Nearly all British poets and novelists have had their roots in a particular region, described with varying degrees of love and intimacy. Some of them consciously identify themselves with this sense of place - Wordsworth with the Lakes, Hardy with Wessex, Crabbe with East Anglia. In others the association is more subtle. In this ‘enormously evocative and rewarding anthology of the English genius loci’ (in the words of Richard Holmes), Margaret Drabble, herself a star in the literary firmament, explores the part that this feeling for locality and landscape has played, often quite unobtrusively, and shows how pervasively it has fashioned some of the greatest works in the language.