What is it like to live next door to a British Army base? England's military heartland provides an eye-opening account of the sprawling military presence on Salisbury Plain, drawing on a wide range of voices from both sides of the divide.Targeted for expansion under government plans to reorganise the UK’s global defence estate, the Salisbury ‘super garrison’ offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact of the military footprint in a particular place. But this is no or...

How have ideas about white women figured in the history of racism? Vron Ware argues that they have been central, and that feminism has, in many ways, developed as a political movement within racist societies. Dissecting the different meanings of femininity and womanhood, Beyond the Pale examines the political connections between black and white women, both within contemporary racism and feminism, as well as in historical examples like the anti-slavery movement and the British camp...

From a fixed point in the middle of English nowhere, Vron Ware takes you through time and space to explain why transcending the urban-rural divide is integral to the future of the planet.Rural England is a mythic space, a complex canvas on which people from many different backgrounds project all kinds of fantasies, prejudices, desires and fears. This book seeks to challenge many of these ideas, showing how the artificial divide between rural and urban works...

This beautifully illustrated history of twentieth century cartography charts a century of social and political change through 100 fascinating maps.The twentieth century was a golden age of mapmaking. Maps were employed not only to chart geography and history but also myriad political and social agendas. Here Tim Bryars and Tom Harper select one hundred maps from the twentieth century that reveal the profound changes that took place—from two world wars and the Great...

The Sunday Times bestseller THE STORY OF BRITAIN during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Find out how Britain changed in this entrancing, lively portrait of Britain’s Elizabethan Age by bestselling writer and broadcaster Andrew MarrBritain changed fundamentally during the Queen’s long, distinguished reign. So who made modern Britain the country it is today? How do we sum up the kind of people we are? What did it mean to be the new Elizabethans?

A fascinating work of what you might call domestic science: our homes, how they work, and the fascinating history of how they got that way.Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as found in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journey...

'Cities cover just 2% of the world’s surface, but consume 75% of the world’s resources’.The relationship between food and cities is fundamental to our everyday lives. Food shapes cities and through them it moulds us - along with the countryside that feeds us. Yet few of us are conscious of the process and we rarely stop to wonder how food reaches our plates.Hungry City examines the way in which modern food production has damaged the balance of human existence, and ...

‘The latest in the series of powerful books on the divisions in modern Britain, and will take its place on many bookshelves beside Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Owen Jones’s Chavs.’–Andrew Marr, Sunday Times‘In his fascinating, enraging polemic, Verkaik touches on one of the strangest aspects of the elite schools and their product’s domination of public life for...

Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and At Home is likely to become the most illuminating book on the way we lived then and live now--the why and the where and the how of it--ever written.Now, in this handsome new edition, his sparkling prose will be enhanced by some 200 carefully curated full-colour images from both the past and the present. Selected from a staggering array of sources to bring Bill's journey to vivid life, these pict...

The first major account of HS2 – and how it went so wrong‘A jaunty account of a monumental cock-up. Makes the unbelievable readable.’ Sir Michael Palin‘High-Speed 2’ was to be the crown jewel of British rail. The first intercity railway built north of London in over a century, it would connect London with Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, bridging the North–South divide and propelling Britain’s infrastructure into the twenty-first century.

Hugh Dennis' hilarious and insightful exploration of the changing image of Britain and Britishness will enthral those who love Outnumbered, The Now Show, Mock the Week and quintessentially British humour.'Utterly readable and laugh-out-loud funny' - Stephen FryHugh Dennis has secretly been worrying about what being "British" meant for nearly a decade, ever since his friend Ardal O'Hanlon had told him in passing that he was the most British person h...

Broken Heartlands is an essential and compelling political road-trip through ten constituencies that tell the story of Labour’s red wall from Sebastian Payne – an award-winning journalist and Whitehall Editor for the Financial Times.The Times Political Book of the YearA Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail and FT Book of the Year**'**Immensely rea...