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May, Derwent

Derwent May has written several novels and numerous books about birds, as well as a study of Proust. He has been the literary editor of The Sunday Telegraph, The Listener and The European, and currently writes about birds and art for The Times, regularly contributing to their Nature Notes column.

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.

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Revelling with Ruskin

Derwent May on John Ruskin, Praeterita

John Ruskin’s Praeterita is one of the most exhilarating books I know, and I often go back to it. For most of his life the great art-critic-cum-sage was writing books to educate people. Once, when a reader told him how much he enjoyed his books, Ruskin answered, ‘I don’t care whether you enjoyed them. Did they do you any good?’ But at the end of his life, when he feared he was going mad, he felt he must abandon all the religious and aesthetic and social controversy of his life, and write a book that just recalled the happiness of his youth. The result was Praeterita – ‘past things’.

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