J W M Thompson
Not So Quaint As It Seems
A Social History of the English Countryside
By G E Mingay
Routledge 246pp £35 order from our bookshop
I well remember an old man saying to me, many years ago, that one of the great regrets of his life was the destruction of the English countryside as he remembered it from the days before 1914. He seemed to be looking back towards a lost Arcadia. Nowadays, I sometimes find myself with the same sort of regret as I recall the countryside from the days of my own youth, in the 1930s.
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