Compelling account of little-known aspect of the Great War
History: The Great Explosion: Gunpowder, the Great War, and a Disaster on the Kent Marshes
By Brian Dillon
Penguin, €25.50
In the exceptional book Landmarks, published earlier this year, Robert Macfarlane explored the evolving relationship between language and landscape in the British Isles; the decimation of a literary lexicon of the natural world in the face of urban uniformity.
The book is both a love-letter to a disappearing landscape and an archive of a dying geographical language, as Macfarlane revives long-defunct descriptive terms such as skradge: a small ...
