About this item
From the best-selling author of The Places in Between, "a flat-out masterpiece" (New York Times Book Review) , an exploration of the Marches - the borderland between England and Scotland - and the people, history, and conflicts that have shaped it In The Places in Between Rory Stewart walked through the most dangerous borderlandsin the world. Now he walks along the border he calls home - where political turmoil and vivid lives have played out for centuries across a magnificent natural landscape - to tell the story of the Marches. In his thousand-mile journey, Stewart sleeps on mountain ridges and housing estates, in hostels and farmhouses. Following the lines of Neolithic standing stones, wading through floods and ruined fields, he walks Hadrian's Wall with soldiers who have fought in Afghanistan and visits the Buddhist monks who outnumber Christian monks in the Scottish countryside today. He melds the stories of the people he meets with the region's political and economic history, tracing the creation of Scotland from ancient tribes to the independence referendum. And he discovers another country buried in history, a vanished Middleland: the lost kingdom of Cumbria. With every step, Stewart reveals the force of myths and traditions and the endurance of ties that are woven into the fabric of the land itself. A meditation on deep history, the pull of national identity, and home, The Marches is a transporting work from a powerful and original writer.
About the Author
Rory Stewart was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Malaysia. He served briefly as an officer in the British Army (the Black Watch) , studied history and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford and then joined the British Diplomatic Service. He worked in the British Embassy in Indonesia and then, in the wake of the Kosovo campaign, as the British Representative in Montenegro. In 2000 he took two years off and began walking from Turkey to Bangladesh. He covered 6000 miles on foot alone across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal -- a journey described in In 2003, he became the coalition Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar -- two provinces in the Marsh Arab region of Southern Iraq. He has written for a range of publications including the , the , the , the , the and . In 2004, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire and became a Fellow of the Carr Centre at Harvard University. In 2006 he moved to Kabul, where he established the In 2010 he was elected as a Conservative member of the British Parliament.
