Nature England

The Full English A Journey In Search Of Its Country And People Stuart Maconie

HarperNorth, 368pp, £20

J B Priestley did it first. Three years later George Orwell had another go at the idea and now, 90 years later, Stuart Maconie, BBC Radio 6 DJ, has written up his own version of a ‘Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought’. (These are J B Priestley’s words to describe his endeavour as he travelled his way round the counties of England.).

For Maconie, Priestley’s English Journey has become a key text in understanding England.

He felt it had become ‘ripe for a proper revisit.’ So he hops on a Megabus to Southampton, where Priestley began his journey, and follows him to Bristol, Swindon, the Cotswolds (far too full of pink corduroy-trousered men), the West Midlands, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Tyne and Tees, Durham, Lincoln and Norwich.

In 2022, Maconie wrote, ‘the English are still as beautiful, exasperating, passionate, solid, divided, combative, warm, humane and funny as ever.

But post-Brexit, post-pandemic, and in the midst of new and endless crises, this seemed to be the perfect moment to pack notebook, check train times and go and see what had changed, and what had stayed the same.’

Victoria Segal, in the Sunday Times, enjoyed the carefully nuanced observations of the author, ‘Part of the writer and broadcaster’s persona is that of a slightly grumpy old flâneur,’ she wrote, yet this travelogue is packed with ‘cosy observational comedy and whimsical digression, … Maconie is a funny, astute writer, alert to the absurd.’ His tone is conversational and ‘despite his enthusiasm for apparently unpromising locations, Maconie’s journey is rarely sentimental.’

Stuart Maconie ‘is observant and witty, veering from caustic indignation to delight in eccentricities,’ wrote Christina Hardyment in the Times. He ‘knows his musical and literary onions well and has form in writing English travelogues with snappy titles.’

Ghosts In The Hedgerow A Hedgehog Whodunnit

TOM MOORHOUSE

Doubleday, 272pp, £16.99

In 2016 hedgehogs were voted Britain’s favourite mammal. Yet since the new millenium the total hedgehog population is estimated to have halved, and now less than one million remain. Tom Moorhouse asks, is it the motorist, the farmer, the badger or maybe even the gardener who is the villain? As in an Agatha Christie novel Moorhouse gathers all the suspects together, and Poirot-like analyses the motives and consequences of all their actions.

He asks, do we know the contributions of these different factors to the population decline? And finally of course, how can the hedgehog be saved? Mark Avery, in his nature blog appreciated it, ‘This book is written wittily as a whodunnit trying to track down the responsible party and looking at the evidence. That’s a clever way to tackle the issue, and generally it works and makes the book a different and gripping read.’

Hana Ketley, writing for the Natural History Book Service, agreed: ‘Throughout the book, Moorhouse takes these complicated factors and picks them apart, examining the reliability of the data and challenging baseless assumptions. He discusses the impact of hedgerow removal in the 1930s and 40s, the emerging threat of automatic lawnmowers, the problem of enclosed gardens and the reluctance of landowners to cut holes into fences for “hedgehog highways”.’

Christopher Hart in the Sunday Times felt that, “Ghosts in the Hedgerow tries to offer some good cheer to do with creating log piles and hedgehog corridors, as well as some fun facts.’ But he emphasised Moorhouse’s sense of urgency for action: ‘The lack of wildlife that I, born in the latter half of the 20th century, experience as “normal” would be regarded as a horrific aberration by anyone living in the preceding 99.99 per cent of human history.’

Chicken Boy My Life With Hens Arthur Parkinson

Particular Books, 240pp, £22

Arthur Parkinson, gardener, Instagram star and ‘henfluencer’ has written, according to Emma Beddington in the Observer, a ‘love letter’ to the chickens in his life.

It includes paeans to several older women, including his grandmothers who encouraged the young Arthur, who had difficulties in school, to love growing plants and cultivating hens

The Duchess of Devonshire, a fellow hen-lover in nearby Chatsworth, also plays a prominent role in the story: she took him up and he adored her.

‘To me’, wrote Parkinson in the Telegraph, ‘she was just a beautiful, mesmerising queen of chickens.’

A ‘henfluencer’s’ love letter to the chickens in his life

The Daily Mail’s Mark Mason was seduced despite himself. ‘The breed names read like poetry. There’s the Barbu d’Uccle and the Vorwerk, the Silver Spangled Hamburg and the Legbar. Arthur has a Blue Pekin called Claudia (after Ms Winkleman, “due to her similar bravado and glamour”), while “the Marans can be quite a lazy layer”. You’ll know the Silkie because it’s so broody it’ll sometimes try sitting on windfall apples.’ Mason concluded: ‘I can’t decide which I loved more –the bits about him or the bits about the chickens.’ In the Sunday Times, food writer Bee Wilson also found Chicken Boy ‘poetic’. And ‘a bit strange, in a good way.’ As well as being a ‘brilliantly practical how-to manual for looking after chickens, punctuated with pleasingly detailed illustrations of rare breed hens by Parkinson, it’s a memoir of growing up obsessed with them.’

HAGS THE DEMONISATION OF MIDDLE-AGED WOMEN VICTORIA SMITH

Fleet, 368pp, £20