LITERATURE
Writing Britain – Wastelands to Wonderlands
Christina Hardyment
British Library, $34.95

REVIEW: WILLIAM YEOMAN

These sometimes nightmarish, sometimes utopian glimpses of Britain's land and cityscapes as seen through the lens of literature through the centuries is a visual as well as a literary feast.

From at least the time of Chaucer, place has been a prominent element in English prose and poetry.

Here, writer and journalist Christina Hardyment sits us on the shoulders of such literary greats as Dickens, Woolf, Wordsworth, Greene, Chesterton, Eliot and Ballard, as they travel through wild northern landscapes and filthy industrial towns, modern council estates and urban dystopias, foggy Victorian London and seedy seaside Brighton.