Barging Round Britain by David Bartley is a beautifully-illustrated guide to a unique and fascinating part of our history: the canal network.Explore the people and places that have forged this national treasure, from the birth of the Industrial Revolution to the leisure explosion on our waterways today. Fully-illustrated with maps and photographs, the book will trace canal routes across the UK, from the Georgian grandeur of Bath to the dramatic splendour of the Scottish Hi...

John Sergeant's acclaimed memoir takes us from his somewhat eccentric childhood to his thirty years' service with the BBC.Memorably handbagged by Margaret Thatcher on the steps of the Paris Embassy as she lost the leadership contest, and the man to whom Ron Davis confessed his midnight perambulations on Clapham Common, Sergeant has been the man on the spot in most of the major news stories of the last twenty years. His mordant wit, keen sense of the absurd and acute powers of analy...

Maggie is John Sergeant's mordant analysis of Margaret Thatcher's career and, more importantly, the legacy she has left to the Conservative party, which he would argue has been little short of disastrous. He takes us from the glory days of three successive election victories to the machinations that saw Mrs Thatcher's departure from Downing Street, and on to the years since, during which she has exerted a remarkable and sometimes baleful influence on the party she once led. Sergea...

The comedy panel game where all the questions are about the guest hostWelcome to The Personality Test, the panel show in which a brand new host takes the chair for every episode to present a quiz entirely themed around themselves. Each gets to run the show by their own rules, devising topics and queries based on their life, whims, fancies and past glories. Among the showbiz celebrities in the hot seat are Gyles Brandreth, Jennie Bond, Antony Worrall Thomps...

On the Margin was a six part BBC TV satirical comedy sketch show written and performed by Alan Bennett, with journalist and TV presenter John Sergeant and actor Virginia Stride. It was first broadcast in 1966 and was such a critical success that it was repeated twice the following year. Although Alan Bennett - already famous due to Beyond the Fringe - took swipes at contemporary Britain, his love of his country’s cultural heritage always remained. Besides Bennett, the ser...

Twelve rare archive editions of the humorous radio quiz show that gives a poke in the eye to the people and stories that make the news.For over forty years The News Quiz has graced the Radio 4 airwaves with an irreverent sideways look at the headlines. Having first appeared in 1977, it boasts a tantalising archive of episodes to remind us of the news from yesteryear, refracted through the satirical gaze of regular panellists including Alan Coren, Andy Hamilton, Mark Steel,...

This first volume of Margaret Thatcher's memoirs encompasses the whole of her time as Prime Minister - the formation of her goals in the early 1980s, the Falklands, the General Election victories of 1983 and 1987 and, eventually, the circumstances of her fall from political power. She also gives frank accounts of her dealings with foreign statesmen and her own ministers.

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. This edition also includes an extra chapter charting the course from Blair to Brexit.It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification. In each decade, political leaders think they know what the...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour…Sir Winston Churchill was a soldier, journalist, writer, Nobel Prize winner and, above all, a leader. Conservative then Liberal then Conservative again, his political instincts won him a sustained career at the summit of British government, while his resolve and politics of personality made him broadly regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20th century.With his early radicalism, bold decisions regarding ...

Allowing you to uncover the woman behind the 'Iron Lady' image, 'Iron Lady: The Thatcher Years' takes a thorough yet lighthearted look at the life and times of Britain's longest-serving twentieth-century prime minister. As both the first woman to become leader of a European country and the first British premier to achieve re-election for three consecutive terms, Margaret Thatcher's legacy is such that even today she plays a significant role in British political life. Reflecting on her life...

In July 2007, Zimbabwe's worsening economy saw inflation skyrocket to 7,634 per cent, deepening the already chronic food shortages in a country where only one in five of the adult population is in employment.Months later, on 20 November 2007, Ian Smith, the former Prime Minister of Rhodesia died, leaving behind him a lifetime of resistance to black majority rule and the dangers that he believed it would bring to his country.Ian Smith was a man with the ability to excite powerful emotions i...

As a small boy in Epping Forest, Jack Straw could never have imagined that one day he would become Britain's Lord Chancellor. As one of five children of divorced parents, he was bright enough to get a scholarship to a direct-grant school, but spent his holidays as a plumbers' mate for his uncles to bring in some much-needed extra income. Yet he spent 13 years and 11 days in government, including long and influential spells as Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. This is the story of how h...