Finding the Plot
"The most fun I have ever had with dead bodies."--Bill BrysonIn this riveting and often hilarious book--part travelogue and part social history--Ann Treneman visits the most interesting graves in Britain. You'll meet prime ministers, queens and kings, highwaymen, scientists, mistresses, writers, painters, poets, rakes and rogues, victims, the meek and mild, and the just plain mad.At times absurd, at times poignant, Finding the Plot is an entertaining guide to the Anglo-Saxon underworld. Ann Treneman was born in Iowa City but grew up in McMinnville, Oregon. She now lives in London where she is parliamentary sketchwriter for the Times newspaper.
Watching the English
Updated, with new research and over 100 revisions Ten years later, they're still talking about the weather! Kate Fox, the social anthropologist who put the quirks and hidden conditions of the English under a microscope, is back with more biting insights about the nature of Englishness. This updated and revised edition of Watching the English - which over the last decade has become the unofficial guidebook to the English national character - features new and fresh insights on the unwritten rules and foibles of "squaddies," bikers, horse-riders, and more. Fox revisits a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and bizarre codes of behavior. She demystifies the peculiar cultural rules that baffle us: the rules of weather-speak. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The paranoid pantomime rule. Class anxiety tests. The roots of English self-mockery and many more. An international bestseller, Watching the English is a biting, affectionate, insightful and often hilarious look at the English and their society.
Stonehenge and Avebury
Please note: This product is a map. The Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site is internationally important for its outstanding prehistoric monuments. Stonehenge is the most architecturally sophisticated prehistoric stone circle in the world, while Avebury is the largest. Around them lie numerous other monuments and sites, which demonstrate over 2,000 years of continuous use. Together they form a unique prehistoric landscape.There is no better way to learn about and experience the monuments than to go out and explore the World Heritage Site on foot. This map is ideal for walkers and others wishing to explore the fascinating landscape of the two areas of the World Heritage Site. The map uses an Ordnance Survey 1:10,000 base and draws upon information from the English Heritage Archive and recent archaeological investigations. With Stonehenge on one side and Avebury on the other, the map shows and describes both visible and hidden remains, with information about where you can find out more.The map is divided into two parts on a durable double sided waterproof sheet.
Portobello Voices
Portobello Market has been going since 1860. It boasts the largest antiques street market in the world, is a source of inspiration for fashion designers, song writers and film directors, receives over a million visitors a year ...and is at risk. In Portobello Voices, Blanche Girouard introduces us to the intoxicating mix of characters that make the market buzz - from the antique dealer to rubbish collector, sausage seller to fur coat vendor, Afghan battery seller to public school entrepreneur. Listening to their stories, learn how to spot a fake, store a fur and make a tin pan; find out what lies behind an obsession with collecting, a passion for buttons and the gusset in boxer shorts and hear how experiences of loss, abandonment and estrangement lead to a life as a market trader.Read the book, rediscover the market and become part of the solution to preserving the wonder that is Portobello.
Not a Guide to Bridlington
Did you know? Lawrence of Arabia worked at the marine craft unit at Bridlington in 1933. David Hockney lives in Bridlington and paints trees on Woldgate. Bridlington fisherman landed the largest shellfish catch in England. From the momentous to the outlandish, this book is packed full of fun facts and trivia about everything to do with this gem of Britain's coastline. Much more than a tourist guide, residents too will discover things they never knew about the town. Facts, history, humor; it's all here in this engaging little book.
Londoners
"A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place. . . . Delightful. . . . In Taylor's patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators." -- New York Times Book ReviewLondoners is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world's most fascinating cities-a vibrant narrative portrait of the London of our own time, featuring unforgettable stories told by the real people who make the city hum.Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor has spent years traversing every corner of the city, getting to know the most interesting Londoners, including the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub doorperson, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard at Buckingham Palace, and a couple who fell in love at the Tower of London--and now live there. With candor and humor, this diverse cast--rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George)--shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before.Together, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London in all its breadth, from Notting Hill to Brixton, from Piccadilly Circus to Canary Wharf, from an airliner flying into London Heathrow Airport to Big Ben and Tower Bridge, and down to the deepest tunnels of the London Underground. Londoners is the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.
Sorry, I’m British!
An original and funny take on what it is to be British The A to Z guide to your own laughable behaviour Explore the oddities of the British psyche with this informative and witty illustrated guide. From small-talk to superiority, from cricket to condiments, and curry to class, when wandering lonely through the clouds of British behaviour this is the perfect companion. Discover the fate of a pitbull named ASBO, find out why we get bank holidays when we do, and learn why it's better to drive on the left. With 40 hilarious illustrations from acclaimed cartoonist Ed McLachlan, this is the perfect book for a nation that loves to laugh at itself.
Not for Tourists 2012 Guide to London
Whether you've called London your home for decades or just arrived last night, there's information in NFT that you need to know. From intimate neighborhood details to how to score tickets to the big football match, this guide will help you master this amazing city like an expert. Packed with over 100 maps and thousands of restaurants, shops, theaters, and under-the-radar spots, you won't find a better guide to London. It includes an invaluable street index and a foldout map of the London Underground and bus system.
Night Haunts
Traditional depictions of London at night have imagined a lawless orgy of depravity and pestilence. But is Britain's capital after dark now as bland and unthreatening as an evening in any new provincial town? Sukhdev Sandhu journeys across the city to find out whether the London night really has been rendered insipid by street lighting and CCTV. Night Haunts seeks to reclaim the mystery and romance of the city--to revitalize the great myth of London for a new century.
Secret Bankside
On the south bank of the Thames, outside the jurisdiction of the ancient City of London, Bankside has long been known as a hotbed of creativity, dissent and loose living. With its brothels and bear-pits, its prisons and its pubs, the area has inspired the nation's greatest writers - Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Keats and Blake - and been home to its most famous theatres - the Globe, The Rose, The Old Vic and the National. These same south London streets have given sanctuary to immigrants and refugees, to tradesmen, craftsmen and Thames Watermen, to the workhouse poor and the criminal underclass. Writer, performer and local historian John Constable is well known for his walks around this fascinating area. The eight walks collected here are among his most popular. Packed with social history and local lore, they are witty, insightful and hugely entertaining. Each walk is easy to follow, accompanied by maps and clear directions, and illustrated with period prints and contemporary photographs. Together, they tell the extraordinary and, until recently, largely forgotten story of London's anarchic, irrepressible 'Outlaw Borough'.
Kingdom by the Sea
After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scotland, the people he encountered along the way revealed far more of themselves than they perhaps intended to display to a stranger. Theroux captured their rich and varied conversational commentary with caustic wit and penetrating insight.
