In brief: Uncommon Ground; The Pretender; All That Glitters
Patrick GalbraithWilliam Collins, £22, pp356
Nature writer Patrick Galbraith's excellent second book more than fulfils the promise that his equally fine debut In Search of One Last Song suggested. In a series of acutely observed and often very funny vignettes ('it was diverse in the sense that there were people there from almost every Oxbridge college'), Galbraith travels across rural Britain in an attempt to look beyond the usual cliches of country life. In his exploration of everything from economic turmoil to the concept of 'belonging', he proves an erudite guide.
Jo HarkinBloomsbury, £18.99, pp452
'Wolf Hall meets Demon Copperhead' is an impressive billing for a first-time novelist, but The Pretender mostly justifies it. Jo Harkin veers closer to the grittiness of Dan Jones's medieval-set fiction than the visionary sweep of Hilary Mantel, but it is still an auspicious venture into fictionalised history. Loosely based on the real-life royal pretender Lambert Simnel,The Pretender explores the machinations of the wars of the roses with authority, bringing the frightening world she depicts to life.
Orlando WhitfieldProfile, £10.99, pp336 (paperback)
If Orlando Whitfield's readable and fascinating memoir-cum-exposé of the art world isn't turned into a big-budget film, it will be an opportunity missed. The author explores his friendship with the charismatic art dealer-cum-convicted fraudster Inigo Philbrick, detailing how he becomes increasingly successful and ever more grandiose in his ideas. All That Glitters would be a considerable accomplishment for a veteran writer, but the knowledge that it is Whitfield's debut makes it all the more impressive.
To order Uncommon Ground, The Pretender or All That Glitters go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Daily Mail
Uncommon Ground by Patrick Galbraith: Everything wrong with Right to Roam
Uncommon Ground by Patrick Galbraith (William Collins £22, 368pp) Right to Roam is a vociferous pressure group that demands far greater access to the countryside for 'the ordinary people of Britain'. This demand depends upon a very particular narrative: at some point in the past, rich aristocrats stole the land from the people and shut us out. We must take it back. It's a matter of social justice. Does any of this make sense, asks Patrick Galbraith? What effect would it have on our precious, beleaguered countryside if Right to Roam triumphed? After all, one of their leading lights recently tweeted a demand for 'the People' to be allowed to wander freely anywhere along field margins. It caused uproar. Field margins are some of the most precious wildlife habitats of all, where our rarest birds nest. Yet what makes Uncommon Ground such a superb read is Galbraith's generous even-handedness, his endless curiosity and his energetic research among all sorts of people, including the Right to Roamers themselves. They like to dress as Morris dancers or woodland sprites, wear face paint, play ukuleles and sing folk songs. He likes their eccentricity but despairs of their ignorance. It isn't true we are excluded anyway. We enjoy an amazing 140,000 miles of rights of way across England and Wales. Some open-access campaigners, meanwhile, are bluntly destructive. They destroy crow traps, even though control of corvid numbers is crucial to bird conservation. An old Devon gamekeeper tells Galbraith about one activist who tore down a lot of fencing as a protest. Yet it wasn't put up by some greedy landowner but Natural England. 'It was to stop the sheep getting in the ancient woodland.' Other problems created by careless or selfish 'human access' include Scottish mountain bikers disrupting capercaillie breeding grounds and jet skiers terrorising wintering birds on the coast. Still, he enjoys his wild swim with a mass trespass group in a reservoir owned by United Utilities. Galbraith never argues puritanically, like some militant eco-warriors, that his fellow humans should be excluded from swathes of the countryside to protect wildlife. In fact he wants far more engagement between people and nature. In his ceaseless quest for a truly 3D, multi-faceted portrait of our country, he goes walking with the British Naturist Ramblers in a bluebell wood, appropriately attired (ie boots and socks, no more.) They're an amiable bunch, harmless and nature-loving, but rather lacking in female members, he notes. He meets the Earl of Leicester, proud proprietor of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, just the sort of toff that the Roamers despise. Yet fully one fifth of his 25,000 acres is superbly managed nature reserve. Public footpaths thread across the other 20,000, and Holkham also hosts a regular 5k Parkrun, which the earl joins in with! This is the kind of aristo we can warm to. Especially when he tells Galbraith, while rolling a cigarette, that it gives him 'great pleasure to beat farmers on the estate who are half his age'. The idea that 'they' are to blame – that is, rich landowners and aristos – is a hopeless oversimplification. 'Landowners and farmers aren't the cause, but they could be part of the solution.' In the end, lack of access isn't the problem, it's lack of understanding. Millions go to the seaside every year, he points out, yet how many know there are two different species of seal in the UK? If only more people did country things in the country. Our countryside is changing fast. Could the solution be a win-win for all concerned? With commitment and imagination, yes, says Galbraith.
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- The Guardian
The Pretender by Jo Harkin review – a bold and brilliant comedy of royal intrigue
One day in 1484, strange men arrive at the Oxfordshire farm where 10-year-old John Collan lives. They've come to carry him away to a new life, for he is not, after all, the farmer's son; in fact, he's Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, spirited away in infancy to keep him safe ahead of the day he might return to claim the throne of England. That day is now in sight. He can't call himself John any more, but he can't yet be announced as Edward, Earl of Warwick. In the meantime he'll be given a third name: Lambert Simnel. Over the course of this fantastically accomplished novel, the many-named boy will travel from Oxford to Burgundy then Ireland, and at last into the paranoid and double-crossing heart of Henry VII's court. The tail end of the Wars of the Roses – with Richard III's crown snatched from the mud of Bosworth by Henry Tudor – is a foment of plot and counter-plot, and our hero spends his adolescence being passed around scheming factions who go so far as to hold a coronation for him. What a painful life this is for a boy 'so grateful for any amount of love' as he falls in and out of favour, uncertain of his own parentage, gaining and losing relatives as their interest turns to other plots and other pretenders. He's heard stories of changelings, but at least those strange children come with the clarity of a straight swap: Simnel is all his past selves, and none of them. He thinks of John, the sweetly priggish little boy from the farm, who loves mystery plays and football and fairy stories, 'bricked up like an anchorite' inside his new self. One character describes him as a changeling in reverse, 'for changelings are dark and wicked things and Edward a fair prince' – but once he's demoted back to Simnel and becomes embroiled in the machinations of the Tudor court, those 'dark and wicked' elements are revealed as inextricable from the 'fair prince'. At least he has the consolation of an education. Hothoused in the ways of nobility, our hero '[eats] up every learning he's been given like a chicken after grasshoppers'. His intellectual world is communicated impeccably and with purpose. Simnel rejoices in books, begs for them, is 'astonied', outraged and aroused by their contents. The Pretender is scattered with fine knobbly period language ('dole', 'maigre', 'puissant', 'wroth') and witty dialogue, and this stylish delivery brings with it considerable substance. Simnel's reading of Chaucer, Dante, Malory, John Gower and John Lydgate alongside classical works of Boethius, Juvenal, Horace, Ovid and Apuleius isn't included simply to pay lip service to historical research. There's a deep love for literature here, and a desire to showcase the formation of the late-medieval mind, which elevates The Pretender above other novels about this period. Simnel, wrestling with all manner of rhetorical devices, discovers bocardo syllogism: 'All kings are of noble birth. You become a king. You are of noble birth.' In interludes, he attempts to write about himself. He tries fairytales and romances, but when attempting satire he comes to the realisation that if 'satire is written by the noble, in service of the social order', then as upstart pretender to the throne, 'he's exactly the thing they're complaining about'. Delving into history books, 'the fragility of the past horrifies him'. It turns out facts are far more mutable than he'd imagined: 'some dead historians have lied, or guessed, and now nobody knows what's true'. When it comes to reading autobiography, he finds authors 'making an argument for their selves', but by this time he has no self of his own to argue for. In fact, he's already signed a prepared confession renouncing his alleged identity. Is he now complicit in his own disappearance? There are few historical eras as passionately disputed as the Wars of the Roses. Much ink and emotion has been spilt in debate of its perceived heroes and villains. Harkin's version of Simnel and his world, therefore, will not necessarily please every reader – but this is a feature rather than a bug. The Pretender is a novel about uncertainty. 'Only kings write history', perhaps, but when those kings are so busy deposing one another, 'history is written in wax'. This doesn't happen in the rustling domain of documents preserved or burned, copied out or left to rot: John/Edward/Simnel shows us what happens when it's your own life being revised and rewritten even as you live it. A traditional Bildungsroman concerns an individual's process of becoming. What is the name for a tale of unravelling? 'In a few hundred years,' our hero says, 'Richard [III] will be a hunchback and I'll be a scoundrel.' This bold, brilliant and deeply compassionate treatment restores a life to Simnel. Was it the life he lived? None of us will ever know. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The Pretender by Jo Harkin is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Daily Mail
30-04-2025
- Daily Mail
JOHN MACLEOD: Skewering of the urban radicals by a countryman who knows and loves rural Britain
The signs were everywhere – KEEP DOGS ON LEAD – but the estate-manager bumped into a local pair he knew well. Lovely couple. Their spaniel dog was unleashed, bouncing around. It had earlier, trilled the lady, killed a hare. He swallowed hard. 'Probably had leverets…' They stared. 'Leverets: Is that so? We didn't know hares got a disease.' Into the midst of such blithering ignorance and the Right To Roam movement, Patrick Galbraith pounces generally like a leopard on a goat. Uncommon Ground is as good a book as you will read this year. An informed, sharp and often very funny look at rural realities and the current clamour for 'access' – and not by some lounge-lizard from Islington. Galbraith is exuberant, involved, hands-on. In the unfolding chapters, he bounces around Britain like an enthusing Tintin. There are some beguiling, bucolic lines – 'After going to see the cheesemaker, I drove to Little Snoring to see an egg farmer called David Perowne.' Or, visiting Appleby in high summer, noting 'the river beneath us, which is down on its bones in the sun…' But our Patrick also heads out with poachers, crashes an illegal rave, drops in on gipsies, sups with lairds and gamekeepers, shoots the breeze at a foxhunt (Reynard's final fate is tactfully unrecorded) and joins a chap foraging for magic mushrooms. The author, too, engages patiently with activists demanding total abolition of the right to own land. And he even, for a few pages, wanders naked with naturists, though that chapter is much less exciting than you might think. Patrick Galbraith knows his stuff. He is still only thirty-two and hails from Dunscore, Dumfries. Attended some frightfully good school, has a a weakness for squashy huntin'-shootin'-fishin' hats. And he's about to marry; his young lady is a serious wildfowler. Galbraith himself is a qualified deerstalker, writes like an angel and, for seven years, was the editor of Shooting Times. The sort of educated Scot who, one metropolitan evening, might sip English sparkling wine at some black-tie private viewing – and, not a day later, be lying on his tweedy tummy on the Clisham bog with an unwitting 10-pointer stag in his crosshairs. Galbraith loves rural Britain. Better still, he knows it – the sort of enthralling companion who can identify distant mallards at a glance, distinguish in an instant a salmon from a seatrout, effortlessly gralloch a deer and identify any tree, even in bare and twiggy winter. And there are two points he keeps hammering in Uncommon Ground. For one, he questions the general obsession on the Marxist-Lentilist Left with who owns a given chunk of Britain. In many – perhaps most – instances, the question is academic. What really matters is who lives on the land, how they work it, and how to greater or lesser degree the public can engage with it. Devolved Scotland's ongoing obsession with 'community ownership' is something Galbraith delicately questions. And with reason. In North Harris, for instance – bought by its residents from a cider-mogul two decades ago – it has proved very difficult to generate income and balance the books. Uncommon Ground's second great strength is another repeated point: that, often, the best thing you can do for endangered wildlife and a given, fragile environment is not to go anywhere near it. In this respect, the beasts are wiser than us. Seals do not show up in your living-room to hog the sofa and use your carpet as a latrine. Yet – wind-surfing, kayaking, snorkelling, bouncing onto remote tidal shores or stomping into their caves – we repeatedly invade their territory. And then suddenly, some summer, wonder why we don't see local seals any more. The gorge, too, has risen in my own throat when I spot raucous tourists making merry by a ghetto-blaster amidst a tern colony, heedless of the frantic birds – circling overhead – desperate to feed their young. This matters in a Britain where the lapwing population has crashed by 90 per cent, untold counties have seen their last curlew, most will never hear a nightingale and the Scottish wildcat may be within twenty years of extinction. Mountain-bikers do not actually have a God-given right to batter repeatedly through the fragile ground of grey-legged partridges and even the dedicated birdwatcher, however clever his camouflage or long his lens, can scare black grouse away from their 'lek' forever. Galbraith, too, repeatedly skewers the preachy pretensions of Right To Roam and its ocean-going ignorance of responsible land management. In one lovely scene, he purrs of a Right To Roam love-in in London, 'Mark is a sort of floating radical on the radical Left, and it was diverse in the sense that there were people there from almost every Oxbridge college...' Elsewhere, Galbraith drawls, 'There is something cultish about wild swimming, like people who have sourdough starters or go to the Tate Modern.' But, when he needs to be, he is rightly angry. In one immersive chapter we spend time on the Arundel estate, where Charlie the gamekeeper – at the decree of the gentle Duke – studies and delights in the songbirds, hatches curlew eggs under a heat-lamp, and responsibly traps voracious predators like crows and magpies. He layers hedges; fences off the plots where lapwings breed, keeps partridge feeders topped up… and his reward? Guy Shrubsole of Right To Roam boasts, online, how he has deliberately freed crows from a Larsen trap under Charlie's remit. Weeks later, Right To Roam summon protestors for a mass-trespass on the Arundel estate – 'to bear witness to the 'ecological destruction' that goes on behind those fences.' In a world increasingly terrified of difficult debates and fraught controversies – the BBC's Have I Got News For You, two weeks ago, completely ignored the biggest story of the week, the Supreme Court's ruling as to what, in law, is a woman – Patrick Galbraith jumps confidently into every complexity he meets. In one of the book's funniest exchanges, an Isle of Lewis poacher confides, 'Never eaten salmon in my life…' Though perhaps, he muses, he should probably try it before the fish-stocks go instinct. Uncommon Ground has its occasional lacunae and would have benefited from proper proof-reading with an eye to detail. But it's an enthralling journey, a vision – and, in its own way, a manifesto. Essentially, our problem is ignorance, Galbraith concludes. In what is now an overwhelmingly urban country, we know little of rural reality, and care less. In a land where an advertised vacancy for an editorial assistant – the lowest rung in publishing – can see a thousand applicants, how many of those young people 'would have welcomed the opportunity to learn crosscutting and tree-felling? How many would have welcomed the opportunity to learn how to use a billhook? To Patrick Galbraith's delight, a campaign by a tireless Bristol woman, Mary Colwell to get a Natural History GCESE on the school curriculum was, last year, on the brink of success. Then, in December, it was paused by the new Government. Labour, sources whispered, had decided it was a 'Tory initiative.' Uncommon Ground: Rethinking Our Relationship with the Countryside. By Patrick Galbraith. William Collins. £22.
