you're listening to a London Review of Books podcast

well thank you all for coming on what is such a beautiful afternoon so I

really do I really do appreciate it.

Wilding, the very name has gained resonance in our era of cybernetic liquid modernity.

Wilding and rewilding have entered the public arena as hopes, ambitions, possibilities.

These new gerons have risen to convey the need to reconnect with the palpable world,

to rekindle in ourselves sparks of energy from nature, from that ambiguous, elusive place that holds our dreams. This festival reawakens our memories of an

activist, a woman, Emily Wilding Davison, who many of the journalists and commentators on her

death a hundred years ago have complained has been forgotten. But she is less forgotten than actually

misunderstood, as I'll try and show. As we are being

spurred to rewild our ways of being in the world by writers about place, bodies, understanding,

and survival, the suffragette who died of injuries she suffered after she was trampled by King George V's cult, Anmar, in the Derby at Epsum in 1913,

also conducts us by nominal coincidence towards this topical ideal to rewild ourselves.

But there are wider and deeper vibrations between remembering Emily Wilding

David Davidson now and refreshing our communal and personal energies, and they provoke many questions,

which I shall only be able to put, not answer. In this talk, I'm not perhaps going to please you or please you all. An audience

gathered to commemorate Emily Wilding-Davidson, though I hope some of you share my confusion.

Her story and her character are not so much the source of my misgivings. She was ingenious and very courageous.

She had a spirit of adventure and was gallant and singular and often brilliant.

But I want to cry out against the necessity to hallow a cause by blood sacrifice.

There must be another way of consecrating an ideal rather than this.

Can there be? Martyrdom seems as old as Homo sapiens,

...