This is a delightful book, nostalgic, slyly witty, perceptive and at times flirting — deliberately — with old fogeyism.
Tom Fort, a BBC radio journalist, starts from the assumption that ‘many of us have a road that reaches back into our past’. For him, this is the 92 miles of the A303 — as he subtitles his book, the ‘Highway to the Sun’.
At first glance I imagined there might a be a sort of literary suicide in store; but I quickly discovered that Fort had much more in mind than an anorak’s guide to a road. By looking closely at the history of the A303, the surrounding villages and historical sites, and by examining our love affair — cooling — with the motor car, he has in fact written a plain man’s state-of-the-nation book. It is about England, and a small tranche of England at that, but it achieves an admirable universality in its insights into travel, holidays, agrarian longing, conservation and the general sense that things were better some time in the past.
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