Our hero was born on 24th March 1940, which in that year was Easter Sunday, in the Bird in Hand pub in the village of Stoulton, 5 miles south of Worcester. There was a lot going on in 1940 of which he was totally unaware: the Dunkirk evacuation, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, for starters. On a lesser level perhaps was the suicide of Virginia Woolf. Meanwhile, over in New York, Duke Ellington was composing and recording masterpieces like Take the A Train, Chelsea Bridge and Sepia Pan...

Tales of an unremarkable engineer and the characters he met on the way at the Royal Radar Establishment Malvern and Pershore, the Royal Aircraft Establishment Farnborough and Bedford, the Aircraft and Armament Evaluation Establishment Boscombe Down, and the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.

This is a non-fiction love story with a tragic end, played out in the 1960s and 70s in Worcestershire, on the Hampshire-Surrey border, in the old county of Huntingdonshire and in Wiltshire. On the way, the author sheds light on the Worcester of their courtship in the early 1960s with its pubs, coffee bars, new innovative Chinese and Indian restaurants, funfairs, a jazz club, concerts at the Gaumont Cinema and the Victor Sylvester Dance Studio free sessions on Friday nights, as well as the ...

Machine Learning with Spark and Python Essential Techniques for Predictive Analytics, Second Edition simplifies ML for practical uses by focusing on two key algorithms. This new second edition improves with the addition of Spark—a ML framework from the Apache foundation. By implementing Spark, machine learning students can easily process much large data sets and call the spark algorithms using ordinary Python code.Machine Learning with Spark and Python focuses on ...

This beautifully-packaged book will take the reader on the slow train to another era when travel meant more than hurrying from one place to the next, the journey meaning nothing but time lost in crowded carriages, condemned by broken timetables. On the Slow Train will reconnect with that long-missed need to lift our heads from the daily grind and reflect that there are still places in Britain where we can stop and stare. It will tap into many things: a love of railways, a love of ...

A Northerner in exile, Stuart Maconie goes on a journey in search of the North, attempting to discover where the clich�s end and the truth begins. He travels from Wigan Pier to Blackpool Tower and Newcastle's Bigg Market to the Lake District to find his own Northern Soul, encountering along the way an exotic cast of chippy Scousers, pie-eating woollybacks, topless Geordies, mad-for-it Mancs, Yorkshire nationalists and brothers in southern exile.The bestselling Pies and Prejudic...

Michael Williams has spent the past year travelling along the fascinating rail byways of Britain for this new collection of journeys. Here is the 'train to the end of the world' running for more than four splendid hours through lake, loch and moorland from Inverness to Wick, the most northerly town in Britain. He discovers a perfect country branch line in London's commuterland, and travels on one of the slowest services in the land along the shores of the lovely Dovey estuary to the far we...

Josie Dew's love of cycling has taken her across the world, travelling everywhere from Japan and Mexico to Iceland, India and Algeria. In her latest book, she sets off on another quirky and riotous ride, choosing to circumnavigate the coastline of the British Isles. And she discovers that her homeland can be as surprising and full of incident as anywhere she has ever been.Beginning in Portsmouth, Josie sets off in a clockwise direction after a Shetland grandmother warns her that she...

Revelling in the off-beat and eccentric, Londoner Suggs takes us on a nostalgic adventure to explore the disappearing history of his extraordinary home town: from the sharp tailors of Saville Row to the sex traders of Bohemian Soho, by way of quaint and quirky habitats, brilliant but endangered boozers, unique eateries that have introduced the capital to the world's finest foods and a music scene that's dear to his heart.

On the way to a show in Skipton, in North Yorkshire, I noticed a road sign to a town called Keighley. So later, during the show, I mentioned this, asking the audience 'Is that your rival town?' And the room went chillingly quiet, until one woman called out with understated menace, 'Keighley is a sink of evil.'Based on his award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, Mark Steel's ‘In Town’, is a celebration of the quirks of small town life in a country of increasingly homogenized high streets....

In When I Was a Nipper Alan Titchmarsh goes on a personal and nostalgic journey through post-War Britain in search of treasured values and traditions that were once the soul of society. With characteristic wit, warmth and humour he draws on the experience of his own childhood, and also takes a broader perspective, creating a wonderfully detailed and evocative portrait of a way of life that is fast disappearing, and asks what can we learn from this era of austerity to make our live...

This is the true story of a little child called Patrick, who was one of five little brothers that came through, what seemed like a strange world full of bombs dropping, causing big fires and total destruction on a massive scale, every morning I would wake up to see new Wendy houses to play in not realizing someone lived there the day before, and the houses were still burning it was nice and warm, food was so scarce it was rationed so much so we had a plot of land where the family tried to ...