Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray

Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country C...

London Review of BooksLondon Review of Books

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Narrative Poems: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In her diary entry for 20 November 1797, Dorothy Wordsworth describes a late afternoon walk with her brother William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘ We went eight miles in the dark,’ she wrote, ‘William and Coleridge employing themselves in laying the plan of a ballad.’ This was t ...  Show more

 . 14min 27sec
Nature in Crisis: ‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane

The idea that a river is a living being has important legal consequences. But it also has imaginative consequences, which can, in George Eliot’s words, ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’. In ‘Is a River Alive?’ (2025), Robert Macfarlane travels with the lawyers, Ind ...  Show more

 . 14min 54sec

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