He is a fan of William Boyd but what book does John Lewis-Stempel always have within

What Book… 

Writing the Wild: John Lewis Stempel is a farmer and writer

…are you reading now?

I always have Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) within reach. It’s the ‘saddest story ever told’, the tragedy of Captain Edward Ashburnham, Edwardian gentleman.

It’s the nature of nature writing that one needs reference books – every time I check a detail, as I did this morning, in Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora I become hopelessly, enjoyably led up a path embroidered with arcane and archaic detail, lore and herbalism.

Who doesn’t want to know that Stitchwort is so-called because Anglo-Saxons believed the plant belonged to elves, whose shooting of invisible arrows is the cause of ‘stitch’ in humans?

William Boyd’s The Romantic, the story of Cashel Greville Ross, 19th century Irish adventurer, is proving a reliably entertaining companion on a sequence of plane and train journeys.

For a modern British literary novelist Boyd suffers a great gift: He is eminently readable. And has a human heart.

…would you take to a desert island?

The Reverend Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne (1789).

The good parson’s diary of the fauna and flora observed in his Hampshire village is the foundation text of English nature-writing, and a portrait of an English Eden, rich in fauna and flora, now threatened with extinction.

I would also need an airdrop of Delphi’s The Complete Works of John Clare, the Romantic ‘peasant poet’ and a decent claim to be the first English environmentalist.

School reading: Recommended by his English teacher, BB’s The Little Grey Men was the first book that got John Lewis-Stempel into reading

. . . gave you the reading bug?

BB’s The Little Grey Men. It’s impossible now, I suspect, to get 11-year-old boys to read about the last gnomes in England, as my English master, Mr David, did. 

But it was BB (the pen name of Denys Watkins-Pitchford) who enabled me to see the iridescence in the magpie’s tail feathers, the perfect curve of the earwig’s pincers, the serial-killer glint in the eye of the pike in the pond.

…left you cold?

Bruce Chatwin’s On The Black Hill, his 1982 novel of sheep farmers on the Welsh Borders.

It’s a miserabilist, over-wrought outsider view of rural life that one had hoped was killed off by Stella Gibbons’ send-up of such stuff in Cold Comfort Farm back in 1932.

And, yes, I do come from a farming family in the said black hills.

John Lewis-Stempel’s new book England is available now from the Mail Bookshop

ENGLAND, A Natural History by John Lewis-Stempel (Doubleday, £25) is out now.