per cent and probably higher in Lithuania. I noticed this upbeat tone too in Julian Roughton, chief executive of the Suffolk Woodland Trust, as he showed me around Arger Fen, a ...”

“... anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There ...”

“... read:Revelations, the biography of Francis Bacon, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn SwanA Curious Boy, Richard ForteyTurning the Boat for Home, Richard MabeyThe Stonemason, Andrew ZiminskiKiss Myself Goodbye, Ferdinand MountWhat Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, Mark DotyPastoral, James RebanksPhilip Roth, Blake ...”

“... atheist denying a dying or dead Catholic the consolations of religion. Coming away I see Richard Ingrams, swathed in a black anorak, trudging along the pavement. He has a brief word with Fr Cunningham, much as, one feels, Oxford dons used to have with the train driver at Paddington when he’d brought the Cathedrals Express in on time. 15 April. In ...”