Stories of the Sussex Downs

This amazing book is itself a little like a flint, a misshapen stone egg of the Sussex Downs. It resists the reader at first, coated in the calcite rind of the author’s slow, scholarly journey, missteps and all. But when you persist, breaking the book’s spine or, as it were, knapping the flinty nodule, you find treasure within.

Alexandra Harris quotes the painter Paul Nash writing in 1937: ‘If I broke all the shells of all my wild stones, I should find that precious yolk which is like precious stones, the black core of the flint.’ From Nash, it’s a hop and a skip to Henry Vaughan, the metaphysical poet who ‘understood his heart as a cold flint that must be violently struck if it were to kindle into divine light’. He called his cycle of religious poems Silex Scintillans – flashing or fiery flint.

Harris’s associative range is second to none, and here she focuses her powers within a 20-mile square.