Bowling along 
Kitty Hauser
- In Search of H.V. Morton by Michael Bartholomew
Between 1925 and the mid-1960s, H.V. Morton sold nearly three million copies of his travel books, from The Heart of London (1925) to A Traveller in Italy (1964). Most popular of all were his volumes on England, especially In Search of England, first published in 1927 and already in its 29th edition by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic jam on the M5.
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Kitty Hauser is writing a book for Granta about the landscape archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford, to be called Bloody Old Britain. She is currently Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.
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