I spent last autumn and winter living in Beijing, my second long stint in the city. My activities included eating, writing, teaching and walking. Not a bad set of gerunds to live by. But come mid-November, I was beginning to miss the British landscape. The symptoms were all there: listening to Vaughan Williams, reading John Buchan, and spending hours on British weather-forecasting sites. The diagnosis was unmistakable: nostalgia in the [...]

North America enjoys a tradition of nature writing that is largely unparalleled in Britain. Springing from the ecstatic essays of Emerson, Thoreau and John Muir in the 19th century, this tradition is distinguished by its exacting eco-consciousness and by its precise, lyrical evocations of wild landscapes. The writer-explorers who are the incumbents of this tradition today - Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder and Richard Nelson foremost among them - braid ecology [...]

Of what are the following all varieties - peelers, lobs, zippers, screamers, bombs, craters and deckers? No, not fireworks, nor ill-behaved children. All, in fact, are different types of fall in mountaineering. A peeler is where you wilt slowly backwards off the rock face. A lob is a straight, fast plummet. Bombs, craters and deckers all involve the ground, and are to be avoided. A screamer speaks for itself, as [...]

At a glance, Sherlock Holmes could deduce a man's name, his age, the countries he had recently passed through and what he'd had for breakfast that day. Don Foster, an American Shakespeare scholar, has developed a similarly impressive percipience with regard to people's language. Foster's thesis is that each of us has a literary DNA, a certain way of using words that is inimitably ours. It is encoded in our [...]