H. V. Morton

"In the quiet village of , men still talk about the as though it happened last week. Eyam is the last place in England with a vivid memory of the . Eyam is a mile-long street of fortress-like stone houses set in a cosy cleft of the wild moors. There is a church, a manor-house behind a wall, and the remains of the village stocks. I went into the church, where the elderly caretaker began to talk, as they all do in Eyam, of the Plague ... (She might have been talking about that year's influenza!)"

"Shakespeare's London was a small walled town whose gates were shut each night with the coming of darkness. His contemporaries went a-Maying and gathering s where now are tramcars and gasometers. A Londoner was to Shakespeare a man who was born probably within sound of , who worked and slept within the ancient town wall of London, and would probably die there and be buried in one of the city churchyards. London three centuries ago was a small comprehensible cathedral city standing behind its wall, and its citizens could look at it and walk all round it, as men can walk round and . A mile or so away was the royal , where the King lived. There were two ways to it, one by river and the other along the strand of the . To the north of the were meadows and hedges, a , a and more fields stretching up to a rural lane that led to and was to become known by the odd name of ."

"At the highest point of the stands the and the 's private walk. At this part of the hill has never been built over, or shaved off and lowered, like so many of the famous , it preserved its original height. ... I do not know of a more beautifully situated radio station, unless it is on its Pyrenean mountain, whose insistent voice dominates the air over southern France and northern Spain. The immensely powerful Vatican Radio broadcasts on twenty-four short, and three medium, wave-lengths and in every language."

"What appeals to me about Morton's work is that you are reading two histories at once. As he recounts stories of the and eras, he is also giving a contemporary account of a world that has entirely vanished. He writes with a crisp matter-of-factness about his faith and his place as an Englishman abroad in the 1930s. I don't mean in a colonially superior way, but just with a certainty that I think few could express today. In the book he is mostly exploring the youthful nation state of 's . For Morton, visiting what remains of the places where stayed is often a case of begging a ride from a local. It is still an age when traveling in the near East is more an expedition than a holiday. When Morton visits the site of the for example, it is a waterlogged ruin, where he imagines the frogs to be croaking out her name. A plate image in the book shows a desolate empty location, and he laments the mutilated statues on the road from the village of ."

"With the 1927 publication of In Search of England, H. V. Morton began to establish his name as the most popular travel writer in Britain. Part of Morton's appeal, particularly to the lower middle class, was that he engagingly interwove human interest accounts of his journeys with potted historical and literary vignettes to convey the sense of an enjoyable holiday. Yet beyond these seemingly casual aspects lay serious ideological purposes, and these are of importance in exploring interwar views on . Morton insisted that the nations's strength ultimately depended on the health of its rural areas. Yet the urban and industrial revolutions had inflicted fundamental damage on the fabric of the nation. Morton called for renewed recognition of the central continuities, especially , in ."