Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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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.

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. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. 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 more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin. To immerse yourself in this East Anglian year is be reminded of why we love and value the rhythms and realities of rural life.Reading this book is to be in the company of a supremely sensitive observer who has spent a lifetime seeing and scenting nature .

After the brilliant and much acclaimed "Akenfield", I found this to be a disappointing book having endless and tiresome quotations from literature and the Bible (Mr. Better to have this in hard copy and flip open to some pages every now and then throughout the year. Blythe's observations of nature are as unforced as breathing, and his descriptions are precise, celebratory and unexpected . a modern Hazlitt -- MARK COCKER The finest rural historian of our times * Country Life * It would be difficult to find . These times are so worrying with such terrible suffering and poverty,we pray and hope for better times but this book is a wonderful read.an expansive exploration of how land scapes, humans, and words interact, touched with great humanity. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded their prestigious Benson Medal in 2006.

Beginning with the arrival of snow on New Year's Day and ending with Christmas carols sung in the village church, Next to Nature invites us to witness a simple life richly lived. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literary and was awarded their prestigious Benson Medal in 2006. 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.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 .