With passion and precision, Gavin Plumley pushes the boundaries of memoir and scholarship and shows that the chronicle of a house can contain the grand history of a whole world as well as the sweet, urgent story of a life: all that intimacy within the vastness of historical time.

This being said, lovely read but a bit of a long winded one, It could have been two books - The history of the house and the live of the author in my opinion. This was particularly shown in the art of the time which was influenced by the more sophisticated European styles and techniques. What starts out as a straightforward house history morphs into something else, a wide-ranging meditation on place and past, taking in climate change, rural depopulation, the Reformation and folklore . If I’m honest, the art history was less interesting to me than the social history aspect of the book, but it has inspired me to take more interest in historical detail and the bibliography included will be invaluable for this.Grove Press An imprint of Grove Atlantic, an American independent publisher, who publish in the UK through Atlantic Books.

The author is entitled to his opinion, but I bought the book for the house not an essay on modern climate change, criticism of government officials’ handling of the pandemic, or the merits of socialism.I almost felt that I had somehow been tricked into reading it by a “false description” given by the publisher and even those who had reviewed and blurbed it. As a final thought, while I was reading this the author posted a comment by a reviewer that said they weren’t able to continue reading the book due to the prevalence of references to his alternative lifestyle.

Features about Gavin’s home and life in Pembridge have also appeared on Inigo, Sphere and in Herefordshire Living. I don’t know if the filling stations are still disturbing the village, but if they are, there are plenty of compensations: a 14th-century church with, so the story goes, the marks of Cromwellian musket balls still showing in its west door; a spectacular pagoda-like bell house dating back to the 1200s; an early 16th-century market hall; 17th-century almshouses; and streets stacked to the gills with picturesquely wonky black-and-white houses. A hybrid work of domestic history and European art, of memoir and landscape, A Home for All Seasons is both grand in its sweep and intimate in its account of life on the edge of England.Engrossingly fusing domestic history, memoir and art, Gavin Plumley’s A Home for All Seasons tells the fascinating story of a couple’s journey of discovering the full past of their ancient Herefordshire house. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. But I have a love of art, literature, gardening, architecture and history (all represented throughout the book) and yet I still felt long portions overly tedious and at times pretentious. A wonderful meeting of memoir and landscape, both rigorous and freewheeling, expansive and intimate, rendered in dreamy prose.

Those involved Protestants escaping mainland Europe and the consequent difficulties they had in integrating with the existing population.Working with several interlocking cycles chiefly the seasons in art, farming and Elizabethan England, this book is also an extended meditation on the big issues of today and their effects on village life.