Making Thatcher's Britain

Making Thatcher's Britain
Author: Ben Jackson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1107012384

This book situates the controversial Thatcher era in the political, social, cultural and economic history of modern Britain.


GCHQ

GCHQ
Author: Richard Aldrich
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2010-06-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0007357125

As we become ever-more aware of how our governments “eavesdrop” on our conversations, here is a gripping exploration of this unknown realm of the British secret service: Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ).


Citadel of the Saxons

Citadel of the Saxons
Author: Rory Naismith
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2018-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786724863

With a past as deep and sinewy as the famous River Thames that twists like an eel around the jutting peninsula of Mudchute and the Isle of Dogs, London is one of the world's greatest and most resilient cities. Born beside the sludge and the silt of the meandering waterway that has always been its lifeblood, it has weathered invasion, flood, abandonment, fire and bombing. The modern story of London is well known. Much has been written about the later history of this megalopolis which, like a seductive dark star, has drawn incomers perpetually into its orbit. Yet, as Rory Naismith reveals – in his zesty evocation of the nascent medieval city – much less has been said about how close it came to earlier obliteration. Following the collapse of Roman civilization in fifth-century Britannia, darkness fell over the former province. Villas crumbled to ruin; vital commodities became scarce; cities decayed; and Londinium, the capital, was all but abandoned. Yet despite its demise as a living city, memories of its greatness endured like the moss and bindweed which now ensnared its toppled columns and pilasters. By the 600s a new settlement, Lundenwic, was established on the banks of the River Thames by enterprising traders who braved the North Sea in their precarious small boats. The history of the city's phoenix-like resurrection, as it was transformed from an empty shell into a court of kings – and favoured setting for church councils from across the land – is still virtually unknown. The author here vividly evokes the forgotten Lundenwic and the later fortress on the Thames – Lundenburgh – of desperate Anglo-Saxon defenders who retreated inside their Roman walls to stand fast against menacing Viking incursions. Recalling the lost cities which laid the foundations of today's great capital, this book tells the stirring story of how dead Londinium was reborn, against the odds, as a bulwark against the Danes and a pivotal English citadel. It recounts how Anglo-Saxon London survived to become the most important town in England – and a vital stronghold in later campaigns against the Normans in 1066. Revealing the remarkable extent to which London was at the centre of things, from the very beginning, this volume at last gives the vibrant early medieval city its due.


There Is No Alternative

There Is No Alternative
Author: Claire Berlinski
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2011-11-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0465031226

Great Britain in the 1970s appeared to be in terminal decline -- ungovernable, an economic train wreck, and rapidly headed for global irrelevance. Three decades later, it is the richest and most influential country in Europe, and Margaret Thatcher is the reason. The preternaturally determined Thatcher rose from nothing, seized control of Britain's Conservative party, and took a sledgehammer to the nation's postwar socialist consensus. She proved that socialism could be reversed, inspiring a global free-market revolution. Simultaneously exploiting every politically useful aspect of her femininity and defying every conventional expectation of women in power, Thatcher crushed her enemies with a calculated ruthlessness that stunned the British public and without doubt caused immense collateral damage. Ultimately, however, Claire Berlinski agrees with Thatcher: There was no alternative. Berlinski explains what Thatcher did, why it matters, and how she got away with it in this vivid and immensely readable portrait of one of the towering figures of the twentieth century.


Warlight

Warlight
Author: Michael Ondaatje
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525521208

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the internationally acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient: “an elegiac thriller [with] the immediate allure of a dark fairy tale” (The Washington Post) set in the decade after World War II that tells the dramatic story of two teenagers and an eccentric group of characters. In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself—shadowed and luminous at once—we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey—through facts, recollection, and imagination—that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.


The Human Factor

The Human Factor
Author: Archie Brown
Publisher:
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2020
Genre: Cold War
ISBN: 0198748701

The Human Factor tells the dramatic story about the part played by political leaders - particularly the three very different personalities of Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher - in ending the standoff that threatened the future of all humanity


Oil!

Oil!
Author: Upton Sinclair
Publisher:
Total Pages: 544
Release: 1927
Genre: California
ISBN:

First edition of Sinclair's savage satire, loosely based on the life and career of Edward L. Doheny, and the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. Although Sinclair's famous novel The Jungle deals with Chicago's meatpacking industry, he moved west to Pasadena in 1916 and began writing novels set in California, the best of which was Oil!, the story of the education of Bunny Ross, son of wildcat oil man Joe Ross after oil is discovered outside Los Angeles. The novel was the basis for Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film There Will Be Blood. In California Classics, Lawrence Clark Powell called Oil! "Sinclair's most sustained and best writing."


People Like Us

People Like Us
Author: Caroline Slocock
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-04-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1785903799

The first ever female private secretary to any British Prime Minister, Caroline Slocock had a front-row seat for the final eighteen months of Margaret Thatcher's premiership. A left-wing feminist, Slocock was no natural ally and yet she became fascinated by the woman behind the Iron Lady façade and by how she dealt with a world dominated by men. As events led inexorably to Thatcher's downfall, Slocock observed the vulnerabilities and contradictions of the woman considered by many to be the ultimate anti-feminist, and witnessed the astonishing way in which she was brought down by her closest political allies. In this vivid first-hand account, Slocock reflects on the challenges women still face in public life and concludes that it's time to rewrite how we portray female leaders. A remarkable political and personal memoir, People Like Us charts the dying days of Thatcher's No. 10 and reflects on women and power, then and now.