There is no journal with a livelier and richer history than The Spectator. As well as being the world's oldest current affairs magazine, none has been closer to spheres of power and influence in Britain. Since its first appearance in 1828, during the dying days of the Georgian era, The Spectator has been ready to spar - with the Tories and their Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, with a corrupt political system, and with the lacklustre literary world of the day. Over the subsequent 54 Prime Ministers, The Spectator has not just watched the world go by but has waded into the fray: it has campaigned on consistently liberal lines, fighting for voters' rights, free trade, the free press and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, while offering open-minded criticism of every modern taboo and orthodoxy. 10,000 Not Out marks the magazine's 10,000th issue by recounting the turbulent and tortuous tale of its history, of 192 years chock-full of crises and campaigns, of literary flair and barbed wit. Eight chapters chart the evolution of the title - from radical weekly newspaper, to moralising Victorian guardian, to wartime watchdog, to satirical magazine, to High-Tory counsellor, to the irreverent but influential Spectator of the twenty-first century. The book weaves together copious quotations from the magazine's unparalleled archive, the contemporary press, private letters and staff anecdote.

How has corruption shaped – and undermined – the history of public life in modern Britain? This collection begins the task of piecing together this history over the past two and a half centuries, from the first assaults on Old Corruption and aristocratic privilege during the late eighteenth century through to the corruption scandals that blighted the worlds of Westminster and municipal government during the twentieth century. It offers the first account that pays equal attention to the successes and limitations of anticorruption reforms and the shifting meanings of ‘corruption’. It does so across a range of different sites – electoral, political and administrative, domestic and colonial – presenting new research on neglected areas of reform, while revisiting well known scandals and corrupt practices.

In 1945, Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys - writers for the New Statesman and a National Trust administrator - purchased Long Crichel House, an old rectory with no electricity and an inadequate water supply. In this improbable place, the last English literary salon began. Quieter and less formal than the famed London literary salons, Long Crichel became an idiosyncratic experiment in communal living. Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor and Knollys - later joined by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer - became members of one another's surrogate families and their companionship became a stimulus for writing, for them and their guests. Long Crichel's visitors' book reveals a Who's Who of the arts in post-war Britain - Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connolly, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Cecil Beaton, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson - who were attracted by the good food, generous quantities of drink and excellent conversation. For Frances Partridge and James Lees-Milne, two of the twentieth century's finest diarists, Long Crichel became a second home and their lives became bound up with the house. Yet there was to be more to the story of the house than what critics variously referred to as a group of 'hyphenated gentlemen-aesthetes' and a 'prose factory'. In later years the house and its inhabitants were to weather the aftershocks of the Crichel Down Affair, the Wolfenden Report and the AIDS crisis. The story of Long Crichel is also part of the development of the National Trust and other conservation movements. Through the lens of Long Crichel, archivist and writer Simon Fenwick tells a wider story of the great upheaval that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. Intimate and revealing, he brings to life Long Crichel's golden, gossipy years and, in doing so, unveils a missing link in English literary and cultural history.

The period of Britain’s Industrial Revolution was perhaps the most transformative era in the nation’s history. Between about 1750 and 1914, life and work, home and school, church and community changed irreversibly for Britain’s rapidly expanding population. Lives were transformed, some for the better, but many endured abysmal domestic and workplace conditions. Eventually improvements were made to Britain’s social fabric which led to the prospect of richer and more fulfilled lives for working men, women and even children. Focusing on 100 objects that either directly influenced, or arose from, these changes, John Broom offers a distinctive insight into this fascinating age. With plentiful illustrations and suggestions for visits to hundreds of places of historical interest, this book makes an ideal companion for a journey into Britain’s industrial past.

This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.

Against the backdrop of unprecedented concern for the future of health care, 'The Cambridge History of Medicine' surveys the rise of medicine in the West from classical times to the present. Covering both the social and scientific history of medicine, this volume traces the chronology of key developments and events.

What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century. Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.