Tag: history
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Popular Astronomy
Agnes Mary Clerke (1842-1907) was not a practical astronomer, but wrote a number of important books and articles that explained existing astronomical research to the general public. Winter, the ghosts of fuchsias sigh; in the frost, the fox chews mouse-tails. I step in each of my father’s foot-prints as we carry the telescope…
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The Way of Florida
Russell Persson’s The Way of Florida is a compact, driving, rhythmical work – a novel, but quite unlike most. The book revisits the ill-fated Narváez expedition of the sixteenth century, which saw a group of some 600 Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese explorers arrive on the coast of Florida intent on establishing preliminary colonial settlements and…
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Wild Alphabet: The Wolf in Irish Poetry
The final wolves in Ireland were wiped out some time during the eighteenth century, outliving the wolf in England by almost three hundred years. The process of their extinction, exacerbated and even engineered by the English colonisation of Ireland, bears multiple parallels with the gradual diminishment of the Irish language, itself subjected to a sustained…
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Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad
Corrie nam Fiadh, Deer Corrie the gentleness ………of browsing deer Allt a’ Mhadaidh, Wolf Burn will never ………dissolve the wolf Some place-names refer to one-off events, like pegs stuck in the ground of memory. Others reckon the catastrophe of species loss over centuries. In his pioneering study of the influence humans have on…
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Crossing Over
Late November in Malaga is beautiful and easy: sun, cloudless skies and highs in the upper twenties. The olive trees bask in the late late heat, the Mickey-Mouse-head-shaped cactuses bloom with geranium-pink blossoms and the tourists still soak up rays outside cafés like solar batteries. But drive two hours inland to Granada and the temperature…
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Zone de sécurité temporaire
There is a strange but commonly used French phrase with no precise parallel in English: entre chien et loup – between dog and wolf. It refers to twilight, when the light has dimmed and one can no longer differentiate between a wolf and a dog (as if it were once so simple to tell the…
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LEAD
If, as Rebecca Solnit has argued, “science is how capitalism knows the world”, then it should not be surprising that, as new auction records are broken seemingly every week, it is to technology that the business of authentication must increasingly turn. The studied perusal of the expert is no longer enough; now it is the…
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Furry Attractions: Polar Bears in the Zoo
In the western hemisphere, polar bears have lived in our midst since the Middle Ages, a result of our fascination with these charismatic carnivores. Already in 1252, Henry III of England kept a muzzled and chained polar bear, which was allowed to catch fish and frolic about in the Thames. The first unequivocally identifiable polar…
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Darwin’s Polar Bear
Many people may be aware that the beaks of Galápagos “finches” (in fact, the islands’ mockingbirds) helped Charles Darwin to develop his ideas about evolution. But few people realize that the polar bear too, informed his grand theory. Letting his fancy run wild, in On the Origin of Species, the man used to thinking in…
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Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection
Karl Reich’s 1913 recording of a nightingale – among the world’s earliest extant recordings of bird song – feels like a bottled metaphor for modernity. Trapped in shellac, this sweet twittering turned stand-in for nature, poetry and sex all at once, becomes a ghost of its living and mythical self, haunting us with questions of…
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Lives, Loves and Loss at Fenton House
The silvery tinkling of servants’ bells welcomes me into the house of merchant Joshua Gee. There’s a fire in the grate and sweet treats on offer in the Still Room where I’m handed a candle to illuminate the winter afternoon, a parchment inventory of household goods and a quill pen so that I may note…