Showing results by author "Lucy Hughes-Hallett" in All Categories

22 writers talk about their memorable excursions and the act of walking, and share their creative observations. In these six series, taken from BBC Radio 3's The Essay, an array of novelists, poets, journalists and biographers chart the varied and inspiring walks they have taken around Britain and elsewhere. Here are treks taken at daybreak and after dark; in winter and in spring; in the footsteps of the past; and - in the case of Robert Macfarlane - along the ridges of the South Downs.

Winner of the 2013 Costa Book Awards, Biography of the Year. Winner of the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. The story of Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, daredevil - and Fascist. In September 1919 Gabriele D'Annunzio, successful poet and occasional politician, declared himself Commandante of the city of Fiume in modern-day Croatia. His intention - to establish a utopia based on his fascist and artistic ideals. It was the dramatic pinnacle to an outrageous career.

It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable. Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love.