Middle England

The characters of The Rotters’ Club–Jonathan Coe’s beloved novel of adolescent life in the 1970s–have bartered their innocence for the vengeance of middle age in this incisive portrait of Cool Britannia at the millennium.

Birmingham, England, c. 1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in school. As the world appears to self-destruct around them, they hold together to navigate the choppy waters of a decidedly ambiguous decade.

First published to wide critical acclaim in 1973, England in the Later Middle Ages has become a seminal text for students studying this diverse, constantly changing period. The second edition of this book, while maintaining the character of the

Crime and Social Change in Middle England offers a new way of looking at contemporary debates on the fear of crime. Using observation, interviews and documentary analysis it traces the reactions of citizens of one very ordinary town to events, conflicts and controversies around such topical subjects of criminological investigation as youth, public order, drugs, policing and home security in their community. In doing so it moves in place from comfortable suburbs to hard pressed inner city estates, from the affluent to the impoverished, from old people watching the town where they grew up change around them to young in-comers who are part of that change. This is a book which will give all students of crime a rare and fascinating insight into how issues at the heart of contemporary law and order politics both nationally and internationally actually play out on the ground.

A witty and incisive state-of-the-nation novel from the acclaimed author of Number 11, The Rotter's Club andWhat a Carve Up! Set in the Midlands and London over the last eight years, Jonathan Coe follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense change and disruption in Britain. 'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby 'Coe is among the handful of novelists who can tell us something about the temper of our times'Observer 'You can't stop reading....I was haunted for days' Independent on 'Number 11'

This title will appeal to scholars and students of early modern social and economic history in England.

This book discusses the prejudices that have distorted understandings of the city of Milton Keynes and focuses upon the original thinking that went into the planning of Milton Keynes.

Now reissued in an updated paperback edition, this groundbreaking account of the Medieval Revival movement examines the ways in which the style of the medieval period was re-established in post-Enlightenment England—from Walpole and Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and Tennyson to Pound, Tolkien, and Rowling. “Medievalism . . . takes a panoramic view of the ‘recovery’ of the Medieval in English literature, visual arts and culture. . . . Ambitious, sweeping, sometimes idiosyncratic, but always interesting.”—Rosemary Ashton, Times Literary Supplement “Deeply researched and stylishly written, Medievalism is an unalloyed delight that will instruct and amuse a wide readership.”—Edward Short, Books & Culture