extract – Stanfords Blog

Extract- Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024

Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 takes us on a beautiful journey through the British countryside, drawn from The Guardian’s beloved Country Diary. With an introduction by Ian McMillan, and illustrations by Clifford Harper.

For over a century, The Guardian’s Country Diary has published the nation’s most celebrated writers of natural history as they capture the essence of the British countryside.

From Yorkshire to Belfast, Orkney to Cumbria, and Gwynedd to the Scottish Highlands, exquisitely written and softly observed snapshots emerge – of fishes lurking in dusky pools, of age-old trees beneath deep blue skies, of lives being lived alongside the ebbs and flows of the natural world.

Bringing together the finest contributions to the column from recent years, Under the Changing Skies is an essential companion for all those with a deep love for the British countryside, charting its subtle changes over the course of the seasons.

With contributions from Cal Flyn, Mark Cocker, Josie George, Nicola Chester, Lev Parikian, Amy-Jane Beer, Kate Bradbury, Andrea Meanwell and many others.

Here is an extract:

Extract: Infinite Life by Jules Howard

In Infinite Life: Revolutionary Story of Eggs, Evolution and Life on Earth, zoology correspondent Jules Howard takes the reader on a mind-bending journey from the churning coastlines of the Cambrian Period and Carboniferous coal forests, where insects were stirring, to the end of the age of dinosaurs when live-birthing mammals began their modern rise to power. Eggs would evolve from out of the sea; be set by animals into soils, sands, canyons and mudflats; be dropped in nests wrapped in silk; hung in stick nests in trees, covered in crystallised shells or secured by placentas.

Here is an extract:

Extract: Running on Empty by Guy Deacon

At the age of sixty, and having lived with Parkinson’s disease for over ten years, Guy Deacon CBE set out on one last adventure: to drive solo from his home in the UK 18,000 miles and through twenty-five countries to Cape Town on the southern tip of Africa. Running on Empty is the story of this incredible journey, across Europe and down the full length of Africa, took the former British Army officer over twelve months. Along the way, he broke down five times, underwent one emergency evacuation, and took 3,650 prescription pills.

There are only a handful of vehicles each year which attempt this difficult journey; many never complete it. Ongoing conflicts in Libya, South Sudan, Mozambique and many other countries make any journey exceptionally dangerous. In central Africa, road conditions, particularly in the rainy season, often make the going treacherous.

Further hazards include illegal checkpoints, extortion, contaminated fuel and a lack of services. Guy drove, lived and slept in his VW Transporter, often in remote spots, hundreds of miles from the nearest village or town. Reliant on patchy GPS, he often got lost.

His journey was, quite simply, an incredible feat by a man travelling alone with Stage 3 Parkinson’s disease, when simply putting on a pair of shoes can take half an hour. But not only did Guy’s journey fulfil a childhood dream to drive the length of Africa, his mission was also to raise global awareness of Parkinson’s disease, for which there is currently still no cure.

Here is an extract:

Extract: The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape by Alexandra Harris

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 the lost local women who left little trace, these electrifying encounters – spanning the Downs, Poland, Australia, Canada – inspired her to imagine lives that seemed distant, yet were deeply connected through their shared landscape.

By focusing on one small patch of England, Harris finds ‘a World in a Grain of Sand’ and opens vast new horizons.

Here is an extract:

Extract: My Family and Other Enemies

My Family and Other Enemies is part travelogue, part memoir that dives into the hinterland of Croatia. Mary Novakovich explores her ongoing relationship with the region of Lika in central Croatia, where her parents were born. In recounting her own family’s tumultuous history, Novakovich opens up a world that is little known outside the Balkans, telling the stories of people whose experiences weren’t widely reported at the time, when the devastation in Croatia was superseded by the Bosnian conflict and media attention moved elsewhere.

Here is an extract:

Extract: The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World by James Crawford

In this extract from The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World, James Crawford goes in search of the Grafferner glacier in the Italian-Austrian Alps. Straddling the border between the two nations, when this glacier moves, the border moves too. It is what is known in Italian as a confine mobile – constituted in law by Italy and Austria as a ‘moving border’. A border defined and shaped by gravity, and now melting at an alarming rate due to the impacts of climate change…

Extract: Free to Go: Across the World on a Motorbike by Esa Aldegheri

When Esa Aldegheri and her husband left their home in Orkney, Esa didn’t know that their eighteen-month motorbike adventure would take them through twenty international frontiers – between Europe and the Middle East, through Pakistan, China and India – many of which are now impassable.

Charting a story of shrinking and expanding liberties and horizons, of motherhood, womanhood, xenophobia and changing geopolitical situations, Free to Go examines the challenges of navigating a world where many assume that women ride pillion, both on a motorbike and within relationships. Part around-the-world adventure, part-literary exploration of womanhood, Free to Go is about the journeys that shape and transform us.

Here is an extract from Free to Go: Across the World on a Motorbike by Esa Aldegheri:

Extract: Atlas of Vanishing Places by Travis Elborough

To celebrate the paperback launch of the 2020 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award winning Atlas of Vanishing Places by Travis Elborough, here is an extract for you all to read:

Rice and peas recipe from ‘West Winds’ by Riaz Phillips

In West Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from Jamaica , award-winning food writer Riaz Phillips tells countless tales of Jamaica through its dishes, drawing on his memories of growing up in the Caribbean diaspora of London and time living in Jamaica.

With a mix of location and recipe photography by Phillips, West Winds fully immerses readers in the spirit and food of Jamaica. From the “waste not, want not” approach instilled in Riaz by his grandmother, to the Ital food he was introduced to living with the Rastafari community, working at eco-farms as well as reconnecting to his grandfather’s birthplace of downtown Kingston, the 100 plus mouthwatering meals, hearty soups, bakes, and refreshing drinks cover all the different elements of Jamaican cooking.

Recipes rooted in centuries of culture through folktales and anecdotes make West Winds so much more than a cookbook – it is an ode to Jamaica and the diasporas, the people and their heritage, with something for everyone. Here is an extract:

Rice and peas recipe from West Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from Jamaica by Riaz Phillips. Published by DK £25

An extract from Nomads by Anthony Sattin

Nomads by Anthony Sattin tells the ground-breaking story of Nomadic peoples on the move across history.

Humans have been on the move for most of history. Even after the great urban advancement lured people into the great cities of Uruk, Babylon, Rome and Chang’an, most of us continued to live lightly on the move and outside the pages of history. But recent discoveries have revealed another story . . .

Reconnecting with our deepest mythology, our unrecorded antiquity and our natural environment, Nomads is the untold history of civilisation, told through its outsiders.

Here is an extract from Nomads by Anthony Sattin

A young man walks towards me with a stick slung across his shoulders and a flock at his feet. The sheep, in front, beside and behind him, are as chaotic as meltwater in the nearby stream and they carry him down the path like a crowd of rowdy children. An older man follows, weatherworn but still strong, a rifle over his left shoulder. He clicks his tongue to encourage them forward. Behind him are two women on donkeys, one older than the other, and I guess they are his wife and daughter. They look strong women, but then it is a tough life beneath the shard peaks of the Zagros Mountains. Other donkeys carry their belongings, bundled inside heavy rust-and-brown cloth that the women have woven and will soon repurpose as door- flaps when the tents are set up.