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Mabey, Richard

Richard Mabey is Britain’s most influential writer on natural history, and has been a pioneer of environmental thinking for over 50 years. He has written over 30 ground-breaking and popular books, including Food for Free, The Unofficial Countryside, Gilbert White (which won the Whitbread Biography Award), Flora Britannica, Beechcombings, Cabaret of Plants and his best-selling memoir Nature Cure, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread, Ondaatje and J. R. Ackerley.  He writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and Granta, as well as Slightly Foxed, and contributes frequently to BBC radio.

www.richardmabey.co.uk

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

Food for Free, [23] 30; articles by, [41] 7; [47] 87; [50] 8

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20090901122829 Linda Leatherbarrow, Food for the Free - Slightly Foxed Issue 23

Optimistic Green Flags

Linda Leatherbarrow on Richard Mabey, Food for Free

This morning, in the woods on Tooting Common, the sight of a young man plucking nettles and dropping them into a forage bag instantly reconnected me to my earlier life where ‘found food’ was a regular treat: wild parsnips, raspberries, blaeberries, angelica stems or water mint. Back in the 1970s, in my anti-consumerist hippy days, my home was sometimes an old Bedford van. Crammed with partner, three children, scruffy dog, cooking equipment, mattresses and quilts, this arthritic dragon – belching out smoke and small metal parts – transported us up and down the country lanes of Britain and Ireland. We enjoyed impromptu alfresco meals often gathered, picked or dug up from woods and field corners at dusk. ‘Dusking’ Richard Mabey calls it.
20190301095422 Posy Simmonds, Richard Mabey, Lewis Thomas

Cellmates

Richard Mabey on Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

As I remember it, Vole was already up and running when Lewis Thomas arose in our midst like some ecological genie, a combination of gentle evangelist and stand-up comedian. It was 1977, and Richard Boston, founder of the magazine, arrived at an early editorial gathering bearing a copy of Thomas’s book The Lives of a Cell, with the clear message that it was required reading. It had recently been awarded, unprecedentedly, two US National Book Awards, one in the Arts category, the other in Science, and been described in The New Yorker as a ‘shimmering vision’.
20160601124024

Wilder Shores

Richard Mabey on Lesley Blanch, Round the World in Eighty Dishes

I slipped into the world of Lesley Blanch’s swashbuckling cookbook, Round the World in Eighty Dishes (1955), before I’d even heard of it. It was the early ’60s, and I was on my first visit to Paris with friends from university. The city was sizzling in a July heatwave, and our host took us to an Arab quarter near St Michel, where we saw something extraordinary to our English eyes: people not just eating in the street but cooking in it.
20150901103535 Richard Mabey on ecosystems of the library, Slightly Foxed Issue 47

More Capability Brown

Richard Mabey on the arrangement of libraries 

I like to think we run an open-door policy in our library at home in Norfolk. That is to say, on warm days in summer the door to the garden is actually open. Anyone’s welcome to come in for a browse. Last summer a stoat wandered in, peered dismissively at the modest shelf of my own titles, sniffed about under my desk and then ambled out. Most Julys the house ants – here long before us and so given due respect – pour out from alarming new holes in the floor, march along the tops of my editions of Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne, and shuffle in a lost and desultory way about the carpet, seeming uninterested in getting outdoors for their nuptial flights. But while I fret about the continuance of their ancient lineage, the culling is already under way. Next through the door come the bolder blackbirds and robins, hoovering the insects up in front of the shelves.

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