A.N.Wilson
Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie (Bloomsbury, £14.99). At last, an Anglican Father Brown. Runcie has sensibly set his detective stories in the 1950s, before the boring era when DNA and science spoilt the poetry of crime investigation. Canon Chambers, a self-effacing, clever clergyman with a taste for pubs and shove-halfpenny, and an agonised capacity to fall in love with women, is surely a bit as Archbishop Runcie must have been when he came out of the Guards and took orders? Each tale is beautifully crafted and surprising. I hope for many more volumes.
How England Made the English: From Hedgerows to Heathrow by Harry Mount (Viking/Penguin, £20) is a punctiliously matched piece of topography-cum-history, taking you from Cornish tin mines to the great churches of Suffolk and the Cotswolds, built from wool wealth, to the suburbs of Surrey. It demonstrates that it is no accident that England looks as it does.
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