Image: Paul Ramsay, some rights reserved
Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City is now re-issued as a seminal work of social thinking. Written over forty years ago, it has lost none of its clear-eyed relevance to our society.
Escaping to the country, Mary McCarthy once pointed out, is the classic resolution of a problem. The implication is that such an escape is illusory. Yet city-dwellers dream of moving out to green fields. There are glossy magazines that cater for such dreams. Sell the flat and buy a period cottage. Of course you will need a car and/or easy access to a rail station. With reasonable money the dream of fresh air, village schools and old world inns looks very tempting.
