Rory Stewart for Middleland: Dispatches from the Borders
Thursday 30th October
York Barbican, Paragon St, York YO10 4AH
6pm
7pm
Middleland tells the other side of the story to Rory Stewart’s bestselling memoir Politics on the Edge, and brings together the strange, surprising, and often uplifting stories Rory found in the North of England – stories of beauty and ingenuity but also a hint of what a better politics might be.
Rory has been a well-known face at the forefront of British politics for decades, serving as the UK's Environment Minister, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Minister of State for Justice and Secretary of State for International Development.
He lived in Cumbria for ten years, serving as the Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border - the largest and most sparsely populated constituency in England - much of which he explored on foot.
His 21-month 6,000-mile walk across Asia, including Afghanistan, is recorded in his New York Times bestseller The Places in Between. His other books include Occupational Hazards, The Marches, and Politics on the Edge, which was a number one Sunday Times bestseller.
He is now the Brady-Johnson Professor of the Practice of Grand Strategy at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the co-host, with Alastair Campbell, of the UK's leading podcast The Rest Is Politics.
Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as a MP of Britain's most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people.
Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Middleland is an unforgettable portrait of rural Britain today - a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics - as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria.