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“... When Margaret Drabble says that, like Trollope, ‘Henry James admires the inimitable, unpurchasable gleam of time’, and describes his Poynton as ‘a Mentmore in miniature’, or when she writes of ‘the allegorical significance and sexual innuendo of the medieval garden’, or remarks that architectural irregularity, to English eyes, ‘seems to be a key, a touchstone, a mystic pledge of some indefinable authenticity’, or calls Dickens ‘the great poet of pollution’, or reminds us that, in Wordsworth’s time, ‘the love of nature seemed almost to replace the love of mankind,’ or says a thousand other such things as she wanders through the settings of our stories and poetry, it becomes obvious that we are in for a new look at this celebrated scenery ...”

“... James Woodforde’s diary retains its lumbering, unremitting interest. The obvious question is: what made him keep it? To tell us about his times, or to tell his page about himself? These are the reasons why most men keep diaries, but neither was the compulsion behind this one. This is perhaps why, with this latest edition of Parson Woodforde, we push along beside a writer who, one imagines, would not have cared to be designated social historian or confessional writer, but who nevertheless, deliberately or artlessly, reveals himself and his age with a starkness akin to the hard Norfolk light falling on a ditch ...”

“... The Second World War, writes Ronald Blythe in the Introduction to Private Worlds, precipitated the ‘last great avalanche of private correspondence’. Thanks to the Education Act of 1918, it was greatest such avalanche there had ever been, and went with the most furious appetite for books – any kind of books, but Penguins for preference – and with the greatest impulsion to try ‘writing’ in the other sense too ...”

“... the books, starting with the choice of locale. First Friends is a narrative bound together by Ronald Blythe out of a trove of letters sent between the Nashes and Carrington, and discovered in a trunk in a bread-oven after John’s death. Blythe edits deftly and writes at once intimately and with a feel for the ...”

“... with the informants or get drawn into their whole outlook or life as we do, say, in the books by Ronald Blythe. The main exception here is the long and disturbing narrative of a Glaswegian fusilier, and significantly, it is a pathological case-history. The fusilier’s life at that time (‘27 cases of absence, countless charges of ...”

“... the gratitude and affection of a host of authors as different as Edna O’Brien and Eric Ambler, Ronald Blythe and Antonia Fraser. That, perhaps, is the crucial difference between the two men. Lane was a publisher’s publisher, a man with immense commercial flair who opened up markets no one had ever dreamed existed but who had very little to say to ...”

“... but are simply offering something to hold onto. In his Introduction Richard Cobb pays tribute to Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield; and it seems as if East Anglia, Essex in particular, has a special place in the re-creation of Lost Things and the rites that accompanied them. The Fleming brothers, who had a good deal in common with the phantom Bagshaw ...”

“... still vividly remembered and resented by the older agricultural workers who were interviewed by Ronald Blythe when he was writing Akenfield. Oral history should have much to teach contemporary historical novelists, though it may be more difficult to write a good, escapist story if every sordid truth about the past is to be borne in mind. If the ...”

“... like Austen (and perhaps equally falsely), had to write in secret because of family disapproval. Ronald Blythe, reviewing Lark Rise to Candleford in the TLS in 1979, accused John of being ‘crushing in his attitude towards her’ and ‘embarrassed by her writing’. John is a disappointment to biographers. He wasn’t literary, cultured or sensitive ...”

“... observer derives from his vantage-point, rather than from his own innocence or disinterestedness. Ronald Blythe has paid tribute to ‘the powerful ordinariness of his daily records ... A more authentic and exciting admittance to his times does not exist.’ But a diarist isn’t ordinary: however well-placed an insider, he becomes an outsider once he ...”

“... has also been reissued, together with a perceptive and generously appreciative Introduction by Ronald Blythe.* Powys’s fantasy of God coming to earth (its whimsicality controlled enough to be tolerable) makes God not only benign but powerful, judging and in some measure rewarding good and evil in the simplicities of village life. Myers’s survey of ...”