There’s a new genre of writing that is currently struggling towards birth – and a proper name. It’s a combination of memoir, history and travel writing – let’s call it the autogeschicte – and, as I know only too well, it’s not easy to do well. I tried to write something along these lines in my London: A Spiritual History, and discovered how difficult it is to hold these disparate elements, that are all too often pulling in different directions, together. Max Adams tries to get under the surface of the Dark Ages by walking the landscapes of its history, mixing memoir with the daily discomforts and joys of walking in our wet climate, all leavened with bits of history along the way. I loved his The King in the North, so I had high hopes for this book, but it proved slightly disappointing. The travel elements were reasonable, but one wet walk ends up resembling another; the memoir was all very well but not sufficiently remarkable to engage much interest; and the history seemed superfluous. In the end, this seemed like a book that helped justify some walks Adams had long wanted to make (together with boat and motorcycle trips) rather than a work that existed in its own right.