Philip Hoare

Philip Hoare (born in 1958) is a British essayist, author of non-fiction books, film-maker, and curator. His 2008 book Leviathan, or the Whale won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize, now named the Baillie Gifford Prize Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Quotes This fascination with the whale, like Philip Brannon’s report from Southampton Water, was an expression of Victorian fashion, a characteristic marriage of ingenious science and human curiosity. In England, live whales were delivered to aquaria in Manchester and Blackpool (although one porpoise show was closed, for fear the flagrant activities of its performers should offend genteel dispositions), and in September 1877 a beluga whale arrived in Westminster, in the centre of the world's greatest city. The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea Harper Collins 2010 978-0-06-197621-6 https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Whale.html?id=y2zXTivayCQC&pg=PA12 12–13 (1st edition published in 2008 by 4th Estate in London) Behind me, bare oaks and beeches lie as cracks against the sky, evoking a peculiarly English landscape. In the late eighteenth century, J. M. W. Turner Turner drew the abbey's ruins in his sketchbook, tracing out the trees that had grown up around the crumbling gothic arches. In 1816 John Constable stayed at Netley on his honeymoon, and painted its scudding clouds and billowing scenery. Theirs were records of a Romantic setting, an alternative reality of sensation and emotion. Hanging over the shore, the gnarled, enamelled branches are made darker by the reflected light of the sea and the stretch of bright shingle, The Sea Inside Melville House 2014 9781612193595 https://books.google.com/books?id=i8CJDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA15 15–16 (374 pages; 1st edition published in 2013 by 4th Estate in London) Quotes about Philip Hoare Hoare's Leviathan is part natural history, part literary criticism, part economics and part memoir but at its heart is the author's lifelong obsession for all things whale. ...He traces his love of whales to reading Moby-Dick and vividly recalls his first actual encounter with a Orca killer whale at Windsor Safari Park Windsor safari park. Hoare now frequently travels to Cape Cod as a volunteer on a humpback whale identification programme. Mark Brown, 'Classic' study of whales wins Samuel Johnson prize 30 June 2009 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/30/whales-wins-samuel-johnson-prize … He moves from personal to literary history with muscular seamlessness (much as he did in the earlier books). We leap from Melville to Robert Louis Stevenson to the inevitable Byron; from Elizabeth Barrett Browning – “Kate Bush in crinoline” – to Sylvia Plath to Virginia Woolf. There are passages about Oscar Wilde and Stephen Tennant, both of whom Hoare addressed in earlier, rather lighter-hearted biographies. There’s some lovely stuff on Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen – “he looks like a boy you knew at school”. …… RisingTideFallingStar is about the author’s relationship to the sea, but then that could be said about both Leviathan and The Sea Inside. What changes with each subsequent book is that the authorial gaze becomes increasingly inward and self-revealing, the tone more forlorn, until some passages in RisingTideFallingStar attain an almost posthumous air, as if the book might also serve as a suicide note. Alex Preston (author) Alex Preston, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/17/risingtidefallingstar-philip-hoare-review The Guardian Review: RisingTideFallingStar by Philip Hoare review – a love of the ocean wave 17 July 2017 External links Category:1958 births Category:Living people Category:Academics from England Category:Biographers from England Category:Catholics from England Category:Essayists from England Category:Non-fiction authors from England