Part travel diary, part a series of literary biographies, this is a gem of a book. The author takes us from Blyton’s Dorset and its “pleasant pastures and clouded hills” to the peaks of Snowdonia with Somerville and Ross, through Doncaster and Jarrow with Bainbridge and Priestley and Bede, and to the Highlands with Johnson and to Rochester with Dickens. Almost all human life gets a look-in: Gerald of Wales’ disappointment; the problematic parenting of Blyton; how mashed Priestley must have been in S Tyneside…
I took this book slowly, and was glad I did; Peter Fiennes lets us travel with people he knows well, and whom we get to know well, too, and if I still don’t like Enid B., I am still enamoured of Fiennes’ love of the landscape - and can echo his despair at the way “Our land is tormented. Poisoned. Dying.”
A book of humour, nonetheless, and wonderfully warm towards its subjects - although “subjects” is the wrong term: we are fellow travellers with quirky, obstreperous writers of genius. And “there’s always Enid.”