“The North for greatness”

Lancashire: Exploring the Historic County that made the Modern World Chris Moss, London: Old Street, 2026, hb., 364pps., £25 In his classic 1902-1904 Collecteana, folklorist Vincent Stuckey Lean cites a proverb which has since passed into cliché – “Lancashire thinks today what all England will think tomorrow”. Travel writer Chris Moss’s task in this highly… Continue reading

Sent from Coventry

SENT FROM COVENTRY Fragments of angels, segments of saints, pieces of people, broken birds, refracted sunbeams, tumbled landscapes, jumbled inscriptions, unidentifiable blocks of time-worn colour—I looked for a long time at the medieval glass so carefully but meaninglessly re-set in Holy Trinity church beside the Cathedral at Coventry. These disjecta membra of former didactic decorations spoke… Continue reading