Culture

Seventy years after the RAF repelled the Luftwaffe, the Battle of Britain continues to have a powerful resonance. The conflict not only decided Britain’s very survival as an independent nation, but was also imbued with an epic moral purpose. The epochal months of 1940 represented the classic fight between good and evil, between freedom and tyranny, this romantic symbolism given added strength by the soaring rhetoric of Winston Churchill. The 70th anniversary of the battle this summer has prompted a surge of new books and the republication of several old ones. Among the best is the comprehensive new study by James Holland, a historian who has already won international acclaim for his works on the siege of Malta and the Italian campaign.

The first game played by the Allahakbarries Cricket Club at Albury in Surrey in September 1887 did not bode well for the club’s future. The first game played by the Allahakbarries Cricket Club at Albury in Surrey in September 1887 did not bode well for the club’s future. One player turned up wearing pyjamas, another held the bat the wrong way round while a third — a Frenchman — thought the game had finished every time the umpire called ‘Over’. The Allahakbarries were skittled out for just 11 runs and under the circumstances it seemed entirely appropriate that the team’s name should have been derived from the Moorish phrase for ‘Heaven Help Us’. However, the team’s captain, the playwright, J. M.

In the autumn of 1826, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau came ashore in London after a long and gruelling voyage from Rotterdam. In the autumn of 1826, Prince Hermann Ludwig Heinrich von Pückler-Muskau came ashore in London after a long and gruelling voyage from Rotterdam. A whiskery Prussian princeling with a heavily indebted estate and a passion for landscape gardening, Pückler had come to England determined to find a wife. This was not a romantic project, however. English women were celebrated on the continent not only for their beauty — the perpetual damp was said to do wonders for their skin — but for their prosperity.

There it is: Winder, one of the most imposing peaks across all the Howgill Fells. Whenever I visit my brother, a teacher at Sedbergh School, we make a habit of climbing it. Up you march, through grass kept short by wild horses and paths kept alive by other walkers, until you round back on yourself and see the entire town of Sedbergh contained within in the valley below. The school. The houses. The shops. The lives and cluttered history that make a community what it is.    Now two current Sedbergh pupils, Ben King and George Head, have done the literary equivalent of climbing up and looking down. In a collection of interviews with Old Sedbergians, they map the peaks and troughs of life at this hardy school.