'Madeleine Bunting's multidimensional chronicle is among the very best pieces of non-fiction to have been published in a long while about what it is like to be English' Simon Schama, Financial Times
Madeleine Bunting is a leading columnist for the Guardian. Born in North Yorkshire, Bunting read History at Cambridge. She is the author of The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands under German Rule, 1940-45 and Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives (both HarperCollins). She lives in London with her husband and three children.
An intriguing and elegant chronicle of a wild and woolly patch of
England ... Bunting is on finest form dealing with recent history,
particularly when she exposes the modern "cultural myth of the
rural idyll" and the very English idiocy of preserving this view
while the environment dies. Her scholarship ultimately produces a
persuasive argument for a more potent sense of place in rootless,
mobile Britain
*Sunday Times*
Bunting's exploration of the relationships between place and people
is wide-ranging, researched with great intelligence and richly
supported by detail
*Guardian*
A startling, willed, one-off book ... What she sets out to do is to
look at the acre of land "in the middle of nowhere", with scholarly
zest, until it becomes no longer a nowhere but a somewhere, known
and minutely understood. She is an exemplary guide ... Her greatest
achievement is to work a single acre to produce a more general
portrait of England ... Above all, she questions what belonging is
and discovers that it is about "commitment rather than
possession"
*Observer*
Madeleine Bunting's multidimensional chronicle is among the very
best pieces of non-fiction to have been published in a long while
about what it is like to be English
*Financial Times*
Madeleine Bunting writes angelically about a place that embraces so
much history
*Sunday Telegraph*
Delightful and fascinating, it also includes a particularly
excellent chapter on the many unexpected medieval uses of sheep
*Metro*
Well researched and beautifully written, Bunting's story builds,
stone by stone, to offer a historical narrative about England, an
environmental analysis of the effects of industrial agriculture,
and a meditation on belonging
*Guardian*
Madeleine Bunting in her haunting and supple book The Plot offered
what she called a biography of an English acre" ... Bunting sought
to discover its significance in her family history and,
inseparably, the cross-winds of English history that have shaped
it
*New Statesman*
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