Showing results by publisher "HarperCollins Publishers Limited" in History

Former Prime Minister John Major takes a remarkable journey into his own unconventional family past to tell the richly colourful story of the British music hall. Music hall was one of the glories of Victorian England. Sentimental, vulgar, class-conscious, but always patriotic and on the side of the underdog, it held a mirror to the audiences’ hopes and fears - and sometimes the general absurdity of life. Vast, smoke-filled auditoriums were packed night after night in nearly every town and city in Britain.

The official companion to the BBC's hit magazine show, The One Show Book is a compilation of the quirkiest, strangest, most random and most fascinating stories pulled from the brains of Icon Films' The One Show research desk. Did you know that Michael Jackson was once made an honorary director of Exeter City football team? Or that Muhammad Ali owed a chunk of his fortune to his love of Ovaltine?

This classic and charming book, a timeless love letter to English cheeses, was first published in 1937, newly rediscovered. It is a treasure trove of wonderful anecdotes including the tale of the monstrous cheese big enough to hold a 13-year-old inside, the Stilton that purred like a cat and the famous cheese maker in Manchester who selected which Cheshire cheese to sell based on where the mice had been nibbling, ‘as they were the best judges of a good cheese’.

On the afternoon of Sunday April 24, 1932, a group of approximately 500 men and women set out for the summit of Kinder Scout, the highest point in Derbyshire's Peak District. They were not here to take in the fresh air and breath-taking vistas; they were here to make a stand. Kinder Scout, like almost every other site of natural beauty in Britain at that time, was privately owned and fiercely guarded. This wild, open landscape was one that they had absolutely no right to visit.