A critic with ‘an almost devout passion for good poems’

HELEN PERCY is a shepherdess in the Perthshire farming community. She finds herself in this peaceful line of work after a tough past as a Church of Scotland minister, but this drastic change of scener

Our gardens have difficult histories. As a historian of empire, writing a book re-telling the stories of America’s plants, I spend swathes of my day reckoning with them. Most of the plants we grow wer

Two recent poetry collections

There are various reasons to be thinking about ...

From the Apennine Mountains to ‘the end of the land’ at Cape Finisterre, Louis D Hall and his horse Sasha trekked untrodden partisan paths across four mountain ranges. Guided by strangers and nature’s clues, it was fulfilment of a childhood dream inspired by Don Quixote . Here, the author shares two extracts that give a glimpse into this wilder way of life