United Kingdom Books

Despite it's seemingly specialized, historical subject, Good Money is really both very topical and very important. The story it tells--of private coinage during the Industrial Revolution--directly challenges the conventional wisdom that's at the foundation of all modern monetary systems, namely, the belief that only government's are fit to supply coins and paper money. Selgin shows that this was far from being the case in 18th-century England. There the government proved itself perfectly unfit to coin money, until private mints showed it how to do its job right! The story of how they designed the world's first successful industrial-scale coinage system, and of how the government ultimately put them out of business, is absolutely spellbinding! No one who reads it can ever look at a central bank or government-run mint without wondering how much better off the world might have been without it!

The scene: Birmingham, England, in the steamy, sooty grip of the Industrial Revolution. George Selgin tells the "riveting" tale of a group of eccentric entrepreneurs who take on not only each other, but the Royal Mint and the British Crown in their bids to supply a burgeoning working class with desperately needed copper and silver coins. The result: a yarn as colorfully amusing as one of Dickens' more ambitious novels, but entirely true, and one that offers up an economics lesson to boot: namely, that good money really does drive out bad--that is, as long as governments stay out of it (as soon as they don't Gersham's Law kicks in). If you love a great story, if you adore larger-than-life characters, if you put a premium on fine prose, do yourself a favor and buy Good Money. It will be well worth yours.

This is a 'must have' publication for anyone visiting the UK. We purchase the new edition each year because it is kept current and provides a good assessment of facilities and food at all the pubs. A great publication.

The pub is the heart of life in the United Kingdom, whether in the centre of London or the Scottish Highlands. Here's a list of the best, a bible for even the tourist quickly passing through. Updated annually, it gives prime billing to a few pubs in each area, then lists others that readers have found noteworthy in a pinch.

I won't be writing a long review since it is absolutely unnecessary. The book is mastefully written, by a skilled researcher. Inspiring, entertaining and remarkably easy to read. Great bibliography and very useful! Clear structure, well-presented arguments, quotes are to the point and from a wide variety of texts. Am simply loving it :)

In a well-known scene of Gothic horror, Bram Stoker's Dracula "throws a moving, whimpering bag at the feet of his three wives." He offers it for their consumption in exchange for the man they have surrounded, the man he desires, Jonathan Harker. In the bag, of course, is a struggling child.

In this breathtaking study Margot Backus unties the strings binding that bag and makes visible the suffering and fear in that child's face when it realizes its fate. In the same Duke University Press series as Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and David Lloyd's Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment (1993), this book matches the standard of complexity of its predecessors. It not only presents the first substantive materialist reading of the Gothic, providing a refreshing corrective to the long familiar, almost singularly psychoanalytic approaches that dominate organizations like the International Gothic Association. It also insists on the inseparability of materialist critique, psychoanalytic approaches, and anti-colonialist critical models. All three are Backus's starting points. And broadening her staging ground still further, a critique of heteronormativity is rigorously incorporated into the analyses throughout.

This makes for an ambitious project. But it is a project that largely keeps its promises through some of the most complex, occluded, and liminal terrain in Irish Cultural Studies. For this reason alone, it deserved the ACIS Durkan Prize for best first book in any field, which it has won this year.

At the heart of Backus's analysis is the problem of child sacrifice within the Anglo-Irish colonial order. Backus explains: "A relatively unmentioned fact of colonial and postcolonial politics is that colonial rule, particularly where colonialism has taken the form of mass settlement, requires the production of children" (2). Furthermore, to keep the system going, to legitimate and perpetuate settler rule, this class sacrifices its children.

For the violent colonial order into which settler children are born predates them, remains a priori to their consent, and will repeatedly interpellate them regardless of their assent or refusal. Constricting, turned inwards upon itself, the settler family cell becomes a chamber of horrors re-inflicting the violence of its traumatic origins and present entrenchment upon its children. Isolated and embattled, the settler class becomes autophagous and pedophagous, i.e., self and child-consuming (two key terms for Backus). The appropriation of children's sexuality through incest, for example, becomes one mode of pedophagy. Indeed incest, adult/child rape, and a range of violations echo throughout this class's domestic history. Crucially, however, it is a history that has been vigilantly silenced. But, as this book teaches us, it is a silence that can become audible if one knows where to listen.

Coddington and Malige would be up to their ears in catnip offerings. The authors have donated large sums to cat rescue (and convinced others to do the same). The illustrations are zany, artful fantasies that will make you laugh while the photos capture those deep cat feelings that make us fall in love with our pets over and over again. The text is sheer delight--& I promise you that you'll give it more than one read. You couldn't choose a better gift for yourself or anyone who knows what it's like to live with a little cat hair on their clothes, in their food--and wouldn't have it any other way!

Grace Coddington and Didier Malige have written a wonderful book that is both entertaining and moving. While all pet owners imagine the "secret" adventures of their pets, Ms. Coddington and Mr. Malige have created an enchanting version of urban cat life - with charming parallels to their city-dwelling owners. More importantly, this book is a moving tribute to the real importance of companion animals in our lives, to their ability to transform our perspective with their (feline) mystery and inscrutable kitty intelligence. This book is a must-read for any cat lover! - Karen Leslie, Executive Director, The Pet Fund

'Twould be impossible not to love Stuart Christie's Granny Made Me An Anarchist, based on the title alone. The 400 pages that follow are just as loveable and after this book, the words loveable and anarchist seem not the least bit in juxtaposition.
Granny is the autobiography of Scottish anarchist and human rights activist Stuart Christie; it's not quite a memoir, rightfully filed under "autobiography/history." Christie is best known for his attempt to assassinate the fascist and murderous dictator of Spain, Francisco Franco--for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
If you want to know the incredibly ironic and exciting way he got out after three years, you'll have to read the book. But I'll tell you this: it includes celebrities and a note from his mum.
Divided into three sections--Scotland, Spain, London--the book begins pre-Stuart in Glasgow in 1890, the year of Granny's birth. Christie credits her for being the "strongest moral influence" in his life. Gran was a hard-working, stoic independent thinker who always rallied for the underdog and was generally fascinating. Christie was reared to be a polite boy who didn't speak unless spoken to. He sometimes slept in a literal hole in the wall of the family kitchen.
Christie's development from a quite boy to an 18-year-old anarchist attempting assassination is fascinating; my only complaint is that there weren't more "personal development" stories peppered throughout the book. While we're still in Scotland, though, Christie offers brilliant philosophies on the psychological reasoning behind group hatred--Catholics hating Protestants and vice versa, for example.
Cover-to-cover, he refers to both men and women anarchists; he's conscientious of the distinction between the term "girlfriend" versus "partner" (and favors the latter). He loves Spain but argues against bullfighting. His perpetual references to films make him endearingly Caulfieldian. And, as his current status as writer and publisher attests, the man loves the written word.
Politically relevant and deeply insightful, Granny is also a hell of a fun read. Full of Scot's speak ("gnat's piss" is weak tea, "wallies" are dentures), it's a linguistic and cultural gambol as well as a personal and political journey. Christie is passionate and compassionate, earnest and extremely funny. Anyone who grew up in the U.S. will feel quite like she's reading another language--and having a great time while fighting just causes. The political climate in Christie's Scotland, Spain and London simply didn't reach that fervent level for those born post 60's in America. This book will awaken, inspire and transport you out of America's political/pop-culture mire.
It's filled with unfathomable details (did you know the author of The Joy of Sex was an anarchist biologist?). Christie names names--and dates and locations--with precision. Read Granny if you like good writing or if you have a paper due on the history of anarchy in Europe.
Stuart Christie is a compassionate warrior who put his life on the line for what he believed in (how else do you explain strapping explosives to your skin?), who takes in stray animals and who will clearly never retire from anarchy.
Granny would be proud.

Review by Michelle Schaefer
Original Posting on: Feminist Review . org

Some people are just born as natural rebels. Stuart Christie is such a person. He was born in 1946 in working-class Glasgow, Scotland, into a world split in two by the ever-present sectarian rift between the Catholics and Protestants. Christie was a member of the Orange Order growing up, an anti-Catholic Protestant fraternal organization. When he came of age, however, he went through a metamorphosis of left-wing thinking. After meeting with members of the Coal Miners' Union, Christie became an anarchist. He was 16. From that point on, his life would revolve around the ideals of anarchism, which stands for social justice, community autonomy, and individual liberty.
Soon after, Christie became involved with the anti-nuke movement in Scotland, where he saw all the different varieties of the radical movement, from pacifist liberals to labor party hacks to Trotskyites to the anarchists. He quickly became impatient with the nonviolent protest marches, which were seemingly ignored, and longs to do more. When talking to older Anarchists, he learns of the fight in Spain a mere twenty-five years before, where the ideas of Anarchism nearly achieved success in the farms and factories of Catalonia in Eastern Spain. If it hadn't been for the betrayal by the Stalinist forces, the anarchists would of beat Franco's fascists and prevented the dictator from taking power. This recent history had a huge affect on the young Christie and he decided to attempt to kill Franco, under the assumption that the end of Franco would mean the end of his regime.
At only 18 years in 1964, he links up with a Spanish Anarchist group and makes his way to Spain through France. Upon entering Franco's Madrid, he is almost immediately arrested by Brigada Politico Social (BPS), the Spanish secret police, who were supplied information on his arrival by the British Scotland Yard. That the British secret service would collaborate with the fascists amazed Christie. During the interrogation and beatings, his explosives are quickly discovered by the police, and the only thing that saves him and the Spanish anarchists arrested with him from a quick execution is his foreign citizenship, since Spain at the time was trying to soften it's image to attract tourism and foreign money and didn't want to scare either away by executing foreigners or those involved with them. Christie enters Spanish prison on a thirty year prison term, and quickly meets the "politicos" or political prisoners, which are a variety of trade unionists, anarchists, socialists, communists, and any other dissenter in Franco's Spain. Later in his life in British prisons, Christie realized that the liberal democracy of Britain's jails were much worse than the jails of Franco's fascist Spain, in brutality, isolation, food, and exercise, amongst other things. Quickly, he becomes the center of an international campaign to free him by radicals to free him, though he is ignored by Amnesty International for accepting violence and because he admits guilt.
Eventually after three years in a Spanish prison in 1967, Christie is freed when his grandmother writes to Franco and Franco decides to score points in order to attract more British and other European tourists to Spain by showing mercy. When he returns to Scotland, dogged by the press, he noticed that Britain has changed a lot during his years in jail, as rebellion and disobedience and rock music became the new norm for the Youths of England and the rest of the West, specifically protesting the US war in Vietnam, nuclear weapons, and a host of other actions attacking the established order of thing. Christie did his best to fit back into the world, moving to London and becoming an electrian for a trade. He joined Albert Meltzer's Wooden Shoe Bookshop on Compton Street, and restarted the Anarchist Black Cross which fights for political prisoners, and co-founded the long-running "Black Flag" magazine with Meltzer, an anarchist investigative and analytical magazine, and helped raise money for the "First of May Group", a Spanish-anarchist resistance group to Franco's regime. However, these activities also brought him near constant police harassment, surveillance, and media attention calling for his imprisonment.
In 1970, as the war in Vietnam roared on and the limits of pacifism and peaceful demonstrations became apparent, the author goes on to tell us that many left-wing youths involved started to turn to more militant and violent actions, like the Weathermen in the US, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in Germany, and in the UK the Angry Brigade. These groups, with varying levels of success, took the guerilla warfare aspects of Mao Zedong and Che Guevera to "bring the war home", in actions such as bombing campaigns, kidnappings, propaganda deeds, and acts of sabotage. The Angry Brigade, a group influenced by anarcho-syndicalists and situationist politics but never outward about their politics, claimed responsibility for 25 bombings in the UK from 1970 to 1972, targeting at government offices, banks, and the homes of conservative politicians, though only targeting property and not killing anyone (unlike later bombings done by IRA, PLO, and Basque groups), as well as releasing political statements explaining their actions. Christie, though sympathetic to the Angry Brigade, has nothing to do with their activities and stays away from any extra-legal activities. This does not stop Scotland Yard from trying to scape-goat him as a well-known Anarchist as a member of the Angry Brigade.
In 1972, Christie was arrested on "conspiracy to cause explosions" from planted evidence by the British "bomb squad" which had been organized to catch the Angry Brigade. He was arrested along with a dozen other British radicals After a very long trial, he is found not guilty of all charges and the others only guilty of conspiracy. Christie notes that one of the keys to their victory is that in the trial, they made sure that the jury was as working class as possible. Why? Because during the course of the trial, the defense proved that the defendants were simply normal working class people, with regular worries and jobs, with different political beliefs who were being persecuted, to the point of even planting evidence, by the Crown as scapegoats. After the trial, Christie also notes that the British prosecution of political trials from then on would be held outside of the cities and in middle-class dominated areas, similar to how in the US, many trials against Blacks are stacked with White jurists.
Stuart Christie helped run Cienfuegos Press, a radical publisher which he founded, from 1974 until 1982, and continues to be active in anarchist publishing projects in the UK. "Granny Made Me An Anarchist" is a really humorous book, and a thing I really enjoyed was that he never assumed that you knew the terms he was talking about, and therefore inserts many excerpts throughout the book explaining terms, periods, groups, and historical events, like Anarchism, The First of May Group, Francisco Franco, the Angry Brigades, etc. He examines his past with a critical eye but never apologizes for anything he's done, since he has nothing to be ashamed of and remains true to the values and actions of his youth (though he hasn't tried to blow up anymore dictators since then.) He's also very funny and doesn't take himself so seriously at any point, a thing you can tell that he came from humble beginnings and never really got away his raising by his Granny and Mum, a truly good person he is. This book is a great find for anyone who has trouble keeping idealistic in troubling times.

This is a very comprehensive guide to the varied architecture of London. London is, of course, one of the worlds great cities, and as such, it possesses some world class architecture. London architecture is not uniform and prefectly planned out out like, for instance, Paris, but it is interesting none the less. I love Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian architecture and London has this in abundance, sadly following the Blitz, London developers built hideous buildings, London got the worst of the so called "modern" architecture of the 50's and 60's. This guide is very well layed out and is easy to navigate. If you have any interest in this great city, then I highly recommend this book.

This is a thorough treatment of London architecture, covering not only iconic landmarks like Buckingham Palace (although they're here too), but as well, buildings from all eras across Greater London. Post-WWII architecture is surprisingly well represented. The region is divided into a grid of 24 squares, each of which is illustrated with a detailed map (except outlying areas), and this grid is used for organizing the book into chapters. In all, over 900 buildings are included, each with a 2 inch x 2 inch photo and a description of three or four sentences. Floor plans are shown for each of Wren's churches and for a handful of other buildings. Appendices have maps showing 'The Great Estates,' London squares in chronological order, and 'The Inns of Court.'

The wartime diaries of Guy Liddell represent an invaluable primary source for any scholar investigating the history of British Intelligence during the Second World War. Liddell, who directed Counter-Espionage for MI5, scrupulously jotted down multifarious details of on-going cases, including the continual roundups of Nazi spies and the running of the Double-Cross agents, whose controlled deception of the enemy helped Britain win the war.

Although Liddell's observations in the first volume usually stick to the intelligence business at hand, every once and a while, he briefly depicts daily life in the early days of the war. For instance, on October 15, 1939, he writes of a hysterical woman living somewhere on the east coast of England, who penned a letter complaining about the great number of "dangerous" kites being flown by children. On May 19, 1940, he relates an amusing anecdote (that illustrates the differences of language on either side of the Atlantic) about how the Americans, who had ordered "cots" from Harrods, were surprised when, instead of camp-beds for the army, they received crib-beds for infants. On September 24, 1940, Liddell gives us a glimpse of London of the Blitz, writing that as he was leaving the Reform Club, where he had been dining with Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, the Luftwaffe dropped incendiary bombs on nearby Pall Mall. Occasionally, a limerick or poem will creep into the diary, but most of the pages are devoted strictly to the serious business of defeating the enemy.

My only reservations about the book concern Nigel West's editing, which has been done with an extremely light touch. Even though he presents a roster of personalities at the beginning of the book, Mr. West is less than informative about the hundreds of personages who appear in Liddell's diaries. BISCUIT, for instance, is identified as the cryptonym for Sam McCarthy, who is then cross-referenced only as BISCUIT (One has to consult another source to discover that Mr. Biscuit was a "reformed crook, drug smuggler, and con man" [Haufler, "The Spies Who Never Were," Penguin, 2006] 30). More and thorough annotations would make the book accessible not only to scholars but also to the interested reader. I also found Mr. West's omission of Kim Philby from the roster of personalities puzzling, since Liddell mentions him in several entries of the diary and even consults him on one occasion. Both Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess (who, like Philby, were later revealed to be unrepentant Soviet agents) are included, being identified as--respectively--"MI5 officer and Guy Liddell's personal assistant" and "Broadcasting expert employed by SIS." One hopes that the omission was accidental and that Mr. West, as an historian, has not voted Philby a damnation of memory. Since Philby was head of counter-espionage in Section V of SIS at the time, he deserves as much recognition as do Blunt and Burgess. One cannot change history by omitting the facts.

As far as I can tell, these diaries are unique in the history of secret services. Guy Liddell was Britain's MI-5, director of counter-espionage during all of World War II. And I think by any measure that he did a supurb job. His doublecross operation of capturing every Nazi agent that came into England during the war undoubtedly saved live, saved time, and was a major assist in the Normandy landings.

In most histories there's a logical flow from the beginning to the end. The trival, the mis-directions, the plain old mistakes, and perhaps above all is the shear number of different kinds of operations going on all the time. How could he have kept them straight? And while all this was going on he had all the traditional problems of budgets, finding good people, putting up with the politicians, life working for the Government.

This is likely to be one of those books that becomes a reference book for all of the books on World War II intelligence operations. It's a great companion to MI-6 and the Machinery of Spying by Davies, also published by this publisher.

This is volume one of a two volume set. The other book covers from 1942 to 1945.

I have used this book many times for my maters in reading research papers. It is very comprehensive and has all the important researchers in literacy.

An extremely well-written compilation and synthesis of research in the field of Reading. Some areas that are explored include Early Literacy, Motivation and Achievement, Historical Perspectives of Reading Research, Comprehension, and Computers and Reading. The synthesis and meta-analysis of the research provides implications for instruction. A must have for reading specialists, Special Education specialist/teachers, and anyone who has the desire to improve their understanding of the reading process and improve their instruction.

It is only to be expected that seven hundred years ago, people did things differently than they do them now. We have difficulty viewing so far back, certainly because language and culture were different, but mostly because detailed records are scarce. Robert Bartlett has provided a unique solution to give us as good an idea as possible "...of the spoken words of the past in the time before the tape recorder" in _The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages_ (Princeton University Press). A professor of medieval history, he has examined closely a peculiar event for which there is rich documentation, a judicial commission which was an inquest into a supposed miracle. While it might seem that such an inquest would be too arcane to give us much of an idea of medieval times, Bartlett has found that the sometimes conflicting testimony of witnesses and the process of the inquiry gives us a window through which we can almost see and hear our ancient ancestors and understand matters important to them. Bartlett has produced an enjoyable volume of time travel.

It was probably in 1290 that William Cragh was hanged in Swansea. William Cragh was perhaps merely a "notorious brigand," but in the words of the English rulers of his region he was one of the rebels "in the war between the Welsh and the lord king." In fact, he was hanged three times. The first time, the rope broke. The second time, the gallows from which it was suspended broke. The third time seemed to have worked just fine. His body was taken down and carried to a house in Swansea for preparation for burial. Its face was black, its eyes bulging, its black and swollen tongue extended. The son of the baron who had condemned him confirmed that William Cragh was dead. But he gradually came back to life. This particular revivification was fraught with religious meaning. William Cragh on his way to the gallows gave a prayer for his life to Thomas de Cantilupe, the recently deceased Bishop of Hereford. Thus, his return to life had the makings of a religious miracle, and an inquest had to be done to make sure. The interrogation of witnesses is the backbone for Bartlett's book. Along the way, we learn about attitudes towards saints, the means of measuring distance and time, and other details of the way the participants lived.

Thomas de Cantilupe got made a saint by a very long process. Canonization was requested seventeen years before the inquest actually happened in 1307, and then there was a long process of approval before Thomas was made a saint in 1320. This was a time of flux for the papacy, with five different popes and years when there was no pope, which partially explains the delay. What shooed Thomas in was a consistent public relations campaign from the local Bishop and the fellows he enlisted, sending fan letters. Also, King Edward I had strong interest, because he had known Thomas personally. Thomas has served on Edward's royal council, and Edward was eager (as he himself wrote), "... to have as a sympathetic patron in heaven him whom we had in our household on earth." While Bartlett's fascinating book tells a lot about the intricate process of sanctification, it tells a lot more about the people of medieval times and their world view.

It's bizarre that we would know so much about, say, Lady Mary de Briouze (one of the principal witnesses in the sanctification case Dr. Bartlett here serves up) when we know so little about, say, Shakespeare, for Lady Mary lived her magnificent imperious life a full three hundred years before Shakespeare's birth. And as Dr. Bartlett complains, much less is known about the lives of eminent women in comparison to their male counterparts. The martyrdom of William Cragh, and his prayers to Thomas de Cantihope, led to a gathering of and the muracle, if you ask me, is that so much of their testimony has been preserved verbatim.

Dr. Bartlett points out that it isn't merely the facts the witnesses reel off that are so interesting, it's the way that memory fails or comes to their aid in unexpected places. It's almost as though memory worked in different ways in the 13th century than it does now, so we are constantly wondering why Lady Mary, when asked, couldn't answer yes or no to what seem like the simplest questions: were her children alive in the year of Cragh's death, for example. Surely she could calculate that far back, it had only been a number of years. Dr. Bartlett speculates that it's possible that her "I can't remembers" have clues iembedded in them, clues to their larger psychic and financial lives. Maybe people didn't have, back then, the supreme attachment to children that they do now, or that society expects of us, and that might explain Lady Mary's extreme vagueness about the status of her children, for she might well be dithering about trying to remember if she owned a particular scarf in 1289, not a daughter. In such ways, worthy of a Henry James, Bartlett brings every verbal statement under the eye of a scientist, examining each for its textures and potentials.

Almost as interesting, even if, in the final analysis, not quite so, is the detail with which Bartlett runs us through what he calls the "Cantilupe process," the steps by which the medieval church proclaimed its saints. The story of the hanged man is quite arresting all by itself; sliced down from the gallows three times, Cragh found himself coming to life again after entreaty to the recently deceased Cantilupe. Witnesses testified his skin had gone completely black in death, even his tongue; and yet Lady Mary's stepson averred, that Clagh's rosy complexion was restored within a few hours.

Is this previous review supposed to be real?!?!
This was a very good book and was well written, but the people who publish the book should not review it. It's a good guide and a good read, but it makes the people who wrote a very good book look bad. As far as content goes, it's got a knack of making you want to go to the places you read about because they're written in a very loose style that gives you a very real sense place. It's also probably the only guide books where I actually laughed out loud reading it. I recommend it.

The newest edition in Frommer's "Hanging Out" series of guides, Hanging Out In England, has finally hit the stands, featuring descriptive and entertaining write-ups on England's hot spots (and not-so-hot spots) by various authors. Sections cover Northern England, London and Southern England.

Hanging Out In England covers all the ins and outs of backpacking through England. It tells you where to go, how to find the hip crowd once you're there, and where to crash once you've partied and are ready to drop. It delivers on affordable hostels and B&B's, the best places for inexpensive food and drink (fish and chips, mate?), and tips on where and how to chat-up the locals. It is, in essence, a travel guide for the modern vagabond generation, the young and young-at-heart travelers who set off on sojourning escapades with what few possessions they can carry on their shoulders.

Contributing writers Kristy Apostolides (Northern England), Dominique Herman (London) and Lauren Koch (Southern England) recount the experiences of their journeys with write-ups that are at times irreverent and often entertaining. They have seemingly sought out the nooks and crannies of their respective regions, exposing areas that are rarely seen by tourists. A refreshing departure from the usual stuffiness of "mainstream" travel guides, Hanging Out In England delivers a first-hand and candid report on the great isle nation, exposed in all its brash glory. From Liverpool to Leeds and London to Manchester, from the White Cliffs of Dover to the Scottish boarder, along Hadrian's Wall and centuries old walkways, these authors have done the footwork and come back to deliver a guide for any traveler who wants to venture out on his or her own and experience England the way the locals live it.