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Special titles for Christmas
Candida Lycett Green Unwrecked England

 

To order or reserve  phone 01367-242742 or 01367 240056
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The author has been writing her Unwrecked England column for The Oldie since its launch in 1992. Her new book gathers together one hundred of her favourite places. Here she tells us more about the book and why these places are special. 

I am the archetypal Anglophile and remain, like Ruskin, ever faithful to ‘blind, tormented, unwearied, marvellous England’. For me it is the most beautiful country in the world. It is also the most geologically complicated and in consequence provides an inimitable palette of constantly shifting colours: the shades of buff or red brick, or the depth of gold in the limestone, vary from one village to the next. The cob and thatch country of deep-valleyed Devon is a world apart from the wide-skied marshes of pebbled and pantiled Norfolk, as are the lush Cornish ‘hedges’, thick with bluebells, stitchwort and campion, from the bleak curlew-haunted heights of the Yorkshire moors. The wildly differing local building styles serve as a wonderful gallery of England’s unsung craftsmen. My book includes places in every county, for it would be 
impossible to do England justice without displaying the fierce local pride of each.

Apart from a handful of showstoppers such as Ely Cathedral in the Fens and Cragside in Northumberland, I do not dwell on perfectly preserved places but more on ordinary England, often battered around the edges and interwoven with modern development. I think we have become impossibly snobbish in seeking out some sort of conservation ideal. From time immemorial, cities, towns and villages have evolved, and new houses have been built among the old and around the edges. Council houses once derided by aesthetes are now an established part of our towns and villages. Some Sixties housing estates have settled over time, grown trees and developed idiosyncrasies. It is the spirit of a particular place which moves me, not so much the fine quality of its architecture. Stanhope, for instance, is not a pretty town, it is a strong-feeling one.

Richard Ingrams created this column for me seventeen years ago. He was actually paying me to indulge in my favourite pastime – exploring England. Inextricably woven through my childhood, the thrill of the journey and the possibility of finding some unknown wonder or half-remembered place is always with me. My mother’s love of the landscape, as well as of pre-history – barrows, earthworks, stone circles and cromlechs – became part of me. My earliest memories are of riding along the Berkshire Ridgeway, sometimes for a few days at a time, and diverting to places like Ashdown, stranded in the downs, and White Horse Hill, ever top of the list. 

Early car journeys with my parents were drawn-out affairs and my father John Betjeman’s love of place and of what he described as ‘indeterminate beauty’ meant that we stopped in nearly every town or village along the way to look at churches, houses and peculiar things. The ivy-clad entrance to the Sapperton Canal tunnel remains a top place for me and it would be hard to forget being led by the hand into the cool, calm beauty of the tiny church of Winterborne Tomson in Dorset. This quest for the romance of England has never faded and, too lazy to walk, I have found half the places in this book by horse, approaching them from unadopted tracks which have often brought me to unfamiliar views.
 

Tourists may find perfection in Castle Combe and Chipping Campden, but I prefer places which are off the beaten track. Even within earshot of a motorway’s constant moan or a mere stone’s throw from a gigantic conurbation such as Aylesbury or Middlesborough, as long as one is going at a leisurely pace, there are still beautiful bits of ‘unwearied, marvellous England’ to be found. Though the pastoral idyll conjured up by Brian Cook posters and Helen Allingham water colours never really existed, I am more than happy with what is here and never stop being surprised at how wonderful England is. I hope this book shows that.

Unwrecked England by Candida Lycett Green
Hardback, 224 pages, 10.5 x 10 inches, full colour photos of every location and woodcuts by John O’Connor. £25

 
 

 
Other Titles recently published:
 

 

Example of photograph:


 
 
This year's Man Booker Prize

Wolf Hall  by Hilary Mantel,  653pp,
Published by  Fourth Estate  £18.99

From Christopher Tayler's review in 
The Guardian, Saturday 2 May 2009

Thomas Cromwell, the chief minister to Henry VIII who oversaw the break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, was widely hated in his lifetime, and he makes a surprising fictional hero now. Geoffrey Elton used to argue that he founded modern government, but later historians have pared back his role, and one recent biographer, Robert Hutchinson, portrayed him as a corrupt proto-Stalinist. He's a sideshow to Wolsey in Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII, a villain who hounds Thomas More to his death in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons. Law and financial administration - his main activities - don't always ignite writers' imaginations, and in the pop-Foucauldian worldview of much historical fiction since the 1980s, his bureaucratic innovations would be seen as inherently sinister. Then there's the portrait of him, after Holbein: a dewlapped man in dark robes with a shrewd, unfriendly face, holding a folded paper like an upturned dagger. He looks, as Hilary Mantel has him say in her new novel, "like a murderer".
 A Village Lost and Found by Brian May and Elena Vidal. 

The book was published on 8 October at  £35. 

Brian May's painstaking excavation of exquisite stereo photographs from the dawn of 
photography transports the reader back in time to the lost world of an Oxfordshire village of the 1850s.

At the book's heart is a reproduction of T R Williams' 1856 series of stereo photographs Scenes In Our Village. Using the viewer supplied with this book, the reader is absorbed profoundly into a village idyll of the early Victorian era: the subjects seem to be on the point of suddenly bursting back into life and continuing with their daily rounds.

The book is also something of a detective story, as the village itself was only identified in 2003 as Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire, and the authors' research constantly reveals further clues about the society of those distant times, historic photographic techniques, and the life of the enigmatic Williams himself, who appears, Hitchcock-like, from time to time in his own photographs.

The product of more than 30 years research, the mixture of social, photographic and biographical detail is handled with admirable lightness of touch, belying the depths of scholarship which underpin this ambitious enterprise.

Publication Details 

Publisher: Frances Lincoln
ISBN: 9780711230392
Format: 310 mm x 235 mm (12.2 inches x 9.3 inches)
Binding: Hardback
256 pages
560 photographs in colour and black and white 
2 small folio sized volumes, one with the text and photographs the other is a folder containing the viewer, together in slipcase.
£35

TO ORDER: call 01367 242742 at special price of £32.50  or send an e-mail
 
 

Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother: The Official Biography by William Shawcross
Macmillan £25 
1,096  pages, hardback

From The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hart September 20 2009:

William Shawcross’s biography, the first official royal ­life since 1990, has already stirred up tremendous excitement. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother valued discretion highly, gave only one interview in her life, and betrayed few thoughts and opinions during 80-odd years in the public spotlight. Now at last we will have the truth about her relations with Wallis Simpson, her machinations ­during the Diana crisis, as well as her salty views on what, ­according to the BBC’s Edward Stourton, at least, she referred to as “Huns, wops and dagos”.

Any reader really expecting all this, however, is going to be sorely disappointed. There is no reference to the ­Stourton quote, for instance. The most interesting ­revelation is what a wonderful letter-writer the Queen Mother was, brimful of liveliness and irreverence, steeliness and sweetness, and the extensive excerpts from dozens of her letters here do vivify what would otherwise be an extremely stodgy tome. Shawcross’s other good source is the series of recorded conversations she had with Eric Anderson, retired headmaster of Eton, in 1994-95. But for long sections he comes close to doing the Queen Mother a ­disservice: making one of the most mischievous and ­amusing of recent royals seem dull.