Cal Flyn’s The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness (William Collins, £20), which I’ve mentioned a few times here, was among books reviewed in the May edition of the Literary Review. Guy Stagg says Flyn is “a courageous and thoughtful guide” and her book is full of “lyrical descriptive writing”, but he wishes she had said more about what effect the places she visited had on her.

Peter Fiennes’s En Route: A Journey Round France in the Company of Great Writers (Oneworld, £18.99), was reviewed by Adrian Tahourdin, who found it an “engaging and well-researched” tour, by a man with “a sharp eye for character”.

Sicily features in two books by seasoned Italophiles reviewed by Jonathan Keates: Helena Attlee’s The Fire in the Mountain (Particular Books, £25), about life around the volcano Mount Etna, and Tim Parks’s Across Sicily with Garibaldi’s Thousand: An Adventure in Landscape and Memory (Alma Books, £20). The latter is Parks’s second outing in the footsteps of the Italian revolutionary, following The Hero’s Way, in which he tracked Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna. Keates says “The tireless curiosity Attlee shows in roaming across her mountain is matched by those many graces of style typical of her writing in earlier books.” Parks’s book is “a superbly paced narrative” by “one of the beadiest contemporary commentators on his adopted country’s identity”.

In the Times Literary Supplement, Robert Moor’s In Trees (Viking, £20) is reviewed by Charles Foster, who says it’s a “splendid” book. Moor “doesn’t anthropomorphise trees, but seeks to arborise us”. He is “incapable of writing a dull, thoughtless or inelegant sentence”, and his book is “a sage, companionable and fulgent meditation on how best to be human”.

Also in the TLS, Robert Mayhew reviews Andrea Wulf’s The Traveller (Allen Lane, £30), her biography of the 18th-century German explorer, writer and revolutionary George Forster. “The great achievement of The Traveller,” Mayhew says, “is to make Forster resonate with the present day. What remains frustratingly elusive is an understanding of how he came to be the traveller, thinker and humanitarian who is able to do so.”
Peter Moore, in June’s Literary Review, has no such reservations about a book he finds “irresistible”. “In this lucent, affectionate retelling of his life, Andrea Wulf makes a convincing case for George as a thinker who has too long been dismissed or ignored.”