Richard mabey book
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An education in the life of the writer and naturalist, Richard Mabey
Richard Mabey, 68, is the author of 'Food for Free', 'Nature Cure' and 'Flora Britannica', as well as an award- winning biography of naturalist Gilbert White. 'Wild Cooking' came out this month. A new version of his book on nightingales, 'Whistling in the Dark', is out next spring, as is 'A Brush With Nature', taken from his columns in BBC Wildlife. Starting on Monday, his R3 series, The Scientist and the Romantic, goes out at 11pm every evening next week.
I remember mostly disasters at Rothesay, the pre-prep school in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire that is named after the grand Edwardian house in which it was situated. I was quite a timid child at this stage and began to have my first experience of psychosomatic symptoms: indigestion and dizzy spells. In those days, one was diagnosed as being "highly strung" – like a harp.
In one classroom there were two teachers and two classes facing in opposite directions. In my first year I once sat in the back row facing in the wrong direction and was subjected to an hour
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Whistling in the Dark
SPRING 2025 NEWS
Whistling in the Dark: In Pursuit of the Nightingale
A new and fully revised edition of this widely acclaimed reflection on the nightingale and its place in human culture is published by Aurum Press on April 10 .
“It’s early May, a nightingale moon. I’m perched in a narrow lane above the Stour valley in Suffolk, listening to the birds. The landscape is already drained of colour, caught in that moment between light and dark when distances and outlines blur. I try to focus on the tumulus of scrub in front of me, but it seems to be dancing and flashing with phosphorescence. I know this is just my eyes playing tricks, but it gives the undergrowth an oddly insubstantial feel, quite out of keeping with the brilliant clarity of the song that is pouring from it….” (from Whistling,1993)
It’s become an annual ritual, this pilgrimage to the Suffolk in May to listen to the nightingales. It’s a more poignant expedition each year. The birds always sing, but in smaller numbers, and in increasingly poor spring weath
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RICHARD MABEY . After education at Oxford, RM worked as a lecturer in Social Studies in Further Education, then as a Senior Editor at Penguin Books. He became a full-time writer in 1974. He is the author of some thirty books, including The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination (2015), and Whistling in the Dark: In Pursuit of the Nightingale (1993), winner of the East Anglia Book Award, 2010, in a revised version entitled The Barley Bird, Beechcombings: the narratives of Trees (2007), the ground-breaking and best-selling “cultural flora” Flora Britannica (1996), winner of a National Book Award, and Gilbert White, which won the Whitbread Biography Award in 1986,. His recent memoir Nature Cure (2005), which describes how reconnecting with the wild helped him break free from debilitating depression, was short-listed for three major literary awards, the Whitbread, Ondaatje, and J.R. Ackerley prizes. His latest book is Turning the Boat for Home (2019). He writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and Granta, and contributes frequently to BBC radio.
In the 1980s he sat on the UK go
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