John McEwen | The Spectator columnists & writers

The text of this well illustrated book is mostly John James Audubon’s, from journals unpublished in his lifetime. Part I describes his 1826 voyage from America to England to set in motion the great task – which would take 11 years – of fundraising for the printing of his mighty double elephant folio book in four volumes, The Birds of America. Part III is devoted to his 1833 seabird searching expedition to Labrador. The well chosen excerpts are introduced and meticulously annotated. Audubon’s innate love of birds grew into a grand ambition to observe, record and publish life-size images – never previously attempted anywhere – of all the birds of North America. He did this before photography proved his dramatic rendering of movement correct.

Invasion of the bread-snatchers

Little Toller Books, in Dorset, aims to publish old and new writing on nature by the very best writers and artists, in books of the highest quality at affordable prices. This offering, neat enough to fit an overcoat pocket, ticks every box. Its author, Tim Dee, co-editor of The Poetry of Birds, has been a BBC natural history radio producer, whose first job was in bird conservation. Born and bred in Bristol, notable for its gull population, he has been a dedicated birdwatcher from boyhood. He thus brings expertise as well as broad engagement to his subject. Accordingly, Landfill, like its principal subject, the gulls we see in Britain, ranges far and wide. It is a crafted work of literature, which draws on poems, plays, novels, films and philosophy to explore what ‘gull-life and gulling-life have done to our minds’.

His muse and anchor

Misery memoirs are in vogue. There is much misery in this harrowing account of married life with John Bellany (1942–2013) CBE, RA, Hon RSA — to 20th- century Scottish art what his hero and acquaintance Hugh MacDiarmid was to Scottish poetry — but its inspiring message is that love conquers all. Helen Bellany is not a ‘quitter’, and her story triumphantly confirms it. It is a long book but does not drag. The past is so alive to her it seems only natural when she lapses into the present tense. She is a highlander from Golspie in ‘timeless and silent’ Sutherland, and the poetry of her descriptions encourages a visit to that far-off county. Golspie is on the coast, and fishing employed the distaff side of her family; a complement to Bellany, the son of generations of Port Seton fishermen on the Firth of Forth.

Bird of ill omen

With bird books the more personal the better. Joe Shute was once a crime correspondent and is today a Telegraph senior staff feature writer. It is his investigative journalism, a series of meetings with people who deal with ravens first-hand, which provides novelty. Historical, mythological and other diversions add ballast. In the prologue he writes: ‘I was born in 1984, making me the flag-bearer of a strange generation.’ Raised comfortably and lovingly in London, his future seemed serene. Then ‘came the financial crash of 2007; and with it the collapse of all the misplaced entitlement of my youth... Rather than better, it was going to get far worse’. At this juncture, he found solace in birds in the Yorkshire countryside.

Wise old birds

Owls, frontally eyed and nose beaked, look the most human of birds. Accordingly, they have for millennia been prominent in mythology and literature and their image continues to be commercialised beyond compare. They offer an author rich pickings, but in a competitive market a strong personal subtext is helpful. That improbable bestseller H is for Hawk told of a bird consoling and inspiring a daughter grieving for her father.Owl Sense has a mother finding a healing source in owls for herself and her worryingly ill son Benji. His Non-Epileptic Seizure Disorder (NEAD) took a disconcerting time to diagnose and is frighteningly unpredictable. Just how frightening is illustrated by his collapse on a bus as a 6ft, 16st student.

Home from the hill

As well as being a leading architectural historian Mary Miers is an editor at Country Life. For her latest book she has mined the magazine’s unmatchable picture library and the photographs are by Country Life regulars Simon Jauncey, who lives in Highland Perthshire, and the late Paul Barker, who sadly died before publication. His memory is duly saluted. Crucially the author is a Highlander by birth and domicile. Every week she commutes between London and her Black Isle home and she summers on South Uist. She knows the Highlands and Islands, or the Gàidhealtachd, from top to bottom: from Balmoral and the Highland balls of the Northern Meeting to crofters’ kitchens and island ceilidhs. It was on the sleeper from London to the far north that she mused on the continuing mystique of the Highlands in the romantic imagination and decided to write this book: a social and architectural history, the two indivisible, because the ‘shooting lodge’ in its various forms (many now hotels) served and promoted the arcadian Highland dream.

An artist of the quickening world

What is it about Yorkshire, particularly Leeds, that it has bred or trained such a succession of famous modern sculptors? Moore, Hepworth, Armitage and, although it stretches the point, Hirst. All attended Leeds art schools and Armitage was born there on 18 July 1916. Everyone knows Moore, Hepworth, Hirst. But Armitage? How many under 60 remember him? Conventional opinion confines his relevance to the 1950s. The Kenneth Armitage Foundation (of which I was a trustee) has marked his centenary with an overdue restoration. There have been two books — Kenneth Armitage Sculptor, edited by Ann Elliott, and The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage by James Scott — and three exhibitions. The first was at the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath; now comes the climax with the two Leeds exhibitions, plus three large sculptures temporarily displayed in the city along with Millennium Square’s ‘Both Arms’ (2000), unveiled in Armitage’s presence by Nelson Mandela.

Raptor rapture

The fewer birds there are, the more books about them, particularly of the literary kind. Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk swept all the prizes; and James Macdonald Lockhart has already won a £10,000 Royal Society of Literature Award for Non-Fiction to fund research for his debut. It is of the quest variety, recently popularised by William Fiennes, Horatio Clare, Mark Avery and others. J.A. Baker, who wrote the one-hit Sixties wonder The Peregrine, is modern father of the genre. Macdonald Lockhart describes his aim: Fifteen birds of prey, 15 different landscapes. A journey in search of raptors, a journey through the birds and into their worlds. That is how I envisaged it. Beginning in the far north, in Orkney, and winding my way down to a river in Devon.

To be astonished by nature, look no further than Claxton

Mark Cocker is the naturalist writer of the moment, with birds his special subject. His previous book, Birds and People, was a tour de force, taking the birds of the entire world as its subject. Craig Brown described it as ‘the sort of masterpiece that comes along only once or twice a decade’. Expectations could not be higher. Claxton is a selection from his journalism for the Guardian and other publications, written since he moved to Claxton village, southeast of Norwich, 12 years ago. The 140 entries are arranged in 12 chronological chapters to form a naturalist’s journal of a Claxton year. Many have been radically revised so that of his eight books this ‘has taken the longest to write’. He regards it as ‘very much more than a collection of journalism’, although journalists would surely deplore the distinction.

What’s eating London’s songbirds?

This book, with its absurdly uninformative photographs, dismal charts and smattering of charmless drawings, looks like a report. A pity, because it is a thorough and entertaining history; the first to cover the entire London area within a 20-mile radius of St Paul’s, from the earliest record, in Roman times, to the present. A chronology lists the date when the 369 species were first recorded, from the red kite in the 2nd century AD to Bonaparte’s gull and the buff-bellied pipit in 2012. The last named illustrate the recent rise in esoteric sightings following the postwar birth of the bearded-birder brigade, with their competitive box-ticking and ever more hi-tech equipment. There are many surprises. Who would have thought the Canada goose, first imported by Charles II, would precede the house sparrow, or the Egyptian goose (1863) the mallard (1866)? And then there are the bizarre sightings: the flock of starlings which stopped a face of Big Ben’s clock, 12 August 1949; the water-rail on a window-sill of the Guildhall, 3 April 1967; the puffin in Sloane Square, September 1984.

No special pleading needed for this disabled Dutch master

To discover an ‘unknown’ is the dream of anyone connected with the arts and in Johannes Thopas (c.1626-1688/95) we have just that. This book catalogues the exhibition now transfering from Aachen to the Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam (12 July–5 October). The curator is Rudi Ekkart, who discovered Thopas’s meticulous lead-pencil (plumbago) drawings on parchment as an art-history student in the early 1970s, when he had unlimited access to the University of Leiden’s famous drawing collection. After that he kept a record of everything to do with the artist, which now finds formal acknowledgment. Other recognised Dutch artists who were deaf and dumb have shown that a normal life could be profitably pursued. Jan Jansz de Stomme even used sign language to thrash out theological complexities with his wife and servant.

How seriously should we take Ruskin as an artist?

This stout and well-designed volume nicely complements Tim Hilton’s classic biography of John Ruskin. It is the catalogue for the exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (till 11 May) and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (4 July–28 September). A Scottish venue is especially appropriate. Ruskin (1819–1900) was a Londoner but proudly Scots by descent. He retained the slight Scottish accent of his father, a successful sherry merchant, who had been brought up in Edinburgh; and already at nine drew a highly competent map of Scotland, which is illustrated but regrettably not exhibited. In common with the fashion of his time, the poems and novels of Sir Walter Scott were his ‘chief source of delight’; a formative visual and romantic memory was ‘going through Glenfarg, near Kinross, on a winter’s morning, when the rocks were hung with icicles’.

Toowit-towoo! At long last, a Collins book on owls

Owls have more associations for us than perhaps any other family of birds, suggested Jeremy Mynott in Birdscapes, so it is puzzling that it has taken Collins 70 years to add this ‘Natural History of the British and Irish Species’ to its famous New Naturalist Series. It is of course primarily a zoological work, with statistics, charts and sentences such as: ‘A real breakthrough in resolving this problem has been the advent of affordable molecular and biochemical methods.’ But the science, if sometimes beyond the simple owl-lover, reveals plenty of fascinating facts. The five principal species found in Britain are tawny, barn, little, long-eared and short-eared. The tawny is easily the most abundant, at possibly 20,000 breeding pairs.

Birds & People, by Mark Cocker - review

‘A world without birds would lay waste the human heart,’ writes Mark Cocker. Following his Birds Britannica and prize-winning Crow Country, in Birds & People he embraces the planet, with the help of the wildlife photographer, David Tipling, and the ‘650 contributors from 81 countries’ to whom the book is dedicated. He begins his cultural celebration of the earth’s 200 recognised bird families with one of ‘the most primitive’, the partridge-like tinamou from South America. Tinamou are loth to fly, not surprisingly since once airborne they tend fatally to crash into things, even houses. A near relative is the completely flightless common ostrich, the largest surviving bird. The ubiquity of ostrich eggs is explained by the size of the clutch, 78 a record.

Our most exotic bird

The Black Grouse (Merlin Unwin, £20) is Patrick Lurie’s first book and the first ever on the the subject. Lurie is a freelance journalist but his mission is to save tetrao tetrix britannicus (the britannicus added in 1913). He devotes much of his time protecting a black cock and a couple of its grey hens on 1,600 upland acres in Galloway; and has written a diary combined with a history of the species, touching on the evolution of landscape and shooting, as well as conservation politics. Sterile tree farms (forest too good a word) now carpet a quarter of once nature-rich Dumfries and Galloway. The black cock with its lyre-shaped tale, which decorates (in replicated form) the pipers’ bonnets of the amalgamated Scottish regiments, must vie for the distinction of being our most exotic bird.

How do birds fly south?

Did you know the external ‘shell’ of the ear is the pinna? That a woman’s oestrogen level alters the way she hears the male voice, making it richer, and thus may affect her choice of mate? That Pride and Prejudice was published the year (1813) that Europeans discovered the kiwil? That Leonardo da Vinci ‘was one of the first to comment on the extra-ordinary tongue of the woodpecker’? These are some indicators of the general interest of this book, subtitled ‘What It’s Like to Be a Bird’, which demonstrates humans are much more birdlike than previously thought. The principal reason is that, like them, we rely most on vision and hearing. Ever more sophisticated research reveals that birds also share our other sensory perceptions, touch, taste and smell.

Bearing the brunt

Ostensibly this small book is a jolly and true story (illustrated with some charming black-and-white snapshots) about the military experiences of Wojtek (pronounced Voycheck), the bear who, bought as a cub by Polish soldiers in Persia, earned name, rank and number as the mascot of the 22nd Company of the Artillery Supply Command, 2nd Polish Corps. But it proves a deeper and, especially for British readers, a much darker tale. Neal Ascherson, in a fine historical essay, explains how Wojtek spread hope and fostered humanity among soldiers, who ‘had lost most of what is supposed to make a war worth fighting and a life worth living’. The men of the 2nd Polish Corps had fought and lost to the Germans and Russians, and survived deportation to the Soviet Union.

Liberating Visions

Victor Willing (1928–88) is perhaps the least classifiable of the brilliant early-1950s Slade generation, which includes his wife Paula Rego.Victor Willing (1928–88) is perhaps the least classifiable of the brilliant early-1950s Slade generation, which includes his wife Paula Rego. So it is uniquely appropriate that this first major posthumous exhibition should be at the beautiful museum built in her honour and opened last year. Willing’s career is dramatically divided. In his twenties he was briefly successful with portraits and still-lives. Then there is a blank 20 years before a last decade of remarkable imaginative paintings, when his art, in Paula Rego’s words, ‘moves backwards and forwards between the figurative and the abstract, the funny and the disturbing’.

Scottish clash

Highlands and Islands: Paintings and Poems Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, W1, until 5 JunePictures are usually exhibited with closed-shop segregation from the other arts, so it is a joy to find the bounds broken by this exuberant celebration of one of the oldest and most beautiful places on earth.The show announces the publication of Highlands and Islands (Eland, £8.99), a poetry anthology (mostly 20th-century, not all by Scots) from Beccan mac Luigdech of Rum (died 677) to the present, selected and annotated by Mary Miers, the architectural historian and authority on Highland and Island culture. Her family home is on South Uist, so she brings a native passion to her subject. Relevant poems, some extra to the book, are displayed alongside the pictures; and there is also a programme of readings and musical events.

A towering talent

Ian Massey is a writer, artist and lecturer and this is his first book. There have been two previous books on Procktor: a ghosted autobiography and a slim volume to celebrate his 60th birthday. About the second, one reviewer wrote that what was next required was ‘a full retrospective to answer the critical question that has been asked repeatedly over the last 30 years, “Is there anybody there?” ’ This handsome, copiously illustrated, well-researched and sensitive appraisal of the art and artist fully meets that requirement. Massey did not know Procktor, but he shows there was much more to him than facility and a façade. Half the book is devoted to the post-1970 career and gives abundant evidence that some of the finest work dates from these so-called lost years.

Flower power

Mrs Delaney (1700-88) is an inspiring example for old age; also a reproach to those who think ‘upper class’ a term of abuse and that women have only recently had a life.Mrs Delaney (1700-88) is an inspiring example for old age; also a reproach to those who think ‘upper class’ a term of abuse and that women have only recently had a life. Her extraordinary cut-paper flowers, collected in the 10-volume Flora Delanica, are now enshrined in the British Museum as masterpieces of collage art. Looking at their remarkable intricacy and accuracy, it is incredible to think she made them between the age of 72 and 82. Nonetheless, these ‘floral mosaiks’, as she called them, are only the summation of her achievements.

Romantic approaches

Spectator readers will know that Andrew Lambirth is a romantic, a force for the literary and poetic approach to art criticism, so he is an admirably empathetic guide to Hoyland:In England the subversive underground Romantic spirit has never run dry, it consistently nourishes art in this country and erupts forth in strange and unexpected ways. The late work of John Hoyland is one such unpredictable manifestation. Mel Gooding’s standard monograph covers Hoyland’s career to 2006, but such is the artist’s productivity that, despite serious heart surgery last year, many of the excellent colour plates — the majority in the case of the 46 full-page illustrations — are of new paintings. There is only one spread of unadorned text in Nick Newton’s sympathetic design and things are brought to a suitable climax, with a last chapter which includes a run of five full-page plates of truly devil-scattering post-operation paintings; a magnificent and defiant riposte.

The Oaks of Cheyithorne Barton

Michael Heathcoat Amory inherited Chevithorne Barton in Devon from his grandmother. She had experienced the unimaginable loss of her husband in the First War and their three sons in the Second, including the author’s father. Creating a garden at Chevithorne was a consoling distraction. Michael Heathcoat Amory has done her and his family proud, transforming Chevithorne over a mere 25 years into one of the world’s great arboretums. His passion is the oak. He now has 282 of the 500 extant species, of which 190 are catalogued in this handsome book. His model introduction is supplemented by three specialist essays. The photographic illustrations reveal that many oaks are unrecognisable as relatives of our emblematic tree, Quercus robur.

The sweetness pictures can add to life

This is the tribute of a child to a parent, especially commendable when the very concept of fatherhood is threatened; rarer still, the co-authors are themselves artists in their separate fields. Peter Mann is responsible for the pleasing design and photographs, and Sargy Mann has answered his son’s questions to provide an autobiographical text which largely concerns visual perception, ‘not at all straightforward even when you can see’, as Peter Mann says. Jean Renoir’s Renoir, My Father is the prototype. Sargy Mann selected and discussed 27 paintings or series of paintings covering his career and Peter Mann has photographed them as they hang today in private houses. This novel idea is also indebted to Renoir, who told his son: You don’t look at a painting.

Poles apart

With more Poles in Britain than at any time since the second world war, when the 17,000 remnant of the Polish army arrived after the fall of France, this book could not be more pertinent. Nor could it have been written by anyone better. Douglas Hall (b. 1926) was the first Keeper (indeed the Alfred Barr) of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He made a virtue of a small budget by backing artistic outsiders rather than hot favourites, and these uprooted Polish painters were by definition eccentric. Under his keepership no British public gallery did more for them in the long years of their exile. It is a chastening story, a reminder of how insular and biased art- historical surveys usually are; how unconcerned countries are with foreign art; and what a snowplough fashion is, clearing a path for the not necessarily deserving few, burying everyone else.

Flights of fancy

Did you know that the first person to cage a budgerigar was John Gould, the 19th-century English artist/naturalist? Or that the word ‘penguin’ is derived from the Welsh words ‘pen’ (white) and ‘gwyn’ (head)? Or that there is no scientific (in other words fossil) evidence that the dodo ever existed? These are just three informative nuggets from Katrina Cook’s entertaining text for her sumptuously illustrated elephant-folio-size history of bird art.That Birds is as enjoyable to read as to look at reflects the author’s unusual combination of artistic and scientific talent: a bird artist, qualified bird ringer and curator at the Natural History Museum; a specialist in printing techniques, who has a particular interest in the art of John James Audubon (1785-1851), widely regarded as the supreme bird artist.

Blast from the past

Percy Wyndham Lewis 1882–1957, Design Centre, Rugby School, until 8 DecemberIn the 1915 Vorticist Manifesto, published in the movement’s magazine Blast, Wyndham Lewis (he dropped Percy) wrote:Lewis is one of them, as this first-rate exhibition at his alma mater — he was a pupil for two years from 1897 — amply demonstrates. It is the sole commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of this artist writer, who is comparable only with that other double-yolked exception to the rules, William Blake, one of his heroes, born 250 years ago this 28 November. Lewis will forever be associated with Vorticism, an artistic rebellion intended to wake England from its academic lethargy (hence Blast), drawing its inspiration from Cubism and Futurism, but deploring the first for its indifference to personality and the second for disowning tradition.

Life and conflict

Ever since he burst on the scene in the 1960s Michael Sandle RA has been the rogue elephant of British art. At Ludlow Castle, a perfect venue for work whose subject is war, both metaphorical and actual, his artistic power is irrefutable. This is a superb show. John Powis, who owns the castle, should be praised for his enlightened patronage and Judy Cox for curating with such panache. The event marks the inauguration of an annual sculpture exhibition of international standard. The selection covers the past 30 years of Sandle’s output, 18 bronzes and one fibreglass, most of it done when he was professor of sculpture at two of Germany’s leading art schools. At a time when hierarchical values have been constantly eroded, Sandle has stood for the pursuit of excellence, for quantifiable artistic and academic standards and public engagement with regard to content.

Treasures of the South Seas

The enlarged, updated and now undivided Sainsbury Centre has reopened with the most comprehensive selection of Polynesian art ever assembled; and yet, shamefully, it has received not a single review. It would be a waste of space to wonder why, better to state that the stunning Pacific Encounters, curated by Dr Steven Hooper of the University of East Anglia, utterly confounds the supposition that Oceanic art is largely a matter of shell and feather knick-knacks. These superlative objects from British collections (testimony to those pioneers of the scientific Enlightenment who went exploring with Captain Cook), three-quarters of them resurrected from the limbo of museum stores, prove that Polynesian (Greek for ‘many islands’) sculpture and workmanship can stand any comparison.

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