Middleland: Rory Stewart’s essay collection is a ‘triumph’

Book cover of Middleland by Rory Stewart — Former MP Rory Stewart brings ‘intelligence and panache’ to his essays

(Image credit: Jonathan Cape)

In a career of great breadth – from a deputy governor in Iraq to Harvard professor and now successful podcaster – Rory Stewart’s latest book represents “one of his quieter triumphs”, said Patrick Galbraith in Literary Review. But it’s “a triumph nonetheless”. It collects the fortnightly columns he wrote for the Cumberland and Westmorland Herald during his nine years as MP for Penrith and The Border. Despite often being “produced in the dead of night (sometimes in the bath)”, the pieces are “very good indeed” – and show how genuinely Stewart cared about this “half-forgotten part of Britain”.

Most MPs who write columns for local newspapers produce only “turgidly self-serving accounts”, said Jamie Blackett in The Daily Telegraph. Not Stewart, whose writings are affecting and wide-ranging. Descriptions of walks across the “fells and valleys” mingle with historical reflections – on the death of Edward I, who developed dysentery after drinking Cumbrian water. And while there are detours into the nitty-gritty of Stewart’s life as an MP – he describes agonising with constituents over a proposed scheme to build wind turbines, and trying to keep an agricultural college open – the overall tone is “one of curious detachment from the political process”.

As a writer, Stewart has long been able to bring “intelligence and panache” to almost any subject, said David Robinson in The Scotsman. That is why, even if you’re unfamiliar with this slice of Cumbria, the pieces in Middleland “stand up surprisingly well”. What they don’t do is make being an MP sound appealing: Stewart describes having to reply to 20,000 emails each year, and having “no real power, though everyone thinks otherwise”. Being an MP, he concludes, is an “impossible job” – which is why he has left frontline politics behind him.