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The Secret History of Our Streets: London
The Secret History of Our Streets: London
Oct 7, 2024 11:22 AM

Author:Joseph Bullman,Neil Hegarty,Brian Hill

The Secret History of Our Streets: London

The Secret History of Our Streets explores six roads spread across inner London - from Camberwell, Holland Park and Islington to Shoreditch, Deptford and Bermondsey - through the experiences of the people who lived there. Stories of poverty and violence, faith, love and hope, this is an intimate examination of our capital and the changing lives of its inhabitants. The history of over a hundred years of social change, this is the untold history of the sreets beneath our feet.

You'll never look at your own street the same way again.

Reviews

A fascinating book.

—— BBC History Magazine

[A] first-rate, skillfully written soldier's story

—— Booklist

Beautifully written and perfectly evokes life and battle in a parachute infantry company

—— Washinton Post

He understood the ties that bind men in battle have more to do with brotherhood and its obligations than ties to God or country

—— Kirkus Review

Perfectly pitched ... an authentic witness to the combat experience

—— Booklist

A classic wartime memoir

—— Stephen K Ambrose

Sarah Rose tells a stirring tale of individual derring-do and the fate of the nations.

—— Waterstone's Books Quarterly

It's an amusing tale... I was fascinated

—— Sunday Express

This will ensure you value your cuppa as never before

—— Country Life

This fascinating book by Sarah Rose tells the story of Robert Fortune, an early 19th-century botanist who, disguised as a Mandarin, was employed by the East India Company to discover the secrets of tea-growing in China

—— The Observer

Fortune's act of agricultural espionage is the subject of Sarah Rose's fascinating book

—— The Tablet

Sarah Rose's For All the Tea in China is a gripping spy story, which brilliantly recounts how plant-hunter Robert Fortune committed one of the greatest acts of industrial espionage in history... Rose's account is superbly well written

—— Good Book Guide

In this lively account of the adventures (and misadventures) that lay behind Robert Fortune's bold acquisition of Chinese tea seedlings for transplanting in British India, Sarah Rose demonstrates in engaging detail how botany and empire-building went hand in hand

—— Jonathan Spence, author of THE SEARCH FOR MODERN CHINA

As a lover of tea and a student of history, I loved this book. Sarah Rose conjures up the time and tales as British Legacy Teas are created before our eyes. We drink the delicious results of Robert Fortune's adventures every day

—— Michael Harney, author of THE HARNEY & SONS GUIDE TO TEA

For All The Tea In China is a rousing Victorian adventure story chronicling the exploits of botanical thief Robert Fortune, who nearly single-handedly made the British tea industry possible in India. Sarah Rose has captured the thrill of discovery, the dramatic vistas in the Wuyi Mountains, and the near-disasters involved in Fortune's exploits. For tea-lovers, history buffs, or anyone who enjoys a ripping good read

—— Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

This book will be of interest to those who want to see and learn more about a significant period in British history.

—— UK Regional Press

Higgins wears her considerable erudition lightly and nimbly hops between her knowledge of the classics and the changing perception of the ancients by the British of the past few centuries.

—— Ben Felsenburg , Metro

A very personal encounter with Roman Britain… Invites us to see our landscape and history as the Romans first imagined and wrote about them – strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world.

—— UK Regional Press

[Higgins] is as sharp and sensitive an observer of the latest version of Britannia as she is of the earliest one… Each chapter is not just a regional itinerary but also a brilliantly constructed and often exhilaratingly poetic treatment of wider themes.

—— Emily Gowers , Times Literary Supplement

Records [Higgins’] own travels around the island in search of Roman traces. She includes plenty of anecdotes about the continuing fascination with the Roman past and its penetration of the present.

—— Oldie

Higgins produced another remarkable British travelogue… that was at once thoughtful, learned, witty and superbly written.

—— William Dalrymple , Observer

Filled with passion and personal interest… Higgins walks us around the landscape of this country as it would have been 2,000 years ago, and in doing so she ably captures the spirit of Britain now, Britain then and Britain in between.

—— Dan Jones , Telegraph

Whether at Hadrian’s Wall or in a car park in the City, she [Higgins] shows how Roman traces are woven through British life.

—— Financial Times

A fascinating look at how we have viewed Rome's presence in these islands and what a debt we still owe to Roman achievements.

—— Good Book Guide

Part history, part travelogue, [Higgins] also brings to life the eccentric archaeologists who have tried to recapture that lost civilisation.

—— Robbie Millen , The Times

A fresh and readable account

—— Fachtna Kelly , Sunday Business Post

Under Another Sky is not only a work of personal history, it is more personal than that... It is conversational, anecdotal, in a way that makes it easy for [Higgins] to slip in quite a lot of information

—— Nicholas Lezard , Guardian

A delightful, effortlessly engaging handbook to the half-lost, half-glimpsed world of Roman Britain... The result is an utterly original history, lyrically alive to the haunting presence of the past and our strange and familiar ancestors

—— Christopher Hart , Sunday Times

The beauty of this book is not just in the elegant prose and in the precision with which [Higgins] skewers her myths. It is in the sympathy she shows for the myth-makers.

—— Peter Stothard , The Times

Evocative...a keen-eyed tour of Britain.

—— Christopher Hirst , Independent

Packed with fascinating and thought-provoking insights.

—— Herald

A captivating travelogue.

—— Helena Gumley-Mason , Lady

A delightfully heady and beautifully written potpourri of a book.

—— BBC History Magazine

A fascinating look at the debt we owe to Roman achievements

—— Good Book Guide

A fascination exploration

—— Mail on Sunday

Highly readable but profoundly researched, The Trigger represents a bold exception to the deluge of First World War books devoted to mud, blood and poetry

—— Ben Macintyre , The Times

a fascinating original portrait of a man and his country

—— Country and Town House
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