Down in the Valley: A Writer’s Landscape, Laurie Lee, Penguin, 2019 Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie (1959) is a classic of English rural writing, lauded for its evocation of Gloucestershire’s Slad Valley in the early 20th century, and the last days of an intensely-experienced, millennium-old way of life. This slender but well-conceived volume revisits some… Continue reading
Posts Tagged → Country Life
A Home Counties St George
Hollow Places – An Unusual History of Land and Legend Christopher Hadley, William Collins, £20 Early one 1830s morning, workmen were uprooting an ancient yew near Brent Pelham in Hertfordshire when the tree fell unexpectedly – exposing a huge cavity, and evoking superstitions of ‘Piers Shonks’, who slew a dragon and defied the Devil. So… Continue reading
Spirit guide
Ghostland, Edward Parnell, London: William Collins; 2019, £16.99 ‘Always the ghosts’, Edward Parnell remembers, looking back over his Lincolnshire childhood. After the daydreaming 1960s, the sudden uncertainty of the 1970s manifested itself in bitter tension and a fascination with all things folkloric and paranormal. Into an unsettling world of candle-lit houses and angry political noises… Continue reading
New Country Life and Quadrant reviews…
The 30th October issue of Country Life carries my review of Edward Parnell’s Ghostland – British eeriness seen through a deeply personal prism. Perfect reading for the season (or any other time). The November issue of Australia’s renowned Quadrant carries my jumbo review of Philip Mansel’s brilliant Louis XIV biography, King of the World. Really… Continue reading
Territorial waters
The Way to the Sea Caroline Crampton, Granta, £16.99 The Frayed Atlantic Edge David Gange, William Collins, £18.99 Seawater pulses through the veins of our islands, the tang of open water reaching to the furthest points inland. Insularity has always been our destiny, determining daily life and deepest meanings even before Albion loomed out of… Continue reading
A million acres, six thousand years
The Fens – Discovering England’s Hidden Depths Francis Pryor, Head of Zeus, £25 ‘Very flat, Norfolk’ drawls a character in Noel Coward’s Private Lives – a supercilious condemnation of another character, and by inference all eastern England. Francis Pryor proves that while the Fens may be level, their gentle undulations and cubist planes hold stories… Continue reading
New review – The Way to the Sea by Caroline Crampton and The Frayed Atlantic Edge by David Gange
Latest review The latest (10th July) Country Life contains my combined review of two absorbing books on watery themes – Caroline Crampton’s The Way to the Sea: Forgotten Histories of the Thames, her source-to-sea account of London’s river, and David Gange’s The Frayed Atlantic Edge, his account of a kayaking trip from Shetland to Cornwall
Time Song by Julia Blackburn
DOGGERLAND DREAMTIME Time Song, Julia Blackburn, Vintage, £25 Something in East Anglia encourages spectral visions, deep thoughts about time. The 14th-century seer Julian of Norwich dreamed of submarine realms, going …downe into the see-ground, and there I saw hill and dalis green, semand as it were moss-begrowne, with wrekke and gravel. In 1658, Sir Thomas Browne published… Continue reading
Animal: Exploring the Zoological World – introduction by James Hanken
A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BESTIARY Animal: Exploring the Zoological World Introduction by James Hanken, London: Phaidon, 2018, hb., 352 pages, £39.95 Any volume examining ‘humankind’s fascination with animals’ can only hope to be a conspectus, but Animal is unusually ambitious and thoughtful, handsomely produced and with an introduction by a Harvard zoologist. It ranges far and… Continue reading
My Country Life review of Animal: Exploring the Zoological World
The 7 November issue of Country Life carries my short review of Animal: Exploring the Zoological World (introduction by James Hanken, published by Phaidon) – “Animal captures admirably two interlocking intoxications: the thrill of ever-expanding zoological knowledge and the sheer joy of looking at animals, which look right back and into us in challenge and… Continue reading