The word ‘neighbour’ dates from the days before the countryside was enclosed, when villagers farmed adjoining strips of common land. A neighbour then was ‘the man who tills the next piece of land to mine’.

These days, you might define neighbour as the person most likely to turn your life into a living hell. And the history of neighbours – as Emily Cockayne reveals in her authoritative if heavy-going book – is really a history of trying to minimise the irritation produced by the people next door.

Literary Review

Apr 2012

Categories

Harry Mount

Instead of a Book

Playing Away

Lava Palaver

Making Yourself At Home

Court Lore

Kindled Spirits

‘Gay But Not Screaming’

Set In Stone?

Roundly Acknowledged

Oh What A Lovely Pile

Delusions of Originality

It Came, It Saw, It Conquered

Those Irritating Lefties

Why Ask If Shad Do It?

TV’s Socrates

Slumming It

Alphabet Soup

Sublime to the Ridiculous

Esprit de Corpse

Stateside Sniping