There’s a tendency to think of great artists being inspired by the muse, sitting down at a desk with reams of blank paper before them, then pouring out pure originality from their imaginations.

In reality it doesn’t often work like that. Not for the greats, at any rate: Shakespeare never came up with a story in his life (even The Tempest is derived from other sources), Herman Melville based Moby Dick on a real-life albino whale, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy was Tolkien’s mash-up of Anglo-Saxon sagas, his research into linguistics, and the trenches of the First World War.

As for JM Barrie’s Peter Pan? That was inspired by his neighbour’s children, his dog, and the spectacularly unspoilt landscape of the Surrey Hills. And the house where Peter Pan, Wendy and the Lost Boys came together in his head is now for sale: Barrie House, a part of Lobswood Manor — formerly known as Black Lake Cottage — is on the market with Savills at £1.25 million.

Barrie had been born in Scotland, but by 1900 was a successful playwright living in Kensington with his wife, next door to the Llewelyn-Davies family and their three children, George, Jack and Peter.

That year, Barrie's wife, the actress Mary Ansell, decided to lease a summer retreat called Black Lake Cottage, on the outskirts of the village of Tilford, close to Farnham. The Barries would have the place for eight years, and the Llewelyn-Davieses were invited to come regularly — an offer which they happily took up.

The three boys threw themselves in to this bucolic spot which, then as now, is a vast landscape of hills, woodland, lakes and rivers. Their roaming and games inspired Barrie, who created a photo book called The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island, featuring the three boys and Barrie’s dog, a placid and endlessly-patient St Bernard (sound familiar?). He also began to spin tales of how the youngest brother, Peter, somehow knew how to fly, and Peter Pan was born.

Barrie didn’t publish the photo book (a copy does still survive, and can be seen at JM Barrie website), but it wasn’t long before Peter Pan was shared with the world — initially in the 1902 novel The Little White Bird, and then two years later with the stage play Peter Pan, which was an instant and enormous success. A plaque adorns the front of the house, commemorating its pivotal role in one of the most enduring literary creations of the 20th century.

Black Lake Cottage came to be renamed as Lobswood Manor, and was split into three separate homes back in the 1970s, but the wing that is now for sale, Barrie House, forms the front portion of the building, and is full of charming, original features that Barrie would surely recognise were he to walk in today.

Take the fireplace in the sitting room, for example: its huge inglenook fireplace is framed by a carved timber which is believed to have been sourced from a 16th century shipwreck.

The ground floor has the aforementioned sitting room, a dining room and a huge kitchen-diner, with french doors opening onto the magical gardens — gardens which Mary Ansell herself created, and wrote a book about (copies of The Happy Garden remain prized today) while her husband stayed indoors working on his writing. (If that makes their life sound idyllic, it shouldn't: the couple divorced after Mary had an affair, while the Llewelyn-Davies boys would be orphaned in 1910, when their mother Sylvia died of cancer.)

One of the four bedrooms, with its own bathroom, is on the ground floor, with the others all on the first floor, and all en-suite.

There's also a cellar and a garage, and a separate one-bedroom annexe bringing the space here to well over 3,000sq ft in total. The annexe, separated from the main house by a stud wall, could easily be reincorporated to the main house; it could make an ideal part of a multi-generational living set-up; or you could just use it as a writer's retreat from which to create your own enduring story.

Barrie House, within Lobswood Manor, is for sale via Savills — see more details.

Sally Raikes sits in the library with a manuscript copy of the Bible bound in three large volumes. As a note in the front of the first explains, they were ‘The gift of Elizabeth Armstrong to her grandchildren, written by herself’.

The same hand has added the date ‘1823’ with a different pen and continued: ‘To be given to Robert Raikes my grandson when Thomas Raikes (my son in law) pleases to part with them.’

It proved an appropriate gift. Robert was a wealthy young man from a Yorkshire family who fell under the High Church spell of John Henry Newman and John Keble when at Oxford in the 1830s and became a Tractarian. He and his wife, Frances, purchased the Treberfydd estate in the 1840s, and, with Gothic Revival architect John Loughborough Pearson, rebuilt the local church, established a school and created a new house for themselves.

The text is written in an even copperplate hand and — presumably to make it palatable to children — punctuated with engraved illustrations taken from other books. Compiling the manuscript must have been a massive task.

‘These volumes are a physical expression of the High Church spirit that brought my great-great great-grandfather here and created the house,’ says Sally.

‘It is interesting that his namesake and kinsman, Robert Raikes, was the founder of the Sunday School Movement.’ 


See more about the house at the Treberfydd website. 


This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The River Tamar that forms the Devon-Cornwall border comes within four miles of making Cornwall an island. In and around the Scottish Borders, many people define themselves as Bordermen first, and Scottish or English second. And the the great medieval border created in the years of Danelaw both split Britain, and lives on today as one of the biggest roads in the country.

These are just a few of the fascinating tales woven together by Richard Collett as he talks to James Fisher in this utterly fascinating episode of the Country Life Podcast.

Yes, a border is a line on a map — but it's also a state of mind, with many of the lines that divide us, define us and even unite us taking on very different meanings depending on where you live.

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Richard Collett has spent years travelling Britain and talking to people throughout the land about our borders, where they come from, and what they mean — and the result is a fascinating book, Along the Borders: In search of what divides and unites the British Isles.

The book is published in April 2026 by Penguin — you can pre-order a copy here — and we can't recommend it enough, if only to read the tale of the English sailor who got shipwrecked on Shetland, and has now spent decades fighting for its recognition as an independent country.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Richard Collett

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Novelist, biographer, journalist and writer Justine Picardie joins the Country Life Podcast to talk about her life in fashion and journalism, her writing, and her close encounters with the Royal Family — including the day she found herself in a remote Scottish bothy, helping the late Queen Elizabeth II clean up after lunch.

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Justine's also talks about her latest book, Fashioning The Crown (Faber, £25), which is published on February 26, 2026 — you can order a copy here.

In the research and writing, she was afforded extraordinary access to the Royal Archives, including the Queen's wardrobe itself — and Justine shares with James some of the most extraordinary insights, including her timeless style, her practicality, and her savvy adoption of bright colours as colour television became widespread. Many of the outfits she wore 'would have looked as perfect today as they would have 100 years ago,' Justine says.

It's a fascinating episode — we hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed recording it.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher
Guest: Justine Picardie
Editor and producer: Toby Keel
Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

I spent what feels like eight years studying Wuthering Heights.

It probably wasn't eight years; actually, definitely not, because it was one of my set texts for A-level English. It merely felt that long because I hated the entire thing. The characters, the setting, the language... the whole lot.

You might think that means I'm not excited by the prospect of the new Wuthering Heights film adaptation, but you'd be wrong.

I've not seen it yet, but by all accounts it does everything it can to take the best ingredients (Sex! Death! Adorable old houses! The Moors!), skate over the boring bits (everything else), and wrap it up in a movie that sounds like a sort of Inglorious Basterds treatment of Emily Brontë. And the best bit? I'll be able to watch the whole trashy mess in a fraction of the time it'd take to read a single chapter of Nelly warbling on about the Earnshaws and the Lintons.

So while the book itself did its best to turn me off going to live in a remote Yorkshire farmhouse, the film has turned me back on to it — and I don't think I'll be alone in that. So here, for those of us who find themselves pining for an existence that ends with their lifeless body being dug up by a crazed former lover*, is our pick of the best Wuthering Heights-worthy farmhouses for sale across Britain right now.

North Yorkshire — £3.15 million

Let's start this look at Wuthering Houses with this absolute beauty of a place which is, at first glance, almost too beautiful to be part of the Brontë world. Built in 1716, Hornby Grange is a six-bedroom house near Northallerton that's set in 20 acres of grounds, with wonderful views of the North Yorks Moors.

Inside, the place is quirky in a very Wuthering way, from the charmingly old-school hallway to a magnificently Gothic home office, complete with wood panelling and a suit of armour in one corner. You can almost picture Nelly coming in and stoking the open fire with another scoop of coal.

Hornby Grange is for sale at £3.15 million through Knight Frank — see more details.

North Yorkshire — £735,000

The classic stone-built house, the slate roof, the backdrop of hills... This house in Upper Niddderdale is the absolute epitome of the Yorkshire farmhouse, and it even dates to the era of Wuthering Heights: it was around half a century old when the book was published.

There's good news for those who want a touch of Brontë romanticism without actually having to rough it too much: the place is gorgeously refurbished inside, with a nicely-balanced blend of old and new.

This property is technically a leasehold, but with 10,000 years left on that lease — coincidentally, the same number of years that it took me to wade through Wuthering Heights.

For sale at £735,000 via Hopkinsons Estate Agents — see more details.

Yorkshire Dales — £725,000

Now this is the sort of view that film-makers dream of when green-lighting the 83rd screen adaptation of Victorian novels. This remote farmhouse is tucked away in a narrow valley between the villages of Dent and Cowgill in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

It's a way off to the north of the old Brontë home at Haworth, but in every other respect this four-bedroom place could be lifted from the pages of the original novel. Beamed ceilings, thick walls, low doorways and huge stone fireplaces in pretty much every room add all the character you could wish for.

As well as the generous gardens and high-speed internet (an unexpected surprise, half-way up Dentdale) there's another bonus: planning permission to convert the barn. Could you turn it into a Brontë tribute holiday home? Why yes, we think you could.

For sale at £725,000 via Fisher Hopper — see more details.

West Yorkshire — £895,000

Finally, we head into West Yorkshire, just a few miles from Brontë Ground Zero at the parsonage in Haworth. And what a find we've made there: Upper Saltonstall, a magical old house, built in 1604, and in the sort of location which will probably make Wuthering Heights's producers kick themselves for not having used the place in the film.

Not only is the setting perfect, everything about the place inside screams 'Wuthering Heights': the ancient stone floors, the wooden panelling, the exposed stonework and beams, the original doors and doorways. This is it. This is Wuthering Heights.

Except, since it's 2025 and not 1847, it's Wuthering Heights with hot water, electricity, 1800Mbps broadband, a decent mobile phone signal, bathrooms swish enough to grace a decent hotel, an Aga in the kitchen and a double-garage.

In other words, it's a house that is a perfect mash-up of Gothic fantasy and post-industrial consumerism. Just like the film, in fact. What a place it would be to live.

For sale at £895,000 via Charnock Bates — see more details.

*Apparently, the director left this bit out of the film. Which is like leaving the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy out of Hamlet. Madness.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve picked up The Rosie Project, yet every re-read feels just as funny and moving as the first.

The story follows Don Tillman, a genetics professor who designs a questionnaire to find the perfect partner. What keeps me coming back? Don. Sharp, hilarious, tender, and entirely different from the usual bachelor you find in rom-coms.

It’s a book with that rare ability to make you feel almost every emotion at some point, while connecting you so deeply to the characters that they feel like old friends you feel fiercely protective of. At the same time, it’s the only book that’s ever made me chuckle, snort and weep — in public, on the Tube, no less (a cardinal sin in London etiquette). I’ll recommend it to anyone and everyone who’ll listen.

Flo Allen, Social Media Editor

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

I first read this as a teenager and was open-mouthed at the sharp satire and the normalising of deep eccentricity and moved by its exposure of human frailty and its final pathos. This was no fairytale ending and when I realised it was semi-autobiographical it impressed upon me that, although things don't always work out, life is what you make of it.

Some images — the 'little houseless match' and Louisa making the best of dancing with an older man whose hair was receding like 'an eiderdown slipping off the bed' — have stayed with me forever.

Kate Green, Deputy Editor

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

This was the first library book I returned late. It wasn’t tardiness, but a need to read it again straight away, accepting the 5p fine that was my (poor nana’s) fate.

It is beautifully written — understandable without being simple— and has a magical story that transfixes readers of every age. At its heart is its understanding of the beauty of Nature and Nature’s ability to transform. You can feel Mary, the central character, changing, chapter by chapter, with each visit to the secret garden. The threads of thought she formed in her previous life slowly disintegrate, becoming compost for her new self to grow from.

It is a book that proves that with a little tenderness, barren can become bountiful, be it a secret garden or a sickly child. It also proves that time spent in the garden can soften anyone’s edges.

Amie Elizabeth White, Acting Luxury Editor

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.’ Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard has often been reduced to one celebrated sentence, an almost Darwinian impulse to adapt in order to survive — so much so that an entire political doctrine, the Lampedusa principle, takes its name after the author. Yet, return to the book and there are many, deeper layers to it, which become more evident or poignant at later reads (and life stages).

Yes, it has a political message — although arguably, it suggests the opposite, that collapse is inevitable for the aristocracy, powerless when confronted with history, as well as, at a time of resurgent nationalism, lifting the veil on the realities of forging a nation and how there is nothing natural about the process. But this is also a novel about an island, Sicily, and its people, so trapped by their past and their culture that they are unable to change even if it means remaining forever steeped in their own misery. It’s about the solace of beauty (of women, but also landscapes and buildings) and the staleness of certain marriages (‘Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty’). And perhaps, above all, it’s about the human condition. Mankind is drunk on self-importance, deluded with its own centrality, yet cannot escape its destiny: death and irrelevance. ‘We were the leopards, the lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, leopards, jackals and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth’.

Carla Passino, Arts & Antiques Editor

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

I always find something new in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. It is a book that I first read at school and which became the subject of my degree dissertation and an obsession of my adult life. It is desperately sad and bitingly funny.

The unusual bildungsroman charts the protagonist’s realisation that she is gay while living with her Pentecostal adoptive mother, who is ‘Old Testament through and through’ and ‘deeply resentful Mary had beaten her to a Virgin birth’. Interwoven with fairy tales, it is a thoughtful novel that unravels like a coil of orange peel, always leaving you hungry for more. Based on many elements of Winterson's own upbringing, you’d be forgiven for assuming Oranges was autobiographical. Winterson’s reply to that very question was: ‘Not at all and yes of course.’ However, she did name her main character Jeanette.

Lotte Brundle, Digital Writer

The World is Not Enough by Zoe Oldenbourg

Zoe Oldenburg was born in St Petersburg in 1916, emigrated to Paris in 1925, and came to England in 1938 to study theology. In Paris, again, she lived as a painter, writing in her spare time. This was her first book — an instant success when it appeared (as Argile in France, 1946) and I first read it, at my father’s suggestion, as a bored teenager on holiday in Wales. I barely left my reading nest on the sofa. I read it again when my children were small, snatching quiet moments to escape to 12th century France and the forthcoming marriage between 14 year old Alis of Puiseaux and the even younger Ansiau, grandson of Galon the Hairy of Linnieres. The Third Crusade, a love story, adventure… Oldenburg draws one in. The writing is faultless, the descriptions utterly convincing. It is the perfect antidote to the modern world.

Tiffany Daneff, Gardens Editor

In Memoriam by Alice Winn

I’ve never truly understood the concept of being haunted by a book, until I read In Memoriam by Alice Winn. Her debut novel is both a visceral description of frontline horror and a poetic and heart-wrenching tale of forbidden love. It is 1914 and Henrich Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood — children ardent for some desperate glory — lie about their age to enlist. As the memory of their idyllic English boarding school life is replaced by the brutal reality of the trenches, it’s impossible not to be entirely consumed by their will they/won’t they romance.

I wept my way through this book on first read, and it still sends shivers down my spine just thinking about the tragedies which unfold. A poignant reflection of the loss of innocence and the complexities of life, this novel is also a testament to true love, which transcends all physical superficiality.

Agnes Stamp, Acting Deputy Features Editor

Bridget Jones' Diary, by Helen Fielding

The two books to which I return time and again seem to encompass the two sides of my personality. On the one hand is a novel about a family's cultural and intellectual inheritance, by a writer prone to snobbery and overthinking (Experience, by Martin Amis). On the other is a satire about a well-intentioned Londoner who makes too many mistakes.

Helen Fielding first wrote Bridget Jones’ Diary not as a novel but as a column. The Independent had asked her to write about single life in London — an offer she deemed too exposing — and so the character that would become a byword for hopeless romantics was born. Of course, Bridget is so much more than that: she is a producer and reporter (albeit, one whose first ever appearance on live television involved bearing her knickers while sliding down a fireman's pole), a fierce friend and a daughter to unfortunately complicated parents. She is also a modern-day Elizabeth Bennett — Fielding based her plot on that of Pride and Prejudice — and, if the soundtrack to the film adaptation is to be believed, 'every woman', too.

The original novel, published in 1996, still feels as funny and refreshing as it did when it first hit shelves, skewering a culture in which lads ruled and women's magazines told readers to watch their weight. Humble brag, but I have a knack for remembering quotes — being forced to learn poems off by heart in primary school will do that to a person — and still cannot find a book more eminently quotable than this one. Sorry, Shakespeare.

It helps, of course, that I have read it at least five or six times. But it is, more importantly, a tribute to Fielding and the fact that she brought phrases like 'emotional f**kwit' into the vernacular.

Will Hosie, Lifestyle Editor

Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

It’s a delightful love story. Within the embrace of Blandings Castle the cares and concerns of the world are firmly shut out and a cast of gentle characters battle against the wit of Lord Emsworth's secretary, the 'efficient' Baxter, surely the least threatening villain ever invented. Wodehouse's ability to turn a hilarious phrase never fails to amaze.

John Goodall, Architectural Editor

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Far be it from me to compare myself to the New Yorker columnist Rivka Galchen, but we have both always been drawn to what she described in a recent essay as 'worlds in which catastrophes are reliably headed off'.

There is no more reliable disaster-averter on my bookshelf than Flora Poste, who goes to stay with distant relatives in Howling, a squalid (fictional) corner of Sussex, between the wars. The Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, who she takes it upon herself to drag screaming into the 20th century, are a note-perfect send-up of the sorts of overwrought rustics that London intellectuals were writing at the time: Lawrentian lothario Seth, Urk and his voles, Aunt Ada Doom menacingly brandishing a copy of The Milk Producers’ Weekly Bulletin and Cowkeepers Guide, Adam who sleeps outside and does the washing up with a twig... And, of course Big Business the bull, confined to a shed to stop him getting at Graceless, Aimless, Feckless and Pointless. My shoulders are shaking just writing this.

Emma Hughes, Acting Assistant Features Editor

It might be true that you can't judge a book by its cover, but the front of Adrian Tinniswood's wonderful The Houses of Guinness (Batsford, £30) does a wonderful job of foreshadowing what lies within. Showing an impending storm over Kenwood House on its thunderous cover, it's as darkly rich and creamy as the eponymous porter, and a perfect match for the tales told. For this is the real-life Irish version of Succession or, more precisely, Netflix’s current historical drama, House of Guinness.

The Houses of Guinness is a compelling story of the family that became the biggest exporter of stout in the world — James Joyce’s ‘foaming ebon ale’. From 1759, at the brewery on James’s Street, Dublin, to 1997, when the firm came to an end, Tinniswood tracks the business through the men who ran it and the houses they bought, built from scratch or remodelled.

Thirteen properties feature, most in Ireland, with England represented by Kenwood House in London, Kelvedon Hall in Essex, Elveden Hall in Suffolk and Biddesden House, Hampshire, plus an ‘interlude’ on churches. The houses are stage sets for the extravagant lifestyles of the Guinnesses and the sumptuous entertainments they held. The dextrous marshalling of such a privileged cast of characters, setting them within their social and cultural milieus and revelling in their extraordinary lives is this author’s forte.

At St Anne’s, just outside Dublin, Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness and his brother, Arthur, bought the house together in 1835 and extended it to give the property a more castle-like appearance. Arthur spent more time in his town house at St James’s Gate, but Benjamin Lee and his wife, Elizabeth, established themselves as Dublin society’s leading couple, Benjamin Lee becoming Ireland’s first millionaire.

They bought No 80, St Stephen’s Green in Dublin and a shooting lodge in Co Mayo. At St Anne’s, they created incident-packed gardens with a hermitage, several grottos, a ‘Druidic circle’ of basaltic rocks and a Herculaneum villa. It was Benjamin’s son, Sir Arthur, who gave St Stephen’s Green to the nation — the family was noted for its philanthropy — and transformed St Anne’s into a huge Italianate mansion.

Sir Arthur also turned Ashford Castle on the shore of Lough Corrib into one of the great Irish country houses. He and his wife, Olivia, entertained lavishly in their fantasy castle, holding banquets, house parties, balls and shooting weekends.

One of many highlights in the book is the 1881 costume ball thrown by Lord and Lady Iveagh at No 80, St Stephen’s Green. Edward Cecil Guinness, Benjamin Lee’s son, had inherited the property in 1868 and turned it into a colossal house, dripping with onyx, marble and alabaster. For the ball, the staircases and passageways were filled with ferns and palms; there were ‘Chinese mandarins and cavaliers, matadors and Elizabethans and powdered ladies of the ancien régime’.

Adelaide’s dinners were crowded affairs, so diners, having to sit elbow to elbow, would take it in turns to eat. William Orpen’s visit to paint Lord Iveagh’s portrait at Farmleigh was a hoot. He sat in terror in the newfangled, chauffeur driven motor car that had picked him up and had to re-paint the portrait because the consensus was that the chin was too long and the head too big.

In England, Edward Cecil bought Elveden Hall in Suffolk, with its Mughal interiors, as a base for shooting parties, doubling it in size. In 1919, he was created Earl of Iveagh and Viscount Elveden and, in 1924, bought Kenwood, ensuring that it would be made available to the public, either in 10 years or at his death.

The Guinness influence in the interwar years was most keenly felt at Biddesden. Lord Iveagh’s grandson, Bryan Guinness, married to Diana Mitford, moved into the serene Queen Anne house in 1931, where they entertained artists and writers — Evelyn Waugh, Augustus John, Aldous Huxley — built a domed bathing pavilion decorated with mosaics by Boris Anrep and gave safe harbour to John Betjeman after he had been jilted by Penelope Chetwode. Roland Pym was commissioned to paint delightful trompe l’oeils for the blind windows on the east front.

For the 1960s, it was Luggala, Co Wicklow, where, at Tara Browne’s 21st-birthday party, The Lovin’ Spoonful performed and Brian Jones dropped acid for most of the weekend. The book is full of such stories and no better tribute could be given than that by the current Lord Iveagh, who writes in the foreword that this is ‘an entertaining masterpiece’ in which the ‘essential character of the Guinness family spirit prevails’.

The Houses of Guinness is out now (Batsford, £30).

'A faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.’ Thus C. S. Lewis inventoried the starting point of what would become the best loved of his novels for children, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published 75 years ago.

The novel’s inspiration, Lewis claimed, also included an image — clear in his imagination since his teenage years — of ‘parcels in a snowy wood’. From these vivid shards emerged the first of what Roger Lancelyn Green (like Lewis, a member of the Oxford literary group known as the Inklings) collectively labelled ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’: stories of good versus evil, rich in symbolism, set in an imaginary world of magic and talking animals.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe even featured Father Christmas, ‘a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as hollyberries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest’. In Lewis’s Narnian fantasy world, Father Christmas is ‘so big, and so glad, and’ — most of all — ‘so real’; he inspires ‘a deep shiver of gladness’ in the children he encounters. Appropriately for a novel set in the English countryside amid the privations of the Second World War, he brings to Lucy, Susan, Peter and Mr and Mrs Beaver ‘a large tray containing five cups and saucers, a bowl of lump sugar, a jug of cream, and a great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot’, everyday luxuries mostly absent from wartime childhoods. As much as anything, it is a story about the return of Christmas to a land from which festivities have been banished during a century of winter. The return of hope, love, kindness and joy.

Described on publication as ‘a kind of modern fairy tale about four children evacuated to an old house in the country during the war’, the novel at first inspired mixed reactions. Fantasy had not hitherto been among Lewis’s stock in trade. For more than two decades a fellow of Oxford’s Magdalen College, the 50-something academic, who later became a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, had achieved widespread renown for a series of broadcasts about Christianity. These were made during the Second World War and later published in a trilogy of volumes that included 1943’s Christian Behaviour.

One early reviewer of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe described Lewis as ‘the author of profound works on theology’ and suggested that, in writing for children, he had ‘taken a holiday’. Lewis himself described a prevalent view that children would be unsettled by the life-and-death struggle of good versus evil at the heart of the novel as a hindrance to its initial popularity. In a letter of March 5, 1951, six months after publication, he noted that ‘a number of mothers and, still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well’. Accurately, he pointed out, ‘real children like it… I think it frightens some adults, but very few children’.

‘Real’ children, of course, soon decided the novel’s fate, whatever the misgivings of mothers and schoolmistresses, and the reviewer’s claim that Lewis’s ‘little book may well become a children’s classic’ was swiftly realised. Sales built steadily and continued to for the rest of the decade. Between 1950 and 1956, Lewis published six other ‘Narnia’ stories, culminating with The Last Battle, which won the Carnegie Medal. Winter issues of The Bookseller typically carried an advertisement for which the wording did not change. Lewis’s ‘Narnia’ stories, the advertisements suggested, were ‘always in demand at Christmas’, as they have remained — and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe most of all.

It’s easy to see why. Like Mary Norton’s ‘Borrowers’ stories and the ‘Green Knowe’ novels of Lucy M. Boston, which were also first published in the 1950s, Lewis’s novel begins in ‘the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of… full of unexpected places’; a house belonging to an elderly professor, ‘large and complicated and full of hiding places’.

Among these hiding places is the wardrobe of the novel’s title. Through it, arms stretched out in front of her, Lucy — the youngest and most engaging of the four Pevensie siblings — takes two or three steps beyond a second row of coats and finds herself ‘standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air’. Ahead lies a lamppost, a ‘very strange person’ (shortly revealed as Mr Tumnus the faun) and a fantastical world of mystery and adventure. ‘I can always get back if anything goes wrong,’ Lucy tells herself.

As in the best childhood reveries, the action of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe shapes all four children for the remainder of their lives, long after they have safely returned through the wardrobe — its imprint stronger than their belief in magic, which fades with the cynicism of adulthood. In 1956, the Manchester Guardian claimed that Lewis ‘enters other worlds in the same dreamlike and certain way as Hans Anderson’. For 75 years, he has enabled young and old readers to do the same, and to share Lucy’s certainty that ‘it’s all true… There is a country you can get to through the wardrobe’.

It is, of course, not simply a story about escape. This is a tale rich in Christian symbolism. Although Lewis himself dismissed as ‘pure moonshine’ any suggestion that, in embarking on his first Narnian adventure, he set out to ‘say something about Christianity to children’, the Christ-like figure of Aslan, sacrificed as the cost of Narnia’s victory over the White Witch, plays a key part in both the novel’s plot and Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy’s understanding of good and bad in the troublingly grown-up world they inadvertently enter.

‘At first I had very little idea how the story would go,’ Lewis reflected later. ‘Then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it… I don’t know where the lion came from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the other six Narnian stories in after Him.’ The purposeful capitalisation of Aslan’s pronouns is Lewis’s own.

Since 1950, readers have responded differently to this element of Lewis’s writing, even if many agree with the contemporary who argued that ‘the thread of allegory is clear enough to give added point to the story, slight enough to be sometimes disregarded’. Simply written, in a direct, colourful and lively manner, the seven ‘Narnia’ novels tell their stories with absorbing vigour.

A children’s author, Lewis wrote, enjoys a unique relationship with his readers; neither parent, teacher nor fellow child, but a familiar equal, ‘like the postman, the butcher and the dog next door’. He may have a ringside seat, but the novel’s narrator experiences the story’s tribulations and triumphs much as the reader does. Like the majority of children, he cherishes rebellious instincts: made clear in the Professor’s disdain for schools, Lucy’s contempt for the White Witch and the children’s dislike of the animals in the White Witch’s service.

This combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary (Susan’s fearful determination that, whatever the risks, the children ‘must try to do something for Mr Whatever-his-name is — I mean the Faun’) contributes to the success of the book. Like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five or Boston’s Tolly, the Pevensies are not paragons. Most children recognise aspects of themselves in Peter, Susan and Lucy, as well as Edmund, who backs the wrong horse by choosing self over others, the White Witch over Aslan, winter over Christmas.

Up to a point, Lewis’s novel offers its readers choices, as well as promoting a moral framework in line with Miss Prism’s definition of fiction in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘The good [end] happily and the bad unhappily.’ When he appears to the children, Father Christmas is described as ‘a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him’. Quite soon, the children recognise that the same applies to the godly Aslan.

After 75 years, Lewis’s story has lost none of its power to delight. It ‘will capture the imagination of most children as well as that of an older generation,’ the Catholic Herald stated of Lewis’s fifth Narnian novel, The Horse and His Boy, in 1954. The same is undeniably true of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — and, surely, certain to remain so.

Up in north Hampshire, the countryside around Basingstoke is a magnet for country-house buyers who are drawn to the area by its choice of excellent schools and ease of access to the capital. It is also Jane Austen country, which this year has been celebrating the 250th anniversary of the much-loved novelist’s birth in December 1775.

By happy coincidence, the event coincides with the launch onto the market of a splendid former rectory, the Old Rectory at Dummer and Oakley House at Oakley, located a hop, skip and jump either side of the village of Steventon, where Austen’s father, the Revd George Austen, served as rector from 1765 to 1801.

The Austen link at The Old Rectory in Dummer — being sold through Savills at a guide price of £3.4m — isn't based purely on proximity. The author was close friends with the Terry family, who lived here at the time, and Austen was a regular visitor. The Terrys had daughters called Jane and Eliza, not far off two of the Bennet daughters names in Pride and Prejudice, and it's been suggested that the Terry sisters' marriages tally with the love matches made in Emma.

All that said, the rectory that stands in this charming village is a very different beast to the one that was here in Austen's day.

Approached through a large set of electric oak gates, the handsome former rectory was built in 1850 to the design of the eminent architect William Donthorne, drawings for which are housed in the V&A Museum.

The design is the very height of Victorian Gothic style and combines Tudor-patterned chimneys with the unusual use of square knapped flints and Bath-stone dressings — the flints thought to be the discarded remains of old flint stones cut in an earlier age for use in flintlock rifles.

Beautifully maintained by the current owners, who have lived there for 14 years, the main house offers 7,158sq ft of generous family accommodation on two floors, including a spacious entrance hall, a drawing room/former music room, a dining room, library, study, recently refitted kitchen, breakfast/family room and boot room on the ground floor.

A fine oak staircase leads to the first floor where a grand principal bedroom wing comprises a large bedroom, a dressing room and a luxurious en-suite bathroom; four further bedrooms and three bathrooms are located on this floor.

Additional accommodation is provided in the one-bedroom coach house and beyond the breakfast/family room is a splendid indoor swimming pool and gym, for which the new knapped flint used in its construction was sourced at great length from Dorset.

The Old Rectory in Dummer, Hampshire, is for sale £3.45 million — see more details.

These articles appear on page 142 of the September 17, 2025 edition of Country Life magazine. Some copies of this issue suffered from a printing error which affected this page, so the full articles are reproduced below. You can also download the PDF of the original page here.

Italy: In the Footsteps of the Great Artists

By Nick Trend (Thames & Hudson, £50)

In 1988, John Mortimer took a break from his ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ books to write Summer’s Lease. The novel centres on a London housewife, Molly Pargeter, who rents a villa in Tuscany for her family’s summer holiday. What unfolds is a comedy of manners of the Brits-abroad type, with added menace (a body in a pool). What attracted well-to-do Molly to this part of Chiantishire, as it was then slightly sneeringly known, was its closeness to the artistic centres of Florence, Urbino and Siena and, above all, her desire to complete the ‘Piero trail’.

Then, Piero della Francesca was little more than a name and the novel and subsequent television series did much to popularise the painter. All of a sudden, the off-the-beaten-track towns of Monterchi, Sansepolcro, Arezzo and Urbino, where his pictures had hung for some five centuries, found themselves full of eager tourists. Had Nick Trend’s book appeared 37 years ago, perhaps Piero would have remained an aficionados’ painter for a little longer, as it offers a range of other, equally appealing ‘trails’. It also offers them in the most handsome of manners: a lucid and informative text is supplemented by more than 300 large photographs and interspersed with hand-drawn maps and vignettes. Travel by book can be done on a tight budget; this is the full concierge variety.

Mr Trend trails 21 different artists, from Giotto to Canaletto. He tries to avoid museums (‘we can forget that [great art] doesn’t really belong there’) in favour of churches, piazze and palazzi. As he notes, a remarkable proportion of Italy’s artworks — more perhaps than any other European country — ‘still survives in the buildings for which they were commissioned’, including some of ‘the most seminal in the Renaissance canon’.

There is something gratifying in, for example, tracking the sublime 15th-century painter Giovanni Bellini through the churches of Venice. Duck down a passage just behind the Doge’s Palace and step into San Zaccaria, rootle for a euro coin for the lights and stare at what they reveal: the sumptuous and undimmed colours of the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints (and a music-playing angel). Then head along the canals to the Frari and sit in a quiet side chapel in front of his smaller panel painting The Pesaro Triptych — another Virgin and Child with saints — as most tourists gawp, unaware, at Titian’s ecstatic Assumption a few yards away.

Those same crowds invariably miss Bellini’s altarpiece in San Giovanni Crisostomo, despite it being on one of Venice’s busiest streets, as well as his polyptych in San Zanipolo and his late Madonna and Child in San Francesco Della Vigna. As the author says, Bellini painted working images, aids to contemplation, and they still play that role today.

Something of the same satisfaction can be had by pursuing, say, Caravaggio across Rome (a pictorially dramatic and sometimes violent church-to-church trip from San Luigi dei Francesi to Sant’Agostino to Santa Maria del Popolo), Lavinia Fontana through Bologna, the six Anguissola sisters through Cremona or, by car, Giotto from Padua to Florence via Assisi.

Mr Trend’s gazetteer steers art travellers both onto and off the beaten track; he explains why it is worth seeking out Mantegna’s own house in Mantua, as well as the Ducal Palace, and Leonardo’s baptismal church in Anchiano, plus The Last Supper in Milan. Above all, he is a trustworthy, engaging guide, particularly attuned to the original context of the art he reveals. His luxurious book is far too heavy to take with you, although the excess-baggage premium might be worth it.
Michael Prodger

Arts & Crafts Chronicler: The Life and Work of Sir Lawrence Weaver

By Lawrence Trevelyan Weaver and Timothy Brittain-Catlin (Lund Humphries, £45)

Lawrence Weaver (1876–1930) is a figure at the heart of the early history of Country Life. Appointed Architectural Editor to the magazine in 1911, he transformed its coverage of the field. As a concluding essay by Tim Brittain-Catlin also argues, he is a founding figure in the modern tradition of architectural criticism.

This detailed biography, written by his grandson and informed by family papers, sets out his remarkable wider personal and professional story. It makes for a fascinating and unexpected read. Inspired by the Arts-and-Crafts Movement and an enthusiasm for both leadwork and history, he became a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries at the age of 25.

The offer of a job at Country Life encouraged his abandonment of a career as an engineer and he entered wholly into the life of the magazine and its publishing endeavours, promoting, among others, the work of Lorimer and Lutyens. He exchanged journalism for the civil service during the First World War and established the still-flourishing National Institute of Agricultural Botany outside Cambridge in 1921.

Subsequently, he was organiser of the British Empire Exhibition in 1924. The project engaged him with the problem of reconciling the world of the Arts and Crafts — which had first inspired him — with industrialisation. His first wife, Kathleen née Purcell, a harpist, who played an important role in both his private and professional life, died in 1927; Sir Lawrence married again, but died of a heart attack at the age of 53.
John Goodall

Nothing lights the fire in Clive Hicks-Jenkins’s eyes like a good epic. ‘The moment you give me a narrative, I’m off like a rocket,’ he says, as a huge grin splits his face. Two years ago, the Welsh artist worked on Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf for The Folio Society. Now, he has completed an even more colossal project for the same publisher: illustrating Homer.

When the society first approached him about tackling the work of the Greek poet, Clive simply enquired: ‘Which one?’ He was thrilled, if perhaps a little daunted, to discover it would be both The Iliad and The Odyssey. Even better, it turned out he would be illustrating Emily Wilson’s translations, which he had much enjoyed, because he found they brought a fresh perspective to what had previously been a male preserve. He headed straight to his books and started re-reading them — The Iliad twice and The Odyssey, with which he was more familiar, once — albeit not before a brief jaunt to the British Museum to look at earthenware vases from ancient Greece. ‘And then I got to work and made a cast list.’

This might seem an odd starting point, but Clive (above) had long worked in the theatre before making a career switch in his forties. Although he had been so passionate about art as a child that his friends and family thought he would grow up to be a painter, he enrolled in a vocational school, becoming a choreographer and stage director, after a spell as a dancer. However, theatre is unforgiving: ‘I was always on planes, always in new cities and I got tired of it. It’s terribly lonely. You go from one job to another to another and you pour yourself into it. It’s a young man’s game, a young woman’s game.’ Having decided on a change, he went back to Wales: ‘I didn’t think: “Oh, I’ll become an artist.” I just took a breather. I returned to my great love of poetry and began to draw. Drawing evolved into painting.’ Still, he admits, he probably wouldn’t have had the courage to pursue it professionally had it not been for his husband, historian and curator Peter Wakelin, whom he met a little more than 30 years ago. ‘He said, “You’re actually very good at this; you should go further.” He took my work to a gallery and I sat outside in the car trembling.’

He has since had more success as an artist and illustrator than he had ever imagined, but in those early, hesitant days, he used to hide his theatrical background: ‘I thought that I’d be poorly judged for that: a parvenu, a jack of all trades.’ As his reputation grew, however, keeping quiet about his performing-arts past became increasingly difficult — until one day he realised: ‘I wouldn’t be as good at this if I hadn’t had that career before. I can absolutely see how, as a director and choreographer in the theatre, I’ve brought that into my work as an artist, because I am a narrative painter. Whether I’m painting a huge Annunciation, or illustrating The Iliad and The Odyssey, I’m telling stories that fit into frames. That’s what you do in the theatre. You have a frame, which is the proscenium arch, and everything is placed into that. So it’s not at all surprising to me that I do a casting at the beginning of a project like this. I don’t know where else you would start other than to make a cast list and say: “Okay, which of you is in and which of you is out.”’

With two complex books such as The Iliad and The Odyssey, the cast list ‘was like this,’ he gestures, opening his arms wide, and threw up some surprises: ‘Looking at The Iliad, you’d think perhaps Achilles would be the principal character, but the character who appears more than anyone else is the goddess Athena. I didn’t plan it that way. It just happened because she threads through both books, moving the chess pieces.’ A stitch in that thread particularly enthralled him: ‘There’s a wonderful scene in The Iliad, where she harnesses her chariot with Hera, queen of the goddesses, and they go off to battle. That idea of Athena and Hera together, a little like Boudicca and her daughters going to battle against Rome — I loved that.’

What makes the real difference in Clive's work is not only his choice of characters and scenes, but how he approaches them. Illustration, he explains, is all too often dismissed as a mere reproduction of words in pictures: ‘That’s not my job,’ he counters. A natural storyteller — ‘If you spoke to Peter, he would say: “You come to me if you want the facts. If you want a story, go to Clive, because he’ll embroider it”’ — he prefers to create images that feel like ‘little cracks between paving stones. I don’t want to illustrate the paving stones. They don’t need it. You’re looking for little entries in the text between them. I want the illustrations to be a breath between the words, like reciting poetry and giving you a moment to take in what’s been said. The image is that moment of thought’. One of his favourite ‘cracks’ is a scene from The Odyssey in which Odysseus goes on a nocturnal expedition and struggles to find his way: ‘The goddess Athena sends a night heron to guide him. It captured my imagination and I did a double-page illustration that has the heron in the foreground, because it is so poetic that a heron sent by a goddess should do this work of guiding [men] through the darkness.’

Not for Clive the ‘obvious’ grand-stand views of monumental battles. Even in perhaps The Iliad’s most famous passage, where Achilles defiles the slain Hector, dragging the corpse behind his chariot three times around the tomb of Patroclus, he chose the unexpected, the subtle detail: ‘It would be easy to over-egg the image and to have the horses and the chariot and the trampling; instead, I did a real close up of Hector’s torso with his legs drawn up and his perforated heels — a detail to meditate on, rather than what you might do in cinema, which would be to pull back and see the whole.’

If anything, he continues, delving into his theatrical past, illustration is more like dance: ‘I love cinema, but with cinema, you can take a story and do anything with it, whereas with a book, you have to work hand in hand with the author — like a dancer has to work with the music.’ A ‘dance’ of which he has fond memories is the collaboration with Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. ‘I had the manuscripts as they were being written. That’s terribly exciting, because you’re watching it unfolding and, although you’re wary of the fact that something might change, by the time you get the final, approved manuscript, you’re like an actor who’s learned all his lines. I don’t need the manuscript anymore, because I’ve lived it, breathed it, slept it.’

There is a flipside to this syntony with the written word: he could never illustrate a book he didn’t like or understand. ‘I always want to have a conversation with the writer, dead or alive.’

A 500-copy limited edition of ‘The Iliad and The Odyssey’ translated by Emily Wilson and illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins is available now through The Folio Society (£700)

One of the great annoyances of life — or so it always seems to happen anyway — is that the more beautiful a book, the greater the likelihood that you lose it on a train somewhere, or you take it to a wedding, as something to read in case the service runs on, and inevitably you leave it at the bar. Quite where my exquisite copy of the Anthology of Scottish Folk Tales has gone, I’m not sure, but I was enjoying it so much that I went out the day after I lost it and bought a replacement, as well as two further copies as gifts. One for an old Border Country poet, the other for a small baby who will have the tales read to him in time. This is a book for storylovers of all ages and it is a book to return to again and again.

From the tale of ‘The Last Highwayman of Dalkeith’ to the story of ‘The Borrowed Boat’, which was once a fireside favourite in Shetland, the range of these yarns is remarkable. There is a sense in which they tell Scotland’s story. To read them is to understand that country and yet they call into question the extent to which it is one entity at all. They give a fascinating sense of Scotland not being a homogenous place, but a place of distinct regions and distinct cultures. Those of you familiar with East Anglian tales of black shuck, will find something relatable, for instance, in the account of ‘The Mauthe Dog of Midlothian’, whereas there is a very Scandinavia timbre to ‘The Mermaid Bride’, a yarn about a ‘finnwoman’ who seeks and eventually succeeds in luring a handsome Orcadian down into the watery depths of the Finfolkaheem. Scotland, The Anthology of Scottish Folk Tales, makes it clear, is rich in stories not because it is out on a limb as people often suppose, but because it is actually in the middle of things, a sort of cultural crossroads.

One of the most striking things the anthology brings to mind is that in the past, magic was thought to be in the realms of the possible. We don’t, I think, believe now that fairies really do steal children and replace them with changelings, as happens in the tale of ‘Margaret and the Three Gifts’, but when the story — with its obvious Christian subtext (think of the Wise Men) — was told a century ago, people really did believe that ‘the good people’, as they are called, existed in mounds across the Highlands and Islands. It was thought that their homes were not accessible most of the year, but could be seen into during Halloween, which was always much bigger in Scotland than south of the border. It is a sad thing to live in a world that has been drained of a sense of magic and wonder and yet, this collection in itself is a sort of ‘thin place’, — that Celtic concept of a location where the veil between the human and the spiritual is thought to be at its narrowest. To read The Anthology of Scottish Folk Tales is to connect in a way with the dark and the divine.

But these are not all tales about the fantastical — some of them are presented as nigh-on true accounts of life as it was lived not so long ago, life of a sort that might seem impossibly distant to somebody in London’s Zone 3 in 2025, but that might be more tangible to old folks still living in the places these stories are set. One such story bears the headline ‘A Disappearance’, which feels like it could have once appeared in the Stornoway Gazette and the note it begins with reads ‘clearly based on actual incident’. The tale itself is about a lady whose fisherman husband gets lost at sea and she remarries only for the husband to reappear again some time later. But details that stay with me are that ‘at that time, in the Hebrides, it was hardly possible for a widow to make a life on her own. It was backbreaking work, building up any depth of soil for cultivation and carrying seaweed from the shore to nourish the peaty ground.’ It was custom, apparently, that after it was presumed a woman’s husband could no longer be living (after not returning from sea) that ‘a widow was then free to remarry and start a new life. Often a brother or cousin of a missing man.’ Similarly, there is very interesting detail on the role of different types of fish in the Hebridean diet and the way they were processed — ‘cod and ling could be salted, dried and sold. The halibut or turbot did not cure well so this was shared out and eaten fresh.’

The other fascinating thing, from an historical perspective, are the brief accounts of those people who have collected stories over the years. Memorably, there is ‘great-aunt Sarah’ a 92-year-old lowlander, and a great fount of stories, who spends her days foraging the hedgerows of Roslin Glen. There is also Duncan J. Robertson, a Kirkwall lawyer (Kirkwall being the administrative capital of Orkney), who collected the tale of ‘The Peerie Fool’ (‘peerie’ meaning ‘little’ in the Orcadian dialect). Robertson passed the story to Andrew Lang of the famous Lang’s Fairy Books. It is interesting, I think, that Lang, like many other publishers over the years, has hit on stories like ‘The Peerie Fool’ as a commercial proposition. Lang, a great man of letters, published a collection of folk tales every year in an age when publishing was a lucrative business, and yet they remain, really, the property of all of those who love them, know them, and tell them. They are our stories, the inheritance of the people of Scotland.

It should be said too that for all that folk tradition is fetishised and for all that scholars write papers on folk culture, at the end of it all these stories endure because on a very basic level they are excellent. They are memorable, they paint rich pictures of the landscape, and they have twists, turns, and morals. Crucially, they have pace. These might be the stories of Scotland, whatever that means, but they all appeal to something very human. We are united across the world by our love of Yarns — from Shetland to Southern Africa. I read the first half of the book in one go purely on arrative merit alone. But as I say these are not my stories, they belong to us all, and I very much hope that whoever picked up my missing copy is, as I write, reading in wonder.

'The Anthology of Scottish Folk Tales Volume Two' is out now (The History Press, £14.99)

Mrs Dalloway is shallow, unlikable and obsessed with a man she turned down many years ago and a woman she could never have. I remember not understanding the complexities of her sexuality, class criticisms and muddled inner monologue when I first read the novel that takes her name at school. The way Virginia Woolf played with language and reality with such deft skill eluded me, preoccupied (as I obviously was, at an all girls’ school while studying the Feminist Literature module) with the titular character’s phallic obsession with Peter Walsh’s penknife.

Alas, Woolf’s literary masterpiece was wasted on me in my youth. Returning to it now, however, almost ten years after I first turned its pages, and 100 years after it was first published, I am able to see parts of Dalloway I couldn’t before. It is a book that has the continuing ability to surprise anew. And so, for the uninitiated, let me provide a short introduction.

Woolf was born in 1882 in South Kensington. Part of the Bloomsbury set, the Modernist author helped pioneer the literary device stream of consciousness, letting readers observe the slow and often winding progress of her character's thoughts. She was affluent and educated, though she did not attend university until many years after her male counterparts. She is best known for To The Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and A Room of One’s Own (1929). Her campaigning for women’s rights and affair with Vita Sackville-West, despite both of their marriages, may have been what she was remembered for, where they not eclipsed by her mental health struggles and ultimate suicide.

Mrs Dalloway is one of the most impressive of her works. The book charts a typical day in London and the inner workings of the people that live there. It hovers in particular on socialite and politician's wife Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares to host a party. In tandem, it charts First World War veteran Septumus Warren Smith’s struggles with PTSD and his tragic death. These narratives intertwine, without the pair ever actually meeting.

The book was written in the aftermath of the War, when society was grappling with how to live now that the conflict was over. This is reflected in Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness, and her character’s preoccupation with their own mortality, not helped by the omnipresent hourly chimes of Big Ben. It is mired in introspection and feelings of bewilderment and subverts many of the norms of traditional novel writing that had come before. For this reason, it is frequently accepted to be a response to James Joyce’s maddeningly untraversable Ulysses, although Woolf denied this and called Joyce’s seminal work ‘pretentious’ and ‘very obscure’ and Joyce, ‘egotistic’ and ‘ultimately nauseating’. Considering that I had Joyce's monstrosity of a novel foisted on me at university, I wholeheartedly agree.

Mrs Dalloway was, for the most part, well-received at the time of publication, although some deemed it too experimental, with its lack of traditional chapters a bridge too far. The Western Mail were particularly upset. ‘This novel is in one chapter, 283 pages of it,’ their reviewer wrote. ‘That is a normal length, but we like to have places which we can dog-ear when we go to bed, with the certainty of restarting at the exact line.’ The Scotsman advised ‘none but the mentally fit should aspire to read this novel’, The Sketch simply stated a fact by way of criticism: ‘The author of this book is Virginia Woolf, and it is published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, Tavistock Square.’

The Times Literary Supplement, however, was all praise: ‘People and events here have a peculiar, almost ethereal transparency, as though bathed in a medium where one thing permeates another,’ their reviewer wrote. ‘Undoubtedly our world is less solid than it was, and our novels may have to shake themselves a little free of matter.’ Despite its contemporary critics, and the lack of respect it received in my school English class, it became, and remains one of the most influential works of literature, not only in the feminist cannon, but of all time. Well worth a first read, or re-read, in its centenary year, at any rate.

Poet, author, musician and Yorkshireman, Simon Armitage has been Britain's Poet Laureate since 2019 — so we're thrilled that he joined James Fisher on the latest edition of the Country Life Podcast.

From the surprising details of what he does — or, more accurately, doesn't — have to do as part of his role, to the primary school teacher who didn't even put his Christmas poem in his class's top six, Simon shares tales of his life, his work and his inspiration.

Nature has always been a big part of the latter, and never more so than with his latest collection of poems, Dwell. The book was inspired by the time he has spent at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall — a place where he'll be back on June 21st for the Heligan Homecoming Festival, which runs June 13-22 and features guests including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Dawn French.

Simon also talks about how the world — and the world of art in particular — is being changed by technology... even if what AI can create so far has been limited to verse that is, in his phrase, 'reassuringly awful'.

That said, Simon also worries that 'it will only get better', something which could actually change how art is made.

'I wonder if it might throw art back on some of its high-end, traditional values that are quite difficult to imitate and replicate,' he adds.

'The art that will really be in trouble is sort of avant-gardism and experimentation which — dare I say it? Yes,I do — is quite easily imitated.

Charming, funny, self-deprecating, Simon was a wonderful guest — enjoy the show.

Simon Armitage's Dwell is out now (Faber & Faber, £10). The Heligan Homecoming Festival runs from June 13-22, 2025.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Simon Armitage

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Understanding the history of any civilisation relies as much on the preservation of the past, as it does its documentation. Yet, in the United Kingdom, both popular and mainstream academic study of history places relatively little emphasis on the production of documents and texts, nor those who have dedicated their lives to putting them together for distribution, let alone the smaller number of specialists whose trade focuses on their long-term conservation and archiving.

Moreover, as the publishing industry continues to fixate on for-profit mass production, centred in warehouses and driven by industrial printing processes that are increasingly automated, the history of classic, manual bookbinding is often considered somewhat outdated — a subject to be pondered by beleaguered academics, a handful of museum conservators, and a small, albeit growing number of hobbyist bookbinders.

That the history of British bookbinding remains obscure is a shame, not least because it overlooks the trade’s significant societal impact, particularly during its height during the 19th and early-20th century.

In response to rapid industrialisation and growing literacy rates, it was English binderies in particular who developed their techniques to produce high quality books for a mass audience. They implemented decorative techniques designed for expensive leather on cheaper book cloth, adding hand-marbled endpaper to the text blocks, and moved away from aesthetically pleasing, yet laborious styles of stitching developed in France, to the quicker, and stronger styles of Kettle and Coptic style stitching, on sturdy linen bands, to hold pages together.

While English bookbinding technically advanced in this period, the trades’ commitment to quality — including hand lettering titles and patterns with pure gold leaf — meant that, for the first time, books were not just the vestige of the wealthy to be used as ornaments or denote status. Accessibility meant that books could be considered objects with utility and purpose, a technology with the power to change society.

Shifting belief in the possibility of well crafted and designed books is at the heart of ‘Bound Together: Modern British Bookbinding’, an exhibition hosted by Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery, and centres around the work of the bookbinder and artist Roger Powell. Having established a bindery in his home in Froxfield, near Petersfield, in 1947, Powell devoted five decades to fine bookbinding, and in doing so, made significant contributions to the field of early manuscript conservation and restoration, as well as the then emerging field of ‘designer’ bookbinding, in which classical bookbinding techniques are built upon with contemporary artistic trends and bespoke craftsmanship.

Powell’s artistic endeavours were cultivated through the values of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement of the 19th century. With figures including Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, who Powell would eventually be contracted to produce work for, the movement was a reaction to the impacts of the industrial revolution on design and craft, and the belief that even the poorest in society deserved to own well-made ornaments that were decorated by hand and produced by individual craftspeople.

After serving in the First World War and following a brief, unsuccessful stint as a poultry farmer, Powell enrolled in the Central School of Arts & Crafts and trained as a bookbinder. It was here where he became interested in the relationship between a book’s structure and its design, and the question of how they could complement, rather than be independent of each other.

Such preoccupations are central to any modern bookbinder’s practice. Whether one is a professional or, like myself, an amateur, the creation of even the simplest notebook requires a consideration over its utility — who is the book intended for? Is it something to be used and carried around, or kept on a desk? Do the pages need to lay flat? Such questions are useful in deciding the kinds of materials best suited for the book, what kind of stitching is necessary to hold the book together and, central to many bookbinding projects, whether the codex will require a glued spine to keep it sturdy.

Powell once said: ‘I regard books as three dimensional, articulated objects, intended for use’ — an ethos evident in some of his early bindings of family Bibles, in which decorative features such as gold-leaf dots and embossed squares were arranged around the raised bands on a book’s spine. This symmetrical pattern not only had a practical use case — to show future restorers where the pages had been stitched — but also reflected the thought process of the bookbinder, asserting their role in the construction and development of the book itself.

Perhaps, Powell’s legacy lies not just in his famous bindings, among them the historic rebind of the Book of Kells in 1953, but also in the reminder that the architecture of objects we hold everyday are made with human hands, that to derive pleasure from reading should not be considered a wholly individual experience.

This reminder is perhaps more relevant today than it was in Powell’s time. The dominance of Kindles and Ebooks, as well as the ever-shrinking profit margins for authors and publishers, has made the process of book publishing less economically valuable, particularly as AI programs, trained on swathes of pirated books, threaten to usurp what is left of the industry. Coupled with increasing library closures, and the shift to tablets over physical books in schools and universities, some people question if physical, printed books designed to be used will continue to exist in the future. Might we see a return to the physical book as a luxury ornament within the next decade or two?

There are some signs of hope. On social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Youtube, a younger, digitally native audience are taking up bookbinding, adapting classical techniques to create bespoke notebooks, and custom-bound versions of their favourite online fan fiction.

Meanwhile, skilled bookbinders, many of whom are part of the UK’s Society of Bookbinders, have found sources of income through bespoke commissions of classic novels and re-binds of old family heirlooms. The revival of interest in handbound books isn’t just limited to individual hobbyists either, as some independent publishers, notably the London-based Tangerine Press, have distinguished themselves in a saturated market with a focus on physical copies, all bound in silk thread and Japanese paper, and put together by hand.

While it is unlikely that the trade of bookbinding will ever be as culturally impactful as it was during the time of Roger Powell, it is clear that his influence, even beyond books, remains strong. Even in the digital age, where delivery apps and subscription services tend to obfuscate those who produce and distribute the items we use daily and take for granted, his work should remind us that nothing is truly automated — that to exist in this world relies on the hands of others.

Bound Together: Modern British Bookbinding is at Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery until May 3

On April 10, 1925, Charles Scribner’s Sons published the latest novel by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. It sold poorly that year, but, in the following century, it went on to become a cornerstone of world literature: The Great Gatsby. Almost on its centenary to a day, on April 11, the musical version has its West End premiere, about a year after its Broadway debut. Despite mixed reviews across the Atlantic, this — together with the book’s anniversary — has renewed attention on the Jazz Age Scott Fitzgerald so vividly portrayed.

1. The end of the First World War and the return to prosperity and international travel fuelled a boom in fashion, design, jewellery, the decorative arts and architecture in early-1920s America. Floral motifs abounded in the first half of the decade, later replaced by geometric ones and a fascination with speed, but other notable influences included (despite persistent racism) African art, which went hand in hand with the rise of jazz, and ancient Egyptian culture.
2. Glamour, innovation, exquisite craftsmanship and opulent materials became the byword for the age. A notable example was Cartier’s series of mystery clocks. Although invented in 1912 (a 1914 version of the original Model A can be viewed at the V&A exhibition devoted to the French maison; ‘Sparkling society’, March 26), they became particularly ornate in the 1920s, with gemstone or gold hands that seemed to float against a glass or crystal disc and elaborate bases, such as a carvedjade elephant or a Shinto temple.
3. Although ‘Avantgarde shapes, radical theory, and brazen combinations of colour and decoration… beckoned those who wanted to experiment with a new way of life,’ as Sarah Coffin writes in The Jazz Age: American style in the 1920s, an interest in antiques rivalled the Modernist wave. Gatsby’s own house was stuffed with antiques: Marie Antoinette music rooms and Restoration salons, the ‘Merton College Library’ and Gatsby’s Adam study.
4. Cars came of age in the 1920s and they feature prominently in Scott Fitzgerald’s book, with Jay Gatsby driving a ‘rich cream’ Rolls-Royce of ‘monstrous length’. In the 1974 film version, Robert Redford had a 1928 Phantom I Ascot Sport Phaeton (pictured), which was sold at auction in 2009 for $238,000 and again in 2022, when it fetched $967,500.
5. Changes in women’s lifestyle sparked demand for unstructured clothes with shorter hemlines, French-inspired accessories, from cigarette holders to perfume bottles, and jewellery — not least head-pieces that showed off newly cropped hair. When Nick Carraway first arrived at Tom Buchanan’s house and met his cousin Daisy and her friend Jordan Baker: ‘They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.’ Gatsby’s death would quell that floaty illusion, just as the Great Depression would put an end to the spirit of the Jazz Age.

The rose is the most ravishingly beautiful and fragrant of flowers. Genus Rosa has flourished on this earth for some 40 million years and has served our physical and spiritual needs for millennia. Perhaps that is why today (May 9), the RHS announced a new rose named after HRH The Princess of Wales. The proceeds raised from 'Catherine's Rose', grown by Harkness Roses, will support The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity — which is where the Royal Family member received treatment during her own battle with the disease.

The rose's exquisitely delicate petals and savage prickles (commonly described as thorns) comprise a conjunction of opposites that, for centuries, has inspired writers, artists and designers who have drawn allusions to love, beauty, sexuality, sin, degradation and death. No flower is more entwined with myth, religion and other stories; cultural production and politics; nor more likened to the human — mostly female — body and emotions. Phaidon’s visually stunning new publication The Rose Book interrogates and rejoices our near-universal relationship with this flower of flowers.

In the second century the rose was personified as female and crowned queen of the flowers by the Greek writer Achilles Tatius in his romantic prose Leucippe and Clitophon. Despite being the most regal of flowers, the rose is also the most common. The shrub has such a broad geographic sweep — permitting so many to enjoy it — because it is resilient, promiscuous, and rambunctious. Whilst recognising the flowers’ Asian origins and global contexts, it is the British who have claimed the rose as their own (we describe delicate-looking young women as ‘English roses’).

It was from the 1870s that the British took the lead from France in growing cultivated roses. World-leading family firm David Austin (est. 1962; based in Shropshire), no doubt familiar to readers, now offer more than 200 gorgeous ‘English rose’ varieties to local and international growers. Imagine reviving the mid-1880s vogue for rose-themed garden parties, timed at the break of day or during moonlight when the flowers are at their most fulsome and fragrant. In 1884, the Vanderbilt’s — once the wealthiest family in the US — ordered 50,000 cut roses for their New York house-warming party, to which they welcomed 1,000 guests. Even today, wearing a single fresh rose marks an occasion out as ‘special’.

In the 21^st century we have seen a renaissance in roses and not only within naturalistic settings. In 2021, NEXT Architects designed a modernistic metal building to house Beijing’s new Rose Museum — imagine, a whole museum dedicated to one flower (above). And, once again, the rose has become highly politicised. In the past, there’s Britain’s War of the Roses and Germany’s anti-Nazi youth movement — which employed a white rose as their symbol of choice. In the present, the bloom has been harnessed to draw attention to vital issues such as racial equality, identity, sexuality, female genital mutilation, fair trade, sustainability and the environment.

My own special interest lies in the myriad ways in which the rose has inspired fashion, textiles, folk costume; everyday, sub-cultural and fancy dress, jewellery, body art and grooming. In Ancient Rome, a culture renowned for its extreme adoration of roses, it was men who wore perfume made from roses (women preferred more pungent scents). In the 18^th century, the western male elite wore the most magnificent flower-embroidered garments and accessories. It was not until the mid-19^th century that roses became synonymous with female fashion.

Roses are a fashion mainstay. It is couture designers Charles Frederick Worth, Christian Dior and Alexander McQueen — the latter dressing a male, female and gender-neutral clientele in extraordinary rose-inspired garments — whom I crown as fashion’s greatest rosarians.

Today, year-round, the world’s wealthiest consumers purchase roses grown by the world’s poorest workers. Standard, long-stemmed and budded roses that have little fragrance and drain local water resources — all before being flown round the world. They are not beautiful and they are certainly not romantic. Happily, there is a shift afoot, spearheaded by florists such as Shane Connolly — who was employed by TRH The Prince and Princess of Wales for their wedding — who are urging us to buy roses that are grown locally and in season. Roses that are truly ravishing.

'Catherine's Rose' is available to pre-order now. Delivery of the bare root plants is scheduled for Autumn 2025

The Rose Book (£34.94) is published by Phaidon on April 3.

'Limited floor space doesn’t have to limit ambition,’ says Ros Byam Shaw, whose new book Perfect English Small and Beautiful offers an opportunity to explore a dozen tiny houses, many of which are under 1,000sq ft and decorated with a confidence not associated with rooms of such modest proportions.

The idea for the book dawned when she wrote a succession of magazine pieces about conspicuously tiny yet beautifully designed houses. ‘It made me realise that of all the houses I’ve visited over the years, it was the little ones that I loved the most,’ says Byam Shaw.

Particularly inspiring was a visit to furniture restorer Guy Marshall’s home in Shropshire. Although only 11½ft wide, its three diminutive rooms are filled with an expansive collection of Georgian furniture, china, clocks and paintings that would look at home in any of the country’s grandest country houses.

With a book commission under her arm, life imitated art and, shortly after signing the contract, she and her husband, Richard, decided it was time to let another family enjoy the east-Devon, Tudor-era house that had been their family home for the past 23 years. Having quickly secured a buyer, the couple found a smaller house from the same period on the other side of town.

At approximately one-third of the size of the previous house, there was an urgent need to edit their possessions. ‘Working out what to keep and what to let go became a full-time job,’ explains Byam Shaw. ‘I lay awake at night thinking about what to do, but the deadline made me more decisive.’ Keen not to send anything useful to landfill, she rehomed approximately half the contents of the house with the help of antique dealers, websites and charity shops. Much of the remainder went into storage: ‘The amazing thing is that, except for some books and a few pictures, once something has gone into storage, you start to become detached and miss them less. It’s a good way to let things go.’

Of the many interiors books she has written, initial feedback suggests that this new arrival is resonating most with readers. ‘We all have a nesting instinct, which is why small houses have such appeal. It’s about feeling snug and cosy. When the weather is awful outside, a small house wraps itself around you. There are no distant corridors where wind whistles and rattles windows.’ She adds that there are also powerful environmental and economic attractions of a smaller property, notably lower heating bills.

The houses in the book demonstrate eloquently how large pieces of furniture don’t have to make small spaces feel cramped. Providing the ceiling height allows, a grandfather clock can look as handsome in a cottage sitting room as in a hallway to a Georgian rectory.

And here’s the rub: it is ceiling height rather than floorspace in small houses that can be limiting. Some of the owners of homes featured in the book have remedied this by removing the ceilings and extending spaces vertically to the rafters. ‘If you can make up for what you lack in floorspace by creating ceiling height, it completely changes the room,’ says Byam Shaw. ‘It’s why the Brutalist architects of the Barbican were clever enough to include a barrel-vaulted ceiling in their smallest flats, creating a feeling of openness despite the modest square footage.’

Fundamental to the success of a small, but beautiful room is having enough storage to hide any retained clobber out of sight — be that in cupboards or well-designed joinery. Throughout the book, it’s clear that owners have used every nook, cranny, corner, back-of-door, over-door, under-stairs or under-bed area available.

Other ingenious ways of opening up wall space include re-hanging doors so that they open into a passage, hall or landing and exchanging doors for curtains. For anyone considering small-space living, this book offers plenty of delicious food for thought.

‘Perfect English Small and Beautiful’ by Ros Byam Shaw will be published next month (Ryland Peters & Small, £40).

Around the world in 19 flowers

Painter and printmaker Angie Lewin (main image) and Christopher Stocks have collaborated on their third book, this time chronicling 19 flowers and the people responsible for bringing them to the UK. ‘My garden may be small,’ writes Stocks in his introduction, ‘but it contains almost the entire world.’

To be published tomorrow (February 27), The Book of Garden Flowers (Thames & Hudson, £16.99) is full of unusual snippets — ‘as much a social study as a horticultural history’ — such as on Charles Dickens’s obsession with a pelargonium, Henry VIII eating the first British-grown artichokes and British horticulturalist Ellen Willmott (she is said to have cultivated more than 100,000 species and cultivars), who died penniless after burning through her fortune employing more than 100 garden staff.

From sand to snow

A few days ago, Country Life’s favourite beach cruiser made an unexpected appearance in the most unlikeliest of environments.

The car? A stripy Mini Moke believed to be one of three surviving ‘Mini Surfers’ (Mokes that were modified by coachbuilder George Barris in collaboration with The Beach Boys). The event? The ICE St Moritz which sees some of the world’s most beautiful cars compete to be crowned most elegant and best in show — on top of a frozen lake. No sand in sight.

Despite its scarcity, the Moke was one of the cheapest and least powerful cars on display: ‘No snow tyres or studs,’ said owner Simon Kidston on Instagram. ‘Wheels the size of your carry-on luggage, the horsepower of a sewing machine and I’ve never ever driven it before today (plus I don’t fit).’

Kidston accessorised his ‘Mini Surfer’ with a surfboard which may well have come in handy had the lake’s surface started to melt. Thankfully, the classic car dealer, his trusty steed and the lake all kept their cool — no mean feat when your co-driver is the grandson of three-time F1 Champion Jackie Stewart.

To pylon or not to pylon

1,000 miles of giant pylons 'would be the most intrusive invasion of the nation’s rural landscape since the Second World War' argues Sir Simon Jenkins in a piece we published yesterday. He’s calling on members of the public to vigorously challenge the Government’s plans to cover the countryside in them.

Missed it? You can catch up by clicking here.

A few of India’s favourite things

India Knight, author of five novels — including Darling, a retelling of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love — and a Substack called Home has revealed that her favourite things include her dogs and The Gunton Arms hotel in Norfolk.

Writing inside this week’s issue of Country Life, Knight said: ‘We have a soft-coated wheaten terrier called Brodie, a Norfolk terrier called Tails and a sporting Lucas terrier called Lupin. My partner and I have five grown-up children between us and started calling the dogs “the kids” as a joke, but it’s stuck and isn’t actually entirely a joke.’

The author’s preference for terrier breeds is particularly fitting given that there are two ‘foxy gentlemen’ on the front cover of the same issue. ‘Terriers are the best dogs bar none: hilarious, intelligent, the best company and, in the case of Lupin, extremely effective on the rodent front,’ she continues.

The Gunton Arms also receives a mention for its Robert Kime interiors, remarkable art collection, deer park and delicious côte de boeuf cooked over an open fire. Knight’s favourite room is called ‘Walpole’.

A ‘beautiful and cheering banner’ made out of lots of different fabrics, from Joanna Thompson, rounds out Knight’s selection. Customers can personalise the text. Knight’s reads: ‘I’m fed up of growth / through pain / I want to be stunted / with pleasure’. Wise words to heed this Wednesday.

That’s all for today — Dawn Chorus returns on Friday.

They say if you can remember the 60s you weren’t there. David Bailey very much was there, though, and it’s through his lens that the very swingingest of London has long been remembered: the city itself, its scene, its celebrities. Jagger wrapped in that furry hood, Caine in those signature glasses, the Krays exuding menace.

It’s why you’ll rarely see mention of Bailey’s name without the term ‘era-defining’ following shortly thereafter.

But a new book, Eighties Bailey, shifts its focus down the timeline. Two decades on from David Bailey the upstart we arrive at David Bailey the established documentarian in an era of bold colours and big hair.

‘The eighties turned out to be magic…[which] came as a surprise,’ surmises Bailey in his puckish intro. ‘And possibly turned into the most amazing time in London. [It] was getting a second chance in fashion, art, theatre and cinema.’

Grace Coddington, on foreword duty, describes Bailey’s Primrose Hill studio as ‘ground zero for the dynamic spirit of the time’ and plenty of fashion and music’s finest were more than happy to head to London to shoot with him.

Jerry Hall and Marie Helvin crop up a lot in the book (spectacularly permed in a couple of instances), Tina Turner reclines in red, and a young Anna Wintour twice peers out from beneath her bob.

‘I was never a big fan of fashion in the eighties,’ Coddington concedes, ‘but the photographs here…have such a strong point of view I am beginning to come around.’ And sure enough, alongside those trademark monochrome portraits — of Grace Jones and Dolph Lundgren, of Anita Pallenberg, of his wife in Alaïa on the cover — there are some riotously colourful spreads and surrealist leanings that are strikingly timeless compared to so much from the decade in question.

Of course, Bailey adds some serious cultural heft for magazines wanting to channel a certain Englishness in shoots, and there’s plenty of that too: raincoats, terriers, the seaside, pearls, fur, lace, stilettos, an impeccably coiffed Diana, Princess of Wales, in an off-the-shoulder number, a none-more-goth Susie Cave (then Bick), and Christy Turlington in tweed.

The east-end lad with a camera remained suitably prosaic whenever pressed about his craft, saying: ‘The pictures are not about me. I spend more time talking to the person than I do taking pictures.’ But here is an abiding testament to a time — often overlooked for the fetishised high-fashion 70s and the en vogue again 90s — when London was beginning to establish itself as a modern cultural powerhouse.

Bailey might think of it as chatting and snapping, but there will be plenty who prefer to call it era-defining all over again.

‘Eighties Bailey’, published by Taschen, is on sale now for £100.

On Valentine’s Day 50 years ago, P. G. Wodehouse died, aged 93. The writer of sentences such as ‘I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled’, he has long been admired by other writers.

To Bernard Levin, he was ‘one of the finest and purest writers of English prose’. Rudyard Kipling considered Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend ‘one of the most perfect short stories’. Evelyn Waugh said ‘one has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page’.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites Wodehouse multiple times as the inventor or first recorded user of a phrase or for particular use of a word in a specific sense or with a certain nuance. How many of these were Wodehouse inventions, rather than him picking up on something and being the first known to use it, isn’t clear, but he is suggested as the inventor of such phrases as ‘down to earth’ and ‘pain in the neck’.

‘What Wodehouse writes is pure word music,’ believed Douglas Adams. ‘It matters not one whit that he writes endless variations on a theme of pig kidnappings, lofty butlers, and ludicrous impostures. He is the greatest musician of the English language, and exploring variations of familiar material is what musicians do all day.’

Wodehouse had originally made his name in musical theatre and was involved with some 50 dramatic works, mostly in collaboration. He took a while to find his feet as a novelist, experimenting with different genres before establishing himself as a farceur.

Later in life, he wrote to a friend: ‘There are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music, and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn. In writing a novel, I always imagine I am writing for a cast of actors.’

His parents lived in Hong Kong, where his father worked, but Wodehouse — known as Plum — was born in Guildford, Surrey, at the home of an aunt; his mother was visiting and he arrived early. After a brief spell in Hong Kong, he was returned to England from the age of two, when he was sent to a governess, together with his two older brothers, and hardly saw his parents until he was 15, when his father retired to England.

By then, the boy was at Dulwich College, which was to remain a love of his life. Even when he was a successful author living in France, he travelled over to report school cricket matches for its magazine. When the XI went through the 1938 season unbeaten, he paid for them to have dinner in London’s West End and watch a show at the Palladium.

Wodehouse was a school prefect, the editor of the school magazine and a fine all-round sportsman. He boxed, was a forward in the first XV and had two seasons in the cricket XI as a fast bowler. He played alongside Neville Knox, who was to play for England and would be described by Sir Jack Hobbs as ‘the best bowler I ever saw’. Wodehouse claimed one of his proudest achievements was that he used to get on to bowl before Knox, ‘although he was a child of about 10 then’. Knox was, in fact, three years younger than Wodehouse. The author continued to play cricket as an adult, was a member of Surrey County Cricket Club and named Bertie Wooster’s valet after Percy Jeeves, a Warwickshire player whose bowling action he admired.

Schoolfriend Bill Townend, who also became an author, remembered Wodehouse’s attitude to prep: ‘He worked, if he worked at all, supremely fast, writing Latin and Greek verses as rapidly as he wrote English. Certainly the two hours were not filled entirely with work: we talked incessantly about books and writing. Plum’s talk was exhilarating. I had never known such talk. Even at the age of 17 he could discuss lucidly writers of whom I had never heard… And from the first time I met him he had decided to write.’

Wodehouse had been destined for university, but his father decided he couldn’t afford to send another son, so he was put to work in a bank instead. He wrote in his spare time and, as soon as he was confident of making a living as a freelance author and journalist, he left banking. Keen to get his fiction accepted by the better-paying American magazines, he turned to a subject that the local authors weren’t writing about — the English aristocracy. Wodehouse had found his niche and light comedies featuring the aristocracy became his staple.

Once he had found his metier, writing held few perils for him, but he was always anxious about finding plots. Outside of the ‘Jeeves & Wooster’ and ‘Blandings Castle’ series, he would often resort to adapting or buying other’s plots, turning theatrical works into novels and vice versa. The idea for Uncle Fred Flits By, rightly declared his best short story in a survey of Wodehouse societies worldwide, was developed from a suggestion by his friend Townend.

Once Wodehouse had an idea for a plot, he wrote a detailed structure — often as much as one-third of the length of the finished work. He averred that he always thought that in writing the novel he was wasting valuable time, as the difficult part was in drawing up the plot.

The Wodehouses — he married Ethel Wayman in 1914 and adopted her nine-year-old daughter, Leonora — lived in America and England, so Plum faced double taxation on all his earnings, with both countries wanting to tax him as a resident.

The family, therefore, moved to Le Touquet in 1934. When the Germans captured France, the writer was sent to an internment camp, where he gave some well-received talks to his fellow internees.

On his release after nearly a year, on grounds of age, he used these as a basis for five talks to neutral America. Light in tone, they were designed to show that morale remained high among the internees, as well as poking mild fun at the Germans. The British Government was furious that he had broadcast from Germany, regardless of what he said (most Britons had no knowledge of what he had said), and orchestrated a vituperative, dishonest campaign against him. Denounced as a traitor and a Nazi, his works were banned by libraries and the BBC.

The Wodehouses eventually returned to France and, when that country was liberated, Plum was arrested by the French. He was interviewed by Maj Edward Cussen, a barrister who worked for MI5, who reported that Wodehouse’s broadcasts did ‘not contain material of a pro-German character’ and that he ‘has not been guilty of treasonable conduct’. Yet the Government never officially exonerated him: the Cussen Report was not released in Wodehouse’s lifetime and it was only in the 1960s that he was assured, albeit still unofficially, that he would not be arrested if he returned to England.

He had gone into exile in America in 1947, settling in Remsenburg, a village outside New York, and taking American nationality in 1955. He still, however, set most of his work in England and wrote with English spellings.

In the 1975 New Year’s Honours, the 93-year-old author was given a knighthood, a public sign that the Government had finally ended its quarrel with him. He was too frail to return to England for the ceremony, but the Queen Mother, a self-confessed ‘devoted admirer of his work’, was eager to travel to present him with his gong. Yet her schedule could not be re-arranged and, instead, it was decided that a ceremony would be held in the British Consulate in New York, with the British ambassador doing the honours.

Before then, Wodehouse went into hospital suffering from pemphigus, a skin disorder, taking with him the manuscript of the novel he was working on. By this stage, he had already had nearly 100 books published, as well as many magazine short stories that had never made it into book form.

On 14th February, 1975, Plum got out of bed to walk across the room and died of a heart attack. A fortnight later, the acting Consul General drove to Remsenburg and presented Wodehouse’s insignia and warrant to Lady Wodehouse.

Roderick Easdale is the author of ‘The Novel Life of P. G. Wodehouse’ (Acorn Books).

What did I know of the late artist and photographer Peter Beard when I met him in 2016, I wonder? Just the legend, I expect, just the spectacular image he had so carefully created and projected into pop culture, of the 20^th century Tarzan, at one with the birds and the beasts, a party animal swarmed under by supermodels, rock stars and the rest.

I knew by that point that he’d had his 40^th birthday party at Studio 54, had been pals with Mick Jagger and Truman Capote, was previously married to Cheryl Tiegs, and that everyone I knew in New York had a cherished Peter Beard story — very often including mountains of cocaine.

But it was his work that first turned me on to him, in the late 1990s, when I was in college. The images of him, hip-deep in a Nile crocodile somewhere in the wild north of Kenya, of a scantily clad Janice Dickinson being licked by a leopard, the dense, technicolor collages of his photographs, illuminated by his enchanting, sinuous handwriting, quoting Darwin or Karen Blixen, pictures scuffed by sands and festooned with foreign beer labels, ephemera from his travels, and splattered with blood and ink lit my brain on fire.

Not only did he look like a silent movie star in these images, but the world that he’d built and so beautifully articulated seemed to appeal directly to me, with all of the wanderlust and angst and machismo a college-aged jock can manage. What’s more, the work all seemed so desperately important — crusading, as he was, for the conservation of elephants, of natural resources, and a balance to life on Earth.

So, yes, something like prophet, playboy, and provocateur all rolled up into one, is probably what I thought.

At the time, I was working at Andy Warhol’s Interview and so knew well of Peter’s long history with the magazine, knew of the notorious shoot he did for the cover in the 1970s for which he ordered several buckets of blood, duly scandalising everyone involved.

Everyone save Interview’s columnist at the time, Fran Lebowitz, who later told me: ‘It's just not my kind of thing, that kind of very showy eccentricity. It wasn't that uncommon then — the writing in his blood and all that kind of stuff. It was the kind of stuff that girls did... kind of crazy upper-class girls trying to get back at their parents for not paying attention to them or whatever.’

The crowd Peter ran with at the time, the 54 crowd which included Warhol, was always out and about, Lebowitz told me, always on the scene. ‘You must understand,’ she told me, ‘these were not philosophers we’re talking about, not intellectuals; this was the party crowd.’ Though she did later admit that Peter was, ‘the most handsome straight man I ever met.’

And still he was, even at 78 when I met him. Still an incorrigible seducer, charmer, cad. And he knew he had me the second I showed up to his house, the easternmost property on Long Island, way out on the tip of Montauk. Knew that he had a captive audience and, boy, he didn’t want to let go — kind of didn’t let go, as he put me up there for the weekend, in one of the clapboard cottages on the property, where I could freely frolic in my imagination with all the wonderful ghosts there.

With Halston, who’d holed up there for a summer in exchange for decorating the place, with The Stones who saw the infamous snake pit when it was still in action, before the windmill on the property burned down in 1977, taking with it all of the Warhols and Andrew Wyeths and Francis Bacons that Peter had.

Not that he ever expressed any regret or nostalgia about it, or anything, ever in his life. In fact, he told me several times during our time together that he had made a choice in his life, right around the time of the fire, to never look back, never ever, to remain utterly present, in the now, for as long as he lived. Which I must have thought pure zen genius or something, and not the slightly sociopathic coldness as it occurred to me to be later on.

For hours and hours and hours in Montauk, we talked and ranted and raved, stopping only for a sushi break, wandering down the stairs he’d built on to the cliff leading to the sea, rambling over the rocks there, showing each other our journals, gawping at pictures of supermodels, watching the sunset, laughing, teasing, and philosophising.

For a long time, Peter and I looked through his diaries — leafing through the fatly layered collages he’d made religiously, almost daily, throughout his life in his large format Lett’s daily planners. And while I marvelled, he just sort of scoffed, telling me that they were just made in pursuit of escapism, that they were nothing more than doodles, piling ups of the detritus of his life, the scraps he found around him, notes to return some phone call, scores from the Giants game, receipts, tabloid cuttings, porn, poetry.

In a letter to the Getty Foundation, Peter’s pal Francis Bacon described these diaries as one of the most important works of their era. And I tend to agree.

Apart from the spellbinding beauty of them, I think that they are the best depiction we have of consciousness in the 20^th century — with all of its distractions and obsessions, the kind of mournful boredom mixed with the noise of advertising, of pop culture, the images of violence and celebrity and the macabre. I already thought all this at the time and tried to get Peter to comment on them, but he just sort of shrugged. Meh, it’s what I did, he seemed to be saying, no biggie.

Peter had suffered a series of strokes a few years earlier and at times during my visit his speech was impaired, as if something was impeding his syntax, causing him to sort of freeze mid sentence. In the silences, I leaped out with ideas, suggestions, help, concern, to which he just smiled and shook his head and we would fall into a comfortable silence together.

Then, suddenly, catching his momentum, he would unravel huge spools of ideas, opinions, stories, observations. At these points he seemed incredibly childlike, Puck-ish. Like a loosened helium balloon. And, when his wife wasn’t there and shooshing him, and even when she was, he’d say some absolutely unpublishable things, unforgiveable things, which at the time I couldn’t make sense of.

Later, when I began writing my book about Peter, the family explained that he’d had dementia. And I wonder if I thought that explained it.

Of course, I spent a lot of time, in the researching and writing of the book, trying to come to grips with some of Peter’s reprehensible behavior throughout the course of his life. Tried to see the man in full, a man I only knew for the last few years of his life, tried to see, through him and his behavior, his appetites and his artwork, what I could of his life and times.

And I know what Edmund White would say, that, ‘biography is usually the revenge of the little people on the big people (the application of the biographer’s petit bourgeois campus morality, for instance, to the uncautious [sic] international high flyers).’ Which very well may be.

Peter was, more than anyone else I can think of, the most uncautious high flyer. So it is very nice to think back, for the first time in a long time, about the meeting that first kicked off our friendship. And, which ultimately changed my life. What did I know?

Christopher Wallace is the author of ‘Twentieth-Century Man: The Wild Life of Peter Beard’ which is out in paperback, now.

Austen’s novels were published anonymously and read by a few thousand (including the Prince Regent), but she was almost unknown upon her death in 1817 and many of her books went out of print. It wasn’t until a biography written by her nephew came out in 1870 that her work took off, later achieving critical acclaim.

Now, we can’t escape Austenmania, evidenced not just by the reams of fan fiction (prequels, sequels and tales of bedroom antics) inspired by her work, but also by the number of UK-wide events organised this year to celebrate the 250th anniversary of her birth.

Read on for our top picks.

In Hampshire

The team at Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, Hampshire have organised a series of festivals themed around some of Austen's best-loved novels. Pride and Prejudice finishes today, but then there's Sense and Sensibility (May 1–11), Emma (July 12–20) and Persuasion (September 12–21), plus a Birthday Festival (December 13–21) and ‘Austenmania’, an exhibition celebrating adaptations. Click here for more information.

In Southampton

‘In training for a heroine’, with Austen’s travelling writing desk, runs at God’s House Tower in Southhampton, until February.

In Somerset

The Jane Austen Festival (September 12–21), plus a nautical Persuasion ball (May), a seaside Sanditon ball (June) and a Yuletide Birthday Ball (December) are all popping up at Bath's Jane Austen Centre.

In Hampshire

A life-size sculpture will be installed outside Winchester Cathedral and 8, College Street, where Austen spent her final weeks, will open to the public for the first time (June 4–August 30).

Across town, ‘Beyond the Bonnets: Working Women in Jane Austen’s Novels’ runs at The Arc on July 26–November 2

In Dorset

With Regency costume, letters and paintings, ‘Jane Austen: Down to the Sea’ at Dorset Museum & Art Gallery explores the author’s relationship with the coast (June 14–September 14.

On screen

Dolly Alderton is said to be writing a script for a new Netflix series of Pride and Prejudice. Miss Austen, a four-part adaptation of Gill Hornby’s 2021 bestseller, has been made by the BBC and begins February 2. Starring Keeley Hawes, it questions why Cassandra burned her sister’s letters. The BBC has also commissioned a 10-part series based on Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister, giving spotlight to ‘odd one out’ Mary.

On the stage

Austentatious, the improvised comedy theatre production seen on the West End, will be touring the UK, with dates in York, Norwich, Buxton, Salford, Winchester, Bath and Leicester.

Michael Billington

I learned most this year from Hitler's People by Richard J. Evans. Sub-titled 'The Faces of the Third Reich', it offers compelling pen-portraits of 22 leaders of the Nazi movement. The author's conclusion is that they were not psychopaths, but, by and large, members of the bourgeoisie traumatised by Germany’s humiliation in the First World War. For light relief, I turned to Rupert Everett's witty collection of short-stories, The American No, which shows he is as magnetic a writer as an actor.

Michael Billington is a theatre critic.

Tiffany Daneff

Sue Prideaux’s biography of Paul Gauguin (below), Wild Thing, stays in the mind and is one of those books you keep recommending to friends, not because they are art enthusiasts, but because it is so engrossing.

The author had access to rediscovered memoirs and reveals the falsehood in recent claims of misogyny and racism. Her portrait uncovers a man of huge intelligence and integrity whose obstinate pursuit of truth changed the way we see the world—and led to his untimely death.

Tiffany Daneff is Country Life's Gardens Editor.

Mark Diacono

James Kaplan's 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans & The Lost Empire of Cool is a brilliant biography of sorts, of three musical geniuses whose 1959 coming together created the seminal jazz album Kind Of Blue. Restaurant critic and broadcaster Jay Rayner’s first cookbook, Nights Out At Home, shares his interpretation of the restaurant dishes that have stolen his heart (and stomach) —opinionated, funny and serious. Hope I Get Old Before I Die: Why rock stars never retire by David Hepworth charts how, starting with Live Aid, music changed and we/society changed with it—unputdownable.

Mark Diacono is the author of several books and regular gardens contributor to Country Life.

Kate Green

‘This is not a memoir of a troubled soul hoping to be fixed by the road,’ says Oliver Smith in his prologue to On This Holy Island—what a relief! This is an interesting modern take on the pilgrimage, incorporating Lindisfarne (Lindisfarne Castle, below) and Wembley.

Petroc Trelawny adopts a similarly non-self-indulgent approach in Trelawny's Cornwall and the result is extremely moving. You feel every step of David Nicholls’s tenderly funny novel You Are Here and Andrew O’Hagan’s ‘state-of-the-nation’ door stopper Caledonian Road was equally satisfying.

Kate Green is Country Life's Deputy Editor.

John Lewis-Stempel

Giving your true love a partridge in a pear tree might be tricky, but there are two acceptable book substitutes to place under the tree. The Return of the Grey Partridge by Roger Morgan-Grenville and Edward Norfolk recounts the fascinating and persuasive story of the rehabilitation of the gamebird on the latter’s ducal South Downs estate. The paradox of saving Perdix perdix? Peppering is a game shoot, where, crucially, apex predators who feast on the bird are controlled. And Tarquin Millington-Drake’s gloriously glossy photo album, Living with Greys, is as captivating as the beloved bird itself.

John Lewis-Stempel is a writer and farmer, and regular Country Life contributor.

Steven King

I know, I know—I wrote Reschio: The First Thousand Years, so I probably shouldn’t be writing about it here. It’s included on this list at the request of Country Life’s kind-hearted Travel Editor, Rosie Paterson.

You can decide for yourself about the merits of the book. The merits of its subject, the Reschio of the title, a large estate in rural Umbria, however, are beyond dispute, and have nothing to do with me. (Best-case scenario, from my point of view: go to Reschio, pick up a copy of the book when you’re there and leave with ecstatic feelings about both.) 

Steven King primarily writes about travel for Country Life. You can read some of his work here.

Mary Miers

Paul Gough’s Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist stands out among the biographies for its fresh material about a well-covered period in British art, beautifully written and illustrated, and revelatory about a painter who has too long been overshadowed. It is excellent on the complex relationship between the Spencer brothers and how Gilbert emerged from the shadow of the more famous Stanley to become a highly regarded observer of rural life.

Mary Miers is Country Life's former Art & Books Editor.

David Profumo

I greatly enjoyed two detective novels—not a genre I often read. From the witty, perceptive Kate Atkinson came Death at the Sign of the Rook, the sixth to feature her beguiling sleuth Jackson Brodie, in a country-house saga. The quite dissimilar Irish policeman St John Strafford is the versatile Irish writer John Banville’s protagonist in The Drowned, a darkly compelling procedural that is unnervingly astute about human foibles.

Julian Pullan has self-published a serious, well-researched and lively volume about salmon fishing: Right Place, Right Time is available from Amazon and would be ideal for any angler’s stocking policy. 

David Profumo is the author of Country Life's Reel Life column.

Carla Passino

On May 29, 1453, the Ottoman army led by Sultan Mehmed II breached the walls of Constantinople and swarmed into the city. Ever since, Europeans have painted the ‘Turks’ as infidels, crumbling and morally corrupt. Diana Darke vigorously challenges this perception (and other historical myths) in The Ottomans: A Cultural Legacy, newly published in paperback. She highlights the often forgotten architectural, artistic and scientific successes achieved by the Ottomans and considers how they were rooted in a social structure that was in certain respects groundbreaking for the time. 

Carla Passino is Country Life's Art & Antiques Editor.

Charles Quest-Ritson

Two excellent new books. First, for gentlemanly gardeners, Thomas Pakenham's The Tree Hunters chronicles 300 years of plant hunters and their aristocratic patrons who loved making arboreta.

Second, for general readers of a curious temperament, Patrick Joyce’s Remembering Peasants is a fascinating analysis of how the pre-industrial peasant classes lived or survived, worked or died, with an emphasis on Poland, Italy and poor, oppressed Ireland. 

Charles Quest-Ritson is a garden writer and horticulturalist. 

Agnes Stamp

What I Ate in One Year by Stanley Tucci is a funny, often poignant reflection on life, death and grief through the medium of food. Simon Schama meets ‘Horrible Histories’ in David Mitchell’s paperback romp through England’s monarchs in his hilarious Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens.

A treat for equestrians is my colleague Kate Green’s Badminton Horse Trials at 75. Superbly illustrated (mostly by the brilliant Kit Houghton), it celebrates the champions (two-legged and four) that have tackled eventing’s ultimate test. Finally, Gavin Stamp’s Interwar, my late father’s swansong, edited posthumously by his widow, Dr Rosemary Hill, is the definitive history of British architecture between the Great War and the Blitz. 

Agnes Stamp is Country Life's Assistant Features Editor.

Jack Watkins

Bill Bowes—balding, bespectacled and ungainly—was an unlikely fast bowler; Dudley Carew thought he ambled to the crease ‘like a cart-horse indignant at being prodded out of its normal stride’.

However, the Yorkshireman played 15 times for England, including on the infamous Bodyline tour of 1932–33, and became a respected journalist. Jeremy Lonsdale’s nicely judged An Unusual Celebrity: The Many Cricketing Lives of Bill Bowes is a window on a time when Test and county cricket, so despised by today’s administrators, was supreme.

Jack Watkins is a regular Country Life contributor.

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A Short History of British Architecture

Simon Jenkins (Viking, £26.99)

There can never be too many introductions to the subject of architecture, the art form that none of us can escape. A readable and concise perspective.

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39

Gavin Stamp (Profile Books, £40 hardback, £25 paperback)

A trailblazing study, posthumously published, that reveals the quality and stylistic variety of architecture in Britain between the world wars. A study that defines its subject.

John Goodall is Country Life's Architectural Editor.

Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect?

Clive Aslet (Triglyph Books, £20)

A concise and engagingly written account of the life of this outstanding architect. The author — a former Editor — and architect both have close connections with Country Life.

British Architectural Sculpture 1851–1951

John Stewart (Lund Humphries, £45)

It’s remarkably easy to overlook architectural sculpture, but as soon as you have it pointed out, you realise how fascinating it is and that you can see it everywhere.

The Buildings of England: Staffordshire

Christopher Wakeling and Nikolaus Pevsner (Yale University Press, £45)

The last volume in the revised ‘Buildings of England’ series. With the foundational survey of architecture in Scotland and Wales also complete, we only await Ireland.

The British Country House Revival

Ben Cowell (The Boydell Press, £80)

Written by the director general of Historic Houses, this book describes the changing fortunes of the country house since the dark days of the 1970s and looks to their future.

The Language of Architectural Classicism

Edward McParland (Lund Humphreys, £35)

A book that encourages us to consider how the language of classicism has evolved and been applied over time. It’s refreshingly wide ranging, fun to read and thoughtfully illustrated.

Jewish Country Houses

Edited by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green (Profile Books, £45)

An account of the Jewish ownership of country houses across Europe. It is illustrated with photography by Hélène Binet.

A British Country House Alphabet: A Historical and Pictorial Journey Volume 1

Curt DiCamillo (New England Historic Genealogical Society, £20)

This is the first in a three-part survey — here covering the letters A–H — that looks at country houses through anecdote. It’s an unexpected and enjoyable read.

Streetscapes

Ptolemy Dean (Lund Humphreys, £45)

Illustrated with the author’s own distinctive water colours, this book looks at the street scapes of our historic towns and their evolution.

George Edmund Street

Geoff Brandwood (Liverpool University Press, £40)

The year 2024 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of this prolific Victorian architect, whose work includes countless churches, but also the Royal Courts of Justice on London’s Strand.

The Irish Aesthete: Buildings of Ireland, Lost and Found

Robert O’Byrne (Lilliput Press, £22.99)

A collection of atmospheric photographs of Irish ruins and abandoned houses. The images are accompanied by short histories and anecdotes.

It begins with a soft humming noise. Then the mudguards swing out and click into wing position as the radiator grille parts to allow the fan-belt propeller and petrol-pump fly-wheel to slide out from the bonnet. A green light on the dashboard blinks PULL DOWN. As Commander Caractacus Pott RN (Rtd) gingerly pulls the lever down and presses the accelerator pedal, the car tilts up her shining green-and-silver nose and takes off. ‘Don’t worry! She’ll look after us!’ he shouts to spell-bound Mimsie and the twins as they soar over the weekend traffic jam. After circling Canterbury Cathedral, they take a short cut over Dover Castle and fly up the Kent coast looking for a place to land for a picnic.

In the hands of ‘James Bond’ author Ian Fleming, the crime-busting exploits of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang cannot fail to thrill. ‘Never say no to adventures… Otherwise you’ll lead a very dull life,’ says Cmdr Pott, the eccentric inventor who saves the 12-cylinder, eight-litre, supercharged Paragon Panther from wreckage. ‘You never get real adventures without a bit of risk somewhere.’ And so the Potts set off in their splendidly restored car, which does 100mph in top gear and has a mind of its own.

When they get marooned on a sandbank, stumble upon a cache of weapons in a French cave, encounter a band of gangsters who kidnap the twins and get embroiled in a heist on a Parisian sweet shop, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang transmogrifies into an aerocar or a speed-boat and gets them out of trouble. Named after the sneezes and explosions that erupt from her exhaust pipes and with a cryptic GEN II on her numberplates, the magical car was inspired by the 1920s aero-engined racing models built by Count Zborowski on his Kent estate, Higham Park.

Fleming had nine Bond novels under his belt and was convalescing after a heart attack in April 1961, when, forbidden a typewriter for fear of straining himself, he reimagined bedtime stories he’d told his son Caspar and penned Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang by hand. Enthralled by the first two instalments, Michael Howard, his editor at Jonathan Cape, expressed hope that he would ‘reel off at least 10 more episodes’. The adventures were to be serialised, as several ‘Bond’ books had been, but Fleming soon tired of the project, confessing in June that ‘I really can hardly bear to look at these stories again and anyway I am knee deep in The Spy’.

By November 1962, he was ‘tidying up Adventure Number 3, but heaven knows if and when I shall produce an adventure Number 4 [he didn’t]. So would your machine now please take the whole problem over and cope with it as best they may?’ he implored Howard. ‘Sorry to put all this firmly on your plate, but such free mind as I have is now engaged in trying to devise another James Bond.’ He did, however, promise to find a more delectable recipe for the top-secret Bon-Bon ‘Fooj’.

He also remained involved in the protracted efforts to secure a suitable artist, having stressed early on that ‘much will depend on the illustrator’ and that the original drawing of the car ‘must, I think, not look too funny’. Among candidates trialled was the Daily Mail’s cartoonist Trog (Wally Fawkes), but the newspaper refused to allow him to collaborate with an author whose work was serialised in its rival, the Daily Express. (There was also the small matter of Fleming’s past affair with the proprietor’s then wife, Ann Rothermere. Although she’d been married to Fleming since 1952, a long-standing froideur lingered.)

It was Cape’s new director, Tom Maschler, who spotted the talent of the author-illustrator John Burningham (1936–2019), pioneer of a new style of picture book that exploited developments in colour printing. Cape had published Burningham’s first book, Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with no Feathers, in 1963 and, on the back of that award-winning success, commissioned him to illustrate Chitty.

‘John adored cars,’ says his wife, the children’s illustrator Helen Oxenbury, recalling his 1934 Austin Seven convertible (inspiration for Mr Gumpy’s Motor Car), his ‘shellfish’ Citroëns and the Jeep you had to double-declutch to brake.

She remembers helping to make the cardboard model of Chitty in his basement flat in Soho, London W1, where he suspended it on a fishing line and photographed it from different angles. She still has what survives of it — a small and fragile remnant like a tattered moth that has lost its wings. Burningham’s illustrations have fared better and Fleming rightly acknowledged their brilliance.

At their sole, brief meeting, he requested only one small change: could a Tabac sign be added to a drawing of Paris. As a fellow enthusiast of both France and smoking, Burningham happily obliged.

The illustrations are notable for their diversity of scale, style and media and the way they convey so dynamically the mix of humour and suspense. Looking at the double-spread of the great green aerocar with her resplendent coachwork trimmed with polished chromium, one can almost hear the ‘delicious rumble’ emanating from the fish-tail exhausts as she speeds along the motorway, firing terrific blasts from her boa-constrictor klaxon. Later, when pursued by gangsters, Burningham depicts her as a swooping black dragon.

Fleming did not live to see publication of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car. On August 12, 1964, two months before Cape released the first of the three volumes, he had another heart attack and died. It was Caspar’s 12th birthday and his father was only 56. Burningham, who always took his readers’ viewpoint, thought it rotten to prolong their suspense by staggering publication over several months. The cliff-hanger adventures were first released as a single volume in 1968 and there have been many subsequent editions and reinventions, three sequels by Frank Cottrell Boyce (in 2011–13) and new artwork by Barney Tobey, Joe Berger, Steve Antony and Thomas Gilbert. The original editions are now much sought-after; Jonkers Rare Books in Henley sold a set of first editions recently, while, Peter Harrington currently lists a trio of first editions of the original volumes at £1,500.

When Fleming took Caspar to see Walt Disney’s newly released The Absent-minded Professor in June 1961, he found to his horror that it featured ‘a flying motor car which circles a church spire! Moreover [the professor] builds it in his back yard. This really is the limit,’ he wrote to Howard. ‘Would you send one of your intelligence spies to have a look at the film and suggest what amendments we ought to make?’ The similarities were no more than coincidental, but Fleming took the precaution of omitting mention of Canterbury’s spire.

He might have been more perturbed by Bond producer ‘Cubby’ Broccoli’s 1968 film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Adapted from a screenplay by Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes, it starred Dick Van Dyke (who allegedly declined Broccoli’s suggestion that he replace Sean Connery as James Bond) and featured many invented characters, plots and creations, notably Truly Scrumptious, stunts in Alpine Vulgaria and Rowland Emett’s fantastical automata. Even the hero didn’t make it through unscathed: Caractacus Pott picked up an extra ‘s’ en route tothe silver screen, being renamed Caractacus Potts.

Burningham considered it ‘ungracious’ that he wasn’t involved and declined to see it. Whatever Fleming might have made of it, the film turned his creation into an international classic. Yet his authorship remains little known, with few people aware of the connection between 007 and the magical flying car.

Gritty, clamorous, proper old London is celebrated in a new book of photographs by Paul Trevor, who helped set up the Half Moon Photography Workshop in 1975, a collective that saw photography as a tool for social change, at about the same time he edited the magazine Camerawork.

His work is in the V&A Museum, among other public and private collections. Between 1974 and 1992, he captured the markets of his local Brick Lane and Petticoat Lane before rapid gentrification changed the character of the East End.

‘I was drawn to the Sunday market by the people, by the contrast between the energy they created and the run-down state of the place, and by the spontaneous and highly visual “street theatre” on display,’ Mr Trevor explains.

‘Like theatre, the show was repeated every week, but the performance was never the same.

'You never knew what to expect, which is probably why I persisted with it for so long.’

Market Day is published by Hoxton Mini Press — you can order a copy here.

Credit: Alamy

Gloriously evil: The Top 10 British villains in Hollywood history

Everyone knows Brits make the best on-screen super-villains. Jonathan Self picks out his favourites.

That morsel of wisdom is delivered by Aunt Betsey in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Not that I remember it from the book. It is the epigraph that appears on the creamy blank page in the front of novel Demon Copperhead, the contemporary adaptation of David Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver.

An epigraph is a little token, a hint of the writer’s intentions. I like the clean space, the nugget of truth, the pause before tackling the single-spaced pages that follow. Demon Copperhead is a long and remarkable book and I spent weeks thinking about the writer’s intentions. By the time I reached page 546, I was pretty sure that recalling the past rarely has any lasting influence upon the present in real life. It’s more likely in the written word.

These days, it’s hard not to look at the past with a kind of wistfulness. Not a sentimental glance back, but with an astonished eye: we didn’t realise that we had it so good. For a start, we weren’t setting the planet on fire. Admittedly, we created a hole in the ozone layer (remember that?), but when we learnt that it was deadly serious and manmade, the countries of the world came together and agreed to stop producing hydrofluorocarbons — or at least reduce them. It seems that they are still used in refrigeration and air conditioning and, as the planet gets hotter and hotter, air conditioning is needed for survival. We probably need to look into that again.

It may be vain to think that the past was a cleaner, quieter and kinder place, but it felt pretty decent when you knew your GP and your GP knew you, milk in glass bottles was delivered every morning and children walked to school. Our village still has a post office, two churches, a village hall, a surgery, a village shop, a fish-and-chip shop, a pub, two hairdressers and a primary school, although there are more children than places. There’s also a new Co-op that’s open until 10pm. It’s in the centre of the village where Tripp Batt’s used to be and we all miss that farm-machinery repair shop and hardware store.

The current political turmoil does make me feel homesick for the past. The election in America is ‘too close to call’ and my days begin with reports from swing states, poll numbers, electoral-college reviews from a divided land where half the country believes everything is at stake and the other half believes it, too. The war in Ukraine goes on, the war in Gaza goes on and a new war in Lebanon is changing the landscape as I write. Floods and wildfires are far away and they are next door. Over-crowded boats with their desperate cargo cross the Channel daily and everyone knows someone with a broken hip who waited five hours for the ambulance to get them to the hospital, where there was no bed.

Most of us believe we would save the earth if we could. Our new government tells us that we live in the motherland of Democracy, but we can’t talk back. We can’t say ‘NO’ to pylons that will ravage the countryside and destroy precious habitat, say ‘NO’ to a vast prison on land that is home to ancient woodlands, say ‘NO’ to the 1,000 more houses added to the 1,000 in the village where there is no surgery.

We wouldn’t mind a nanny state that persuaded us to modify our lives, turn off computers and televisions from standby, switch off lights and use drying racks instead of tumble dryers. We would be grateful for a democratic government that championed the smaller nuclear reactors being developed by Rolls-Royce and called a halt to Sizewell C, for which even the French investors admit the design is already out of date. We’d welcome identity cards that would solve far more problems than they would create, make ‘stop and search’ a smoother process and help get knives and other weapons off the streets.

We tend to be balanced observers of the dramas in our world. We don’t stand on platforms, but we think it is unkind to raise the price of a first-class stamp to £1.65 six months after the previous increase. Ditto the looming threat to do away with telephone landlines, the life raft of the old. We feel lucky to live in a country where we have the right to speak our minds, but we wonder if we have a government that cares what we say.

Studies show that the human attention span has shrunk to the size of a broad bean. Smartphones, texts, SnapChat, Amazon, Paypal, apps, apps and more apps, Elon Musk — it’s a handheld cyclone out there and we are now warned daily about something called Artificial Intelligence. We are told that if it doesn’t destroy us, it will save us. Fingers crossed on that one.

I am truly sorry if I have added to the gloom of your day. I was raised with the epigraph ‘If you can’t say something nice, at least be plucky’. So that you know this writer’s intentions, I’ll close with a handful of epigraphs. Take your pick:

Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

Jason Goodwin: The dark, chilly undercurrents in the seemingly-idyllic life of the English village

Jason Goodwin was feeling decidedly nostalgic for village life — until he had a run-in with one of its discontents.

What is the fundamental job of a writer? 'We try to turn the world into language,' according to the poet, broadcaster and writer Ian McMillan.

Ian, one of Britain's best-loved poets and writers, as well as the presenter of The Verb on BBC Radio 4, joined James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast in what is one of the most entertaining and wide-ranging chats so far.

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James and Ian start off by discussing Under the Changing Skies, a collection of highlights from The Guardian's long-running Country Diary series. It's a collection for which Ian has penned the foreword, despite admitting that he'd be 'no good at all' at writing the column himself.

'You've only got 200 words, 200-and-odd words,' says Ian. 'I'd still be clearing my throat at 250 words, and might just be ready to go at 300 words.'

Ian and James go on to talk about an amazing: nature, writing, inspiration and more, with some wonderful anecdotes added in from an illustrious career (Ian's, that is; not James's). There's also a chance for Ian to explain why he chose John Cage's 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence when he appeared on Desert Island Discs — a quirky choice to put it mildly, and one which might conceivably have had some rather alarming unintended consequences.

Under the Changing Skies: The best of The Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is out now, published by Faber (£20)

Podcast: Britain's best architects, interior designers, craftspeople and garden designers

Giles Kime joins James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast to explain how he and the team come up with

Norman Foster on the Country Life podcast: 'The Green Belt is one of our greatest inventions'

Lord Norman Foster, one of Britain's great architects, joins the Country Life podcast.

Naughty sheep, clever cows and a lifetime of farming: Rosamund Young on the Country Life Podcast

Listen to best-selling author Rosamund Young on the latest edition of the Country Life Podcast.

Credit: Getty Images

Literature, landscape and re-wiggling rivers, with Vicky and Charles Rangeley-Wilson

70 years and two days ago, The Fellowship of the Ring, first part of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, was published. To mark the occasion, Bayliss Rare Books has launched ‘the finest collection to come to the market in decades’, with first editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (ranging from £30,000 to just under £80,000), as well as various opinionated letters written by J. R. R. Tolkien to his friends, publisher and the original theatre director of The Hobbit. In these, he discusses theories of language, his thoughts on Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes (‘quite a sniff of priggery about these two precious gents’) and how he named the home of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, Bag-End, after his aunt’s house in Worcestershire.

‘I am well aware that dwarfs is the correct modern English plural of dwarf; but I intend to use dwarves for good reasons of my own,’ wrote Tolkien to his publisher Allen & Unwin on July 22, 1953. ‘I take it harder that my elven and elven-should be replaced, though not consistently, by the detestable Spenserian elfin, which it was specially designed to avoid… I never have voluntarily used, and do not intend (if I can avoid it) to be represented as using the form farther for the older further, and should be grateful if the further of my copy could be left alone… I think it would be much better, and save time and annoyance in the end, if it was assumed that all apparent oddities and idiosyncrasies… were intentional.’ The letters range in price from £15,000 to £40,000.

‘Tolkien is known for being fastidious with language and here we find him incredibly disgruntled… It is considered a holy-grail letter for collectors,’ explains Oliver Bayliss, adding that, when the letter criticising Conan Doyle was sold in 2002, ‘the cataloguers didn’t seem to notice Tolkien talks about Holmes or Conan Doyle. It changes a letter on language, grammar and verbs… into something completely different. A next-level letter, potentially the only one of its kind to exist.

'The last time such a major cache of Tolkien material came to market was more than 20 years ago,' adds Mr Bayliss. 'All the letters are nothing short of fascinating.’

Visit www.baylissbooks.co.uk to see more details about the sale.

Credit: The Tolkien Estate 1976 / The Tolkien Trust 1999 / Bodleian Libraries, Oxford

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I should declare a slight acquaintance with Australian author Matthew Evans, who visited my farm when researching Milk. My team of hardened dairy-farming fanatics were sceptical about meeting Mr Evans, who farms 70 acres in Tasmania where he milks between one and three Jersey cows, as well as rearing pigs, ‘chooks’, bees and goats and running a market garden, heritage orchard and olive grove. It all sounded a bit good lifey.

Large-scale farmers tend to look down on smallholders, whom they dismiss as ‘hobby farmers’, but Mr Evans could teach us a thing or two about farming profitability. From his 70 acres (40% of which is reserved for wildlife) he produces enough food for 10,000 meals per year. Roughly half of them feed his family and friends, the remaining half he sells in his on-farm restaurant — where he was the head chef — turning over about £580,000 per annum, providing 10 full-time jobs and a fair proportion of profit. Somehow, he was finding time to write books and host a television programme — humbling.

It turns out that he can also teach us a huge amount about our product. As a biologist, farmer and chef, there is probably no one better to unravel milk in all its complexities than Mr Evans, perhaps the best food writer in the world today. What a complex thing it is. Until recently, it appears that we knew more about the galaxy — galaxias in Greek, derived from gala, the word for milk — than the properties of milk itself.

"Cows’ milk has sustained us for at least the past 8,500 years as ‘a mobile tap for high-quality protein, along with just about all the other nutrients that a human needs to survive'"

The book brims with serendipity. We learn that Romulus and Remus could not have been suckled by a wolf as the nutrient overload would have killed them; what Mrs Beeton recommended for feeding the wet nurse (half a pint of stout and a biscuit for elevenses); and of poor, dying Mary Wollstonecraft being encouraged to suckle puppies as a doomed strategy for curing infection from a retained placenta.

Infant mortality was high until well into the 20th century because of a failure to understand nutrition and hygiene. Thanks to the wonders of modern science, we now know more about the importance of breast milk. Nature has endowed mothers with the ability to absorb any infections afflicting their babies by kissing their heads so that they can use their own immune systems to produce milk that is ‘a cocktail of readymade immunity, tailored to the child’s needs that day’. Who knew?

Once weaned from our mothers, however, it is herbivores’ — and particularly cows’ — milk that has sustained us for at least the past 8,500 years as ‘a mobile tap for high-quality protein, along with just about all the other nutrients that a human needs to survive’. Mr Evans traces the milking of cows through to the world’s biggest dairy farm in China, which is 22.5 million acres — about the size of Portugal — and has 100,000 cows that never go outside.

In the western world, we now drink less milk, partly, Mr Evans reckons, because 70 years ago the processors decided that, rather than dumping waste ‘hog slop’, they would market skimmed milk as a healthier alternative (erroneously) to full fat. We have also been turned off milk by drinking an inferior product. It comes as no surprise to learn that the health-giving qualities of milk depend on what your cow ate — grass-fed milk is much better for you, although it may be some time before the food industry stops keeping us in the dark about how it has been produced.

Vegans may be disappointed to learn that, after a rigorous examination by the author, plant-based ‘milks’ don’t match up. We are only beginning to understand the benefits of the highly complex proteins in cow’s milk for human health — 4,654 of them discovered so far, against a handful in plant ‘milks’. As Mr Evans writes: ‘Milk has been a blessing for humanity, embellishing culture… raising the gastronomic stakes and nourishing three-quarters of the world’s population. It’s the Swiss army knife of foods that has transformed our diets, and our genetic code… while bringing pleasure to billions. And for that we should be grateful.’ Highly recommended.

'The last red squirrel in Dumfries — if it comes to that — is most likely to be predated by a pine marten'

Credit: Jonathan Wilson/iStock via Getty Images

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I was told last week by a veteran London publisher, who had just returned from the newly defunded Hay Festival, that there is a book out about the palatability and acceptability of ‘killing in the name of conservation’. Is it ever OK to trap rats in order to protect seabirds or to shoot Welsh foxes to save the last of the country’s lapwings? A farmer in Ceredigion called Charles Grisedale has one of the last breeding lapwing populations in Wales. When he was a boy, he told me, they were all over the country, from the Severn to Cardigan Bay.

As we all do when people recommend books, I said that I would read Hugh Warwick’s Cull of the Wild without delay. I even went home and ordered a copy. I’ve just got Francesca Reece’s novel, Glass Houses, to finish first, a brilliantly written exploration of life in rural Wales. It’s rare to come across a young, London-based writer who can talk at length about different types of chainsaw, but her father, like the protagonist in her book, was a forestry worker. Then I’ve been savouring for some months John Healy’s extraordinary memoir The Grass Arena, on boxing, chess and, as he puts it, ‘being a wino’.

I really will try to get round to Cull of the Wild; my issue is that the premise of it slightly irritates me (although the Country Life reviewer, a retired gamekeeper, comments that the author comes to some realistic conclusions). A podcaster who interviewed Mr Warwick said he was apparently a little nervous about the public outcry that might come from his daring even to grapple with the idea that we should kill in order to save wildlife.

"I’m coming to the end of a long grey-squirrel culling campaign and my neighbours, as well as the sparrows, seem to be delighted with the results"

In an ideal world, where unicorns roam and book festivals can fully fund themselves, there would be no need. Nature would be perfectly balanced, Man would only take what he needed and lapwings would tumble and cry all across the Gower Peninsula, but we messed it up a long time ago. We are a brilliant and terrible species. We’ve partied too hard for too long and the duty now rests with us, through wilding, active conservation and the lethal control of animals (which is simply an integral part of responsible countryside management), to improve biodiversity.

I’m coming to the end of a long grey-squirrel culling campaign in my London garden. It’s a pretty wild place full of brambles and vines, but the squirrel numbers were nuts and I watched as they bullied the sparrows, which have had a rough time over the past few decades, into oblivion. I won’t give you my address, in case an activist bashes my windows in, but my neighbours, as well as the sparrows, seem to be delighted with the results. Katie at No 4 tells me that, for the first time ever, her window boxes have remained unmolested throughout spring and her bulbs, which usually get dug up, are still in the ground.

This afternoon, I am looking at a small meadow with a view to renting it for rabbit shooting with my spaniel. It sounds like a luxury, but the total cost, per year, will be about the same as one fee for a newspaper column. There is, at the far end — or there was — a pair of lapwings. There are also mink, a fox’s earth and countless corvids, all things that would happily raid lapwing nests. I could sit by and get on with the rabbit shooting, but that would be wrong. The right thing to do is to kill in the name of conservation, in the desperate hope of saving a bird that is already all but gone.

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Kate Green isn't just the Deputy Editor of Country Life magazine. She's also one of the country's foremost equestrian journalists, having worked at four Olympic Games as well as countless other top events around the world.

With her book on the 75th anniversary of the Badminton Horse Trials just launched, Kate tells the tale of how the crushing disappointment of the 1948 Olympics paved the way for a resurgence in the sport on these shores, which has led to Britain becoming the home of eventing.

• Listen to Country Life podcast on Apple Podcasts
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Kate joins Country Life Podcast host James Fisher to talk about Badminton, equestrian sport in general and the incomparable magic of the Olympic Games, from being chased by irate security guards while walking the showjumping course in Atlanta to the outpouring of joy shared by fans and competitors alike during the golden weeks of London 2012.

Kate's book, Badminton Horse Trials at 75, is published by Quiller (£40) — you can find out more about it here or order a copy.

Episode credits:

• Host: James Fisher
• Guest: Kate Green
• Editor and Producer: Toby Keel
• Music: JuliusH via Pixabay
• Special thanks: Adam Wilbourn

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My Badminton Moment: memories of the world’s most famous horse trials

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On the shingle at the beach in Dungeness, Kent, a Victorian fisherman’s hut stands proudly. This structure, called Prospect Cottage, was the home of director and artist Derek Jarman from 1987 until his death in 1994.

The gardens of Prospect Cottage are much visited and widely known, cultivated in the shingle surrounding the pitch-black building. Sculptures assembled from the flotsam of the sea are interspersed with plants that can survive the unprotected and unpredictable forces of coastal weather.

Inside, however, Prospect Cottage has remained a mystery. Saved for the nation in 2020, the property and its contents have remained a most exclusive secret. However, a new book by the photographer Gilbert McCarragher will allow readers ‘into the personal sanctuary of the iconic artist for the very first time’.

A friend of Keith Collins, who owned Prospect Cottage following Jarman’s death, Mr McCarragher was invited to photograph the house in 2018, compiling 160 images that are now accompanied by reflective essays that intent to take the reader inside the cottage and ‘reveal something of its history’.

Published on April 4, via Thames and Hudson, a selection of images can be viewed below. 

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Readers of Out of Africa never forget the haunting first line: ‘I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.’ It’s that small past-tense verb ‘had’. My grandparents lost their farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1931, the same year Isak Dinesen lost her farm in Kenya, but I never heard the words ‘We had a farm in the Delta’. No unforgettable words are tattooed on my heart.

Dinesen then describes the landscape of her farm: ‘The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom and unequalled nobility.’ Views across the cotton fields in the Delta are also immensely wide, but ‘greatness’, ‘freedom’ or ‘nobility’ were not in our agrarian vocabulary. From the first page until the last, I knew I was in another country, another world. Reading the book was like falling in love.

I didn’t come to Out of Africa by chance. It was required reading in a history class my first semester at university. The title of that course was ‘The Legacy of Colonialism’ and my ignorance was as vast as the Ngong Hills. I’d barely heard of Kenya, was unaware the country had achieved independence two years earlier in 1963. Years would pass before I knew that Isak Dinesen was the nom de plume of Karen Blixen —called Tanne by her family, Tania by her friends, and that she died in 1962, the year before Kenya’s independence. My copy of her book was published in 1952. I was amazed to learn that it first appeared in 1937.

"All sorrows in life are bearable if you can tell a story about them"

Yet, somehow, the book and its writer stayed with me. I kept it during all my wandering years. I think that I recognised something that the Danish writer had in common with Southerners: all sorrows in life are bearable if you can tell a story about them.

It almost felt like a story when I came as a bride to a farm in Suffolk and discovered that my nearest neighbour was a Dane. Jorn Langberg became my closest Suffolk friend and his house was filled with what I called ‘Blixiana’: prints of her paintings (she had studied painting and intended to be an artist), the same Royal Copenhagen porcelain that was shipped out to Kenya and, 17 years later, shipped back to Denmark; the leather-bound volumes of all her books translated into Danish — she wrote in English.

Jorn and I travelled one spring to Denmark. We spent a day at Rungstedlund, the family home she returned to, grief stricken and demoralised, when she left Africa in 1931, her marriage to Baron Blixen long ended, her coffee farm a failure and the great love of her life, Denys Finch Hatton, killed in an air crash.

Jorn knew every detail of her life ‘out of Africa’: ill (her husband gave her the syphilis that would ruin her health), lonely and exiled after the loss of her farm, she returned to the family home to live with her mother and her maiden Aunt Bess, not something a fiercely independent 46-year-old woman would ever want to do.

I knew the rooms from photographs: the orderly Danish comfort, the Masai spears brought back from Africa by her brother Thomas hung on the wall behind her desk. I felt a wave of melancholy, but Jorn brushed away my sadness: ‘Coming back home was the making of her!’ Her lover, the dashing Finch Hatton, English aristocrat, scholar, soldier and fabled hunter, turned Tania into his Scheherazade. He recognised and honed her genius as a storyteller during their evenings by the fire as she told long tales. Jorn believed this enabled her to relearn her life. ‘Without her failures in Africa, her Seven Gothic Tales would never have appeared. The success of the Gothic Tales gave her the courage and stamina to write Out of Africa. Writing gave her life purpose.’

"There is beauty and there is poverty, order and corruption, wild Nature and Nairobi, which now looks like Dubai"

Another friendship brought me even closer to Blixen. I’d known Virginia Graham for years before I learned that she was born in Kenya, that her mother and father were born there, that both sets of grandparents went out to Kenya early in the last century. Her grandfather, Charles Taylor, was a pioneer coffee planter, founder of the Coffee Board and of the Muthaiga Club, doyen of Kenyan growers and adviser to Tania on her plantation. His wife, Kit, Virginia’s grandmother, an eloquent observer, provided a beautiful description of Denys and Tania in Sara Wheeler’s life of Finch Hatton, Too Close to the Sun.

The Taylor and Graham roots in Kenya were deep. Like so many of the English, they rejoiced to live there, but in 1963 they returned to England. Few of the ‘English Kenyans’ ever returned to Africa. Virginia’s mother, Kathini Graham (née Taylor), always dreamt of building a house in the Rift Valley where she was born, but never felt economically secure enough to do it. After she died in 2012, her three children, all born in Kenya, decided to build ‘Kathini’s House’.

I am a reluctant traveller, but, thanks to Virginia’s patience and persistence, last month I walked into the house where Karen Blixen lived at the foot of the Ngong Hills. Now a museum, it looks exactly as it is described in her writing. Two days later, I was in Kathini’s House, a beautiful place in the Rift Valley. In it is the Kenyan library, the fine china, silver and pictures that were shipped to England 40 years ago, and have now returned to Kenya. I sat on the terrace of Kathini’s House, built by her children, and watched a family of zebras gather by the house.

No one can capture this country on a single page. The writer Martha Gellhorn came close when she described Kenya as ‘the paradise of Africa’. There is beauty and there is poverty, order and corruption, wild Nature and Nairobi, which now looks like Dubai. Life for the English who live here is far from the mythic Happy Valley world, and families who continue to farm—roses, cattle, dairies, coffee, tea—struggle to make it work. When describing an experience, Isak Dinesen often wrote the words: ‘I suddenly understood everything.’ All I can say is: I now understand more about the writer and the country she loved. I am grateful.

Carla Carlisle: The day I rescued The Queen

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‘I’ll send it to Bob Cratchit’s!’ decides a very merry Scrooge on Christmas morning, rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of the ‘prize turkey’ — ‘twice the size of Tiny Tim’ — that will soon be gracing the table of his long-suffering employee and his family. A heart-warming sign of his redemption, it must be one of the most famous gift-giving scenes in literature, in one of the world’s best-loved Christmas books. But shop around (as we must at this time of year) and you can gather a whole stocking-full of fictional presents: memorable, comical and relatable gifts that go on giving, every time we unwrap them anew.

In literature, as in life, the most appreciated presents are sometimes the most thoughtful ones, no matter how humble. ‘’Tes mine?’ says aged and underappreciated farmhand Adam Lambsbreath, staring at the neat little washing-up mop that Flora Poste assures him will better ‘cletter the dishes’ than the thorn-spiked twig she finds him using on her arrival at the eponymous Cold Comfort Farm. So enamoured of the handsome gift is he (although, perhaps, determined not to be swayed from a habit of ‘fifty years and more’) that he hangs it reverentially ‘above t’ gurt old greasy washin’-up water’—much to his benefactor’s annoyance.

Occasionally, the wrapping alone is enough to excite: we probably all know a Winnie-the-Pooh, who, when given a ‘Special Pencil Case’ by Christopher Robin as a thank you for effecting the brave rescue of Piglet from the flood, opened it ‘as quickly as ever he could, but without cutting the string, because you never know when a bit of string might be Useful’.

Nancy Mitford’s Christmas Pudding provides a warning to any of us so reckless as to parcel up similarly shaped presents without carefully affixing gift tags: precocious Etonian Sir Roderick ‘Bobby’ Bobbin, intending to gratify his horse-mad mother with an unexceptionable volume of hunting songs, having muddled up his gifts, presents her instead with a racy tome on The Sexual Life of Savages in Northern Melanesia. With considerable aplomb he complains ‘volubly and in tones of utmost distress… that the shop must have sent the wrong book by mistake’ — his only reward for such quick thinking being to see the book, bought ‘at great expense’ for a friend, thrown with scepticism onto the fire.

"The pianoforte given to Jane Fairfax by her secret fiancé Frank Churchill in Jane Austen’s Emma becomes more of a millstone around her neck"

A well-meant attempt at a bit of pre-Christmas bribery pays similarly poor dividends for Georgette Heyer’s most rackety young Regency couple, Viscount ‘Sherry’ Sheringham and his wife, Hero, in Friday’s Child. Employing a young horse-whisperer of a groom whose one failing is his regrettable past as a pickpocket, they have ‘the happy thought of promising to bestow a timepiece’ on him at Christmas, if he will but refrain from pilfering from their friends in the meantime. Jason, however, succumbs to ‘his instincts’ almost as soon as he has his ‘fambles’ on the ‘tattler’ — although he is morally improved, someone points out, as his stolen booty includes not one watch.

Heyer plays with her couple’s careless generosity, but it’s Mitford who excels at gifts characteristic of their literary giver. Rarely has a choice of present personified anyone so well as the ‘fur hat’ and ‘gold and topaz bracelet’ that the Bolter — Fanny’s glamorous and permanently absent mother — dispatches to her from Paris in The Pursuit of Love (deemed ‘unsuitable’ by Aunt Sadie, but madly envied by the Radletts); or the ‘sports wristwatch’ — ‘never worn’ — that is all romantically minded Linda can bear to pass on to her own estranged daughter, Moira, having discovered in her a disappointing incapacity to thrill at the idea of an air raid.

That said, the festive offering of Brideshead Revisited’s Rex Mottram comes close. In the unconvivial aftermath of the Flyte family Christmas, as they attempt to stop Sebastian getting sloshed, Julia’s suitor gives her a tortoise, the shell of which has her initials set in diamonds. ‘Beastly,’ her sister Cordelia calls his gift and although it certainly is that (the creature reputedly had a real-life counterpart, owned by a French aristocrat, whose decadent ornamentation proved a death sentence), it undeniably shares qualities with the ‘vulgar, pushful and unprincipled’ Rex.

If the tortoise is a dubious pleasure for Julia—who spends a lot of time frowning at it—it’s not the only such in fiction. Schoolteacher Lucy Snowe of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is given novels by her colleague and admirer Monsieur Emanuel, but as ‘pruned’ by his penknife, with the passages he considers inappropriate chopped out, no matter the effect on the narrative. And although the pianoforte given to Jane Fairfax by her secret fiancé Frank Churchill in Jane Austen’s Emma appears to be a love token of a more desirable kind (allowing them to continue flirting clandestinely — ‘if I mistake not that was danced at Weymouth’, he can say, nonchalantly, in company), it’s more of a millstone around her neck, making her the subject of speculation and adding to her guilt over the impropriety of their secret contract. Of course, neither compares with The Moonstone, the looted and consequently cursed Indian diamond given to Rachel Verinder, who is ‘fascinated’ — until what must rank among fiction’s very worst gifts brings murder, suicide, scandal and distrust to her door.

Yet where there are good intentions, an effort must always be made to show gratitude and even one of literature’s most famous adolescents, a 14½-year-old Adrian Mole, manages to politely paste on a ‘false smile’ — worn ‘for so long that it hurt’ — after being presented with Bible Stories for Boys by his grandma at Christmas.

Even harder does his fellow teenager Cassandra Mortmain, of I Capture the Castle, try in her attempts to reassure her besotted old friend Stephen that the portable wireless he has scrimped and saved to buy her is more than equal to the ‘glorious’ gramophone sent her by Simon, the rich American she has fallen for. ‘Oh, Stephen!’ she cries, guiltily conscious that in her mind there’s no comparison between the two. ‘It was a much bigger present from you. Simon didn’t have to save — or work for it.’ His quiet, dignified response reminds us what gifts — whether real or imagined — are really all about. ‘No,’ he simply replies, ‘that was my privilege.’

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Rosamund Young, the best-selling author of The Secret Life of Cows, has been a farmer for almost half a century. In her new book, The Wisdom of Sheep & Other Animals, she turns her focus from her cattle to her sheep, showing a side if these oft-maligned animals that's by turns amusing, surprising and eye-opening.

'Some are affectionate, others prone to head-butting,' says Rosamund. 'Some are determinedly self-sufficient, others seek our help when they need it. And some can be trusted to lead the flock home. They are as individual as we are.'

Rosamund spoke to the Country Life Podcast in an episode published on Friday 15th December, while you can read an extract from her new book here:

A cold late winter

Kite’s Nest had one significant disadvantage when we first came here: a very limited range of buildings. Most of them were in poor condition and none of them were really suited to modern farming, being either too low or too narrow for tractors.

On the farm that Richard rented when he left school, he had had no trouble obtaining capital grants of 40 per cent for a range of buildings to keep all the cattle comfortable in adverse weather and all the hay, straw and farm machinery under cover. In the early 1970s, he was still using nitrogen fertiliser and other chemicals. I’m not sure if it was specifically stated in the legislation, but these were effectively the key to obtaining the grants, because the money was conditional on increasing yields, and also on specialising in preferably one or at most two enterprises.

When we applied for a grant at Kite’s Nest, we got a shock. We were told that we were not eligible as we wouldn’t be able to meet the productivity criteria without nitrogen fertiliser. The Agricultural Development and Advisory Service (ADAS) was, at that time, a free service for farmers. One very kind ADAS officer took up our case, which was that by using clover in our grasslands we could increase the farm’s output without nitrogen. But the 18 Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) was institutionally hostile to the concept of organic farming and totally committed to intensification through increasing use of agrochemicals. It took the ADAS officer five years of battling on our behalf to get MAFF to agree reluctantly that we could apply. He said he almost lost his job as a result.

It seemed as if everything was against us at the time: interest rates were soaring and the cost of new buildings had increased so much that even with the grant they were going to cost a lot more than they would have done had we put them up when we arrived in 1980. The grant scheme was also being phased out, limiting our time to arrange finance and get planning approval, which we needed because the farmhouse is listed.

The scale of the problem posed by the condition of the farm’s buildings became clear in the first months of 1983, which saw a very cold late winter with biting east winds against which we had to build temporary windbreaks with straw bales to keep the cattle warm enough. Come April it seemed as if spring had finally arrived, but the weather suddenly turned cold again and, very unexpectedly, snow was forecast. We got the cattle back in and bedded them down. Rather than the sprinkling of snow we’d expected, we woke up to find six to eight inches of wet and frozen snow lying everywhere, including on the flat roof of the flimsy pole barn erected by our predecessor.

"There were close to a hundred cattle in this barn when the roof caved in during the night"

Very lightweight plastic sheets were supported on beams only two inches wide. This was enough to support the 19 sheets, but completely inadequate to take the weight of the snow as well. There were close to a hundred cattle in this barn when the roof caved in during the night. Clearly there must have been some creaking before the collapse, as the cattle had all huddled at one end, where about a quarter of the roof was still precariously in place. Miraculously none of them were hurt.

Another heavy flurry of snow left me wondering how to rescue our tiny flock of sheep, who I knew would be huddling against the top wall of the Seven-Acre Field. Richard hitched our old cattle transporter to the tractor, and we set off uphill on the impassable-looking farm track. I clung on precariously as he drove in blizzard conditions, zigzagging and sliding. Up one very steep part, the wheels spun so much we almost came to a stop, but we just managed to reach the top track and with it the flatter ground. When we reached the sheep, we opened the transporter and fought against the wind to push the gate open just far enough for them to squeeze through. Although they had never travelled in any vehicle before, they all hurried inside and we tobogganed terrifyingly home.

Fortunately, the snow didn’t last long and we were able to turn the cattle out and feed them in the field. The pole barn was a complete write-off. We’d tried to get it insured, but every company had balked at its flimsiness. Not only were there broken beams and large pieces of plastic roofing sheet everywhere, but many of the sheets had shattered into hundreds of small pieces. These all had to be picked out of the straw by hand before we could clean out the three-foot-deep winter bedding. Without a grant we couldn’t afford to replace the barn with a new building, but we had to have shelter ready for the following winter. Richard decided the only option was to upgrade the size of the beams significantly and re-roof it himself with second-hand corrugated sheets. Little did we know at the time, but this would have to suffice for the next thirty-three years.

The Four Seasons

Spring is so brief. It is glorious relief, after a long winter of laborious and relentless feeding, to be able to let the cattle graze grass in abundance instead of hay or silage. No sooner do they have the right to roam freely, however, than we need to confine them to certain fields unsuitable for haymaking and leave the rest of the grass to grow.

Summer is all about winter: assessing the weather, mowing, spreading, rowing up, baling and carting the precious fodder to the safety of the barn. Farmers have to plan a long time ahead to be sure they have sufficient feed for their animals, just as people always had to grow their own food and learn how to preserve as much as they could before the advent of supermarkets.

Autumn will vary. If you grow crops you will be totally absorbed with the harvest and preparing the soil for planting. If you have only livestock, there will be time to enjoy them enjoying just being. The tough work of winter will seem a long way off, and as your animals eat their way towards it, grazing the grass as it declines in abundance and quality and grows more slowly, you will hope and almost believe that autumn will stay kind until spring.

"Sheep absolutely hate being kept inside and make their feelings very clear"

Winter is eating the summer bounty, spiking and unzipping the bales, repairing fences when you can find 22 time on a dry day, and cleaning, sharpening, oiling, greasing and servicing the kit ready for summer.

In many ways, sheep are less trouble than cattle in winter. They need to be fed of course but they are lighter and don’t poach the pasture into deep mud with their hooves as cattle do when it is wet. All of our animals prefer to be outside if at all possible, but the cattle do appreciate the shelter of the barns in adverse weather while our sheep absolutely hate being kept inside and make their feelings very clear. Their coats are weatherproof, coated with lanolin to repel water and able to protect them from fierce winds.

The Wisdom of Sheep & Other Animals: Observations from a Family Farm by Rosamund Young is published by Faber (£14.99 hardback)

Credit: Sheep in a field - ewe and lamb

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Early in December, my husband asks me: ‘What would you like for Christmas?’

Every year, I say: ‘I have everything I want.’

And it’s true: every room, cupboard, surface in this house is covered in stuff. It’s like the house in the Somerville and Ross novel The Big House of Inver: ‘Under everything there was something’ — and, in this house, it is papers and books.

This year, I was able to reply: ‘I want The Letters of Seamus Heaney.’ It was on order for the bookstore that occupies our old dairy, so it had another advantage, it would be easy for him to procure.

Then something happened. As soon as the box of The Letters arrived, I knew I couldn’t wait four more weeks. Although it meant that I would deprive my husband of the peace of knowing his ‘present dilemma’ was solved, I couldn’t let go of the book. I added it to my shop bill, wrapped it in my sweater and, with it safe as a puppy, I carried it home.

There was no chance of hiding it: The Letters has the heft of a piece of farm machinery. It is also a beautiful book: very good paper, pages sewn so it opens out gracefully onto the table — this is not a book to read in bed. Straightaway, you feel you will be guided by the sensitive and scrupulous editor.

"He believed that being poet was a preoccupation, not an occupation"

Christopher Reid, a poet himself, was formerly Heaney’s editor at Faber & Faber and this is a remarkable achievement. In the summer of 2007, Heaney wrote to him after reading the Letters of the poet Ted Hughes, which Mr Reid had recently completed editing. ‘Your introduction has perfect pitch — true to the friendship, to the editorial requirement, close, kind, grave, loyal and loving.’ I don’t think Heaney anticipated him editing his own letters, but all he wrote can be said about Mr Reid’s introduction to this volume.

It is not a quick read: more than 800 pages and, even with that plenitude, Mr Reid admits that he ‘had to cut back severely to make a book of publishable proportions’. Absent from the collection are the letters Heaney wrote to his wife, Marie, and their three children, Michael, Christopher and Catherine.

One suspects that those letters would be a tender treasure trove: Heaney spent months each year in the US, first at Berkeley, then long stints at Harvard, always trying to pay the rent, then the mortgage, placate the bank manager, support his family. The reader may wish for the love letters, but his love for his wife and family is all through this collection.

In the very first letter, December 9, 1964, he writes to his friend, fellow poet and Northerner Seamus Deane: ‘Now to minor matters. I got engaged a fortnight ago to Marie Devlin and hope to be married next August. We are very happy and believe we can remain so for a lifetime… I met her two years ago and knew from the beginning that she was the girl to hunt — but now she is not so much a quarry, more way of life.’

He wasn’t a poet when they met, something Marie thought was a ‘good thing’. Heaney would have agreed. Long after he was being called ‘the best Irish poet since Yeats’, he remained gently superstitious. He used ‘poet’ to describe others, applying ‘writer’ to himself. When he filled out landing cards, under ‘occupation’, he wrote ‘teacher’ or sometimes ‘writer’, never poet: ‘I’m too superstitious and religious.’ He believed that being poet was a preoccupation, not an occupation. Until you win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Reading the letters of writers can feel intrusive, but, as well as being a map into the writer’s life, it is a lens into the writing life. Heaney’s letters show the complicated balancing act of earning a living, raising a family and making space for the ‘work’. The letters also show what a saint the man was. A letter to his friend, the artist Barrie Cooke, is memorable: ‘In the last two days I have written thirty-two letters… The trouble is, I have about thirty-two more to write: I could ignore them but if I do the sense of worthlessness and hauntedness grows in me, inertia grows…’

"Heaney deserves a sainthood, as well as his Nobel Prize"

I read those lines aching for Heaney, a poet so genuinely kind, generous and sensitive, that he feels honour bound to answer letters. And then, suddenly, I felt a small patch of relief. I, too, have a letter from Heaney. Not collected here in The Letters, but one written after I’d interviewed him in his home in Dublin for The Washington Post back in the autumn of 1981. As do so many of his letters, it begins with an apology: ‘...a little shamefaced and tail-between-the leggish’, then an account of the family’s two weeks in the Dordogne after a stay with me in Paris that included our exchange of books by the widow of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam.

I’m not an archivist, a saver of letters. Nothing amazes me more than the vast collections of poets’ letters, something that will vanish in the age of email. Thankfully, I saved my Heaney letter, together with a handwritten poem, The Easter House, which he left for me in the flat in Paris. Written in his ‘brown-ink’ period, it has faded a little, but, at some point, I framed it, which I hope helped it to survive.

I didn’t keep in touch with Seamus and Marie. Reading these letters, I remembered why. In his study at the top of the house where much of the interview took place, I saw the stacks of to-be-answered letters that haunted him. Heaney deserves a sainthood, as well as his Nobel Prize, for the many thoughtful, generous, kind and time-consuming letters he wrote during his all-too-short lifetime. Without them, we would not have this rare and precious volume, which is an enduring life of a great poet and a truly good man.

Are these the seven best independent bookshops in Britain? A writer makes her case

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One summer, when I was a student at Trinity College in Dublin, I got a job helping to clear out a very old bookshop on the banks of the River Liffey. Years before, the proprietor — for reasons unknown — had simply locked it up one day and left, never to return. Over time, the shop fossilised into a literary time capsule. The bell on the door remained silent, the books gathered dust and the shelves mouldered as the damp seeped in, until the shop was finally sold and the decision was taken to reopen it. For several months, I was immersed in the business of taking apart a bookshop and putting it back together again. The abandoned volumes were sorted, boxed up and sold, and an array of shiny new titles were shipped in, to be catalogued and arranged upon the shelves. There was fresh paint, bleached wood, a credit-card machine and a restaurant upstairs. It was quite clearly the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, a glimpse into the heart and soul of the place.

What gives a bookshop such a special atmosphere? Perhaps it is the peculiar nature of the goods it sells. Unlike a chair, or a picture, or an item of clothing, you can’t immediately tell whether you are going to like what you are buying—a book requires you to read it first. To step inside a bookshop is to be met with a realm filled with possibilities, where every shelf contains dozens of worlds waiting to be discovered. This feeling intensifies when you discover one that’s run by a passionate reader, someone who’s willing to give space to forgotten gems and lesser-known authors, because they know that other people will enjoy them, too.

Certain bookshops spark the imagination so strongly that they almost seem to belong in the pages of the stories that they sell. One of the most famous examples is Shakespeare and Company in Paris, which has captivated generations of authors and readers alike. The layout is pleasingly eccentric, with beds for visiting writers dotted amid the teetering shelves of fiction, poetry and memoirs. ‘I created [Shakespeare and Company] like a man would write a novel, building each room like a chapter,’ wrote the founder, George Whitman. ‘I like people to open the door the way they open a book, a book that leads into a magic world in their imaginations.’

Here in the UK, there is a wealth of independent bookshops that brim with their own unique charm and atmosphere, all celebrating the act of reading as an endless source of entertainment, enlightenment and pleasure.

John Sandoe, London SW3

020–7589 9473 — johnsandoe.com

Tucked away on a quiet street just off London’s King’s Road, John Sandoe has been supplying reading matter to the residents of Chelsea and beyond ever since it opened in 1957. Over the years, the shop has expanded across the two adjoining buildings, yet retains its old-fashioned atmosphere, with window boxes brimming with red geraniums above the smart black façade. The interior is equally captivating, with each of the rooms packed with a thoughtfully curated array of books. During the pandemic, staff ‘prescribed P.G. Wodehouse as if he were a 19th-century patent medicine’, spreading some much-needed cheer via a series of recorded extracts.

The establishment offers plenty of gift options and subscriptions, but, best of all, it also does a complete wedding-list service, helping couples to choose what books they might like to be given, then taking care of everything else, from bespoke book plates to delivering the new library, neatly wrapped and beribboned.

Leakey’s Bookshop, Inverness

01463 239947 — leakeysbookshop.com

It’s worth taking a trip to Inverness purely to visit Leakey’s, an enormous second-hand bookshop that stocks more than 100,000 titles, packed across two floors of a converted 17th-century church. The space itself is breathtaking, with its soaring ceilings and labyrinthine layout of tall bookcases that are densely packed with all manner of volumes, from the dog-eared bestsellers of yesteryear to valuable antiquarian editions.

Visitors have likened it to the Hogwarts library from the ‘Harry Potter’ series and it’s certainly hard to beat for its size and scale. Best of all is the woodburning stove that crackles away merrily in the middle of the shop floor, with a large pile of logs piled high beside it. There are worn leather armchairs and plenty of nooks where you can sit and turn a few pages of whatever has caught your eye. It’s the sort of place where you can’t help but linger, soothed by the scent of old books and woodsmoke.

Topping & Company, Edinburgh

0131–546 4202 — toppingbooks.co.uk

Although Topping & Company is one of the newer arrivals to Edinburgh’s literary landscape, opening in 2019, it’s also one of the largest, with more than 70,000 books in stock. It occupies an imposing building on Blenheim Place, which was formerly used as a bank and has been transformed into a light-filled, airy bookshop, with rolling library ladders to reach the higher shelves. It’s one of four independent bookshops launched by the Topping family—you can find their other branches in Bath, Ely in Cambridgeshire and St Andrews in Fife.

The shops are known for their friendly atmospheres and regular events. There are also ‘Coffee with a Bookseller’ vouchers on offer, which allow you to meet with an experienced bookseller and get suggestions as to how you might like to spend your voucher over tea (or coffee) and biscuits—surely a far more civilised way to discover your next read than relying on a computer algorithm.

Octavia’s Bookshop, Gloucestershire

01285 650677 — octaviasbookshop.co.uk

Children will be drawn to this lively independent bookshop, set in a beautiful old building in the market town of Cirencester. In the 12 years it’s been open, Octavia’s Bookshop has become one of the most popular bookshops in the Cotswolds, thanks to its brilliant selection of children’s tomes. You can find everything from board books to general fiction for grown-ups, as well as a collection of handmade Moomin toys made by the owner’s mother.

There are regular book signings and events to keep even the smallest readers entertained, with plenty of famous faces popping in for a visit. If you’ve ever watched the 1990s classic film You’ve Got Mail and wished you could find a real-life children’s bookshop like The Shop Around the Corner, then this is it.

Richard Booth’s Bookshop, Herefordshire

01497 820322 — boothbooks.co.uk

Straddling the border of England and Wales, Hay-on-Wye is a town that’s become synonymous with books, thanks to the proliferation of independent booksellers and the world-famous Hay Festival. At the heart of its literary heritage lies Richard Booth’s Bookshop. Its eponymous founder pioneered the concept of a ‘book town’ after establishing the premises in 1961.

The sheer size of the shop makes it a natural focal point—it’s one of the best to lose yourself in, with an impressive number of well-stocked bookcases set across several floors, selling both new and old books. There’s also a café and a small cinema, which ensure that there’s a steady stream of people through the doors. Expect it to be extremely busy if you visit during the festival season, otherwise, it’s an excellent place to while away a few hours.

Persephone Books, Bath

01225 425050 — persephonebooks.co.uk

This pretty little shop sits in an 18th-century building in the heart of Bath, having relocated from Bloomsbury in 2021. With its polished wooden floorboards, vases of fresh flowers and displays stacked on antique tables, it’s one of the most elegant bookshops around. Persephone Books mainly republishes fiction by women writers from the first half of the 20th century, so you won’t find the traditional publishers’ lists here. Instead, there are displays of the company’s own volumes, each with their distinctive grey dust jackets and brightly patterned endpapers.

The curators have a talent for truffling out some spectacularly good writers who were formerly out of print and you can trust that whatever you pick up will be a good read. It’s worth speaking to the supremely knowledgeable staff, who can point you in the direction of what titles you might like best, be it lyrically written, shrewdly comic, or both.

Barter Books, Northumberland

01665 604888 — barterbooks.co.uk

If you’re a keen bibliophile, consider a trip to Barter Books in Alnwick. One of the largest second-hand bookshops in Europe, it is hidden inside the town’s decommissioned Victorian train station. There are more than 350,000 books, ranging from valuable 18th-century tomes to modern paperbacks.

Blazing open fires provide warmth in winter, a model railway runs above the shelves in the soaring, glass-ceilinged former station and there are plenty of nooks to discover, from the children’s room to the antiquarian book room, with 40 glass cases of rare volumes on show. The Station Buffet is the perfect place for a tea break, plus there’s an ice-cream parlour that’s sure to be popular if you have children in tow.

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Towards the end of his life, Chekhov said that everything he read seemed to him ‘not short enough’. I know the feeling, and I’ll try to keep this short. When the Russian writer said that I don’t know — I heard it from Martin Amis who, when asked about ageing, agreed with Chekhov.

Amis was referring to writing, however, not reading and not to life. Although he feared the ‘tsunami of old people’ occupying the land, he wasn’t personally ready for the euthanasia booths on street corners providing the ‘martini and a medal’ that he once proposed as the noble exit route for the elderly. Like most enfants terribles, he was pretty confident that he would avoid the civil war between the young and the old that he saw coming.

When I heard Amis had died — the lead news on Today at 6am on May 20 — the announcer added, as they always do, ‘age 73’, my first thought was: he concocted his exit potion of choice. Amis claimed that he started smoking at the age of 10 and he was rarely photographed without a roll-up and a whisky, the same poisonous brew that ended the life of his closest friend, fellow writer and agent provocateur Christopher Hitchens 10 years earlier, aged 62.

Without checking the archives, I think it is safe to say that Amis, ‘Britain’s most famous literary son’ (New York Times obituary, May 22), didn’t show up regularly in the pages of Country Life. Why would he? His novels are largely urban tales with emphasis on the messiness of life, love, sex and money. There were a few bucolic detours — he had happy childhood memories of an interlude in South Wales when it was still Cider with Rosie country — but the iridescent and sympathetic complexity of country life was not his world.

Before heading to the kitchen for coffee, I went to my bookshelves. I found only one volume by Amis: The Rub of Time, a collection of his non-fiction: essays, literary criticism, reviews. Where was his memoir Experience? The essays The War Against Cliché? Had they strayed to bedside tables in guest rooms? I didn’t search for the novels, which I often found ‘not short enough’, but his essays are passionate, graceful, fierce.

"He was horrified by the ‘cancel culture’ that now infects both countries: ‘Every fibre in my being resists. It’s a philistine manifesto. It’s anti-creative'"

My single Amis volume was almost eclipsed by a row of fat volumes by Hitchens, better known as ‘Hitch’. Fellow ex-patriots, literary soul brothers and friends through thick and thin, which includes Hitch’s polemics on the Iraq war, Mother Teresa, Ralph Nader, Hillary Clinton and God. Over the years, Amis disagreed violently with his friend in print, but never fell out with him personally. It was a lesson Amis said he’d learned from his father, Kingsley: ‘He lost a lot of friends over Vietnam, great friends. You can’t afford that. As Hitch said, you can’t make old friends.’ Both of the writers held an obvious fascination for me. Long before I settled into this space under the agreeably ambiguous banner ‘Another Country’, I shared with them the expatriate journey, in reverse.

Even before Amis exchanged his house in Camden for the brownstone in Brooklyn, his was the gaze of an exile who captures the Old Country with a ferocity that those left behind read with apprehension and dread. I remember seeing his 2012 novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England, described in Hatchards as a ‘grotesque version of modern-day Britain under the reign of celebrity culture’, and wondered who thought that would boost sales. The reviews put Amis on the defensive. In an interview with Jeremy Paxman, he insisted that the novel was not an attack on England: ‘I am proud of being English.’

Of course, for all their Americaphillia, Amis and Hitchens knew they were lucky to be English. Both born in 1949, both Oxford graduates (Hitchens, Balliol College; Amis, Exeter), they were revered in America for their scholarly writing and their beautiful Oxbridge accents and rich baritones. They both expressed their dazzlingly digressive ideas with a fluency that left their audience spellbound. The prophetic Amis was not recognised in his old homeland, however. He won the Somerset Maugham Award for his debut novel The Rachel Papers in 1973, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Experience in 2000, and nothing between or after. The critics in his homeland were pious and merciless. Even the English obituaries felt snide, stooping to cracks about his diminutive height and stratospheric dental bills, expenditure any half-wit American would consider a better investment than a designer kitchen.

If changing countries freed him from constraints and judgements that were distracting and demeaning (those teeth again), he knew there was no Utopia. He hated what Brexit said about Britain, but he thought what Donald Trump said about America was worse. He was horrified by the ‘cancel culture’ that now infects both countries: ‘Every fibre in my being resists. It’s a philistine manifesto. It’s anti-creative.’ If future students are allowed to read his novels, they will require a ‘safe space’.

Long before the phrase existed, Amis was accused of being a ‘nepo’ kid. That was particularly bad luck as his famous writer father never gave his son any literary encouragement. In his memoir, Amis wrote of his gratitude to the stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard who gave her near-illiterate 15-year-old stepson a volume of Pride and Prejudice and said: ‘Read this!’ It was the turning point in his life and he credited Howard for making him a reader, which made him a writer.

Writers like Amis tell us things that are important, things that scare us, things we don’t want to think about and, sometimes, things that bring understanding. They also remind us that there comes a time when what we read and what we write is ‘not short enough’. The good news is that we are not alone.

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Sometimes, early in the morning, with a jumper or an old coat pulled over my pyjamas, I slip out of a side gate and along the drive to stare at the point where there is a bend in the valley. Bracken-covered hills rise ochre, grey and green towards the sky and, in the distance, beyond broad fields of cattle, a lane bisects the landscape, winding out of sight.

More than once, at the end of the summer, bare feet in gumboots, drinking deep draughts of sharp, pure air, I have thought of Bilbo Baggins leaving Beorn’s hall in The Hobbit. Of that heavy-hearted departure on the part of our affable, but not excessively bold hero, Tolkien tells us ‘there was an autumn-like mist upon the ground and the air was chill, but soon the sun rose red in the East and the mists vanished’.

In my out-of-the-way Welsh hills, early-morning mists and rose-red dawns are a familiar sight. Whether it’s true or not, I’m happy to believe the statement of an elderly local, who told me that Tolkien spent holidays in the house in which I now live, surrounded by mist-coiled hills and densely green fields that, for me, resemble the landscape of the Shire, a terrain of springs and mountain streams, even, within driving distance, ancient barrows, that also recall Tolkien’s translation of the Old English poem Beowulf, which he completed in the 1920s, a decade before Bilbo made his debut.

The bucolic dimension in the work of Britain’s best-loved fantasy writer is sometimes overlooked. Tolkien’s novels, which include The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, are richly descriptive. Landscape is vividly evoked, its features sharply delineated, like the thicket amid the glens of the Morgai into which, in The Return of the King, Sam and Frodo fall: there, memorably, ‘the thorns and briars were as tough as wire and as clinging as claws’. Tolkien notes, too, the passage of the seasons and their changes: in late spring, Bilbo looks in vain for something to eat, ‘but the blackberries were still only in flower, and of course there were no nuts, not even hawthorn-berries’.

The same attention to detail is clear in many of the sketches Tolkien made in coloured pencils throughout his life, such as an image from 1928 of a copse of tall, thin trees growing within sight of the sea at Lyme Regis in Dorset: each finger of fern leaf is crisp, the tree trunks minutely patterned to capture the uneven contours of bark. The author, who loved surviving remnants of the language and culture of Anglo-Saxon England, was equally in thrall to the precious remaining unspoiled landscapes of these ancient islands. His pictures, like his writing, celebrate his love of trees, flowers, the countryside and, occasionally, rural architecture. Townscapes are rare.

Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on January 3, 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, known in his family as ‘Ronald’, lived in England from early childhood, following the death of his father, Arthur, in 1896, until his own death in 1973. The relations of his mother, Mabel, were from the West Midlands, and artistic; in their new home in the then rural hamlet of Sarehole, which later inspired his illustration of Hobbiton-across-the-water, Mabel taught her child botany and to paint and draw.

Although Tolkien may not have been old enough to recognise it at the time, the West Midlands showed him all too starkly Nature’s fragility. Whereas Sarehole remained convincingly rural, nearby Birmingham, where he later went to school, was uncompromisingly industrial, its skyline blackened by smoke, many of its streets crowded, noisy and dirty.

For the rest of his life, his preference would be for a vision of pre-industrial England. To his publishers, he described the Shire, home of the country-dwelling Hobbits, as ‘more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee’. Referring to the kingdom established in the Midlands after the Roman occupation of Britain, he would tell his youngest son, Christopher, that he considered himself ‘Mercian’.

Over the misty mountains

Mabel Tolkien died of diabetes in 1904, leaving 12-year-old Ronald feeling, he remembered, ‘like a lost survivor in a new alien world after the real world has passed away’. As did many ‘lost’ children, he sought solace in imaginative escape — in his case, in northern mythology, inspired by a story he had encountered in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book, of a dragon-slaying hero called Sigurd. He read the 13th-century Old Norse Völsunga saga, in a translation by William Morris, with its account of a golden ring made by dwarves, stolen, then cursed. He also read Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language.

An aptitude for ancient and modern languages — Gothic, Finnish, Welsh, Latin, Greek and Hebrew — came to shape his own written style, as well as exposing him to compendia of stirring and dramatic storytelling. Later, he would write: ‘Things that are uncomfortable, palpitating and even gruesome, may make a good tale.’ It was a lesson he absorbed as a teenager, discovering the Norse legends that would remain an abiding love and colour much of his published work. From his study of Finnish and Welsh emerged his version of ‘Elvish’ language; he claimed he had based his Dwarvish language on Hebrew.

Tolkien was in his early thirties when, in 1925, he won a professorship at Oxford: for the next 20 years, he would remain professor of Anglo-Saxon, although he discovered he had little appetite for teaching, describing it unequivocally as ‘exhausting and depressing’. How fortunate that this should have been the case.

In a moment of flagging spirit, marking examination papers, he wrote what would become one of the best-known first lines in English: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ The resulting novel was published in 1937 to instant acclaim and led, at its publisher’s suggestion, to a sequel, long in gestation, the trilogy of novels that make up The Lord of the Rings. All four novels display their author’s remarkable ability for absorbing wide-ranging influences in the creation of a new mythology, with roots not only in Norse and Celtic traditions, but in legends of Alexander the Great and even the work of Plato. Fellow Oxonian C. S. Lewis praised The Hobbit’s ‘happy fusion of the scholar’s with the poet’s grasp of mythology’.

Tolkien had married Edith Bratt in the spring of 1916, before his departure to fight in the trenches of the First World War. The couple had met when he was 16; together they had three sons and a daughter, Priscilla, the last born in 1929. Theirs was a close and loving family life, centred on a devoted partnership between Tolkien and his wife, whose ‘raven’ hair and bright eyes delighted and inspired him for more than half a century. He would outlive Edith by less than two years, dying on September 2, 1973; they lie together under a single gravestone. At his death, much of Tolkien’s work remained unpublished.

It is tempting to see parallels between Tolkien’s last years and Bilbo’s return to the Shire. ‘He took to writing poetry and visiting the elves; and though many shook their heads… and few believed any of his tales, he remained very happy to the end of his days.’

The life and times of J. R. R. Tolkien

January 3, 1892 born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, to Arthur and Mabel Tolkien

1895 Mabel Tolkien and her sons Ronald and Hilary return to England, after Arthur’s death, but she dies in 1904

1911 Tolkien goes up to Oxford. After changing to English Language and Literature, he is awarded a First. He studies philology, exploring historical developments of language

1916 Marries Edith Bratt. In the same year, as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, he leaves England for France, returning after four months with trench fever, an illness that recurs over the next two years

1917 Begins writing The Silmarillion

1918 Becomes Assistant Lexicographer on the New English Dictionary, mostly working on the history of words of Germanic origin beginning with W

1920 Appointed Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds

1925 Becomes Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford; collaborates on a translation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; invents ‘Elvish’ languages

1926 Meets C. S. Lewis. Later, Tolkien writes: ‘The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not influence but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience.’ In the same year, writes, but does not publish, a translation of Beowulf

1928–29 Works on an archaeological excavation on the site of a Romano-Celtic temple, at Lydney Hill in Gloucestershire, known as Dwarf’s Hill. Ancient folklore connects the area with dwarves and a labyrinth of holes and tunnels runs through the hill

1929 Tolkien’s fourth and last child born; now he has John (1917), Michael (1920), Christopher (1924) and Priscilla (1929)

1930s First meetings of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings, often in the Eagle and Child (or Bird and Baby) pub. Fellow members include C. S. Lewis, as well as Chaucer scholar Nevill Coghill and Lord David Cecil

1937 The Hobbit is published. Tolkien cites Beowulf as one of its ‘most valued sources’. Within a month of publication, publisher Stanley Unwin requests a sequel

1937–49 Works on the sequel to The Hobbit. On publication between 1954 and 1956, The Lord of the Rings becomes one of the biggest-selling works of fiction of all time

1945 Becomes Merton Professor of English Language and Literature

1959 Retires from Oxford University

1971 Edith Tolkien dies

1973 Dies in Bournemouth and is buried with Edith at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford

Although I am a member of the New Year: Stay Home tribe, I enter a new year with respect. I choose a rare and irreplaceable bottle of wine, I prepare a perfect fillet of venison and celeriac gratin and lay a table for two in front of the fire. This year — no trains, no nurses, no post, no ambulances and a bad war — I think, but don’t say, that a general anaesthetic might have been a better choice than Paulliac.

And so the year begins. The sheep welcome me as their Angel of the Bales (hay) and Buckets (ewe nuts). The chickens and turkeys no longer try to escape their wired world when I arrive with their oats and corn. Once a Palais des Poulets, their prison is now called ‘Love in the Ruins’. In Walker Percy’s book of that title, a doctor creates a miraculous instrument, an ‘ontological lapsometer’, a kind of stethoscope of the human spirit. The doctor plans to use it to cure mankind’s spiritual flu and save the world from destruction. A cure for bird flu, a cure for spiritual flu — how do we get there?

Accepting the uncontrollable vagaries of time and change enabled me to stop making New Year resolutions a few decades ago. Instead, I undertake what I call ‘The Clearances’. Some years, it’s simply taking the bottles to the glass recycling next to the grain store. I stack newspapers filled with articles on how to achieve balance, strength and weight loss in the paper skip. I don’t believe these little acts will save the planet, but they treat the symptoms of spiritual flu when no cure is in sight.

This year, the new-year mission began back in August, when we read Giles Coren’s column ‘Bin those books, your children will thank you’. It was like an O. Henry short story: I read it online and printed it out for my husband. He read the print edition and tore it out for his wife (me). Although the books on our shelves have never intermarried (‘That’s mine!’), we share nuggets of truth. Mr Coren’s bibliocide message inspired rare complicity. We agreed to bin our books, which really means: ‘Edit your one and precious life. Prepare for Judgement Day. Do it Now.’ And, five months later, as 2023 crept in, we began.

"The words ‘book grief’ struck at my heart"

In fact, we aren’t motivated by the afterlife gratitude of our son and daughter-in-law. We are more troubled by the idea that they will simply load the thousands of books into the John Deere tractor and trailer and dump the load at an Oxfam warehouse. Or, if there is a red-diesel shortage, dump the books into the pit on a field, together with rotten bales and centuries of agricultural debris.

Our fears have roots. We inherited an ancestral library of hefty volumes on field sports, cricket, farming in Argentina, flower arranging, lives of Field Marshal Haig. With no tender regret, we sold the lot to a specialist bookseller from Aldeburgh (they still existed back then). We cleared the attic, but, alas, we did not clear the shelves in the rooms where our own books live.

Now, almost all the second-hand bookshops have closed (except for Oxfam). There is still a wonderful book stall in the market square in Cambridge, but they don’t want paperbacks, modern fiction, crime or Habitat coffee-table books. They prefer cookbooks published in 1895 to ones published in 1995 and encyclopaedias, text books and Bibles have no future.

The ‘P’ word is often heard. One of the large second-hand booksellers in America, Wonder Books, pulps ‘damaged’ books, producing 100,000lb a month of recycled paper. I don’t dare ask what Oxfam does with its unsellable books. Are the unwanted tomes sent to Rwanda? Are volumes of The Da Vinci Code sent to countries ravaged by climate change? Do the starving and homeless read old Lonely Planet guides by candlelight, using Gone With the Wind for firewood? And here’s a spoiler alert: hardback books can’t be recycled — glued bindings contaminate rivers. It seems that books aren’t good for the earth.

Do we blame Amazon, which made it easier to acquire books than to go to the local library? Or (mea culpa), blame IKEA and the Billy bookshelves? Or do we just accept the security and comfort in the volumes, read and unread, that furnish our lives?

So it was that Epiphany began at Wyken Hall with a stack of black boxes from Anglia Produce. Strong enough to transport swedes, turnips and beetroots, they are now filled with His and Her books. Despite a long and happy marriage, our library is ‘Separate but Equal’ and we conduct our bound farewells accordingly. We plan for the boxes to reside in the old farm workshop and emerge on sunny days at the farmers’ market to be sold. Proceeds may be meagre, but they will go to the Ixworth Library in the neighbouring village.

When I had filled five boxes (goodbye John Updike, Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch, Robert Lowell), I made myself a mug of coffee and retrieved the FT Weekend from the recycling pile. I began to read an interview with Annie Proulx (rhymes with ‘new’). She described her recent move from the Pacific Northwest, where she’d developed an allergy to western red cedar, to New Hampshire in New England. She says that the hardest part of her move was ‘winnowing down’ her beloved library because she could not afford the third moving truck taking the books would have required. ‘I thought I could do without them’, but when she got to her new home and unpacked, she realised ‘the enormity of what I had done. I was filled with book grief’.

The words ‘book grief’ struck at my heart. Without a lapsometer to cure my ‘spiritual flu’, the thought of adding ‘book grief’ to my list of sorrows makes me feel crazy. I’ve just spent a desolate hour looking for my old copy of Love in the Ruins. I fear the new year is passing me by.

From time to time, I’m asked to give a talk and I always say yes, because writing is lonely and it’s nice to be in a room full of people, especially when they might want to hear what you have to say. Strangers usually give you the benefit of the doubt. I once did a book tour in America accompanied by my son and, as I entertained the good people of Jackson or San Diego, he went to the furthest part of the bookshop and hummed, with his fingers in his ears.

Like Boris Johnson, I don’t do these speaking gigs for nothing. When I was tidying my study last week, I was thrilled to discover a book token I’d been given for a talk at Daunt Books. It’s the sort of money that buys quite a lot of my time and lots of books, so my plan is to start with Annie Freud’s poems in her first collection, The Best Man That Ever Was. Annie is a grown-up, and the poems are not at all Fotherington-Tomas. She sees them as little films; they are full of oddities and slapstick and tell intriguing stories that make you laugh and think.

The same is true of Isabel Bannerman’s new book, Husbandry, about her and Julian making a garden in Somerset and also about being married and children and roses and lawns and a lot else besides. It is so out of the ordinary, so fantastically written, clever and very funny, that I might get two of them: husband-and-wife copies.

Nomads traditionally inhabit the world as if it were a garden. Anthony Sattin’s Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World explores the story of our other selves, those roaming peoples from whom we are all descended. Creators of vast empires, traders and catalysts, nomads live now on the margins, but he shows they may have something yet to teach us.

Nomads still roam the Stans of Asia, where Brigid Keenan’s husband was ambassador. She starts where Eric Newby leaves off: her confessional Diplomatic Baggage, recently reissued, makes me hoot; her memoir of the fashion trade contains simply one of the funniest scenes in 21st-century literature. I’m getting them both for friends.

John Llewellyn Rhys died young at the start of the Second World War and gave his name to a distinguished literary prize for the under-35s. He was a passionate and skilled flyer between the wars and his novel The Flying Shadow is for anyone with a love of the sky, full of understated flying talk from the golden age of aeronautics, split-arse pilots and invitations to Suck Up at the bar. Both his slim books have been beautifully republished by Handheld Press.

Reissuing travel classics is Eland’s stock-in-trade, but the publisher also works with living authors — it has recently reprinted all Jonathan Raban’s titles. Now, a compendium On Travel and the Journey through Life, quotes wisdom from Pliny to Paul Theroux. A. N. Wilson’s own life journey is addressed in Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises and I shall send friends on a scientific and psychedelic trip with Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, about the fungal underworld.

I feel a wave of affection for people who write: it seems the quietest, least attention-seeking form of communication. Silent, but for the reader’s sighs or laughter, and the occasional flicker of paper as the page is turned. Collaborative and private. Characters in novels don’t give fatuous interviews to the press, authors are rarely pressured into sleeping with their publishers and books are blessedly free of wires and plugs. It’s all so modest. And if you want a speaker for the price of a book token, drop me a line.

Credit: Alamy

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You can’t judge a book by its title. I have no idea how Possessed by Bruce Hood made its way onto my bedside table, but there it has been lurking, unread, for the past couple of years. I assumed it was either a passionate romance (bleurgh) or about demons (zzz) and was surprised, when I finally opened the thing, to discover that it was concerned with the human urge to acquire.

The book turned out to be a page turner.

Ownership is, of course, one of the most powerful concepts in the human mind. We are not content simply to exist in the physical universe, but want to possess as much of it as possible. Possessions represent more than economic status: we have an emotional relationship with the things we acquire. To a certain extent, they define us. We believe that happiness comes from getting what we want, but very often what we want doesn’t make us happy. When we die, we leave evidence of ourselves through what we owned, and yet the people we leave it to generally discard most of it and start over. By the time I reached chapter seven — ‘Letting Go’ — I was nauseated by the sheer volume of stuff I owned and, determined to take a strong line with at least a portion of it, rushed up to the attic with a view to instigating a major disposal.

The first box I tackled turned out to contain a number of practical things taken from my mother’s flat after she died 45 years ago: a pressure cooker, a box of carbon paper, a chicken baster and what the French would call a madeleine de Proust in the form of a rock tumbler complete with little bags of grit. For a year or two during the 1960s, my mother became obsessed with rock tumbling. She had half a dozen machines that, owing to our home’s paucity of electrical sockets, she positioned in bedrooms and hallways so that, for days on end (they could not be unplugged during each two-week cycle), one heard the relentless grinding sound of tumbling rocks. Once polished, she would parcel up the stones and store them in the bottom of cupboards and under beds. What my mother planned to do with them, what happened to them all, is a mystery.

Overcome by a wave of nostalgia, I plugged in the last remaining evidence of her grand passion and, to my delight, discovered that it worked. What I needed was some material with which to try it out. Armed with a basket, the dogs and I set off for the beach. It was bright but breezy, as Joyce would have said: ‘Wind whines and whines the shingle.’

There are valuable gemstones to be found in Ireland — amethyst, for instance, aquamarine, carnelian, jasper, tourmaline and even, apparently, diamond (in 1816 a whopper was discovered in the Colebrooke River) — but not, sadly, where we live. Still, I collected a goodish supply of small black, grey, blue, green, red, white and yellow stones, as well as an interesting piece of bog oak, some shells (whelks, cowries and conches), an example of ‘dead man’s finger’ (a species of coral), a mermaid’s purse and assorted bits of driftwood.

Back home, the stones were set a-tumbling and the rest of my treasures were arranged on a shelf in the library. I have given up my plans to declutter (let the children deal with it) and console myself with something William Morris said: ‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’

Credit: Damian Lugowski

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Sir Walter Scott is one of the great figures in Scottish literary history — and architectural history, come to that. One of the most successful writers of the 19th century — the creator of Ivanhoe, Heart of Midlothian and dozens more masterpieces — built a house in the Boders called Abbotsford, whose self-consciously whimsical and dramatic design was enormously influential. So much so, in fact, that Queen Victoria remodelled Balmoral in what became known as the Scots Baronial style.

A decade before he began on Abbotsford, and several years before he became a household name for his poetry and historical novels, Scott lead a very different life, settling with his family at a thatched cottage in Lasswade, a few miles south of Edinburgh. And that place, Barony House, is now for sale via Ellisons in Edinburgh. It's listed as 'price on application', and is being sold off-market; its previous appearance for sale was in 2008 at 'offers over £1.5m', but a huge amount of work has clearly been done to the house in recent years.

The future writer was still a lawyer in his 20s when he rented Barony House at £30 a year from 1798, spending summers there while also keeping a home in Edinburgh at 39 North Castle Street. It was during his spells in Lasswade that his long-standing desire to live a literary life began to develop alongside his legal work. He invited writers from across Britain to stay, not least William Wordsworth, with whom he is said to have shared an opium pipe or two in the lounge.

That lounge is still part of the house as it stands today, but there is much else here that Scott would not recognise. What was once called Lasswade Cottage was hugely extended twice in subsequent years, and Barony House in 2022 is a six-bedroom house of 7,862sq ft, sitting in 4.5 acres of beautifully-manicured gardens.

The oldest part of the building, still thatched (on the right in the picture at the top of the page), houses the sitting room and a huge, semi-circular home office which looks out over the formal gardens.

The drawing room and dining room are in the newer wing (on the left of the photo), with the kitchen-dining room and utility in the central section, as well as one of the most beautiful larders we've seen in years.

There is also a games room and family room off one corner of the property, and a timber-framed conservatory at the back of the house.

Upstairs, the Sir Walter Scott Bedroom is directly over the home office, while there is also another principal bedroom — with a stunning dressing room — and four more bedrooms.

This is no gloomy old home: there is a light, airy feel about the place, with huge windows and high ceilings, and it's presented as a largely blank canvas. It's a place to let your imagination run riot, in other words — just as Scott's did when he picked up his pen and began his writing career from within these walls. It was here where he began to pen The Lay of the Last Minstrel, his first significant success.

The poem wouldn't be published until after his 1804 move to Ashiestiel — which, coincidentally, also went on to the market not long ago — but it was at Lasswade that the first seeds were planted.

Barony House at Lasswade, Midlothian, is for sale off market via Ellisons in Edinburgh.

The sporting Scottish estate that was once home to Sir Walter Scott

Romantic Ashiestiel House at Clovenfords was inhabited by the novelist in the early 1800s.

The devastatingly pretty home where Sir Walter Scott became a literary superstar

Within the splendid walls of Ashiestiel House, Sir Walter Scott enjoyed the happiest years of his life as he wrote

Credit: Breckon & Breckon

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Rawk R1 retro drop through complete longboard

Okay, so skating nonchalantly through a park in Guildford isn't quite going to match riding one of these along Venice Beach. But still — very cool.

£79.99, Skatehut — www.skatehut.co.uk

Animambo piano

I think we all know that dad/mum/uncle/aunt/grandma etc will be just as excited to have a go on this as little Jemima. But who knows what you might start by planting this musical seed at an early age?

£69.98, Djeco — www.tickety-boo.co.uk

Personalised Baghera silver ride-on aeroplane

It's a truth universally acknowledged that nothing is as fun as a ride-on, particularly when motored up and down granny's hallway by a toddler fuelled by over-tiredness and chocolate decorations snuck from the tree.

£150, My 1st Years — www.my1styears.com

NASA lava lamp

NASA's recent Artemis launch means space hasn't been more fascinating for decades.

£34.99, Thumbsup — www.thumbsup.com

Hedgehog book cart

Kids really do love this sort of thing. Just don't expect it to be used for books: presents, pets and even baby siblings are bound to end up in this thing.

£48, Great Little Trading Co — www.gltc.co.uk

Red wooden cash register

Let's be clear: in our near-cashless society, and in an era of barcodes which means that cashiers probably key in numbers less than twice a month, your little ones will still get a kick out of playing with this.

£24.95, Le Toy Van — www.letoyvan.co.uk

Lion basket

This probably our favourite thing on the entire list.

£49.99, Bellybambino at Scandi Born — www.scandiborn.co.uk

Spaceman musical box

The happiest astronaut in the galaxy, and he plays on demand!

£21.99, Djeco

Childhood Classics read by Alan Bennett

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Childhood Classics read by Alan Bennett, £23.95 – click here to buy.

Dinosaur monopoly

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The Beatrix Potter collection

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Jungle Friends wallpaper mural

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The Snowman

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Handmade wooden Noah's Ark set

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Oak and Rope Company garden swing

Other names are available.

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Christmas gifts for nature and garden lovers

Roald Dahl’s attachment to the country ran deep. In the year he died, he claimed that he had ‘never lived in a town or city in my life and I would hate to do so’. Like Danny’s father in Danny the Champion of the World, he regarded himself as ‘a true countryman’: ‘the fields, the streams, the woods and all the creatures who lived in these places were a part of his life’. Albeit a partially misleading statement, his denial of town-dwelling and assertion of his love of the country accurately reflected his feelings.

In fact, Dahl, who was born in 1916, spent much of his childhood in the north of Cardiff. His father died when he was three, prompting his mother to sell their large Victorian farmhouse outside the city, Ty Mynydd, which had a working piggery, woodland, pasture and, as Dahl remembered rosily, ‘haymaking, hay wagons and horses’ and, at harvest time, fields of corn stooks through which he and his sisters wandered at will. By contrast, their new home, Cumberland Lodge in Llandaff, was a four-square red-brick suburban villa: tall hedges enclosed its generous gardens of cricket nets and doily-patterned rosebeds.

Happily, there were trees to climb. At the top of a mighty horse chestnut, Dahl wrote his secret diary: ‘It was lovely being high up there in that conker tree, all alone with the pale young leaves coming out everywhere around me,’ he recalled later. Most of all, he relished its springtime ‘cave of green leaves’ and his sensation, perched among the flowering branches, of being ‘surrounded by those wonderful white candles’.

For the remainder of his life, a sense of wonder coloured Dahl’s engagement with Nature and the country. On the table in the writing hut in which he worked seven days a week, fortified by a flask of coffee and a supply of his preferred Dixon Ticonderoga 1388–2 5/10 (medium) yellow pencils, specially ordered from New York, clustered a collection of his favourite objects, including a carving of a grasshopper and a cedar tree cone. The country provided the setting for much of his writing. ‘If you live in the country, your work is bound to be influenced by it,’ he commented in the early 1950s.

Frequently, the country moved him to lyrical admiration. Matilda, for example, first visits Miss Honey’s cottage on a golden autumn afternoon when ‘there were blackberries and splashes of old man’s beard in the hedges, and the hawthorn berries were ripening scarlet’. In The Magic Finger, even the villainous Mr Gregg is moved by the sight of the night sky: ‘He stopped and looked up. The night was very still. There was a thin yellow moon over the trees on the hill, and the sky was filled with stars.’ Dahl’s first story, The Gremlins, begins ‘in early autumn, when the chestnuts [are] ripening and the apples beginning to drop off the trees’.

More than 30 years after his death in 1990, Dahl’s reputation is understandably tarnished by distaste for his antisemitism. Yet, for me, he remains a master storyteller and, as I discovered working on his biography, a man for whom the simple, good things of life provided enduring pleasure, as well as solace at moments of tribulation or suffering. In 1954, he and his film-star wife, Patricia Neal, bought a small, square, white-painted farmhouse, on a gentle incline that traced the path of an ancient drove road, a short walk from the village high street of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire. Around it, gardens and green slopes extended over five acres.

All was desuetude and neglect, but, beyond a clutch of outbuildings of brick and dun-coloured rubble, an old orchard lay full of apple and pear trees — this was a boon for Dahl, for whom it was ‘a most marvellous thing to be able to go out and help yourself to your own apples whenever you feel like it’. The Dahls arrived in the middle of May, when ‘the hawthorn was exploding white and pink and red along the hedges and the primroses were growing underneath in little clumps, and it was beautiful’. Dahl remained there for the rest of his life. He renamed the house Gipsy House.

A beech tree at the top of the orchard became the setting for Fantastic Mr Fox; staring at a cherry tree in the same grassy enclosure, he pondered what would happen if the cherries were to grow and grow and not stop growing, then he asked the same question of apples and pears, and then he thought of a peach. In 1959, he published a story in The New Yorker called The Champion of the World. When, in 1975, he revisited the tale, turning it into a full-length novel for children, Dahl’s lilting evocation of idealised, romantic, rakish country life drew inspiration from the garden of Gipsy House, and the brightly painted gipsy caravan, bought from his brother-in-law, in which all his children played.

Gipsy House provided the setting — as well as the stimulus — for Dahl’s work. His writing hut in the garden, approached along a neat path, was a private sanctum where, with curtains drawn against distractions, he immersed himself in what he called his ‘dotty world of fantasy’. However, Gipsy House was much more than a writer’s quiet retreat. A setting for the rambunctious, close-knit family life Dahl valued, it was also where he grew vegetables, amassed an extensive collection of hothouse orchids and watched birds.

In the summer of 1960, with building work ongoing on the little house, he recorded delightedly the spectacle that greeted him each morning on his short walk from the house to his writing hut: new plantings of roses; cattle in the fields beyond and ducks on the grass; bright shoots of young spinach in the vegetable beds; and, in branches in the orchard, blue and green budgerigars that roosted in a new octagonal birdhouse.

Dahl was a man of contradictions, fascinated by the lives of the rich, but equally drawn to the raffish world of local greyhound racing. At Gipsy House, he grew enormous onions to enter in local shows. In a corner of the Home Counties, this Welsh-born son of wealthy Norwegian parents restored the vanished Eden of his early childhood, a painstakingly tamed idyll that recalled his hazy memories of the farmhouse outside Cardiff in the closing years of the First World War.

Dahl’s view of country life was not a sportsman’s. As a schoolboy at Repton, in Derbyshire, he had occasionally followed the Burton Beagles, but he grew to dislike fieldsports and his antipathy to shooting is key to the plots of The Magic Finger and Danny the Champion of the World. The writer kept a series of ‘ideas books’, in which he noted thoughts and reactions alongside kernels of new stories. ‘I have yet to be convinced that a man has the right to kill the anopheles mosquito merely because his strength and brains enable him to do so, or to kill any other animal, reptile or insect,’ he wrote in one. ‘Obviously, it is murder.’ It was a conviction that hardened over time.

An elderly Dahl recorded his thoughts about the months of the year, published posthumously as The Roald Dahl Diary and, subsequently, My Year. It was a hymn to Nature’s bounty written with the storyteller’s instinct he had sharpened over a lifetime. Musing on his favourite month, September, Dahl told his readers, ‘the colour of the entire landscape is slowly changing from green to gold’. The delighted anticipation of Dahl the countryman is palpable.

Matthew Dennison’s biography of Roald Dahl, ‘Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl’, was published in August (Head of Zeus, £20)

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Every year, the local church fête is the cause of domestic tension. It’s simply that Agromenes cannot resist the book stall and, despite earnest entreaties, always returns with yet more books for which there is simply no room on the shelves.

This year was no exception, but all was excused by a special find. Among the as-yet-unread murder stories, a dictionary of conmen and fakes and an introduction to cookery with garlic and olives, there was a slim volume, published in 1948, that shone a light on the condition of the countryside today in a quite remarkable way. Suffolk Summer was written by a young American airman, John Tate Appleby, who had come to Europe for the first time and found himself stationed in East Anglia. There, he fell in love with the English countryside and described it with an unusually perceptive eye.

He starts with the weather: ‘England has a moist climate, but the rainfall is not by American standards excessive. What makes the rainfall particularly effective is the fact that it is fairly uniformly distributed throughout the year, so that England does not have the hot, dry, withering summers that we have at home.’

Well, 2022 put paid to that idea. ‘Hot, dry, and withering’ is a pretty exact description of what we will increasingly come to regard as normal. In three quarters of a century the climate that Appleby described has wholly changed. What was once expected and valued has gone forever.

He continues: ‘Most of the rainfall is of a gentle nature, rather than the exuberant cloudbursts and torrential downpours that one suffers in America.’ What better picture of the pattern of rain to which we have grown used over the past decade? Instead of the refreshing showers of the 1940s, we now have precisely those sudden and intense storms Appleby thought wholly alien to the England he had begun to love.

Indeed, back then, he rejoiced that, ‘being of a gentle nature, the rain is almost wholly absorbed as it falls’. He had no inkling of the compacted soil and hard-baked ground and the increasingly torrential rainfall that now makes flooding in England so much more general. He never realised that in just a few generations we would expect drought and floods as regular occurrences almost every year.

Sadly, there is more truth to be revealed. Appleby is caught up by the beauty of the English countryside and he wants to explain what is particular and special about it. He lights upon our hedges and describes the historic process of enclosure and the aesthetic pleasure hedgerows offer. However, he doesn’t leave it there; he turns to more practical matters: ‘The hedgerow… provides a windbreak, protecting the fields from the high winds that can do much damage both to the crops and to the soil — it is a check to soil erosion.’ And so it is, and was then — but now, when so many of those hedges have been torn out for government grants, more and more topsoil is lost every year and the erosion that damaged so much of the American Middle West is now a real problem in England, particularly in the East Anglia where he was stationed.

The English countryside that captured Appleby’s imagination has been drastically damaged and the climate that he so enjoyed has been fundamentally changed. Yet his vision of the land that he grew to love should inspire us to protect what remains and fight to recover what is lost of ‘the English landscape that is a setting to be lived in; as a work of man it is pre-eminently a lovely and suitable background for man’. That is the environment that Man made and now threatens.

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Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot crafted these short lines that form a part of his fractured epic The Waste Land in October 1921, as he sat in the inauspicious Nayland Rock Shelter (granted Grade II-listed status in 2009) on the promenade of the Kent seaside resort.

The American poet was struggling to write, battling with the pressures of a taxing marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, and had recently endured a tense family visit that saw his ageing mother, Charlotte, travel to England from America. He was living on his nerves, quite likely suffering from a nervous breakdown or, as he later stated, from ‘aboulie’ — consequently, he was about to be granted a three-month sabbatical from his job at Lloyds Bank. At this point, he was seemingly unable to personally connect anything with anything.

It is often easy to feel the personal anguish woven into The Waste Land, but the 434 lines that make up this work — now widely regarded as one of the greatest poems in the English language — are nothing if not complex. Indeed, critics have critiqued it — and over-critiqued it — for 100 years, since its publication, in October 1922, in The Criterion, the journal Eliot founded, and in The Dial in the US a month later. Despite Eliot’s contemporary Amy Lowell, a poet and fellow American, calling it ‘a piece of tripe’, The Waste Land scooped The Dial’s lucrative annual literary prize.

Since then, generations have appreciated its rich tapestry of literary references, from Homer to Shakespeare, as well as its myth (the title is owed to Jessie Weston’s examination of the Holy Grail in From Ritual to Romance), religion, the collapse of civilisations, cyclical regrowth, disparate polyphonic voices, series of vignettes and failed relationships. All in all, this mingling of discordant elements, that ‘heap of broken images’ conveyed in part one, The Burial of the Dead, adds up to a potent rendering of a metaphorical land as sterile and arid, a disordered, dysfunctional, broken place and its maimed people living futile lives, shattered by the armageddon of the First World War.

‘Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),’ is one such mention of this barren land that remained after the American poet Ezra Pound had performed his ruthless, self-confessed ‘caesarean operation’ on Eliot’s original version. Near the end of the editing process, however, Pound had written to the creator, saying: ‘Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies.’

Yet what of actual places, for many seemingly diverse locations are mentioned in The Waste Land, if fleetingly? London. The Cannon Street Hotel. The Strand. The Isle of Dogs. Highbury, Richmond and Kew. Moorgate. London Bridge. Munich’s Hofgarten. Thebes. Carthage. Jerusalem. Athens. Alexandria. Vienna. That desert. Mountains.

‘When he’s naming other cities, he’s playing with time and place. He’s going back to the likes of Athens and through to London, encapsulating a decline in human history over thousands of years,’ explains Dr Fran Brearton of Queen’s University Belfast.

‘But Eliot doesn’t tend to be talked about much as a poet of place. There isn’t that kind of specificity compared with how some poets at the time are so deeply rooted. Think of Hardy in the Wessex countryside and how central place is to him.

‘Eliot references specific places and the number of different locations map onto the different voices that are changing all the time and he uses these to convey that sense of dislocation.’ As for Margate, Dr Brearton, suggests: ‘Why Margate Sands is something we could think about indefinitely. It is Margate Sands, but it could almost be anywhere.’

The Waste Land may reference the waves, yet it is equally — if not more so — a poem of a river, specifically the River Thames, which carries with it the detritus of modern life: ‘Empty bottles, sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs [contraceptives], cardboard boxes, cigarette ends…’ For many critics and devotees of The Waste Land (once you have read it, it never quite leaves you), London, through which this dirty river flows, is the towering and tangible place of the poem (if anywhere can be tangible), partly summed up in those haunting lines: ‘A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.’ Apart from its reference to Dante’s The Divine Comedy, think of the monotony of commuting and of humdrum 20th-century human existence, a living death and the grief for incomparable loss.

However, if human life is empty, so, too, is London at certain times, according to Professor Jason Harding of Durham University. ‘In the 1920s, there was a massive depopulation of this area, so the parish churches mentioned — such as St Mary Woolnoth and Magnus Martyr — have no one to worship there. Eliot was working in the City when he was writing this poem, feeling miserable, and he would walk out in his lunch hour and visit one of the beautiful city churches and that is resonant in the poem.’

This Easter, however, those churches were full again thanks to Fragments: The Waste Land 2022, a bespoke, one-off experiential festival to mark the centenary. This brought music and musings delivered in the very churches Eliot had visited, with St Mary Woolnoth hosting the opening and closing celebrations and St Magnus the Martyr hearing music by Erland Cooper, together with poems read by performers, including the actor Toby Jones.

A century earlier, following his trip to Margate, Eliot travelled on to Switzerland, where he underwent a psychiatric rest cure in the hands of Dr Roger Vittoz, which unlocked his powers of creativity. Part five, What the Thunder Said, flowed and it teems with mention of mountains: ‘Of thunder of spring over distant mountains’ and ‘There is not even silence in the mountains’.

‘I think Eliot is writing the end of the poem surrounded by those mountains and imagining himself in the heart of Europe, worried whether Communism will sweep away the civilisation and culture he wants to hang on to,’ intimates Prof Harding. ‘Mountains are prominent in Romantic literature as places of transcendence or of vision. In high places, real wisdom will be communicated. There are thunder clouds gathering, so it is pregnant with anticipation, but I think that, although the poem is waiting for that revelation, it’s not quite getting it.’

When The Waste Land was poised for print, Eliot wrote to the novelist Virginia Woolf and said that he believed it to be his best work yet. It was an apposite statement and, if his magnum opus is not solidly rooted in any cityscape or landscape particularly, it is as firmly fixed in the 21st-century psyche as it was in the 20th and is likely to be equally entrenched for centuries to come.

Celebrating the centenary of The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot worked for Faber and Faber for 40 years, until his death in 1965. To mark the centenary of The Waste Land, Faber is publishing The Waste Land: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Making of a Masterpiece, by award-winning biographer Matthew Hollis, in October.

Earlier this year, the publishing house released The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, which shows the manuscript in colour for the first time. Additionally, in association with the T. S. Eliot Foundation, it has already released an audiobook recording of Edoardo Ballerini reading the epic poem.

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Jump down to read the full poem.

Thomas Gray may no longer be the most famous name in British poetry, but if any lines of 18th-century verse still quoted in the 21st century can be expected to draw even the vaguest nods of recognition, several of his surely qualify. ‘Where Ignorance is bliss/’Tis folly to be wise,’ from Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College is one example. Extracts from his Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard have also become part of the literary heritage: ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/And waste its sweetness on the desert air’; ‘Far from the madding Crowd’s ignoble strife’; and a reference to life’s ‘cool sequestered vale’ undoubtedly carry a familiar ring.

However, Gray (1716–71) would have been content for his name to rest in anonymity, his poems only circulating among his associates. The London-born son of a City scrivener, he was educated at Eton between 1725 and 1734, where one of his closest friends was Horace Walpole, who would arrange for the first, anonymous, publication of Gray’s odes in 1747. Like Walpole, Gray attended Cambridge, but, although his intention was to prepare for a career as a London barrister, he returned to the university city after taking a two-year Grand Tour of Europe in the company of Walpole between 1739–41. In Cambridge, pursuing his literary interests as a gentleman scholar, he would effectively live for the remainder of his life.

Gray had begun writing English language poetry in the early 1740s, and Elegy may have had its origins in some lines penned on the death of another of his Eton friends, Richard West, in 1742, an event that caused him much grief. In fact, Gray had unknowingly sent West what has been adjudged as his first significant poem, Ode on the Spring, on the very day of the latter’s death from tuberculosis. Gray’s valuing of rustic simplicity above the ardour of the Crowd (‘How low, how little are the proud/How indigent the Great!’) is an early introduction to the mood of Elegy: ‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,/The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,/The plowman homeward plods his weary way,/And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’

Elegy was completed in 1750 in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, where Gray’s mother and aunt had lived for a number of years, and where he spent his summers, regularly attending Sunday services at St Giles’s church. A letter to Walpole accompanying the poem, referring to it as ‘a thing to which he had at last put an end’, suggests Gray considered it unexceptional, although his friend immediately spotted its quality.

St Giles’s Church, Stoke Poges

After Walpole had shown copies of the poem to several of his circle, it came to the attention of the publishers of the monthly periodical Magazine of Magazines. When they indicated their intention to publish the poem, as permitted by the copyright laws of the day, Gray hurried to persuade Walpole to ask his publisher to print the poem immediately, although still without naming him as its author.

Despite this, the machinations of Magazine of Magazines had ensured that Gray’s cover was blown and, in any case, the poem was an immediate success. However, Gray’s retiring nature and his fear that his poems would be ‘mistaken for the works of a flea’ meant that he only published 13 of them in his lifetime. He also turned down an offer of the Poet Laureateship in 1757.

His later years were devoted to antiquarian and botanical pursuits and travels, leaving Elegy to stand as his most famous work, admired for its atmospheric opening and natural setting, its images of rugged elms, shady yews and toiling farm workers. In its calm, brooding contemplation of the obscure destinies of villagers, each now in their narrow cell forever laid beneath the churchyard turf, it reminds us of the inevitable fate that makes equals of us all.

Reaction to the poem

‘Gentlemen, I would rather have written that Poem than take Quebec tomorrow’ General James Wolfe’s attributed comment to his men on the eve of the Battle of Quebec, 1759

‘With the exception of certain works of Byron and Shakespeare, no English poem has been so widely admired or imitated abroad and after more than a century of existence we find it as fresh as ever’ Edmund Gosse, 19th-century critic

‘Gray’s Elegy is one of the greatest poems of the English language; to many readers, learned and otherwise, it has stood almost for the idea of poetry itself’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Elegy in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower

The moping owl does to the moon complain

Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,

Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade

Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,

The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,

The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,

No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn

Or busy housewife ply her evening care:

No children run to lisp their sire's return,

Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;

How jocund did they drive their team afield!

How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile

The short and simple annals of the Poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave

Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:—

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault

If Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise,

Where through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault

The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath,

Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,

Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,

Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,

Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll;

Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,

And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood,

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood.

Th' applause of listening senates to command,

The threats of pain and ruin to despise,

To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,

And read their history in a nation's eyes

Their lot forbad: nor circumscribed alone

Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;

Forbad to wade through slaughter to a throne,

And shut the gates of mercy on mankind;

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,

To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,

Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride

With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife

Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;

Along the cool sequester'd vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.

Yet e'en these bones from insult to protect

Some frail memorial still erected nigh,

With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,

Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd Muse,

The place of fame and elegy supply:

And many a holy text around she strews,

That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,

Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,

Some pious drops the closing eye requires;

E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,

E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who, mindful of th' unhonour'd dead,

Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;

If chance, by lonely Contemplation led,

Some kindred spirit shall enquire thy fate,—

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,

'Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn

Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,

To meet the sun upon the upland lawn;

'There at the foot of yonder nodding beech

That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,

His listless length at noon-tide would he stretch,

And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

'Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,

Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove;

Now drooping, woeful-wan, like one forlorn,

Or crazed with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.

'One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill,

Along the heath, and near his favourite tree;

Another came; nor yet beside the rill,

Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

'The next with dirges due in sad array

Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne,—

Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay

Graved on the stone beneath yon agèd thorn:'

The Epitaph

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth

A youth, to Fortune and to Fame unknown;

Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth

And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere;

Heaven did a recompense as largely send:

He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,

He gain'd from Heaven, 'twas all he wish'd, a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,

(There they alike in trembling hope repose,)

The bosom of his Father and his God.

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