Of cabbages and kings

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison

When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of academic Lit. Crit., with its lemming-like leaps from mandarin French theory to each latest fashion in identity politics, I’m not sure that I’d sell my shirt for any living critic. But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, published in 1992, has the true quality of literature, not criticism — it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after you have read it.

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Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

Though more modest in scope, this new book is similarly destined to become a classic.