Robert Macfarlane

Macfarlane teaches at Cambridge and writes about landscape by walking through it, usually alongside people who know it better than he does. Underland goes downward instead: catacombs under Paris, a nuclear waste repository in Finland, glacial moulins in Greenland, and the question of what this century is leaving buried. Landmarks gathers the local words for weather and terrain that were dropping out of dictionaries. The Lost Words, made with the artist Jackie Morris, answered a children's dictionary that had quietly removed acorn, bluebell and kingfisher.