In Bright Particular Stars, David Mc Kie examines the impact of twenty-six remarkable visionaries on twenty-six unremarkable British locations. From Broadway in the Cotswolds, where the Victorian bibliomaniac Sir Thomas Phillipps nurtured dreams of possessing every book in the world, to Kilwinning in Scotl&, where in 1839 the Earl of Eglinton mounted a tournament that was Renaissance in its extravagance & disastrous in its execution, he has created a vivid patchwork of arresting narratives that together illuminate some of the most secret
- but most extraordinary
- byways of our national & local history. Some figures, including Mary Macarthur, who helped the women chainmakers of Cradley Heath win the right to a fair wage in 1910, were good to the point of saintliness; others mixed the admirable with the morally dubious: the composer Peter Warlock rented a cottage in the Kentish village of Eynsford where he composed a gentle song cycle, but set net curtains twitching by his hard drinking & naked motorbike riding. In Bright Particular Stars quiet, unassuming streetscapes are transformed in to beguiling, eccentric & uproarious sites of action which
- through the eyes of David Mc Kie
- are once more filled with the great triumphs & failures of the visionaries that have each, in their own way, helped shape our island`s rich & chequered history.