Madeleine Bunting was for many years a columnist for the Guardian, which she joined in 1990. Born in North Yorkshire, Bunting read History at Cambridge and Politics at Harvard. She is the author of The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands under German Rule, 1940-45, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives (both published by HarperCollins) . The Plot won the Portico Prize and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize. Madeleine left the Guardian in 2013 to concentrate on her writing. She lives in London with her family.

An intriguing and elegant chronicle of a wild and woolly patch of England ... Bunting is on finest form dealing with recent history, particularly when she exposes the modern "cultural myth of the rural idyll" and the very English idiocy of preserving this view while the environment dies. Her scholarship ultimately produces a persuasive argument for a more potent sense of place in rootless, mobile Britain