Shadowlands
MATTHEW GREEN
(FABER & FABER, 368 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

There’s a need, in these fractured times, for balm. This explains the popularity of the reflective essayist – think of Dr Gavin Francis, who skilfully mines the history of his own profession, and his travels, or Kathleen Jamie, who brings a poet’s eye to the everyday and transforms it. But there’s another brand of essayist – the enthusiast.

Matthew Green is one such. He’s an historian. He’s also founder of Unreal City Audio, which produces “immersive tours of London as live events, podcasts and apps”. So don’t expect a treatise from him; he’s a breathless character in his own essays who sips cider in deserted village pubs and muses on ruined remains where flies “doodle away”. He wants to “make the past live vividly”. He also wants to alert us to the fragile nature of community, the poignancy of maps, which are anything but constant: on the contrary, they chart loss.