Laurence Whistler's story of his five-year marriage to Jill Furse before her sudden early death has achieved a classic quality. Despite the tragedy of its ending the lasting impression is of two lives lived to the full in supreme happiness. Jill Furse was remarkable for many gifts; beauty, acting, poetry and above all gaiety and courage. This edition includes her poems.

Shortly after the end of World War II, Laurence Whistler set out to write 'a guide to the festivals of England as they are and as they might be' the result is a captivatingly readable and enchanting narrative, the ancient holidays revealed as a microcosm of the wheel of life in England. Christmas, New Year, Twelfth night, Easter, May Day, Whitsun, Midsummer, Harvest (and sixteen others) - these are the most ancient of our traditions, more ancient than any present-day beliefs, and strong enough to have survived even the attacks of Puritans in the seventeenth century.

Here, for...