'Here, at least, I understand why I am not understood.'




For Humfrey Coningsby - lord of the manor of Neen Sollars in South Shropshire - the world was a place of wonders and despair, of love found and then forsaken. He was a cantankerous, sentimental, petulant traveler; a gentleman soldier; a sly linguist; a confidant of Princes and Emperors; a receiver of such delights, and a doomed versifier. He walked out of this world on 10th October, 1610 - and now he walks back in, with barely a word of explanation.




This series of poems, complaints, explanations and demands for satisfaction forms the narrative of a life still being lived over four hundred years later. The Siege of Strigonium in 1595 was wretched; life in Aleppo in 2015 is worse.