Features routes less than three miles in length and spread right across the delightful Cotswold countryside. This book aims to encourage strollers to find out more about the area through the discovery of its many-faceted literary associations. It is suitable for lovers of literature and landscape.

The combination of country walking with visits to battlefields is a most rewarding experience. The Midlands has played a prominent part in the military history of England and the events that form the basis of the 22 walks in this guide range from the 13th to the 20th centuries, from the Battle of Evesham (1265) to the bombing of Coventry (1940).

Features 30 circular walks that are evenly spaced across the varied terrain of the county. This book gives an introduction to Worcestershire's landscape. Each route visits a heritage site, market town or village which enables you to learn about the area's cultural life.

With its gentle hills and timeless villages, the Cotswold countryside is a vision of natural beauty and rural calm, but it is also a region rich in history. In this new addition to the Landscapes of the Imagination series, Jane Bingham offers an intriguing portrait of the Cotswolds over the centuries, ranging from ancient stone circles and ruined Roman villas to the Cotswolds today, a picturesque destination spot popular with country-weekenders, tourists, and celebrities. Readers will visit fine churches and manor houses that have survived from the Middle Ages, and tour a landscape still bearing the scars of the Civil War. The home of kings and nobles since Saxon times, the region is famous for its elegant estates, such as Blenheim Palace--England's grandest stately home--while signs of the early industrial age can be seen in its mills and factories. Artists, musicians, and writers were also drawn to this rural paradise, from William Shakespeare and William Morris to T.S. Eliot and Ralph Vaughn Williams. Bingham captures it all in her charming portrait of this glorious spot in the heart of southern England.

From the author of Red Star Sister “An excellent biography. Brody has made the world a better place by telling [Mitford’s] saga so skillfully” (San Francisco Chronicle). Admirers and detractors use the same words to describe Jessica Mitford: subversive, mischief–maker, muckraker. J.K. Rowling calls her her “most influential writer.” Those who knew her best simply called her Decca. Born into one of Britain’s most famous aristocratic families, she eloped with Winston Churchill’s nephew as a teenager. Their marriage severed ties with her privilege, a rupture exacerbated by the life she lead for seventy–eight years. After arriving in the United States in 1939, Decca became one of the New Deal’s most notorious bureaucrats. For her the personal was political, especially as a civil rights activist and journalist. She coined the term frenemies, and as a member of the American Communist Party, she made several, though not among the Cold War witch hunters. When she left the Communist Party in 1958 after fifteen years, she promised to be subversive whenever the opportunity arose. True to her word, late in life she hit her stride as a writer, publishing nine books before her death in 1996. Yoked to every important event for nearly all of the twentieth century, Decca not only was defined by the history she witnessed, but by bearing witness, helped to define that history. “Brisk, engaging.” —Wall Street Journal “A valuable retelling of a provocative life.” —Kirkus Reviews

In terms of literary history, Gerard Manley Hopkins has been difficult to pin down. Many of his concerns - industrialism, religious faith and doubt, science, language - were common among Victorian writers, but he is often championed as a proto-modernist despite that he avoids the self-conscious allusiveness and indirectness that typify much high modernist poetry. It is partly because Hopkins cannot be pigeonholed that his influence remains relevant. The Fire that Breaks brings together an international team of scholars to explore for the first time Hopkins's extended influence on the poets and novelist who defined Anglo-American literature throughout the past century.