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Bell, Adrian

Corduroy, [22] 16; Silver Ley, [46] 13; The Cherry Tree, [54] 14; A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, [72] 6

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20240906170055 ‘Every September day is born in a caul’ | A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook

‘Every September day is born in a caul’ | A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we are beginning to ready your pre-orders of Adrian Bell’s A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook. In this, the final selection from Adrian Bell’s weekly essays, written between 1950 and 1980 for his local newspaper the Eastern Daily Press, completes our seasonal quartet. ‘You can stand in the windless calm of an autumn evening and hear the heartbeat of the countryside,’ Bell writes, and it’s that steady, persistent, unchanging heartbeat that we can hear in these beautifully observed little pieces.
20230421163004 Adrian Bell, The Hungry Gap, A Coutnryman's Spring Notebook extract

Adrian Bell | The Hungry Gap | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Spring Notebook

‘April is the cruellest month,’ stated a famous poem in its first line. T. S. Eliot, who wrote it, was as townee a poet as ever lived, and hadn’t the faintest idea of the literal truth of it for the countryman. ‘Breeding lilacs out of the dead land’ he goes on, and generally making things look deceptively pleasant in a doomed planet. Not since Browning have poets exuded cheery notions, unless it were G. K. Chesterton in a pub.
20230120170036 Adrian Bell | A Countryman's Spring Notebook, Spring 2023

Adrian Bell | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook

We’re delighted to bring you news of a Slightly Foxed special release: Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Another treat for lovers of Adrian Bell to put alongside A Countryman’s Winter Notebook, which we published in 2021. A Countryman’s Spring Notebook is our second seasonal selection from the weekly column Bell wrote from 1950 to 1980 for the Eastern Daily Press and catches beautifully the arrival of Spring in the East Anglian landscape he loved and knew so well. Each essay is a little masterpiece, a fleeting moment captured with a painterly eye and the down-to-earth observation of the farmer Bell became after he left his fashionable life in Chelsea shortly after the First World War – an experience which produced his much-loved farming trilogy, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree.
20211008173506 Adrian Bell | A Countryman’s Winter Notebook

Adrian Bell | A Countryman’s Winter Notebook

We’re delighted to bring you news of a Slightly Foxed special release: Adrian Bell, A Countryman’s Winter Notebook. ‘Bell writes always of the ordinary things, of the seasons, of memories, of rain and laughter. Gentleness fits him naturally, just as the purity of his words opens our eyes to a life all around us which we might otherwise never have seen.’ So wrote the journalist Clement Court of his contemporary, the farmer-cum-writer Adrian Bell, best known for his rural trilogy, Corduroy, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree, which vividly describe a time before machinery took over much of the work of men and beasts, altering the landscape and the face of farming forever. In addition to the books that followed his famous trilogy, from 1950 to 1980 Bell wrote a weekly column called ‘A Countryman’s Notebook’ for Suffolk and Norfolk’s long-serving local paper, the Eastern Daily Press. His columns were, as his son Martin Bell says in his preface, ‘not really journalism but prose poems about the natural life around him’, and these essays share that which is common to all his writing – a deep appreciation of the small moments of each passing day. Now a selection of these beautifully crafted essays has been gathered together and introduced by Richard Hawking to form the first, we hope, of a quartet of Bell’s writings on the seasons.
20180904131254 Munnings Art Museum: Barge on the Stour at Dedham Sir Alfred Munnings 1930's (c) The Estate of Sir Alfred Munnings

Munnings Art Museum Birthday Lecture

Wednesday 3 October 2018 Dedham Assembly Rooms, Essex The Munnings Art Museum’s second birthday lecture was a wonderful opportunity to hear life stories from broadcaster and former politician, Martin Bell OBE, in a beautiful setting. Like Sir Alfred Munnings, Bell grew up in the Waveney Valley on the Suffolk/Norfolk border and his father, farmer, writer and first Times crossword compiler Adrian Bell was friends with Munnings in the 1930s.
20180328122733 Ian Stephens - Pigs

Pigs

Ian Stephens

‘“Those are good pigs,” he said, “aren’t they?” If he had said they were bad pigs I should have agreed with him equally. Their shape meant nothing to me. “Good length,” he explained, “broad in the back and not too much head.” I strove to see it, but no person can appreciate the points of a pig till he has dwelt long with them. Looking back, I cannot tell at what point I began to know a good pig from a bad one. The farmer’s eye is as subtle as the artist’s.’
20170601121720

Ploughing On

Hazel Wood, Preface to Adrian Bell, The Cherry Tree

The writer Adrian Bell first arrived in Suffolk in 1920 – a delicate young would-be poet, fresh from public school at Uppingham and the polite drawing-rooms of Chelsea, under pressure from his father, who was news editor of the Observer, to get a proper job. He was, he says, ‘flying from the threat of office life’ when he first presented himself for work on the farm of an old-established farming family in the countryside near Bury St Edmunds.
20090606112240 Adrian Bell Corduroy Plain Foxed Edition Slightly Foxed

Another Country

Christian Tyler on Adrian Bell, Corduroy

Bell’s first book has the virtues which allow it to transcend its times: acute observation, sincerity and that simplicity of style which does not date. Published in 1930, it portrays a way of life which had been overturned by the First World War and was to go on changing rapidly through the century. It is more than a nostalgic lament for a vanishing world, however: it describes a way of living that is very much alive.

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