A tale set in a Welsh farming community that examines in great detail the petty squabbles and minutiae of village life.The story starts when the integral characters are adults with a fleeting mention of the twins Lewis and Benjamin looking at a wedding picture of their parents, from then on its a...
It was the day before I left for my vacation to South America that I learned about this book. It was an offhand mention by a client, "Oh, have you read In Patagonia?" I picked it up on my way home and stuffed it into the already full backpack.Chatwin's writing got under my skin, and I don't neces...
4.5 starsOne of the great travelogues and in Bruce Chatwin’s opinion “the greatest travel book of the twentieth century”. It helps a great deal that Bedford can write well and has a gift for observation and description. Living from 1911 to 2006, Bedford had a long and colourful life and is not ap...
Meg Miller reviewed What Am I Doing Here? on OfftheShelf.com. Quite Possibly the Best Travel Writing You’ve Never Heard Of by Meg MillerYou know that awkward moment when you’re at dinner with Diana Vreeland and she mistakes a word you say for its other meaning, resulting in a charming little misu...
Bruce Chatwin’s The Viceroy Of Ouidah masquerades as a small book. In 50,000 words or so, the author presents a fictionalised life that has been embroidered from truth. History, hyper-reality, the supernatural and the surreal and the cocktail that creates the heady mix through which strands of st...
It is always fascinating to read the minor works of someone whose majo works one loves. After having finished Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969-1989, I have only two more works of Bruce Chatwin to tackle: On the Black Hill and his collected letters, both of which I have on my shelv...
The Sertanistas are wild and poor. They have tight faces, sleek hair and sometimes the green eyes of a Dutch or Celtic ancestor. They hate negroes. They believe in miraculous cures, and their legends tell of a phantom king called Dom Sebastião, who will rid the earth of Antichrist. Like all peopl...
He dropped them, like chocolates, into the palm of my hand. ‘Very interesting,’ I said. ‘But now I tell you something more interesting.’ Most porcelain experts, he continued, interpreted Böttger’s discovery as the utilitarian by-product of alchemy – like Paracelsus’s mercurial cure for syphilis. ...
on the day before Edinburgh University required him to register. That night he took the sleeper to Edinburgh. No digs existed for married students.While he hunted for an unfurnished flat, he lodged for £10 a week at the Avondale B & B on the main road south out of the city. He had arrived in ...
Her death robbed Harvard University of the finest glaciologist at work in the United States; I lost a close ally and a good friend. I cannot think of Estelle without recalling her humour, her capacity for statistics and the blind, unreflecting courage that lacked the imagination to turn round. He...