Ann Wroe (Ann Wroe – Economist) is an English author and columnist who has been the obituaries editor of The Economist since 2003. Her non-fiction books include biographies of Pontius Pilate, Percy Shelley and Perkin Warbeck. Lifescapes is a dazzlingly original blend of memoir, biography, observation and poetry. Wroe reflects on the art and impossibility of fully capturing […]
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Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001) (WG Sebald | Books | The Guardian), known as W. G. Sebald was a German writer and academic. After study in Germany he held academic posts in Manchester and The University of East Anglia. His literary output includes celebrated works such as ‘The Emigrants’ (1992), ‘The Rings
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For many years Andrew Greig (https://andrew-greig.weebly.com/biography.html) saw the poet Norman MacCaig (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/norman-maccaig) as a father figure. Months before his death, MacCaig’s enigmatic final request to Greig was that he fish for him at the ‘Loch of the Green Corrie’; the location, even the real name was mysterious. His search took in days of outdoor living,
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Travelling for a story in Mongolia when five months pregnant, journalist Ariel Levy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Levy_(journalist)) gave birth to her son alone on the floor of her hotel room, shortly after which, he died. This traumatic tragedy damaged the writer in ways which are described in ‘The Rules Do Not Apply’. This memoir is a fast paced account
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In 2013 Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick were convicted of 86 arsons in Accomack County, Virginia. Reporter Monica Hesse (https://www.monicahesse.com/) tells the story of their motivations and communities living through fear, confusion and danger. Hesse spends a chapter comparing Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick to Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Tonya was a showoff with something
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Transport yourself to a place somewhat hotter and drier than Clydesdale in March 2018. The Sheltering Desert is about two young German geologists, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn, who seek refuge in the Namib Desert and live a bushman existence for two and a half years. Martin and Korn had left Nazi Germany for Namibia to conduct field
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This is a classic study of an artist, first published 1970. Lawrence Gowing (http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/07/obituaries/sir-lawrence-gowing-a-painter-writer-curator-and-teacher-72.html) explores the ways in which Johannes Vermeer (Johannes Vermeer – Dutch Baroque, Genre Paintings, Delft | Britannica) was similar to and different from his contemporaries – especially Vermeer’s early struggles with genre scenes and his solutions (solitary women lost in their
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The similarities between between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are not hard to point out. Both men had been ardent beetle-hunters in their youth; both subsequently had become travellers, collectors, and observers in some of the most remote parts of the world; both were drawn to asking the big questions (such as why there
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Dutch scientist Eugene Dubois (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Dubois) is not nearly as well known as his most important scientific contribution. Dubois’s 1892 archaeological expedition found the first fossil evidence of Pithecanthropus erectus (what we know today as homo erectus, http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-erectus) or ‘Java man’. At the time of its discovery, P. erectus was viewed by many scientists as the
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