Norfolk
Will Ben Stokes be fit for the Ashes?
What a marvellous summer this has been for Test cricket, which is sadly at risk of becoming an endangered species.…
The slow delights of an OAP coach tour
Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs…
Suburbanites vs the countryside
‘Same old boring Sunday morning, old men out, washing their cars.’ So begins the punk anthem ‘The Sound of the…
An ill wind: Poppyland, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed
Norfolk life looks quietly bleak in these carefully worked short stories of broken homes, precarious employment, dwindling expectations and torpor
The medieval English matriarch was a force to be reckoned with
Like many 15th-century women, Margaret Paston was a fearless protector of her family, supremely capable, in her husband’s absence, of defending their property against predatory neighbours
Parallel lives
Aged 69, the travel writer had a stroke and spent his last 20 years as a hemiplegic – and writing this memoir of his father’s life intertwined with snapshots of his own
My wife aced it at Wimbledon-on-Sea
The Hunstanton Lawn Tennis Tournament has become an annual fixture in the Young household. Known as ‘Wimbledon-on-Sea’, the week-long competition…
Mitfordian mischief
It takes chutzpah to tackle a national treasure as jealously loved and gatekept as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.…
The real Norfolk
D.J. Taylor is a Norfolk native who, un-usually, has stayed put. These stories, written during the pandemic, are all set…
Cricket notebook
Although it was a miracle that he survived until a few weeks before his 95th birthday, the death of John…
Norfolk may be flat, but it’s never boring
Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man if every person who told him that the Fens were ‘flat…
From haunted to haunter: the afterlife of W.G. Sebald
East Anglia, the rump of the British Isles, has inspired a disproportionate number of writers: Robert Macfarlane, Daisy Johnson, Mark…
A historical whodunnit that lets you into a forgotten world: The Paston Treasure reviewed
In 1675 Lady Bedingfield wrote to Robert Paston, first Earl of Yarmouth. Never, she exclaimed, had she seen anything so…
All from nothing
Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years stars Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as a long married couple whose relationship is disturbed by…
The lonely sea and the sky
In the manner of Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, Julia Blackburn’s story of John Craske is as much autobiography as biography, as…
Dogs of war
I’ve spent years in conflict zones. But the scariest thing that’s happened to me involved two bull terriers on a Norfolk beach
Walking the same walk
Mark Cocker is the naturalist writer of the moment, with birds his special subject. His previous book, Birds and People,…
To the lighthouse
Elements of Raffaella Barker’s new novel, her eighth for adults, suggest commercial fiction: a narrative that oscillates between the aftermath…
