Richard Olney – författare

Voted 'The Best Cookbook Ever' by The Observer Food Monthly, Richard Olney's The French Menu Cookbook is a beautifully written celebration of French food and wine. Filled with inspirational seasonal menus, over 150 authentic recipes and evocative writing, this celebrated book conjures up the scents and scenes of Provence.A new, re-edited and checked, edition of the OFM’s ‘Best Cookbook Ever’, 2010.Originally published in 1970, The French Menu Cookbook became an instant kitchen classic that redefined modern cooking.Written from Olney's home in the hills of southern France, Olney takes the reader through spring, summer, autumn and winter with enlightening guidance on French wine, exquisite dishes, lucid instructions and inspired seasonal menus.The French Menu Cookbook includes 32 thoughtful menus – from a simple Provencal lunch to an informal autumn dinner, an elegant winter supper and a festive meal for two. Each menu includes honest and enlightening explanations of how the French really cook and compelling descriptions of dishes and techniques. With lyrical writing and unsurpassed French recipes, Olney's delightful book is a masterful resource that is a must for every home cook.

England is remarkable for the wealth and variety of its archival heritage – the records created and preserved by institutions, organisations and individuals. This is the first book to treat the history of English records creation and record-keeping from the perspective of the archives themselves. Beginning in the early Middle Ages and ending in modern times, it draws on the author’s extensive knowledge and experience as both archivist and historian, and presents the subject in a very readable and lively way. Some archives, notably those of government and the Established Church, have remarkably continuous histories. But all have suffered over time from periods of neglect and decay, and some have come to sudden and violent ends. Among the destructive episodes discussed in the book are the Viking raids of the Anglo-Saxon period, the Norman Conquest, the Peasants’ Revolt, the dissolution of the monasteries and the bombing raids of the Second World War. Archivists and historians have a shared interest in the protection and study of the country’s surviving records. This book has been written for members of both professions, but also for every reader who cares about the preservation of England’s past.

England is remarkable for the wealth and variety of its archival heritage – the records created and preserved by institutions, organisations and individuals. This is the first book to treat the history of English records creation and record-keeping from the perspective of the archives themselves. Beginning in the early Middle Ages and ending in modern times, it draws on the author’s extensive knowledge and experience as both archivist and historian, and presents the subject in a very readable and lively way. Some archives, notably those of government and the Established Church, have remarkably continuous histories. But all have suffered over time from periods of neglect and decay, and some have come to sudden and violent ends. Among the destructive episodes discussed in the book are the Viking raids of the Anglo-Saxon period, the Norman Conquest, the Peasants’ Revolt, the dissolution of the monasteries and the bombing raids of the Second World War. Archivists and historians have a shared interest in the protection and study of the country’s surviving records. This book has been written for members of both professions, but also for every reader who cares about the preservation of England’s past.

First published in the 1970s to great critical acclaim Richard Olney’s Simple French Food follows in the tradition of the writing of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, and Grub Street are re-issuing this classic work in the same format and size as Elizabeth David Classics and Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery.

Engaging account of the fortunes of a farming family during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Proputty, proputty, proputty: Tennyson's "Northern Farmer, New Style" could hear the word in the rhythm of his horse's hooves as he cantered between his fields. The Dixon family built up their estate in Holton-le-Moor, betweenMarket Rasen and Caistor, from a minor purchase in 1741 to the point where they owned the whole parish, with a fine house, a governess for their daughters, and a phaeton in which to ride out. But despite these marks of status, they remained working farmers well into the Victorian era. Even more remarkably, they created and preserved a comprehensive archive, including farming accounts, diaries and correspondence. Dr Richard Olney has known this archive for nearly fifty years, first uncovering the documentary riches at Holton Hall (where manuscripts from the loft had to be lowered in baskets to the study below) and subsequently cataloguing the entire collection in the LincolnshireArchives. In this book he creates a vivid portrait of the building up of a farming estate over several generations, revealing the introduction of agricultural improvements, the use of canals and, later, railways to access wider markets, and the place of "the middling sort" in nineteenth-century English rural society.Richard Olney was an archivist at the Lincolnshire Archives Office from 1969 to 1975, and an Assistant Keeper with the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts from 1976 to 2003. His publications include Lincolnshire Politics 1832-1885 (Oxford 1973) and Rural Society and County Government in Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire (History of Lincolnshire Committee 1979).