The Green Road into the Trees, By Hugh Thomson

Though he has written books on Andes, Himalayas and Mexico, Hugh Thomson is not sure anywhere is "quite as strange and foreign as England".

This sparky account of a walk from Dorset to Norfolk had this reader nodding about the "strikingly neurotic behaviour… that often lies beneath the English skin" in the characters of Wind in the Willows, applauding the recognition that "Empire didn't suit us.

It brought out the bossy, inflexible, hierarchical side" and whooping at Thomson's use of tie and clipboard to enter the officially imposed sanctum sanctorum of Stonehenge.