Adam Nicolson

Life Between the Tides

The Sea Is Not Made of Water

Where does Homer come from? And why does Homer matter? His epic poems of war and suffering can still speak to us of the role of destiny in life, of cruelty, of humanity and its frailty, but why they do is a mystery. How can we be so intimate with something so distant? This is a genre-defying book of vast ambition which takes the reader on a deeply profound, tender journey through Adam Nicolson's love of Homer and why he believes this great ancient poet still matters to us all in our search to understand what it is to be human, to love, to lose, to grow old and to die. Nicolson is one of the greatest writers of landscape and sea -- and in this book he takes his readers to places on the Aegean shores forever haunted by their Homeric heroes, to a disputatious dinner in 19th-century-France; to Keats and his travels in the "realms of gold"; memories of setting sail from a Scottish beach to face the vengeful sea and navigating storms off the coast of Ireland; to Sicily awash with wild flowers, to Bosnia where oral poetry still thrives; to Syria where he is forced to face his own mortality; to the deserted, irradiated steppes of Chernobyl, where Homeric warriors still lie unexcavated under the tumuli. This is a world of springs and drought, seas and cities, all sewn together by the poems themselves, and their great metaphors of life and suffering. The book is driven by a desire to find the source of Homer's directness and to understand why Homer is still so present and so relevant to us all some 3,700 years after the poems were composed. On every page, the book offers reflections on relationships between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, on the violence of warriors and the deep-held desires of home-makers, of peace and war, youth and old-age. Like Homer himself, it is a book haunted by transience, by the way memory drifts in the face of time. It is a book that will bring each reader face to face with the meaning of existence in a text as accessible as it is full of surprises.

Why Homer Matters

The Mighty Dead

A network of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Bacon; the era of the Gunpowder Plot and the worst outbreak of the plague. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than the country had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between these polarities. This was the world that created the King James Bible. It is the greatest work of English prose ever written, and it is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment "Englishness," specifically the English language itself, had come into its first passionate maturity. The English of Jacobean England has a more encompassing idea of its own scope than any form of the language before or since. It drips with potency and sensitivity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

The Making of the King James Bible

God's Secretaries

Taking readers on an extraordinary journey through mythical and modern landscapes, the author of a celebrated column for The Sunday Telegraph explores the places forever haunted by their Homeric heroes and reveals the real roots of Homeric consciousness.

Adam Nicolson explores the marine life inhabiting seashore rockpools with a scientist’s curiosity and a poet’s wonder in this beautifully illustrated book. The sea is not made of water. Creatures are its genes. Look down as you crouch over the shallows of a rockpool and you will find a periwinkle or a prawn, a claw-displaying crab or a cluster of anemones ready to meet you. Go to the rocks and the living will say hello. Inside each rockpool, tucked into one of the infinite crevices of the tidal coastline, lies a rippling, silent, unknowable universe. Below the stillness of the surface course different currents of endless motion—the ebb and flow of the tide, the steady forward propulsion of the passage of time, and the tiny lifetimes of its creatures, all of which coalesce into the grand narrative of evolution. In The Sea Is Not Made of Water, Adam Nicolson investigates one of the most revelatory habitats on earth. Under his microscope, we see a prawn’s head become a medieval helmet and a group of “winkles” transform a Dickensian social scene, with mollusks munching on Stilton and glancing at their pocket watches. Or, rather, is a winkle more like Achilles, an ancient hero, throwing himself toward death for the sake of glory? For Nicolson, who writes “with scientific rigor and a poet’s sense of wonder” (The American Scholar), the world of the rockpools is infinite and as intricate as our own. As Nicolson journeys between the tides, both in the pools he builds along the coast of Scotland and through the timeline of scientific discovery, he is accompanied by great thinkers—no one can escape the pull of the sea. We meet Virginia Woolf and her Waves; a young T. S. Eliot peering into his own rockpool in Massachusetts; even Nicolson’s father-in-law, a classical scholar who would hunt for amethysts along the shoreline, his mind on Heraclitus and the Hellenists. And, of course, scientists populate the pages; not only their discoveries, but also their doubts and errors, their moments of quiet observation and their thrilling realizations. It is all within the rockpools, where you can look beyond your own reflection and find the miraculous an inch beneath your nose. “The soul wants to be wet,” Heraclitus said in Ephesus twenty-five hundred years ago. This marvelous book demonstrates why it is so. Includes Color and Black-and-White Photographs

Deborah Steiner

W. H. D. Rouse

Όμηρος

The Odyssey

Life itself could never have been sustainable without seabirds. As Adam Nicolson writes: "They are bringers of fertility, the deliverers of life from ocean to land." A global tragedy is unfolding. Even as we are coming to understand them, the number of seabirds on our planet is in freefall, dropping by nearly 70% in the last sixty years, a billion fewer now than there were in 1950. Of the ten birds in this book, seven are in decline, at least in part of their range. Extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of the seabird colony, rolling around the bays and headlands of high latitudes, will this century become little but a memory. Seabirds have always entranced the human imagination and NYT best-selling author Adam Nicolson has been in love with them all his life: for their mastery of wind and ocean, their aerial beauty and the unmatched wildness of the coasts and islands where every summer they return to breed. The seabird’s cry comes from an elemental layer in the story of the world. Over the last couple of decades, modern science has begun to understand their epic voyages, their astonishing abilities to navigate for tens of thousands of miles on featureless seas, their ability to smell their way towards fish and home. Only the poets in the past would have thought of seabirds as creatures riding the ripples and currents of the entire planet, but that is what the scientists are seeing now today.

The Lives and Loves of the Planet's Great Ocean Voyagers

The Seabird's Cry

‘A remarkable and powerful book, the rarest of things ... Nicolson is unique as a writer ... I loved it’ EDMUND DE WAAL ‘Miraculous ... An utterly fascinating glimpse of a watery world we only thought we knew’ PHILIP HOARE Few places are as familiar as the shore – and few as full of mystery and surprise.

The Sea is Not Made of Water: Life Between the Tides

Documents the author's experiences with and love for three Outer Hebrides islands he inherited as a young man, tracing the area's rich and sometimes violent history of hermits, legendary ghosts, farmers, fishermen, and Bronze Age gold.

An Island Life in the Hebrides

Sea Room

Wordsworth and Coleridge as you've never seen them before in this new book by Adam Nicolson, brimming with poetry, art and nature writing. Proof that poetry can change the world. It is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came The Ancient Mariner and 'Kubla Khan', as well as Coleridge's unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, Wordsworth's revolutionary verses in Lyrical Ballads and the greatness of 'Tintern Abbey', his paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. Bestselling and award-winning writer Adam Nicolson tells the story, almost day by day, of the year in the late 1790s that Coleridge, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and an ever-shifting cast of friends, dependants and acolytes spent together in the Quantock Hills in Somerset. To a degree never shown before, The Making of Poetry explores the idea that these poems came from this place, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlit walks, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood. What emerges is a portrait of these great figures as young people, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths towards it. The poetry they made was not from settled conclusions but from the adventure on which they were all embarked, seeing what they wrote as a way of stripping away all the dead matter, exfoliating consciousness, penetrating its depths. Poetry for them was not an ornament for civilisation but a challenge to it, a means of remaking the world.

The Experiment

'A remarkable and powerful book, the rarest of things ... Nicolson is unique as a writer ... I loved it' EDMUND DE WAAL 'Miraculous ... An utterly fascinating glimpse of a watery world we only thought we knew' PHILIP HOARE Few places are as familiar as the shore - and few as full of mystery and surprise.

WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2018 WINNER OF THE JEFFERIES AWARD FOR NATURE WRITING 2017 The full story of seabirds from one of the greatest nature writers. The book looks at the pattern of their lives, their habitats, the threats they face and the passions they inspire – beautifully illustrated by Kate Boxer.

The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers

Nigel Nicolson

Two Roads to Dodge City offers a vividly fresh look at today's Americans and their ways, by two gifted observers--father and son. This portrait of the country and its people from coast to coast is revealing, understanding, entertaining, and full of surprises. Nigel, the father, starts in Miami, driving in easy stages with stops in small towns and large cities up the coast to Canada, then down the middle of the country to New Orleans, and up to his rendezvous with Adam. Thanks to his frequent visits to the States and his fame as a writer, he has easy access to the grand houses as well as the modest, to leaders of society, government, business, academia, as well as folks in towns and roadside stops. Son Adam, not yet thirty, but already author of several books--one of which, Frontiers, won the 1986 Somerset Maugham Award--wanders a lower road from Los Angeles through San Francisco, Oregon, Idaho, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Santa Fe, and Wyoming. A tall, unmistakably upper-class Englishman, he has an uncanny gift for swiftly striking up acquaintance with any kind and age of man or woman. His California, for example, has an astonishing freshness, and his experiences with the young and wild, the comfy and the raunchy, the settled and the nomadic, are a joy to share. The diversity of the Nicholsons' adventures and views, together with the affection, argument, and mutual stimulus which link them across the ever-narrowing 3,000-mile gap, combine to make this an unusual and exciting book.

Two Colorful English Writers, Father and Son, Chronicle Their Wonderful Journeys Across America

Two Roads to Dodge City

Nicolson crafts a geography of the ancient world and a brilliant exploration of our connections to the past. In How to Be, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. Grounded in the belief that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, this book reintroduces us to our earliest thinkers through the lands they inhabited. To know the mental occupations of Homer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and find landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient life. Nicolson, the award-winning author of Why Homer Matters, uncovers ideas of personhood with Sappho and Alcaeus on Lesbos; plays with paradox in southern Italy with Zeno, the world’s first absurdist; and visits the coastal city of Miletus, burbling with the ideas of Thales and Anaximenes. Enhanced with maps, photographs, and artwork, How to Be provides a vital new way of understanding the origins of Western thought. It's an expedition into early ideas and a geography of our deepest preconceptions. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and a nexus of cross-cultural connection, and he makes the questions of the ancient world new again. What are the principles of the physical world? How can we be good in it? And why do we continue to ask these questions? “A thing of beauty as well as wit and wisdom.” —Paul Cartledge, author of Thebes: The Forgotten City

Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

How to Be

Kate Boxer

Seabird's Cry

In 1937, Adam Nicolson's father answered a newspaper ad—"Uninhabited islands for sale. Outer Hebrides, 600 acres. . . . Puffins and seals. Apply."—and thus found the Shiants. With a name meaning "holy or enchanted islands," the Shiants for millennia were a haven for those seeking solitude, but their rich, sometimes violent history of human habitation includes much more. When he was twenty-one, Nicolson inherited this almost indescribably beautiful property: a landscape, soaked in centuries-old tales of restless ghosts and Bronze Age gold, that cradles the heritage of a once-vibrant world of farmers and fishermen. In Sea Room, Nicolson describes and relives his love affair with the three tiny islands and their strange and colorful history in passionate, keenly precise prose—sharing with us the greatest gift an island bestows on its inhabitants: a deep engagement with the natural world.

In October 1805 Lord Horatio Nelson, the most brilliant sea commander who ever lived, led the British Royal Navy to a devastating victory over the Franco-Spanish fleets at the great battle of Trafalgar. It was the foundation of Britain's nineteenth-century world-dominating empire. Adam Nicolson's Seize the Fire is not only a close and revealing portrait of a legendary hero in his final action but also a vivid account of the brutal realities of battle; it asks the questions: Why did the winners win? What was it about the British, their commanders and their men, their beliefs and their ambitions, that took them to such overwhelming victory?

Heroism, Duty, and Nelson's Battle of Trafalgar

Seize the Fire

A fascinating, lively account of the making of the King James Bible. James VI of Scotland -- now James I of England -- came into his new kingdom in 1603. Trained almost from birth to manage rival political factions, he was determined not only to hold his throne, but to avoid the strife caused by religious groups that was bedevilling most European countries. He would hold his God-appointed position and unify his kingdom. Out of these circumstances, and involving the very people who were engaged in the bitterest controversies, a book of extraordinary grace and lasting literary appeal was created: the King James Bible. 47 scholars from Cambridge, Oxford and London translated the Bible, drawing from many previous versions, and created what many believe to be the greatest prose work ever written in English -- the product of a culture in a peculiarly conflicted era. This was the England of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Bacon; but also of extremist Puritans, the Gunpowder plot, the Plague, of slum dwellings and crushing religious confines. Quite how this astonishing translation emerges is the central question of this book. Far more than Shakespeare, this Bible helped to create and shape the language. It is the origin of many of our most familiar phrases, and the foundations of the English-speaking world. It was a generous and deliberate decision to make the Bible available to the common man: not an immediate commercial success, but which later became a bestseller, and has remained one ever since. Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the early years of the first Stewart ruler, and the scholars who laboured for seven years to create the world's greatest book; immersing us in a world of ingratiating bishops, a fascinating monarch and London at a time unlike any other.

Adam Nicolson

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