Armchair Traveller – The Bell Bookshop

Thoughtlands

Emma — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is a book is about walking and writing: about walkers who wrote, and writers who walk. It is about the circuit that exists between mind and feet, and about landscapes that exist both physically in front of you and in a line of words. And since all this walking and writing and thinking must have somewhere to take place, it is also a book about Suffolk, the author’s birthplace, and how writers have used and responded to its unmistakable magic.

Colliss Harvey travels from west to east, from chalk plain to crag; from velvety farmlands muffled by leaves to deafening shingle and uncompromising sea. She walks in excellent company – her fellow writers range from Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson to Patricia Highsmith, P. D. James, Ronald Blythe and Ruth Rendell. They include the poets George Crabbe and Robert Bloomfield; literary greats Wilkie Collins, George Orwell, and W. G. Sebald, who found a new native land here; and those born to Suffolk, such as M. R. James and Edward Fitzgerald.

The walks can be followed on foot with this book in a backpack, for those moments when walking gives way to reading, or from within the deep comfort of a favourite armchair. A bit of the writer’s notebook, a little of the memoir, and a dash of the love-letter, Thoughtlands is a one-of-a-kind literary journey and an unparalleled exploration of the Suffolk landscape.

Chaucer’s Italy

Emma — Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Geoffrey Chaucer might be considered the quintessential English writer, but he drew much of his inspiration and material from Italy. In face, without the tremendous influence of Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio (among others), the author of The Canterbury Tales might never have assumed his place as the ‘father’ of English literature.Nevertheless, Richard Owen’s Chaucer’s Italy begins in London, where the poet dealt with Italian merchants in his roles as court diplomat and customs official. Next Owen takes us, via Chaucer’s capture at the siege of Rheims, to his involvement in arranging the marriage of King Edward III’s son Lionel in Milan and his missions to Genoa and Florence. By scrutinising his encounters with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the mercenary knight John Hawkwood – and with vividly evocative descriptions of the Arezzo, Padua, Florence and Milan that Chaucer would have encountered – Owen reveals the deep influence of Italy’s people and towns on Chaucer’s poems and stories.Much writing on Chaucer depicts a misleadingly parochial figure, but as Owen’s enlightening short study of Chaucer’s Italian years makes clear, the poet’s life was internationally eventful. The consequences have made the English canon what it is today.

Churchill’s Britain

Emma — Tue, 02 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

More books have been written about Winston Churchill than any modern historical figure, but Peter Clark’s Churchill’s Britain does something quite different. It takes the reader the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland to lesser-known places associated with Churchill’s life. Some are familiar – Blenheim Palace, Chartwell, the Cabinet War Rooms – but we also see his schools, far-flung parliamentary constituencies in Dundee and Epping, the sites of famous speeches, the place he started to paint, the shop he bought his cigars, and the final resting places of his family and close friends. We read about these places in his own words alongside Clark’s insightful analysis and, by visiting sites that made important but less-celebrated contributions to the story of Churchill’s life, we come closer to a full picture. Clark takes us from the site of his father’s marriage proposal to his American future wife on the Isle of Wight to his grave in a country churchyard in Oxfordshire.Each of the eight regions of the United Kingdom is introduced with a map, and the entries cross-referenced. It can be dipped into, consulted by the traveller, or read straight through. However used, Churchill’s Britain provides fascinating and fresh insights into this extraordinary man.

The serpent coiled in Naples

Emma — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new ‘destination’ in Italy. While many of its more esoteric features are on display for all to see the stories behind them remain largely hidden.In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this baffling city, the serpent can be many things ? Vesuvius, the mafia-like camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves.Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa. The Serpent Coiled in Naples is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.

The view from the hill

Emma — Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In Christopher Somerville’s workroom is a case of shelves that holds 450 notebooks. Their pages are creased and stained with mud, blood, flattened insect corpses, beer glass rings, smears of plant juice and gallons of sweat. Everything Somerville has written about walking the British countryside has had its origin among these little black-and-red books. During the lockdowns and enforced idleness of the Covid-19 pandemic, Somerville began to revisit this rough treasury of notes, spanning forty years of exploring these islands on foot. The View from the Hill pulls together the cream of this unique crop, following the cycle of the seasons from a freezing January on the Severn Estuary to the sight of sunrise on Christmas morning from inside a prehistoric burial mound. In between are hundreds of walks to discover randy natterjack toads in a Cumbrian spring, trout in a Hampshire chalk stream in lazy midsummer, a lordly red stag at the autumn rut on the Isle of Mull, and three thousand geese at full gabble in the wintry Norfolk sky. Best of all, you don’t have to stir out of your chair to enjoy these walks. Just stir up the fire, fill your glass, and let Christopher Somerville take you out of here and far away.

Walking Pepys’s London

Emma — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Samuel Pepys walked round London for miles. The 2 ½ miles to Whitehall from his house near the Tower of London was accomplished on an almost daily basis, and so many of his professional conversations took place whilst walking that the streets became for him an alternative to his office. With Walking Pepys’s London, the reader will come to know life in London from the pavement up and see its streets from the perspective of this renowned diarist. The city was almost as much a character in Pepys’s life as his family or friends, and the book draws many parallels between his experience of 17th-century London and the lives of Londoners today. Colliss Harvey’s new book reconstructs the sensory and emotional experience of the past, bringing geography, biography and history into one. Full of fascinating details and written with extraordinary sensitivity, Walking Pepys’s London is an unmissable exploration into the places that made the greatest English diarist of all time.

The Serpent Coiled in Naples

Emma — Thu, 19 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In recent years Naples has become, for better or worse, the new ‘destination’ in Italy. While many of its more esoteric features are on display for all to see the stories behind them remain largely hidden. In Marius Kociejowski’s portrait of this baffling city, the serpent can be many things ? Vesuvius, the mafia-like camorra, the outlying Phlegrean Fields (which, geologically speaking, constitute the second most dangerous area on the planet). It is all these things that have, at one time or another, put paid to the higher aspirations of Neapolitans themselves. Naples is simultaneously the city of light, sometimes blindingly so, and the city of darkness, although often the stuff of cliché. The boundary that separates death from life is porous in the extreme: the dead inhabit the world of the living and vice versa. The Serpent Coiled in Naples is a travelogue, a meditation on mortality, and much else besides.

Chaucer’s Italy

Emma — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Geoffrey Chaucer might be considered the quintessential English writer, but he drew much of his inspiration and material from Italy. In fact, without the tremendous influence of Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio (among others), the author of The Canterbury Tales might never have assumed his place as the ‘father’ of English literature.Nevertheless, Richard Owen’s Chaucer in Italy begins in London, where the poet dealt with Italian merchants in his role as court diplomat and customs official. Next Owen takes us, via Chaucer’s capture at the siege of Rheims, to his involvement in arranging the marriage of King Edward III’s son Lionel in Milan and his missions to Genoa and Florence. By scrutinising his encounters with Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the mercenary knight Sir John Hawkwood – and with vividly evocative descriptions of the Arezzo, Padua, Florence, Certaldo, and Milan Chaucer would have encountered – Owen reveals the deep influence of Italy’s people and towns on Chaucer’s poems and stories.Much writing on Chaucer depicts a misleadingly parochial figure, but as Owen’s enlightening, short study of Chaucer’s Italian years makes clear, the poet’s life was internationally eventful. The consequences have made the English canon what it is today.

The View from the Hill

Emma — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000