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Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger
Robert Chandler
Robert Chandler on why The Years of Anger by Randall Swingler is the best book of 1946.
Best Book of 1480: MS Egerton 1821
Elvia Wilk
‘The original owners of many devotional books kissed, licked, rubbed, scratched at, and cried upon their pages.’ Elvia Wilk on the best book of 1480.
Best Book of 1998: Symbiotic Planet
Daisy Lafarge
‘Symbiogenesis is horizontal and anarchic, a frenzy of illicit fusions and mergers – energies coming together for mutual benefit.’
Daisy Lafarge on the best book of 1998.
Best Book of 1924: The Beggar
Bill Manhire
‘I still have, somewhere at the back of my head, the notion that there are real poets out there and that all the rest of us are just pretending.’
A Bleed of Blue
Amy Key
‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’
The Want
Cyrus Simonoff
‘It’s often in the morning that the want is biggest. The want is to wake up, lazy and horizontal, and have it.’
On Diane di Prima
Iris Cushing
‘Sex flowed into art, art flowed into livelihood, livelihood flowed into poetry, poetry flowed into friendship, friendship flowed into sex. The entirety of this life was sacred.’
The Lye of the Land
Derek Gow
‘One in seven British species is now threatened with extinction. Many more, from the grey wolf to the blue stag beetle, are already long gone.’
Garden Time: The Palm Forest of W.S. Merwin
Robert Becker
‘This place, where the temperature drops noticeably as you walk into it from the road, survived William Stanley Merwin as equal parts oasis, stage set and work of art.’
Scapegoat
Katharine Quarmby
‘In 2000 the Disability Rights Commission was founded, to push for equal rights for disabled people. It had a major job on its hands, listening to and acting on individual cases – access, transport, discrimination – and getting the 2005 Disability Discrimination Act onto the statute book.’
Introduction
Isabella Tree
‘Never has there been a greater need for writers who can communicate about the environment in such clear, immediate and powerful ways, who can envisage the past as well as the future.’
