Event Cancelled – Alexandra Harris

Due to unforseen circumstances this event has had to be cancelled. Please contact the bookshop for further information.

The story of English culture over a thousand years can be told as the story of changing ideas about the weather. Writers and artists across the centuries, looking up at the same skies and walking in the same brisk air, have felt very different things.

In a sweeping panorama, Alexandra Harris’ Weatherland allows us to witness cultural climates on the move. The Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest lived in a wintry world, writing about the coldness of exile or the shelters they must defend against enemies outdoors. The Middle Ages brought the warmth of spring; the new lyrics were sung in praise of blossom and cuckoos. It is hard to find a description of a rainy night before 1700, but by the end of the eighteenth century the Romantics will take a squall as fit subject for their most probing thoughts.

The weather is vast and yet we experience it intimately, which is why Alexandra Harris builds her remarkable story from small evocative details;  and she catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals. ‘Bloody cold’, says Jonathan Swift in the ‘slobbery’ January of 1713. Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one.

Weatherland is a celebration of English air and a life-story of those who have lived in it. As we enter what may be the last decades of English weather as we know it, this is a history for our times.