What van Leeuwenhoek discovered next went beyond anything he could have imagined: After adding water to a glass tube that contained dried sediment and rotifer tuns he’d collected from a rain gutter, van Leeuwenhoek watched in wonder through his homemade microscope as rotifers came back to life. “I examined it, and perceived some of the Animalcules lying closely heaped together,” he wrote in a letter to the British Royal Society. “In a short time afterwards they began to extend their bodies, and in half an hour at least a hundred of them were swimming about the glass …” As a good experimentalist, he repeated the process by drying out other rotifers and witnessing the same phenomenon numerous times—even after samples were desiccated for a month.
“These little animals, which had appeared to be completely dried and lifeless, were restored to motion upon the addition of water, as if they had never suffered any harm,” van Leeuwenhoek wrote. Microbiologists would later find that some species of rotifers are able to reanimate after up to nine years of desiccation.
After a while it is clear that someone, or something, is following us. A figure, some distance back. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t appear to draw any closer, or get further away. It seems to remain, matching our pace, just at the edge of vision – at the edge of the dusk now descending over the grand Lincolnshire parkland surrounding Burghley House. When we stop, the figure vanishes. When we set off again, it returns. A shrouded shape; a shadow stalking our steps.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise. The old Roman highway we’ve been intermittently tracing from Water Newton to Stamford is a nine-mile track layered with history. Now overgrown and concealed, it was once a bustling leg of a great north-south thoroughfare that has run, in some form or another, like a backbone through the body of Britain for at least 2,000 years. A unique assemblage of ancient trackway, Roman road, medieval path, pilgrim route, coach road and motorway. Today, hereabouts, its modern incarnation – the A1 – loops west, leaving, as it does in many places, forgotten, discontinued ghost highways to their own devices.
There was some irony to it all: Once you tell people where to find quiet, the place becomes less so.
When the couples therapist inevitably asks, I’ll have an answer ready: The trouble began in August 2017, when my boyfriend and I moved in together, and I quickly revealed myself to be an absolute ding-dong at loading the dishwasher.
Eugen Bacon’s A Place Between Waking and Forgetting is an exploration of contrasts, as suggested by its evocative title. This collection of short stories by a British Fantasy Award winner showcases Bacon’s distinctive voice in speculative fiction. The book deftly navigates themes of identity, memory, trauma and the complexities of the human experience, often through a lens that integrates elements of African culture and folklore.
If you believe in fated mates, “Zeal” is a page-turner that will teach readers a few things about our past.
Before entering Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, visitors must walk over disinfecting mats to rid their shoes of bacteria or other pathogens. Next to the mats is a sign whose admonition seems at once both practical and religious: “Cleanse your soles.” Whenever I visit, as I often do, this sign always makes me smile: this ritualised cleaning is an important measure to prevent outbreaks of disease among the garden’s 730 species, but it also seems to be some kind of spiritual act.
Anyone tempted to jump that mat should read Liz Kalaugher’s new book, a wide-ranging, thorough and persuasive investigation of the ways in which we have made non-human animals sick. Her book reads as a kind of shadow history of human endeavour and innovation, tracing the calamitous price that trade, exchange and intensive farming have exacted on everything from frogs to ferrets. It’s a measured and detailed account, but below the calm surface you can hear an anguished cry imploring us to open our eyes and see how our own health is intertwined with that of other species.
“You once said to me that I would always be isolated,” wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo in 1884. It was the second time that year that he returned to this assessment by the person who knew him best. Vincent argued that Theo was wrong: “you’ve decidedly mistaken my character.” But a new book by Miles J. Unger shows us how Van Gogh, even when he went to live with Theo in crowded Paris and spent his days with fellow artists, was always alone.