Caroline Eden

1 month ago | engelsbergideas.com | Caroline Eden

Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art, Giovanni Aloi, Yale University Press, £30At the end of the Afghan-Soviet war in the late 1980s, weavers in Afghanistan’s carpet heartlands set about creating rugs that depicted the Soviet army withdrawing. These ‘exit rugs’ featured armoured vehicles surrounded by flowers, and helicopters under fire hovering above shrubs in bloom. The meaning of these botanical motifs is debatable.

2 months ago | theguardian.com | Caroline Eden |Susan Smillie |Laura Hall

Our writers make the most of warm weather, smaller crowds and off-peak prices to visit their favourite spots, from the Baltic to the Bosphorus

2 months ago | engelsbergideas.com | Caroline Eden

Walking Europe’s Last Wilderness: A Journey Through the Carpathian Mountains, Nick Thorpe, Yale University Press, £20. Ever since Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul in December 1933, later recounting his adventures in A Time of Gifts (1977), Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and in the posthumous The Broken Road (2013), many others – usually young, well-educated men with aspirations to write – have followed.

2 months ago | theguardian.com | Anna Berrill |Melissa Thompson |Caroline Eden |Killian Fox |Kate Guest |Georgina Hayden | +5 more

PeopleParis Rosina and the return of supper clubs“My food is like your grandmother’s, but far sexier,” says chef Paris Rosina, the first part perhaps unsurprising given she grew up watching the likes of Fanny Cradock, Keith Floyd and the Two Fat Ladies.

Feb 11, 2025 | engelsbergideas.com | Caroline Eden

Under a Metal Sky, Philip Marsden, Granta, £20Man stripping the earth’s natural resources is a story as old as time. In Metamorphoses, Book I, Ovid condemns the work of miners: ‘They dug up riches, those incentives to vice, which the earth had hidden and had removed to the Stygian shades. Then destructive iron came forth, and gold, more destructive than iron; then war came forth.’ Dig into the flesh of the planet and suffer the consequences.