Serious writing and thought, he knew, wasn’t a hopeless but honorable pursuit; for the Review’s subscribers it was an essential part of life. An intellectual magazine with a larger, more devoted readership than many lifestyle publications—he proved that was possible.
Novels set in a medieval past are often fleeing the realities of the present, whether they take refuge in dragon-battling heroism (The Hobbit) or fantastical sensationalism (George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire). This, of course, doesn’t mean that the authors of such books are stuck in the past. Consider Paul Kingsnorth, whose debut novel, The Wake, takes place in eleventh-century England. Kingsnorth has been known for much of his career as an activist, interviewing Zapatistas in Mexico, participating in the G8 protests in Genoa, and, most recently, protesting the damage we’ve done to the environment (his
