I’m diverging from my usual topics today to publish something that is of mainly local interest to those who live in the county of Sussex in the South of England.
My own history with Sussex goes back a long time. I first moved to the county at the age of 23 when I took a job as a computer programmer in Hastings. I soon fell in love with this region which although only 60 miles or so from London feels very remote from the capital. While some of the towns of Sussex are quite large, you can also visit many tiny villages and sometimes you find yourself driving up little lanes that seem to be in the deepest countryside. Although it can be busy in the day time, when you drive out after 9.00pm it often feels like you have the county to yourself along with the foxes and the owls.
However, my time in Sussex has been intermittent, with periods spent in other parts of the country due to work commitments. Now we have moved back down here, and I feel that we are going to stay. Now I find that Kipling expresses my feelings about a more permanent residency in Sussex in his poem, The Recall:
Under their feet in the grasses
My clinging magic runs,
They shall return as strangers,
They shall remain as sons.
Many writers have lived in Sussex. I have previously written about Hilaire Belloc who made his home in the west of the county, and now in this article its the turn of Rudyard Kipling who’s love for his adopted Sussex is reflected in countless articles, books and poems. David Arscott has published a fine collection of Kipling’s Sussex writings under the title A Sussex Kipling, a well-produced book published by his own Pomegranate Press which is based in the county town of Lewes and specialises in Sussex titles.
Continue reading Review: A Sussex Kipling – David Arscott
I rarely write about out-of-print books, the focus of A Common Reader being primarily modern literature and European literature in recent translation. However, I recently found myself turning once again to an old favourite on my shelves, 
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