United Kingdom Books

This book sits rather oddly with others in the Institute of Economic Affairs Choice in Welfare Series. Whilst the sub-title 'Welfare before the Welfare State' suggests that this is an account of self-help swept away by the state the content is more contested arguing that the self-help which was available was confined to the skilled and semi-skilled working class rather than to all of the working classes at the time. This point of view is not particularly challenged, a fact which, given the genesis of the project, is surprising to say the least.

Before Beveridge is a welcome addition to the literature about welfare before the state intervened in Britain. Contrary to the establishment history books which used to argue that the benevolent state stepped into a welfare vacuum, a number of studies have challenged this claim with books and scholarly articles demonstrating that the working classes were more than capable of providing education and welfare for their families by themselves as individuals and in groups long before the administrative machine moved in.

In this slim volume it seems that the editor and the staff at the IEA Health and Welfare Unit have rather abdicated the case for individual enterprise in welfare provision to those authors who put forward the view that in reality this provision was available to a select number of the working classes and the unorganised and the poor were not able to avail themselves of the opportunity. The so-called liberals appear to stand aside in the face of the attack and do not attempt to join battle with those propositions. I find the papers of Whiteside, Harris, Vincent and Thane to be particularly well researched and argued as well as persuasive given the paucity of David Green's paper especially.

The weakness of the writers who suggest that there was indeed a need for the intervention of the state in bringing welfare provision to the neediest in British society is the determination to overlook the evidence that many of the disenfranchised working classes who did not belong to either friendly societies or trades unions were determined to provide education for their children regardless of their personal circumstances. The fact that individuals of limited means were capable of identifying, by themselves, often without any education of their own, options for the betterment of their children over the longer term and were prepared to forego current onsumption to pay for it speaks volumes which significantly undermines the position supporting the need for state involvement.

This is a very thought provoking book which adds substantially to the lierature and which colours the debate about welfare provision more vividly than before. I would heartily recommend the book to sixth form and college students of history and social policy as well as practitioners of the black arts of social policy and policy-makers in general.

This book sits rather oddly with others in the Institute of Economic Affairs Choice in Welfare Series. Whilst the sub-title 'Welfare before the Welfare State' suggests that this is an account of self-help swept away by the state the content is more contested arguing that the self-help which was available was confined to the skilled and semi-skilled working class rather than to all of the working classes at the time. This point of view is not particularly challenged, a fact which, given the genesis of the project, is surprising to say the least.

Before beveridge is a welcome addition to the literature about welfare before the state intervened in Britain. Contrary to the establishment history books which used to argue that the benevolent state stepped into a welfare vacuum, a number of studies have challenged this claim with books and scholarly articles demonstrating that the working classes were more than capable of providing education and welfare for their families by themselves as individuals and in groups long before the administrative machine moved in.

In this slim volume it seems that the editor and the staff at the IEA Health and Welfare Unit have rather abdicated the case for individual enterprise in welfare provision to those authors who put forward the view that in reality this provision was available to a select number of the working classes and the unorganised and the poor were not able to avail themselves of the opportunity. The so-called liberals appear to stand aside in the face of the attack and do not attempt to join battle with those propositions. I find the papers of Whiteside, Harris, Vincent and Thane to be particularly well researched and argued as well as persuasive given the paucity of David Green's paper especially.

The weakness of the writers who suggest that there was indeed a need for the intervention of the state in bringing welfare provision to the neediest in British society is the determination to overlook the evidence that many of the disenfranchised working classes who did not belong to either friendly societies or trades unions were determined to provide education for their children regardless of their personal circumstances. The fact that individuals of limited means were capable of identifying, by themselves, often without any education of their own, options for the betterment of their children over the longer term and were prepared to forego current onsumption to pay for it speaks volumes which significantly undermines the position supporting the need for state involvement.

This is a very thought provoking book which adds substantially to the lierature and which colours the debate about welfare provision more vividly than before. I would heartily recommend the book to sixth form and college students of history and social policy as well as practitioners of the black arts of social policy and policy-makers in general.

Before the Mast: Life and Death Aboard the Mary Rose (Archaeology of the Mary Rose) (Archaeology of the Mary Rose)Has to be one of teh BEST research tools available for this period. I have personally used it to create reproductions. We''l planned, executed and illustrated. If you need information on 16th century sailing ships and the sailors, this is it.

The Mary Rose shipwreck is a unique time capsule for those interested in history, let alone in Tudor England. The range of artifacts represent the life, death and warfare aboard a late medieval ship, consisting of the naval equipment, arms and armaments (arrows, bows, cannon, etc), furniture, clothing, the bones of those drowned, jewellery, medical supplies, games, musical instruments, and this list goes on. Because of the condition of the finds it is a great reference for those using it to make replicas. The descriptions, line drawings and measurements make it all the easier to understand how the artifacts were made and used.

The presentation and and text is well done and easy to read. All in all a worthy addition to any libary or bookshelf.

Being Bilingual Safder Alladina Trentham Books. UK ISBN:1 85856 051 9 As a language teacher in Montreal, I found Safder Alladina's "Being Bilingual" very readable and informative. I think every language teacher and elementary school teacher would benefit greatly by reading this book. There are some elements and points of view which can only be learned from someone who comes from a minority language experience. It is written in simple language without being patronising. As well, it is attractively laid out and has wonderful illustrations. It is a must read for professionals in this field!

I am raising my child in Poland to be bilingual in Polish and English. I found "Being Bilingual" immensely helpful and supportive. Safder Alladina talks to parents in plain English without talking down to them. There are many ideas in the book which are useful to know about a child's language development. There are many concepts which I, as an ordinary parent, was not aware of. Safder Alladina's book has encouraged me to find and read other academic books on bilingualism --something I wouldn't have done before.

There are lovely pictures and cartoons in the book so I was even able to share the book with my three year old son. Thank you Safder for a lovely and helpful book.

Both the tragic subject and the density of documentation, with graphs and statistics, make this a hard book to read. The Famine killed over a million people, even on the most conservative estimates. It virtually wiped out the Gaeltacht. The question that resonates today is whether fewer people would have died if Ireland in 1840 had been an independent country, with its boundaries at the salt water. You'd have to read this book at least, and maybe some others as well, to get an answer to that question.

This is a fraught subject, but O Grada handles it with both rigour and compassion.

Mr. McCallum offers a comprehensive yet entertaining glimpse into a most fascinating chapter in the history of warfare and weaponry.

McCallum, Iain, Blood Brothers: Hiram and Hudson Maxim - Pioneers of Modern Warfare, Chatham Publishing, London 1999, 220p, 33 photographs, 2 maps. ISBN 1 86176 096 5

The Maxim brothers were self made men from a humble New England background whose inventions span many fields of activity. They were rumbustious, even vulgar, but they had a talent for making things work. Hiram's automatic machine gun is the best known of their inventions, with variants on his design in use in several armies until well after World War II. Even the Royal Navy's multiple pompom was basically to Hiram's design. Both the Admiralty and the War Office are shown as interested and progressive in trials of the new weapons. Their reluctance to purchase in quantity seems well justified in the light of rapid developments in this field.

Both men were active on propellants for guns and both warned of the danger of cordite as then made in the United Kingdom. Hudson was largely instrumental in persuading the US Navy to adopt nitro-cellulose, which probably kept that navy clear of the disastrous explosions which afflicted ships using cordite. It was Hudson's initiatives in this field which led to the final split between the brothers, as Hiram thought that Hudson had pirated his work.

Hiram's attempts to fly were unsuccessful but very brave and well conceived. He began serious work in 1889 with the development of a light weight steam engine and boiler. Over the next few years he built an aeroplane which, in final form, had a wing span of 104 feet and weighed 8000lb with fuel, water and a crew of two. It ran on rails for take off but a second set of rails prevented it from rising too far at first. In July 1894,near Dartmouth in Kent, it did take off and seems to have travelled about 600 feet before crashing. Though work continued for a time, it was proving costly and the support of the Vickers company was withdrawn.

The book is well written, easy to read and, with numerous wives, mistresses etc., quite spicy!

Naval stories do not get more gripping than the tragedy of HMS Dunedin, a British light cruiser sunk by a German U-boat in 1941, and seldom are the stories better told than the one related in Blood in the Sea: HMS Dunedin and the Enigma Code.

The author Stuart Gill uses the experiences of his father, Marine William Gill, one of only sixty-seven survivors (out of 486 crew and officers) to construct a history of the ship, and the result is one terrific read.

The ship had seen twenty-four years of fairly ordinary service (in the words of Gill's father, the cruiser "was a bit player on a large stage") when it went down far off the Central Africa coast. Broken by two torpedoes fired from U-124, the Dunedin sank so quickly that over 200 men were trapped below.

The ship had no time to report its position--or even that she was going down. There was not enough room in the seven rafts for all those still alive. Those still in the water soon realized they were surrounded by sharks. The tropical air temperature was unmercifully hot. There was no water. There was no food. The rafts were taking on water. These sailors knew they were as alone as men had ever been on the sea. The moment called for ordinary men to become something extraordinary.

Author Stuart Gill succeeds in doing something very rare among the thousands of WW2 books in print: juggle several points of view to tell a fast-moving story of a largely unknown tragedy. Like a good film director, Gill cuts back and forth between the British warship on patrol, the British cryptographers using the captured Enigma code to track the enemy's moves, and the German U-boat that is first hunted, then becomes hunter.

The tragedy that ensues is simply and unsparingly presented. The reader is then cast forward in time to share the heartbreak of loved ones as they receive the news and live with the loss for decades to come. No reader can be untouched by the passage of the young woman who lost her fiance on HMS Dunedin only to find, years later, the love poem he marked just for her.

Although the war action of the book is during the 1940-41 period when Britain stood alone, American readers will appreciate Blood in the Sea for the way history often throws us signs. The survivors of HMS Dunedin are picked up by an American merchant ship on Thanksgiving Day, 1941. Those survivors were disembarked at a friendly port on Sunday December 7th. Anglo-American friendship was to endure.

Stuart E. Prall's "The Bloodless Revolution" is an extensive and non-biased study of the seminal constitutional developments in 17th century England; which defined the constitutional monarchy in Britain in the age when absolutism reigned supreme elsewhere in the world. Author prepares the scene for the revolution by explaining relationship between king and the Parliament throughout Stuart dynasty starting from James I, thought Long Parliament, Civil War, Protectorate, Restoration, last years of Charles II, and the many encroachment on liberties and mistakes of James II which ultimately led to Glorious Revolution.

Emphasis is on developments in the legal system and relationship between multiple religious institutions and political parties during and after the Restoration period.

One extended quote from the book might give you a flavor of the level of scholarship and insights this book will offer.

"The medieval and Tudor view of the dispensing power was premised on the distinction between malum prohibitum (a prohibited evil) and malum per se (an evil in itself). The distinction was essentially medieval, and the foundation was divine law and/or natural law. Restrictions considered man-made (malum prohibitum) could be dispensed with. Restrictions that were thought to have been authored by God or Nature (malum per se) were not to be dispensed with. These distinctions permeated both the secular and the ecclesiastical structures of the medieval worlds. The Tudor era, especially after the English Reformation, saw the gradual secularization of the political and legal thought and the gradual erosion of the distinction , because the whole conception of divine and natural law was one of the victims of the new age of science and its concomitant mechanical laws of nature, which were coming to the fore in the seventeenth century. One result of the pre-1640 struggle for sovereignty and the constitutional struggle of the Puritan Revolution itself has bee the triumph of the principle that sovereign power was identical with the lawmaking, or legislative, power. Neither the Long Parliament or Protectorate felt any divine or natural limitation upon their ultimate freedom to exercise total legislative authority. The lesson of the Restoration had been that the supreme or sovereign legislative authority did exist in the English state, and that it existed in the triple-headed institution of the King-in-Parliament. The problem was very complex. Because if the king-in-Parliament can make or unmake any and all laws, then there is no longer any practical distinction between the malum prohibitum and malum per se. All laws are merely malum prohibitum. The state is supreme, not God or Nature. The result is that the king could now feel free, at least in theory, to dispense with any law, while those who might oppose his particular use of this power ... would be thrown back upon the old medieval distinction between the human and the divine. English constitutional development was to be unique in seventeen-century Europe in that these same intellectual tendencies on the Continent were indeed leading to just this justification for royal absolutism, while in England the struggle for power between the king and Parliament would continue unabated ..."

This is a stupendous book. It reveals the Glorious Revolution in its entirety. From the Restoration to the Act of Settlement, nothing is overlooked. In addition, the book is written without any of the historical or idealogical predispositions which have long plagued previous studies of this seminal revolution.

One of the best biographies on Mary Tudor, "Bloody Mary" ever written! The authoress outdoes herself and makes a fantastic dive into the good and the horrible events that outlined Bloody Mary's reign. This books is long and a bit overly detailed in places, but it is necessary to give the voluminous background on the life of this queen who was hated bitterly by many of her subjects. You won't be disappointed in this biography, especially if you want facts, details, and emotional input. A FANTASTIC ALL-AROUND BIOGRAPHY!!

What, out of print? What a shame. Carolly Erickson has outdone herself with this hefty volume, devoted to chronicling the dark side of English history. She fills us in on heartbreaking details of the Tudor family saga, keeps a lively sense of international conflicts; and very nearly creates sympathy for the self-described "unhappiest lady in Christendom" -- whose death was celebrated as a national holiday.

Anyone remotely familiar with the British blues scene of the 60s and 70s will have heard Dick Heckstall-Smith, whether you are aware of his name or not. I'm halfway through this book and...what a treat! In his own words, Dick recounts his personal history as a musician growing up in the British Jazz scene of the 50s and the blues rock period of the 60s and beyond. In the process, he writes a veritable history of the British blues. Why? Because he was present during many of the key episodes of that history. In addition to his musical insight, DHS shares some stories of the road which sound so impossible that they just have to be true. Standouts are the tale of the "homemade stew", Jack Bruce's introduction to him and Ginger Baker's attempt to drive in a blinding snowstorm. The tales of his tenure in the Graham Bond ORGANization are worth the price of admission alone. DHS was a wonderful musician, inquisitive human being and a true ambassador of the British jazz/blues scene. This is a must read book. Rest in peace Dick.

Most blues guides focus on American blues music: Dick Heckstall-Smith and Pete Grant's Blowing The Blues covers fifty years of playing British blues, includes cd with previously unreleased tracks, and provides insights into blues saxophone to accompany a blend of autobiography and British blues history. Add cartoons by Biff making comments on the life of a blues musician and you have a honest survey of the music scene of the British blues world.

This book is an excellent resource for the history of toilets. All sources are sited and the text is rich in historical facts. It also has colored graphics.

I truly liked this book. It was both interesting and informative. I am still annoying people with bits of toilet history.