The Marches

by Rory Stewart Jonathan Cape 368pp £18.99 The Week Bookshop £14.99

In 2014, the Tory MP and serial adventurer Rory Stewart set out on a series of walks along the border, or “march”, between England and Scotland. For part of each day, he was accompanied by his elderly father, the distinguished former diplomat and spy Brian Stewart. Put like that, The Marches sounds like “a tale of two posh blokes going for a strange walk”, said Melanie Reid in The Times. Fortunately, it’s much more interesting than that. Though Stewart embarked on the walks intending to show that the English-scottish border is “arbitrary and meaningless” (and that Scottish independence is therefore a bad idea), the book becomes, as it “unfurls”, more about Stewart’s “intensely close” relationship with his father. And it ends with “one of the most unflinching, moving descriptions of death I have read”, as Brian, aged 93, “dies in his son’s arms and is laid to rest in the grounds” of his Scottish estate.

Stewart’s upbringing was certainly “remarkable”, said Tristram Hunt in The Sunday Times. When he was a boy, his father gave him fencing lessons in Hyde Park, and re-enacted the Battle of Waterloo for him with toy soldiers. It was a world of “night-time swimming lessons, tree planting and Highland dancing”. But The Marches is more than a childhood reminiscence; it also contains ruminations on history, geology and politics. What emerges is a sense of the “roots” of Stewart’s conservatism, with its old-fashioned dedication to public service and deep respect for the land. This is a “rare” sort of book by a politician, said Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman: it has more in common with a book by Sara Maitland than a memoir by Nick Clegg. And it left me with one “lingering feeling” about its author: “that Theresa May would do well to promote him”.