This is no dry and prosaic history, but a work of imagination and a deeply literary book… wonderful prose . Along the way we learn about how roads were sited, construction methods, how roads were used by and against (e.

Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook).The joy of this book though is not simply to be found in how Hadley attempts to reconstruct the Roman past from trenches and ceramic shards buried in the landscape. Time and nature have erased many clues; they rotted bridges and raised whole woods across the route. Year after year the heavy clay swallowed whole lengths of it; the once mighty road became a bridleway, an overgrown hollow-way, a parched mark in the soil.

It's not perfect, and there are definitely moments when Hadley loses control of his prose and both he and you get a bit lost. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin.His pieces have appeared in The Independent , The Guardian , The Times , London Review of Books , Esquire and his local parish magazine, among many other publications. I admit that my pitch barely sounds any better but, well, I'm glad Hadley made it, his agent touted it and William Collins accepted it. Whilst Christopher Hadley’s book makes no mention of this Python skit, ‘The Road’ tells us why the Python crew were correct. Much like a road itself - there are some interesting bits and then there are some bits where you’re just chugging along and the scenery is pretty pleasant but it’s scrolling past as you go on your way. Readers would be better served with the images printed on better paper bound into the centre of the book.