Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside

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We should be grateful to have him and his beautiful pages, and for the privilege of spending so many ordinary and yet rare and precious days in his company -- SUSAN HILL * Telegraph 5* review * A capacious book that contains multitudes .

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’ve been reading this over Christmas along with Guy Shrubsole’s brilliant new The Lost Rainforests of Britain, and I’ve enjoyed every moment. I got “Next to Nature” for Christmas 2022 and started reading through its monthly collections of essays in January. 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. This book was with me for most of the year that's passed, and I know I'm going to miss those safe and reassuring words of his which may be worth a revisit sometime.This was a 2022 Christmas present, signed by the centenarian author, now no longer with us, alas, having died in January of this year. In these troubled times it is good to read about the joys of nature and tied in with the Anglican faith Ronald Blythe will be sadly missed by his readers since his passing , he contributed much in his writing living a simple down to earth life and appreciating nature. The structure is perfect, compiling Blythe's columns from the Church Times by date, but not by year, so that we read through the circular time of the natural and ecclesiastical year, without altogether knowing where we are in a linear time that seems far less significant out in this little patch of the old rural England, where any self-respecting village needs something to hang dreadful stories on; Borley Rectory was just down the road, and "This was a Mabey walk to rival his walk with me to Wormingford Mere where, although I don't like to boast, we have a dragon. All the charm, wonder, eccentricity and vigour of country life is here in these pages, and told with such engaging directness, detail and colour . His work, which has 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.

The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. a work to amble through, seasonally, relishing the vivid dashes of colour and the precision and delicacy of the descriptions' THE SPECTATOR'My favourite read of the year . 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.We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. There is, for example, the quotation from "Wuthering Heights":: "Hearing a climbing rose scratch against the window like Catherine Earnshaw's escape-me-never hand" - all very clever and cultured, but such endless quotations become very annoying, destroying the flow of the narrative. I fully realise that these writings were originally written for the Church Times, but I maybe wasn't expecting quite so much of it.

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. From here, 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. 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.Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. an expansive exploration of how land scapes, humans, and words interact, touched with great humanity. 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.