“Maybe I’d been stupid in approaching an active ­volcano as quickly as I did,” Cal Flyn confesses. To write about some of the remotest places in the world for The Savage Landscape, her new book exploring the place wilderness occupies in our cultural imagination, she felt it was crucial to travel to them herself, no matter how hard it would be to get there.

“As much as it’s a natural history, it’s also a history of an emotion – of this sublime response that we have to place. I felt strongly that I had to feel it, or else it would be entirely abstract.” Fear, for Flyn, is an intrinsic element of the sublime: “It’s what we’re looking for.” The book delves into the history of nature ­conservation, showing how closely it’s ­interwoven with aesthetic and cultural ­priorities that arose from the post-industrial urge to transcend the human.

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