A Gleaming Landscape: A Hundred Years of the Guardian's Country Diary by Martin Wainwright
'Wonderfully engaging, this is the perfect bedside book' Times Literary Supplement Martin Wainwright's sparkling compilation of a hundred years of the Guardian's much-loved Country Diary column was a critical and sales success in hardback. It features some of Britain's best writers on natural history and the countryside: Jim Perrin the mountaineering writer, whose biography of Don Whillans won the Boardman-Tasker Award, writes the dispatches from Snowdonia; Mark Cocker, author of the bestselling Crow Country, writes from Norfolk. There are also diaries written by Richard Mabey (Flora Britannica and Nature Cure) and Harry Griffin, as well as a leading Suffragette, one of Rupert Brooke's mistresses, and even one of the Guardian's printers! The remarkable range of subjects includes: neighbours woken at midnight to be shown a glow-worm; a beached shark to be saved from the council binmen; a peregrine flushed during the Normandy landings; the prevalence of owls in First World War trenches full of vermin, and an earnest preoccupation with stoats. 'A delight to dip into' Country Walking Martin Wainwright is Northern Editor of the Guardian, and lives in Leeds. He edited A Lifetime of Mountains, and has written The Guardian Book of April Fool's Day and A Coast-to-Coast Walk,, also published by Aurum.