Author Joseph Pearce, who has written biographies of Hilaire Belloc, CS Lewis and GK Chesterton among many other writings, has just published a deeply personal account of a private pilgrimage he made through England.
Entitled Merrie England (TAN Books), it is accompanied by evocative black and white illustrations of places as varied as the tower mill at Stansted and Goathland Railway Station.
Is the book simply an exercise in nostalgia? Pearce admits to me its chapters were written between 2001 and 2003 for the St Austin Review, the Catholic cultural journal of which he is the editor, immediately after he moved to the US, “so it would be fair to say that there’s an element of nostalgia about them.”
