During the week, Kenneth Grahame sat behind a mahogany desk as Secretary of the Bank of England; on the weekend, he took lengthy walks along the Thames in Berkshire with his wife Elspeth and fragile son Alistair. The result of these pastoral wanderings was the children's classic The Wind in the Willows, which was also a cautionary tale about a rural and traditional Britain that was soon to vanish. Also the biographer of Beatrix Potter and Vita Sackville-West, Matthew Dennison probes the psyche of an author who was conservative yet maverick, Edwardian yet timeless.