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…