This is a quite wonderful book of essays, although it's very hard to describe as none of the words which come to mind quite do it justice. It is charming and offbeat, but both those words make it sound cutesy, which it definitely isn't - there's a desert-dry humour, as well as a deep sense of humanity, behind these essays. (To quote the start of one of the driest, about Rogers' accidental stint as a speechwriter to Prince Charles: "[the Prince's Private Secretary] had always been careful of speech to the point where you fancied you saw semicolons form in air. But this time he sounded as though English were a foreign language in which he was taking an oral exam.")

Rogers' interest is in English villages, and the individual human lives within them, both now and the traces that are left from the past. He has an eye for the quirky - one essay deals with what "the last Turkish POW in British hands", a tortoise captured at Gallipoli - but in fact, his interest is in the tortoise's owner, and how the story of the tortoise came to define his life. Even when he's writing about Roman tombstones, Rogers manages to bring to life the individual characters buried under them.

Truly a gem.

Recommended for: anyone with an indulgent eye for English eccentricity. ( )