In his recent Radio 4 series on heroism, Rory Stewart admitted that as a child he had ambitions. Some eight-year-old boys want to be train drivers, others fancy becoming postmen. Stewart wanted to be Alexander the Great. He wanted, he told listeners, ‘to achieve magnificent things’.

There is no doubt that, in an age of general banality and malaise, the man has more or less done it. He may not have conquered empires, but he has been a deputy governor in Iraq and a professor at Harvard, and his podcast The Rest Is Politics has millions of listeners. Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders, a portrait of largely forgotten people in a half-forgotten part of Britain, is one of his quieter triumphs – but a triumph nonetheless. 

For a decade Stewart was the Member of Parliament for Penrith and The Border, the largest and most sparsely populated constituency in England until the redrawing of constituency boundaries in 2024. He spent a great deal of that time out on foot, meeting those he represented. He had never lived,