Cambridgeshire. By Olive Cook. (Blackie. 10s. 6d.) A COUNTY with
one famous town and a little-known countryside is not an easy subject—especially for an isolated book which should have more completeness, perhaps, than one of a series. You cannot write of Cambridgeshire without Cambridge; but dozens of books have already been written on the town while the uplands, lowlands and Fens of the county are little known. Miss Cook in this not very long but pleasantly printed survey gives Cam- bridge itself good measure, but breaks up the familiar historic details with memories of her own. She is a native of the town, and can describe schoolgirl visits to the Botanic Gardens and to the Museum of Cla§sical Archaeology. She has, too, a great affection for the lonely spaces and almost hidden settlements of the rest of the county ; she intersperses details of village churches with her own impressions, and almost, if not quite always, avoids guide- book monotony. She is familiar with the other small Cambridgeshire towns and particularly with Ely, feeling "an ecstasy akin to that which inspired the saints " as she stands in the cathedral. She runs over the history of Fen-draining in the seventeenth century, but again includes personal experience, describing, for example, a winter day when she watched workers fighting the floods. Her style is picturesque; she is good on flowers and seasons; and she makes the reader want to see the places she has seen. The photographs (from several sources) are plentiful and not printed too small, and they have something of the same heightened sensibility as the book.
G. F.
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