Blighty

This book, produced in collaboration with the Lewis Cohen Urban Studies Centre, is all about memories of Brighton during the First World War. Through an examination of ephemera such as posters, photographs, pictures, songs and personal recollections, it portrays a collective memory of the city. Photographs are central to this work; for example Brighton Museum, Preston Manor and Brighton Reference Library are all featured pictorially. This book provides a valuable and important source of local history - a must for all those passionate about the city and its historical roots!

Britain. What's that all about then? Having skewered modern life and culture in the bestselling Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit?, Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur set out to uncover the deep dark truth about Britain - its history, its myths and its people. Over the course of a year they endure the Last Night of the Proms and search for a couple of pissed dragons under a hill in Wales. They witness Scotland rising again (a bit), encounter terrifying Europhobe ladies in Surrey and lose the will to live in Gibraltar. They also meet a lot of druids. Hilarious, provocative and filled with fascinating facts, Blighty offers a brilliant, alternative vision of Britain - the island in the Atlantic that some people call Britain.

World War One had a devastating, cataclysmic impact on the world and the British people. As its reverberations were so long-lasting and significant, it is easy to assume that the social consequences were as profound. In this highly readable and moving survey of life back at home during the First World War, Gerard DeGroot challenges this assumption, finding pre-war social structures were surprisingly resilient. Despite economic and technological changes, the British peoplemanaged to cling onto their usual ways of life as much as possible in this new world. Back in Blighty has been fully revised to take into account new scholarship and historical perspectives, and is full of fascinating glimpses into everyday life during the war. The lives of ordinary people are illuminated and given historical significance in this powerful portrait of the British people and their culture.

Alexander Mullay tells the story of Britain's Railways during the First World War. From troop and hospital trains to carrying munitions and freight, the railways were vital.

The former Yugoslavia, on the brink of war and disintegration, was a scenic but intriguing location in which to undertake a cycling tour on a shoestring. The most formidable challenge proved to be finding a way out and returning home safely once the tour was completed, in a country where the unexpected came to be expected.

'So the recruiters, rolling up their sleeves, varied the appeal to pride, honour, manliness and vengeance with warnings to eschew shame, disgrace, betrayal, sloth and cowardice. From a poster showing the ruins of Belgium a woman asked, 'Will you go or must I?'' First published in 1980, Dear Old Blighty is E.S. Turner's superb account of life 'on the home front' in Britain during the Great War of 1914-1918: a time of conscription, propaganda, 'spy fever', industrial unrest in the arms factories, and grieving families turning to spiritualism. When even the blind were being recruited to serve as listening sentries for approaching Zeppelins, all were expected to contribute to the war effort; and, as Turner shows us, the means of exhortation (and the penalties for non-compliance) were many. 'No matter where you open a page, you learn something you feel you should have known.' Miles Kington, Independent

As well as incorporating the latest scholarship, he makes rich, and often very moving, use of primary sources - newspapers, poetry (both high and low), literature, memoirs and letters - to illuminate the attitudes of society at all its levels, not merely the elite and the articulate. He reveals the extent to which the dominant social force in Britain during the war was not change but continuity.