![]() ![]() Given the title of his book, he views the process as all but complete: he is obituarist, as much as observer. In The Lost Village, he wants to hear, first-hand, from those who recall the old days: primarily, to preserve their eye-witness accounts for future generations, and also in an attempt to analyse quite how far the decline of the village has gone. His particular concern is the decline of the archetypal English village, and a celebration of the values and characters that, he says, have historically propped up this key component of rural life. Richard Askwith's is an earnest voice in the sea of despair that surrounds this particular genre of nostalgia. And, of course, the poets have had their say: Philip Larkin mourned the passing of country ways that he had previously assumed to be permanent. ![]() Wind in the Willows celebrated a gentle rural existence that seemed, a century ago, already to have departed forever. ![]() Laurie Lee's luscious prose was as much bucolic elegy as it was autobiography. ![]() There is a rich literary tradition that has fed on the nostalgic notion that, a generation earlier, the English countryside was somehow better, more beautiful, less spoilt. ![]()
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