Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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Better to have this in hard copy and flip open to some pages every now and then throughout the year.

To immerse yourself in this East Anglian year is be reminded of why we love and value the rhythms and realities of rural life. It took me a little time to get used to his writing style and it would have been helpful to have footnotes relating to some of the biblical and literary references. All the charm, wonder, eccentricity and vigour of country life is here in these pages, and told with such engaging directness, detail and colour. The love of nature, the land, the creatures in the surrounding fields and trees meshes seamlessly with an encyclopaedic command of the back story to everything and the rhythms of the country churches.I would not normally select anything with a religious theme but this warm and transparently kind man reminds me of chapel in my Dales upbringing. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. His] minute observation of places, people and plants, his ear for scraps of dialogue and his feeling for poetry and painting make everything about those days immediate . His work, which won countless awards, includes Akenfield (a Penguin 20th-Century Classic and a feature film), Private Words, Field Work, Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends and numerous other titles. This was a 2022 Christmas present, signed by the centenarian author, now no longer with us, alas, having died in January of this year.

For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. James, Holst, Coleridge are still presences, death notwithstanding, but the fields grow ever emptier of people, the villages more and more separate from their surroundings - something Blythe laments, even while being old enough to be well aware of the privations that came with agricultural life as it used to be. I started this in March, and was playing catch-up until October, but really it would have worked much better read month by month; it's only a shame that there isn't quite an entry per day. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, the Royal Society of Literature took out a long lease on a white stucco Bayswater house, formerly the home of General Sir Ian Hamilton, leader of the.

It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. Next to Nature is a hoard of observation, gossip and stories designed to take you through the year, with something rich and strange on every page -- Hilary Spurling * The Spectator, Books of the Year 2022 * [Ronald Blythe] is an English institution . I seldom read any book for an entire year so Ronnie, as he was known to his many friends, has felt like a companion throughout 2023. As this is a compendium of Blythe's writing, I'm afraid I was a little lost with who people were, but I'm sure more avid fans will be very familiar with who's who.

From here, Ronald Blythe has spent almost half a century observing the slow turn of the agricultural year, the church year and village life in a series of rich, lyrical rural diaries. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. a modern Hazlitt -- MARK COCKER The finest rural historian of our times * Country Life * It would be difficult to find . His work, which won countless awards, includes Akenfield (a Penguin 20th-Century Classic and a feature film), Private Words , Field Work , Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends and numerous other titles.With gentle wit and keen observation Blythe meditates on his life and faith, on literature, art and history, and on our place in the landscape. Being with Ronnie Blythe in one of his books is like being on a magic carpet, the exhilaration of being alive, and of nature, and the world -- Ian Collins * Today Programme * Next to Nature is the perfect memorial, a latter-day Book of Hours . a sensibility which is richer or better fed, more deeply watered and manured, more drenched in Englishness -- ADAM NICOLSON [His] minute observation of places, people and plants, his ear for scraps of dialogue and his feeling for poetry and painting make everything about those days immediate . I imagined him reading them by lamplight, just as I read when I was a boy, the twin wicks faintly waving inside the Swan glass.