'Poets make the best topographers', W. H. Hoskins has said, with Wordsworth in mind, and Margaret Drabble's fine survey of British landscape as seen through literary eyes from Celtic times until our own serves as an extended confirmation of this. With a fund of quotation and example agreeably maverick, by no means always the expected writers or passages – she ranges through time and space, from Cistercian abbeys to Dickensian London, from the Trossachs to St Ives. This is a long, thoughtful book, packed with information, unsettling in that it has the reader both reaching for unread books and lusting after unvisited places, and presented in a style that engagingly combines down-to-earth comment ('Romantic scenery is not, of course, the best arable land') with scholarly analysis.

It must at the outset be said that Margaret Drabble has been splendidly served by her photographer, Jorge Lewinski. The photographs, both colour and black and white, are magnificent: more than that, they complement and enlarge the text, which is a rare thing in a book of this kind. Each one has been specially commissioned, and relates to discussion of a place, book or poem from the Lakes to Eastwood, from romantic impressionistic