Horatio Clare

Saviours of souls: the heroism of lifeboat crews

10 February 2024 9:00 am

Helen Doe’s moving history of the RNLI celebrates the volunteers who, over the centuries, have risked their own lives for those in peril on the sea

Seeing the dark in a new light

16 December 2023 9:00 am

Even in the deepest mineshaft we’re surrounded by light we can’t see, explains Jacqueline Yallop, drawing on quantum physics to help dispel ordinary night terrors

The life of an Exmoor stockman reads like bloody-knuckled rural noir

15 April 2023 9:00 am

Through her interviews with the exuberant countryman ‘Tommy’ Collard, Catrina Davies provides a vivid picture of nature in the raw

A poet finds home in a patch of nettles

6 August 2022 9:00 am

Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…

The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal

21 May 2022 9:00 am

There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…

Another fallen idol: the myth of Ferdinand Magellan debunked

26 March 2022 9:00 am

Ferdinand Magellan’s fame was largely undeserved. Horatio Clare sees the explorer cut down to size

Feathered friends

8 January 2022 9:00 am

Unusually for a book about nature, the species in question, in this lucid story of the relationship between birds and…

A whale of a time with Albrecht Dürer

17 April 2021 9:00 am

Great books make genres jump. It happened with W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which looked like a travelogue, claimed…

The problem with pills: The Octopus Man, by Jasper Gibson, reviewed

16 January 2021 9:00 am

Having a breakdown? Try this pill, or that — or these? Built on the 1950s myth of a chemical imbalance…

Heated debate over Franklin’s doomed Arctic expedition

18 April 2020 9:00 am

How refreshing in a time of general sensitivity to find a book intended to infuriate and debunk. Welcome to the…

Man’s first instinct has always been to return to the sea

5 October 2019 9:00 am

Travelling the Indus valley late in the third millennium BC you would have been awed by two Bronze Age megacities,…

Shackleton’s ship The Nimrod trapped in McMurdo Sound.

Bitten by the cold: the strange attraction of polar exploration

15 December 2018 9:00 am

‘We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of…

‘He strikes me dumb with admiration.’ Van Gogh on Howard Pyle’s pirate illustrations

The facts – and fiction – of piracy

17 November 2018 9:00 am

Avast there, scurvy dogs! For a nation founded on piracy (the privateer Sir Francis Drake swelled the exchequer by raiding…

The scandal of American shipping – incompetence, venality and shocking safety standards

16 June 2018 9:00 am

‘We are globalisation,’ a senior executive at the shipping company Maersk told me. ‘We enable it, and we have questions…

Four million bats stream from the Deer Cave every evening in Gunung Mulu National Park

Leeches, bats and toxic sap in Borneo’s Eden

20 January 2018 9:00 am

Eton turns out prime ministers of various stripes and patches, but it also forges fine explorers. It seems to prepare…

J.S. Bach and Horatio Clare in Arnstadt

The 280-mile walk that made Bach who he was

16 December 2017 9:00 am

It was in his organ loft at Arnstadt that I began my acquaintance with Johann Sebastian Bach — with JSB,…

‘A new Raft of the Medusa’.Two survivors, Maurice Anderson and Goodman Thomasen, of the Norwegian ship Drot turned on their German companion in an act of cannibalism — after which Anderson savagely attacked Thomasen (From Le Petit Journal, 1899.)

The worst things happen at sea

7 October 2017 9:00 am

This horrifying and engrossing book could scarcely be improved upon. In this age of HRHs Harry, William and Kate-led openness…

Dan Powell

Formidable black talons…

5 August 2017 9:00 am

I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising —…

Male bowerbirds’ creations look like little art galleries — built to impress the females

Which came first — the bowerbird or the egg?

23 April 2016 9:00 am

What is it about birds? They are the wild creatures we see most often, their doings and calls a daily…

An otter’s metabolism is so high that you’d have to eat 88 Big Macs a day to match it

Charles Foster: ‘I need to be more of a badger’

20 February 2016 9:00 am

Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That…

In and out of the drink

23 January 2016 9:00 am

‘If I were to go mad,’ Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, ‘It would come…