The English Village
by Martin Wainwright. Fifteen Centuries Young Townfolk know pleasures, country people joys. Minna Antrim (1861–1950) Britain rushes around on its bypasses and motorways. Rapid roads and trains connect city to city, home to office, school collection to shops. The traffic lights have gone green, the circle and slant of the derestricted sign allows the speedometer [...]
Scotland
2 February 2012 // Books //On Water
An extract from Jon Berry’s new book A Train To Catch: If one journey typified the travels of adventurous Victorians, it was the grand tour of Scotland. These were not the third-class day trips enjoyed by ordinary Thamesmen, but extended excursions for the moneyed gentleman hunter. Shotguns, servants and rod boxes with Pall Mall addresses [...]
An Evening With Felt
28 January 2012 // Books //Music
Our friends Lora and Paul are having a launch for their Felt book at Rough Trade on Friday February 3rd at 7pm. Here are some details about the truly unique party they’re putting on: “For the first time since their split Lawrence and other members of seminal indie group Felt will be on stage talking [...]
How I Came To Know Fish
How I Came To Know Fish by Ota Pavel, Penguin Translated Texts By Chloe Evans. When I was a little girl, I was allowed to go with my Dad fishing the trout streams around Llanddewi Brefi, a blonde dot trailing after him with a blue and white rod. I fell in the water so often [...]
The Maggot Train
12 January 2012 // Books //On Water
An extract from Jon Berry’s new book, A Train To Catch: The Wessex rivers owe much to the railways, and may never have flourished without them. Until the final years of Victoria they were ostensibly salmon rivers, but that changed in the 1890s when two fishermen – the Gomm Brothers – used the new railway [...]
Kenneth Allsop Update
8 January 2012 // Books //Miscellany
Mathew Clayton, in response to our review of Kenneth Allsop’s In The Country, that ran last Wednesday: I was lent that book about a year ago by my aunt who brought it when it came out in the ’70s. I found it too depressing to read all the way through but wasn’t quite sure why. [...]
Feet In The Clouds: A Tale Of Fell-Running And Obsession
By Richard Askwith (Aurum Press) Reviewed by Nick Small It’s New Year’s Day. I’ve had a poor night’s sleep and I’m being pebble-dashed by cold, hard rain, driven on strong crosswinds, as I try to negotiate deep peat bog, a riot of tussocks and sheets of near freezing water on legs rendered uncontrollable by the [...]
In The Country
Kenneth Allsop – In The Country (Little Toller Books) Reviewed by David Hemingway Inspired by the likes of WH Hudson (A Shepherd’s Life) and Henry Williamson (Salar The Salmon) but seduced by Fleet Street, Kenneth Allsop combined these passions with a weekly column in The Daily Mail that would eventually morph into In The Country. [...]
Savage Messiah
Iain Sinclair’s praise of Savage Messiah, a book by Laura Oldfield Ford (the Guardian, 22/12), has left me eager to pick up a copy: One response to our stunned impotence in the face of financial meltdown, political chicanery and the creeping surveillance society, is to indulge in fugues of entropy tourism. Badlands dérives. Websites clanking [...]
WG Sebald
From Charles Rangeley-Wilson: For those who didn’t make the excellent In Remembrance of / In Celebration of WG Sebald event at Wiltson’s Music Hall on the 14th, there is a series of podcasts from BBC3, which I missed when they transmitted but can still be listened to by nipping over to the BBC website on [...]
