Nothing Gold Can Stay

October in the northern hemisphere is a time of splendour and nostalgia.

Everyone likes trees

International Day of Forests falls on Thursday 21 March 2019. Its theme this year is Forests and Education.

A handful of berries keeps the doctor away

Long before setting off on a ten thousand year fishing expedition along the coast of their brave new world, our tree-dwelling ancestors lived on a diet of berries and nuts.

Sean Spicer’s load of bollards

One of Robert Frost’s best known lines comes from the poem “Mending Wall”.

Robert Frost: My November Guest

In 1912 the American poet Robert Frost left the USA for England. In London he met many contemporary poets including Edward Thomas, T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, and it was there that his career began to flourish after the publication of his first two volumes of poetry.

The road not taken (I)

Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic poem The Divine Comedy begins with the lines “Midway upon the road of our life / I found myself within a dark wood / for the right way had been missed” (in Charles Eliot Norton’s version) – perhaps the best known lines in western literature. Writers and artists often use the allegory of taking the right or wrong road to explore life’s confusions and conundrums.