Böcker av Peter Saunders

Peter Saunders meets his family.Agricultural labourers from Essex, Lincolnshire and the Scottish borders; hat-makers, pin-headers, shoemakers and coal miners from Gloucestershire; cotton spinners, weavers and piecers from the slums of industrial Lancashire; illiterate Irish peasants from County Cork; rag-pickers, charwomen, abandoned wives and prostitutes; soldiers who died in the Flanders mud and were never found; soldiers who made it home broken men; children sent to convalescent homes and old people dying in the workhouse.Reading their stories is like reading a potted history of the common people of these islands over the last three hundred years. These are the shadowy people who dug the coal that fuelled the industrial revolution; the people who wove and spun the yarn that clothed the world; the people who planted and harvested the crops that fed the cities; the people who fashioned our modern world. They were the unnamed, unrecorded heroes on whose shoulders we now perch.

Jason Wall was fleetingly famous in the sixties as lead singer with Jason and the Argonauts. Their hit single, The Sweetest Girl, got to number six in the charts in 1966. Almost fifty years later, England is in the grip of a paedophile panic, politicians are in disgrace following an expenses scandal, and traditionalists and progressives are at each other's throats over gay marriage, political correctness and the Iraq War. Jason Wall is now a successful businessman and peer of the realm, but returning from a winter holiday in the sun, he is arrested on historic sex abuse charges. Just before his trial is due to begin, Jason's estranged wife Dawn finds him drowned in his bath. The coroner rules it an accident, but Dawn thinks someone was at the house at the time he died. She enlists Jason's reluctant daughter Amy to help her investigate further. A slow-burn crime thriller from the author of The Versailles Memorandum.

Provides an examination of a number of the political questions posed in urban studies. Divided into two interrelated sections, this book discusses the theoretical problems raised by work in Britain, Europe and the US and covers such issues as 'non-decision making' and the mobilisation of bias in political systems.

An introductory text about class and inequality in modern Britain. Written specifically for students following a basic course in sociology, its breadth, originality and style mean it will appeal to a much wider readership.