PD Smith

I have to be honest and admit that I'm struggling a bit to keep up with reviewing, writing and updating my blog at the moment! Still better to have too much work, than not enough...

So in between trying to write my book on urban detectives for Bloomsbury (thanks for being so patient guys...), I've been reading a study of medieval bodies and a couple of books on rural life for the Guardian, as well as one on the shape of things to come for the TLS.

Art historian Jack Hartnell's Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages explores the medieval world-view through the body. Rather than a closed system, the body was seen as fundamentally linked to the external world of matter and spirit: “understanding the body was just one part of an attempt to make sense of the universe in its entirety”. The body was at the centre of their physical and metaphysical world-view, an endlessly fecund source of metaphors and ideas around which their imaginative and intellectual lives evolved.

Hartnell’s erudite yet lively prose, accompanied by beautiful colour illustrations, brings the Middle Ages alive in a physical, and almost visceral way. He highlights the surprisingly deep cross-cultural links between Byzantium, Europe and Islam, and shows how philosophy, art, religion and practical knowledge about treating wounds and illnesses, as well as anatomical ideas, informed medieval attitudes and beliefs about the body. A triumph of historical scholarship. My review is in Saturday's Guardian.

Countryside writer John Lewis-Stempel has written a beautiful book about a wood in Herefordshire which he managed for four years. Nature is not abstract in his writing, but visceral. It’s a physical presence, sometimes sensual, sometimes cruel, but always full of wonder – from the “sad soliloquies” of the robin in January to “a dead rabbit reanimated by the maggots inside it”.

He has a wonderful way with words, and his descriptions of nature have a no-nonsense concision that is remarkably evocative, from the “paper-rustle of rabbits scuttling across dry sycamore leaves” to “the hand-clap of pigeon wings”. You can read my review of The Wood here.

Mark Connell's The Cow Book covers a similar subject but in a very different style. It's a brooding, powerful memoir about a 29-year-old man’s return to the family farm in Ireland and his difficult relationship with his morose and short-tempered father.

As well as a memoir, Connell’s book explores our relationship with cattle, our companions for some ten thousand years: “to speak of cattle is to speak of man”. From the ancient wild ox, the auroch, that appears in ancient cave art to the extermination of the American buffalo by European settlers and Robert Bakewell’s selective breeding in the eighteenth century that produced the first beef cow and influenced Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

It's clear, though, that the strength and power of this book lies not in natural history but in Connell’s deeply personal account of trying to reassemble the pieces of his life after a period of severe depression, what he terms “the Past”. You can read my review at the Guardian.

Both these books about the countryside are memorable and strongly recommended. I'm fascinated by the powerful connection to landscape and nature that I'm finding in many new non-fiction books. It's as if the nation whose people pioneered the move to cities in the 19th century and where by 2030 more than 90% will be city dwellers, has suddenly rediscovered the value of reconnecting to the natural world.

The final book I've reviewed is Peter Bowler's A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H. G. Wells to Isaac Asimov. This was a fascinating book for me to read, because it reminded me of the research I did while writing Doomsday Men. In particular the fiction of HG Wells. The historian of science Peter Bowler describes Wells as a “prophet of progress” and argues that the voices of such technological optimists have been obscured in surveys of the way the future was depicted in writing during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. He accuses fiction writers of spreading an atmosphere “of permanent doom and gloom” while popular science writing was “full of expectations of future benefits”.

Instead of exploring the “nightmare stories set in a dehumanized world” of Huxley, Yevgeny Zamyatin and others, Bowler concentrates on the work of what he terms the “enthusiasts”, writers of popular science from J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal and A. M. Low to Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, who were typically optimistic about a future improved by the discoveries of science.

It's a fascinating study and well worth reading, although I felt in the end that he risked over-simplifying what is at heart a complex and subtle story of the interaction of science, society and culture. My review appears in the 13 April issue of the TLS and is sadly not free to view, although if you have a subscription it's online here.

If I find a free moment I may post it on my website...

We've just returned from a few days staying in Lisbon - a beautiful hilly city of cobbled streets, tiled houses and delicious food. You can see some of my impressions of the city on Flickr.

Before I left, I read Elisabeth’s Lists: A Family Story, by Lulah Ellender, a hauntingly beautiful meditation on life and death, spanning three generations of a family. The narrative is anchored in a book of lists kept by the author's grandmother. The lists range from inventories of household linen and a “register” of eggs laid by her chickens during the war, to what to serve at a cocktail party for eighty people. According to Ellender, “Elisabeth’s lists are her filing system for her troubles and her joys, triumphs and boredom”.

Ellender also explores how we use lists to bring order to the world: “these catalogues hold our chaos”. As his marriage crumbled, Einstein handed his wife an impossible list of Conditions for Marriage. Before he married, Darwin wrote down the pros and cons of marriage, eventually deciding a wife would be “better than a dog anyhow”.

My review of Ellender's book is published in Saturday's Guardian.

I've been reading former philosophy lecturer Michel Eltchaninoff’s study of the ideas of Marine Le Pen. One former senior figure in the Front National tells him: “Marine Le Pen doesn’t have any ideas. She only acts through instinct, because her brain is like a reptile’s. what ideas? What concepts? She’s an echo chamber, that’s all!”

But his fascinating ideological detective work shows how her thinking is deeply embedded in the tradition of French far-right thought: “Le Pen moves behind a mask and she is very good at the game.”

Read my review at the Guardian.

I've just read A Philosophy of Dirt by Olli Lagerspetz. It's one of those rare books that are worth reading purely for the pleasure of observing a superbly subtle mind at work. Lagerspetz provides a master class in philosophical thinking, a lucid and rigorous analysis of a commonplace notion, one that opens up a new and fascinating view of dirt “based on our physical engagement with the world”.

You can read my review at the Guardian.

I've been reviewing Owl Sense, by Miriam Darlington. It's a wonderful account of the author's fascination with owls and an attempt to re-wild our imaginations with some primal owlishness. This bird has featured in our myths and religions from the beginning: the Chauvet cave paintings dating back to 36,000 BC, include the oldest depiction of an owl, an almost life-size version of a Long-eared Owl, whose penetrating gaze meets those entering the cave: “the artists understood something of the Janus nature of the owl, its troubling liminal status on the boundaries of light and dark”.