some LANDSCAPES

  The Coat of Arms of Alland, Lower Austria I like the way that when you look somewhere up on Wikipedia you tend to get given its coat of ar...

A recent edition of The Early Music Show on Radio 3 focused on the music of Latin America and had a segment on the soundscapes of ancient m...

In between the first and second waves of coronavirus I managed to get to an art exhibition - the Royal Academy's Léon Spilliaert retrosp...

John Constable, The Cottage in a Cornfield , c. 1817-33 #cottagecore I have often discussed here the enduring popularity of pastoral poetry ...

The Book of Songs ( Shijing ) contains the seeds of later Chinese landscape poetry.  Its oldest poems are around three thousand years old bu...

I should have more time for the blog soon, but for now I will make do with posting a long quotation from The Compleat Angler , first publish...

I've been a bit short of time recently so here is just a brief post to share a clip from YouTube of the beginning of Werner Herzog's...

Gaṅgā, the personification of the sacred river Ganges, early 19th century watercolour in The British Museum Eric Newby's Slowly Down the...

Sophia de Mello Breyner has been one of my favourite poets since I first read her work in Richard Zenith's translations from the Portugu...

Killed by a landscape! This nearly happens in Bong Joon-ho's multiple prize-winning film Parasite . Chekhov famously said that "one...

In 1908 Pathé created their own version of Le Film d’Art, the new initiative to make more highbrow films whose first production, starring...

Thomas Bewick, Industry on the Riverside , 1804 'The unframed scene casts landscape into a new kind of subject.  The view is not gi...

Eusebius: 'Now that the whole countryside is fresh and smiling, I marvel at people who take pleasure in smoky cities.' Timothy:...

"I wanted so to see the Arno..."     Disappointed Lucy Honeychurch gets her wish when Mr Emerson and his son George kindly o...

A couple of days ago I read in The Guardian that 'police have warned young people not to attend illegal raves this weekend, promisi...

Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology edited by Todd Andrew Borlik was published last year and so ...

The passing of Christo has prompted various articles and obituaries - I have included some links below.  The Guardian published one about W...

Autojektor, Basilisk , 2019 Well, the weeks drag on and I am starting to forget what hills, rivers and shorelines actually look like....