Sensible Places: essays on place, time, & countryside

Book excerpt: Acclaimed author of works on the fall of the Chamberlain government and on the sinking of RMS Titanic, GMW Wemyss is also the West Country's beloved essayist, here returning to rural matters and their cosmic echoes and harmonies in this seasoned and seasonal collection of essays. Sheep, chalk-streams, eccentric neighbours, Evensong, village cricket, Lib Dems in the wild, the pub and the parish jumble: here are reportage, reminiscence, and a gift for making the daily round a meditation upon eternity.Elegant, epigrammatic, and acute, these meditations and essays form a countryman's calendar of changeful time and the eternal moment: life in sprung rhythm. This is a countryside classic, wise and humane, after the fashion of Gissing's Henry Ryecroft and the memoirs of Adrian Bell.