If you had a unruly ox that needed stunning last summer, you could have done worse than use the initial hardback edition of this vast, rambling, compendious book. The sheer bulk and meandering scope of it brought forth a variety of responses, from low whistles of "size queen" admiration to a kind of shirty bafflement from more establishment voices.
Revisiting it now in paperback is a quiet joy. The almost megalomaniacal cultural sweep is still impressive; the chutzpah of including, in your enormous survey of the north and its meaning, almost as much about your childhood bus routes from Stockport to Manchester as the Hallé, Alan Turing, Engels, Man Utd or any other of the more obvious signifiers.
This quixotic juggling of the personal and the socio-historical has delighted some but infuriated others, especially within the M25 or the home counties. If you expect conventional history, indeed conventional anything, you will be disappointed. The North (And Everything In It) yokes, sometimes elegantly, sometimes Heath Robinson-style, memoir, history, travelogue, polemic and sociology with frequent, brilliant digressions; caprices of thought that always intrigue even when they go nowhere, just like the abandoned slip road in the sky off the Mancunian Way that features in these pages.
Books about the north of England could probably fill a shelf or two of your local library, if you still had one of course… Their quality is as variable as our landscape; there are great peaks and dizzy heights and also much that is flat and ugly. Morley's deserves a section all to itself; the poetic, stream-of-consciousness, socio-historical non-linear gazetteer. One of the many things I love about his work is that he can write about himself for pages without a whiff of conceitedness or showboating. He simply places himself in the landscape, like Blackpool Tower or the Yorkshire Dales alongside Stan Ogden, Myra Hindley, Anthony Burgess, Morrissey, the Lancashire cricket team of the 1970s or Wittgenstein, who apparently whistled all the way through orchestral concerts at the Free Trade Hall and flew kites in Glossop. If this makes you think that the book should have been called "The North-West And Everything In It", well, you're probably right.
Morley says that "the beauty of the North is that it is all about difference and a refusal to sacrifice a pungent hard-won sense of difference". That hard-won sense permeates every page of this leviathan, along with flair, gloom, graft and sundry other very northern qualities.
