Fiona Stafford

Join us this February for the launch of Fiona Stafford's Time and Tide! Weaving together stories drawn from literature, local history and her own family heritage, Oxford professor Fiona Stafford leads us along coastlines and through forests and fens, revealing the forces, both natural and human, which leave places unrecognisably changed.

Time and Tide

A village waits at the bottom of a reservoir. A monkey puzzle tree bristles in a suburban garden. A skein of wild geese fly over a rusty rail viaduct. The vast inland sea that awed John Clare has become fields.

Swooping along coastlines, through forests and across fens, following in the footsteps of Burns and Keats, Celia Fiennes and Charles Dickens, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Noel Coward and Compton Mackenzie, join Fiona, time-travelling deep into the stories of our Isles.

From red squirrels to brick vistas, from botanical gardens to hot springs, the landscapes of Britain are full of delights and surprises. Chance discoveries of rare species, shipwrecks and unlikely ruins, curious trees and startling towers, weird caves and disused airfields, or even just baffling placenames offer ways into unexpected histories and hidden lives. The clues to the past are all round us - Time and Tide will help you find them.

About Fiona Stafford

Fiona Stafford FBA is Professor of English Language and Literature and a Fellow of Somerville College at the University of Oxford. Her publications include The Brief Life of Flowers, The Long, Long Life of Trees, and Brief Lives: Jane Austen.