The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape

This luminous chronicle of lives in an English landscape over time is a feat of time travel from the prize-winning author of Romantic Moderns and Weatherland.An ancient church sheltering a medieval anchorite who chose to be buried alive.The country estate parading a menagerie of exotic animals.The cottage where William Blake received the poetic spirit of Milton.A safe house harbouring secret agents from wartime French resistance networks. When the celebrated critic and cultural historian Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, bringing a lifetime's reading to bear on the place where she started, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area's past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see? From the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to...