Tag: Britain

More Birds: Paintings of British Birds

I absolutely loved Jim Moir’s first bird art book Birds, published in 2022. I pledged immediately for the follow up More Birds, and it arrived this October. I decided to save it, though. Christmas is a good time for reading the smaller books that are deserving of closer attention.

More Birds follows the same format as Birds, with a double page spread for each bird with a reproduction of a watercolour on one page and the bird’s popular and Latin names plus an interesting fact about it on the other. There are 80 birds in this volume, instead of 100, and the printing quality doesn’t feel quite as good, or perhaps it’s the paper stock. The images of Jim Moir’s paintings aren’t quite as crisp.

It’s still a beautiful book, though, and I enjoyed looking through it on Boxing Day afternoon. There are some birds that are new to me among the entries, and a small number of repeats from the first volume – with new paintings and facts, of course.

We saw lapwings in the wild for the first time this year, at Martin Mere, so I was particularly happy to see one in More Birds. Jim’s painting captures its colourful beauty perfectly. I also enjoyed meeting the red-breasted merganser, which made me think of Woodstock from Peanuts.

Read 26/12/2024

Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

Tomato Cain and Other Stories

Tomato Cain and Other Stories, from Manchester’s independent publisher Comma Press, is a reissue of Nigel Kneale’s fiction debut. It brings together the 31 tales that appeared in the original UK and US collections plus two stories not previously included in any collection, and previously thought lost.

Kneale is better known for his television and film scriptwriting than his fiction, and was responsible for the creation of the Quatermass series of films and television programmes, as well as a group of six eerie tales shown on ATV in the 1970s, collectively known as Beasts. He is associated with the genres of science fiction and horror, something that did not sit well with him in his own lifetime.

The first edition of Tomato Cain and Other Stories was published in 1949 and the stories have an otherworldly feel to them as much for that reason as for their subject matter. There’s a certain tone to them, a sense that the old world hasn’t quite been shaken off yet, or the modernism of the mid-century fully embraced. Kneale conjures a world where chapel on Sunday is still part of the fabric of life, but for some has begun to represent an unwanted ritual without meaning. For others, the old ways are more important than the Bible. There are morality tales that fix on human weakness, stories that are science fiction in their fascination with engineering and strange technologies, and yarns that play on a sense of dread wrapped up in the peculiarity of a situation.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

Caliban Shrieks

I started my 10 Books of Summer badly with a book I’m finding quite dry. I was delighted, therefore, when my library reservation for Caliban Shrieks came available and I could put my chosen read to one side.

Caliban Shrieks is the novelisation of Jack Hilton’s life. Hilton has been largely forgotten about because, as a working class man who refused to play the publishing game, he returned to earning his living as a (better paid) plasterer in 1950. When Caliban Shrieks was published in 1935, it found a passionate audience that included George Orwell. Orwell was inspired by Hilton to write The Road to Wigan Pier, a book that Hilton disparaged, stung by Orwell’s depiction of working class people as though they were specimens to be classified.

Two years ago, a young journalist writing for the Manchester Mill described his rediscovery of Hilton’s book at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. You can read the article here. Jack Chadwick’s investigations led him to find the copyright owners of Hilton’s work and this year the novel was reissued by Vintage Classics.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 8

The Crowded Street

“What on earth shall I do when I get home? Read? All books are the same – about beautiful girls who get married or married women who fall in love with their husbands. In books things always happen to people. Why doesn’t somebody write a book about someone to whom nothing ever happens – like me?”

So asks Winifred Holtby’s heroine Muriel Hammond towards the end of The Crowded Street. Muriel can be seen in part as a version of Holtby that never came to be, and The Crowded Street the book Muriel longs for.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

The Scheme for Full Employment

In The Scheme for Full Employment, Magnus Mills imagines a world where everyone is employed. You might think everyone would be happy in such a world, given the security of a regular income, the routine of daily work, community with colleagues and the like. But not everyone wants the kind of job that is so routine that it doesn’t allow for individuality. And such a set up inevitably becomes an inefficient, unwieldy way of doing things.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 6

The Mirror and the Light

It is nine years since I wolfed down the first two books in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. I read those two books in quick succession, coming to them late thanks to the television dramatisation of 2015. It is four years since The Mirror and the Light was published and it has been languishing on my e-reader all that time. I decided that I wanted something familiar to read, so finally picked it up.

Reading Mantel’s prose is like slipping on a comfortable pair of shoes. I had loved her writing style in Wolf Hall and the way it took me into Cromwell’s mind, and The Mirror and the Light did the same. It opens in the aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s execution, with Henry VIII already betrothed to her replacement, Jane Seymour, and Cromwell steering the ship of state through the wake of the scandal, drawing on his network to keep tabs on those jockeying for position, both in favour of the king and against. He is rewarded by the king for ridding him of his unwanted second wife, elevated to a Lord, holder of the Privy Seal.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 0

Way Out West

I picked up the third in Anne Ward’s series of quirky guides to unusual tourist destinations when we were holidaying in Cornwall back in 2019. I intended it to be a reason to keep holidaying in the South West once our holiday package that took us there repeatedly over the previous three years ended. Five months later, holidays went on hold and we didn’t ease back into going on holiday properly until last year. Which means this little gem has gone unread until now.

In her introduction, Ward describes how writing Way Out West happened by accident “when a simple trip to North Cornwall – never designed to eke out the brilliant and the bizarre – unearthed a collection of unexpected treasures of such wealth and scope that a third volume [in the Nothing to See Here series] became inevitable.”

Some of the places are familiar to me, either because I’ve visited them while on holiday or when I lived in Plymouth, but Ward’s writing brought new angles to them. Other places are now on my list of places to go.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

Safely Gathered In

Safely Gathered In is the first collection of short stories by Sarah Schofield, an author and lecturer in creative writing based in the north west of England. The stories have an edge to them, presenting a skewed perspective on the mundanities of life, the things unspoken in relationships, the way we assimilate grief and fear rather than confront it head on. It is a largely female perspective, the women in the stories and their survival mechanisms the focal point. The men depicted in these tales are fools, the women looking to them for something they can’t give.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

The Red Queen

Margaret Drabble’s 2004 novel The Red Queen is inspired by the memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong, a Korean Crown Princess in the second half of the 18th century. In it, Drabble has constructed a fiction in which the ghost of Lady Hyegyeong possesses the mind of a British academic, Dr Babs Halliwell, in order to correct some misconceptions about her life and who she was as a person.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

Flesh and Blood: A History of My Family in Seven Maladies

Flesh and Blood, Stephen McGann’s medical memoir of his family, is a book I was convinced that I had read, but I hadn’t. I’d read about it because of McGann’s work as a science communicator who has spoken at the Cambridge and Cheltenham Science Festivals, and bought it on Kindle where I promptly left it languishing in the digital doldrums.

McGann is from Liverpool, part of the troupe of acting brothers that includes Joe, Paul and Mark. The family traces its origins to Ireland, with an earlier generation emigrating to Liverpool in the mid-19th century as a result of the Great Famine. McGann appears in the tv show Call the Midwife, which I’ve never watched. His role as Dr Turner, alongside a childhood full of illness, sparked an interest in medical science, leading to him undertaking a Master’s degree in Science Communication. The introduction to the book is a wonderful combination of McGann’s artistic, actorly brain and his science brain. As an actor, his job is to tell stories by imagining himself into the character he is portraying, feeling his way into that character’s being. When he began researching his family history, he says he did the same, imagining what might fill the flesh and blood gaps in the documentary data to try to form an idea of a recognisable personality for each ancestor he will never truly know. For this book, he has married that storytelling with his academic interest in the relationship between health and society.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4