The Lark Ascending: People, Music and Landscape in Twentieth-Century Britain

Illuminating, idiosyncratic and never less than fascinating.

Deftly woven artistic and political ley lines mapping and connecting the figurative landscape of the psyche and the literal landscape of the British countryside.

Less a book and more a poetic time-travelling device.

The Lark Ascending is something more rugged, lyrical and strange than a conventional history. Like the bird of Vaughan Williams’s piece (itself inspired by the 1881 George Meredith poem), it swoops and dives through the century that followed its first performance.

The nation’s favourite piece of music is established as the presiding spirit of an idiosyncratic pilgrimage through 20th-century experiments in life and sound ... Wanders between cathedral stalls and festival fields, magnetically drawn to overlaps of avant-gardism and popular song, radicalism and tradition ... An appealing breadth of sympathy ... Revealing and timely ... A valuably original book. I liked the bursts of vivid passion, the cameo sketches of “post-psychedelic crofters”, the heartfelt account of travellers ...

The Lark Ascending is something more rugged, lyrical and strange than a conventional history. Like the bird of Vaughan Williams’s piece (itself inspired by the 1881 George Meredith poem), it swoops and dives through the century that followed its first performance.