Monthly Archives: October 2015

Conduct unbecoming Mark Cocker — Part 2

We have re-read Mark Cocker’s article in the New Statesman 17/06/2015, and there seems little doubt that he wrote it partly with the intention of slighting Robert Macfarlane: as to a possible motive, we touched on this in our previous post.

As well as the points we had already noted we saw that a photograph was captioned ‘Wild thing: Robert Macfarlane, the genre’s figurehead, has been criticised for being an excursionist.’ Is this really so? By whom, we wonder? What is certain is that as Mark Cocker had written somewhat pejoratively about the ‘New Nature Writers’ — in itself a phrase well over-used — yet it was to this ‘genre’ that he referred in his caption and to further state that Robert Macfarlane had been ‘criticised’ as an excursionist seemed disingenuous; even spiteful. Continue reading