Idea of North

Peter Davidson is Fellow of Campion Hall, University of Oxford. He has taught at the universities of Aberdeen, Leiden and Warwick. He is the author of a book of essays about northern culture, The Idea of North (Reaktion, 2005), Distance and Memory (2013), a collection of verse, The Palace of Oblivion (2008) and The Last of the Light: About Twilight (Reaktion, 2015).

"One of the most beautiful books I&#39ve read . . . Davidson&#39s taste is both baroque and ascetic his prose is correspondingly extravagant and refined. This is cultural history at its very best, unfolding new maps of imagination." - Alexandra Harris, author of Weatherland"a deeply researched and beautifully written survey of the concept of north in legend, history and the arts, and in the psyche of northern people. Ice and snow feature often." - Daily Telegraph"A masterpiece . . . The Idea of North reminded me of Paul Fussells The Great War and Modern Memory in taking a vast and shifting subject and reducing it to clarity, radically changing the way we look at a history . . . it is hard to imagine writing a better book within the terms Davidson has set for himself . . . beyond being merely clever or wise: a beautiful book. He ends with a magnificent couple of pages entitled Keeping the Twilight a description, from his study, of the fading hours of the northern winter day. His last two sentences are perfect abstract expressionist description of North." - Scottish Review of Books"a fascinating exploration . . . a tour around the imagination and makes remarkable observations." - The Herald (Glasgow)"[The North] is roamed in fascinating, suggestive fashion . . . Davidson is as interesting writing about snow sculptures and 17th-century paintings of the Arctic as he is about Auden, and his reading of the imaginary land of Zembla in Nabokov&#39s Pale Fire as an eternal, symbolic north is highly evocative . . . [a] lovely book" - The Guardian"From the Old Norse sagas to the fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen, from the films of Bergman to the paintings of Eric Ravilious, from Nabakovs Zembla to Simon Armitages Yorkshire, [Davidson] finds that the north is a breeding ground for ghosts, a place of exile and punishment, the antithesis of the human. Yet its bleak landscapes have inspired poetry of great beauty: ice, crystal, diamond and glass all blur in recurring images . . . Davidson never lets his learning cloud his enthusiasm for this wide and protean subject and his writing shares the awe of the poets who preceded him on this journey." - The Observer"Beside being a discriminating critic, Davidson has an arrestingly personal voice . . . The Idea of North is one of those books that have you making a long list of references you want to follow" - The Independent"The nearer he gets to the North of England and Scotland the more deeply felt his writing becomes. . . . Marvellously sensitive." - London Review of Books"This is a book about poetry, myth, and art, and the myriad ways in which artists, poets, and explorers have filtered the north&#39s stark natural splendor through their imaginations. . . . Davidson has compiled an extraordinary catalog of the shapes the north has taken in the minds of humans . . . A work of genuine erudition, guiding readers northward out of their home ground and into unknown territory." - Discover"Provocative . . . Davidsons evocative prose and sensitive analyses of an impressive range of sources heighten the readers appreciation of the rich complexity of humanitys imagined Norths." - Times Higher Education Supplement"[a] delightful work . . . beautifully written . . . an esoteric but important gem original treasure from the north" - The Herald (Glasgow)"[A] gifted prose writer" - Scotland on Sunday"There are indeed a lot of norths to cover, and the charm of the book is it exhaustiveness, zooming into a variety of touchstones to show how theyve influenced global culture in sly, often surprising ways . . . Davidsons north is an enormous, challenging land: humbling, shifting, austere, empty, fragile, desolate, desolating, marginal, authentic a place, as Davidson perfectly puts it, forever suffused with absolute, difficult beauty." - Ruminator Review (USA)"An interesting meditation" - TLS"A truly stunning assessment of the concept of &#34north" in literature, legend, history and the psyche of &#34Northern" people . . . Davidson writes with an incredible sense of place" - Aberdeen Evening Express"Mesmerising cultural history . . . Davidsons style achieves a lyric expression of phrase. In several passages of personal recollection . . . he achieves a marvel of descriptiveness that is moving as well as expressive" - The Scotsman"In The Idea of North, Peter Davidson dances around the idea that the cold is idealised in the north of England. He quotes lines evoking ‘the quintessence of a winter city’ from Poem Written on a Hoarding, by Sean O’Brien, who resides in Newcastle." - Andrew Martin, The Financial Times