Sensible Places: essays on place, time, & countryside

Parliamentary historian, chronicler of Titanic's sinking and Churchill's ascent, annotator of Kipling and of Kenneth Grahame: GMW Wemyss is, admittedly, these, but much more is he the West Country's beloved essayist, the wry, fond observer of rural humour, chalk-streams, proper gardens, and real ale; village cricket, Evensong, and Lib Dems in their natural habitat. These collected essays tell of the great themes and small doings of the Valley of the River Wylye, the twenty-st- ... er, twenty-scone Baker's Daughter and her dreams of an empire of the Higher Nosh, river and village, trout and change-ringing, funerals and f tes. His jewel-like essays, 'The River' - charting the rise of the Wylye and its course to the sea - and 'The Village', analysing with wit and learning the development of British settlement patterns from Downton to the Pal olithic, are pride of place in this volume. Yet trout on the dry-fly and ghostly terrors, scrumpy and silver bands, poets and pubs, rascals and Remembrance Sundays, all receive their equal due in these warm, wise, and affectionate observations. As he observes, 'townies think Thelwell a caricaturist: we know he drew from life'; and here the England of Sir John Betjeman and Miss Read, Barbara Pym and SR Badmin, lives on, in secret corners of country lanes, beneath a skylark's skies. White horses in the chalk, the downs and the cathedral's spire, heritage steam trains and off-spin hit for six: here is a feast for mind and senses.

GMW Wemyss lives and writes, wisely pseudonymously, in Wilts. Having, by invoking the protective colouration of tweeds, cricket, and country matters, somehow evaded immersion in Mercury whilst up at University, he survived to become the author or co-author of histories of the Narvik Debate, the fall of Chamberlain and the rise of Churchill, and of the UK and US enquiries into the sinking of Titanic; and co-editor and co-annotator of Kipling’s Mowgli stories and Kenneth Grahame. He is also the co-author of a forthcoming history of that year of portent, 1937 (Bapton Books, Christmas 2012).