Rachel Hewitt – författare

'A gripping story about the personalities who initiated the mapping of Britain and their extraordinary skill and endurance' Max Hastings, Sunday Times The Ordnance Survey is a much beloved British institution, but in our modern map-obsessed world how much do we know about its curious origins and extraordinary challenges? Here at last is the remarkable story of the creation of the first complete, accurate, affordable map of the British Isles. What it reveals is a colourful and engrossing secret history of the Ordnance Survey and the obsessive and ambitious men who dreamt and delivered it. The Ordnance Survey's story is one of political revolutions, rebellions and regional unions that altered the shape and identity of the United Kingdom over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It makes for an engaging and page-turning account of one of the great untold British adventure stories, following those intrepid individuals who lugged brass theodolites up mountains to make the country visible to itself for the first time. 'This is a brilliant book, and it's astonishing that no one has thought of writing it before... History at its best' A N Wilson, Reader's Digest 'Endlessly absorbing... In her lively and informative narrative, Hewitt highlights the Ordnance project's legion of draughtsmen, surveyors, dreamers and eccentrics' Ian Thomson, Observer

'Heartfelt, passionate, infuriating and often devastating, this book will inspire you to fight for your right to tread your own path' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ, author of Invisible WomenWhen Rachel loses five family members in five months, grief magnifies other absences. Running across moors and mountains used to help her feel at home in her body but now feels fraught with danger.Rachel goes in search of a new family: the foremothers who blazed a trail at the dawn of outdoor sport. She discovers Lizzie Le Blond who scaled the Alps in woollen skirts and photographed fearless women climbing, skating and tobogganing at breakneck speeds. Telling Lizzie's story alongside her own, Rachel runs her way from bereavement to belonging, inspired by the tenacious women, past and present, who insist that breaking boundaries outdoors is, and always has been, in her nature.‘A book of limitless curiosity and eloquent passion’ The Times

In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke called 'the most important of all revolutions...a revolution in sentiments'. Inspired by the French Revolution, British radicals concocted new political worlds to enshrine healthier, more productive, human emotions and relationships. The Enlightenment's wildest hopes crested in the utopian projects of such optimists - including the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood - who sought to reform sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine by freeing desire from repressive constraints. But by the middle of the decade, the wind had changed. The French Revolution descended into bloody Terror and the British government quashed radical political activities. In the space of one decade, feverish optimism gave way to bleak disappointment, and changed the way we think about human need and longing.A Revolution of Feeling is a vivid and absorbing account of the dramatic end of the Enlightenment, the beginning of an emotional landscape preoccupied by guilt, sin, failure, resignation and repression, and the origins of our contemporary approach to feeling and desire. Above all, it is the story of the human cost of political change, of men and women consigned to the 'wrong side of history'. But although their revolutionary proposals collapsed, that failure resulted in its own cultural revolution - a revolution of feeling - the aftershocks of which are felt to the present day.