The Spirit of Britain

Fülszöveg

From a correspondent, Whitby The approach of sunset was so very beautiful, so grand in its masses of splendidly
coloured clouds, that there was quite an assemblage on the wall along the cliff in the old churchyard to enjoy the beauty. before the sun dipped below the black mass of kettleness, standing boldly athwart the western sky, its downward way was marked by myriad clouds of every sunset-colour - flame, purple, pink, green, violet, and all the tints of gold then without warning the tempest broke.
from Dracula by Bram Stoker, 1897
The Spirit of Britain is the first county guide to places in Britain which have inspired our greatest writers to unlock their secrets and ensure that we will never see them in the same way again.
Here is Daphne du Maurier's Cornwall, the Galloway of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, the Camusféarna of Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water, Thomas Hardy's Dorset, the Warwickshire of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Susan Hill's Aldeburgh,... Tovább

Fülszöveg

From a correspondent, Whitby The approach of sunset was so very beautiful, so grand in its masses of splendidly
coloured clouds, that there was quite an assemblage on the wall along the cliff in the old churchyard to enjoy the beauty. before the sun dipped below the black mass of kettleness, standing boldly athwart the western sky, its downward way was marked by myriad clouds of every sunset-colour - flame, purple, pink, green, violet, and all the tints of gold then without warning the tempest broke.
from Dracula by Bram Stoker, 1897
The Spirit of Britain is the first county guide to places in Britain which have inspired our greatest writers to unlock their secrets and ensure that we will never see them in the same way again.
Here is Daphne du Maurier's Cornwall, the Galloway of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, the Camusféarna of Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water, Thomas Hardy's Dorset, the Warwickshire of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Susan Hill's Aldeburgh, the Exmoor of R.D. Blackmore's Lorna Doone, the Fens of Graham Swift's Waterland, A.E. Housman's 'Land of Lost Content' (Shropshire), the Tintagel and Glastonbury of Arthurian myth, Dickens' London, Róbert Louis Stevenson's Highlands, R.S. Thomas's Wales, Peter Ackroyd's Stonehenge, and many more powerful evocations that make up the literary landscape of Britian.
In 1810, when Sir Walter Scott wrote 'The Lady of the Laké', a thousand tourists descended on the Trossachs and watched the sun setting on Loch Katrine. Today, every year, people flock to Haworth to discover what it was that inspired Emily Bronté to sculpt the terrible beauty of Heathcliff from the grey gránité of the Yorkshire moors.
•Since the ancients first couched magicai stories of love and betrayal in the mythical mountains of Wales, man has sought to capture the spirit of place that lies among the roots of our culture. 'The very geography of the land, the very nature of its mountains and rivers, the very falling and lifting of the mists that waver over them. This,' wrote John Cowper Powys, 'is the secret of the land. This is the secret of the people of the land.'
The Spirit of Britain is a guide for the literary detective, with maps and clear roadside instructions, and a delight for the armchair reader, with extracts from the novels, poems, stories and myths, and many specially commissioned photographs. Vissza