It is one thing having a name or having made your name. But how does an ordinary John Smith born to a small tenant farmer of poor coal-riddled soil in unfashionable Derbyshire become a qualified accountant and work as a management consultant for the mighty Price Waterhouse? And not just at home base. We go to Singapore and India and many other places to live this story This is not a rags-to-riches tale. Rather a roller-coaster experience As many lows as highs, as many tears as laughter. Not a part life but a full one. Seven decades of change. Of rants and surprises You will be amazed. You will be swept along.

Comprehensive, lavishly illustrated survey of English popular music during the early modern period. Accompanied by specially commissioned recordings.

It's 70's Britain and industry is rapidly reforming to prepare for a new age of opportunity and prosperity. John Smith a one time tenant farmer's son gives a compelling account of how his family came second in his race to the top of the Price Waterhouse consultancy ladder and then in corporate life. Be prepared for some frank admissions about where life lost out to work in the work/life balance, but more importantly whether it was all worth it and whether there is a life hereafter

The Parish Church was the primary site of religious practice throughout the early modern period. This was particularly so for the silent majority of the English population, who conformed outwardly to the successive religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What such public conformity might have meant has attracted less attention - and, ironically, is sometimes less well documented - than the non-conformity or semi-conformity of recusants, church-papists, Puritan conventiclers or separatists. In this volume, ten leading scholars of early modern religion explore the experience of parish worship in England during the Reformation and the century that followed it. As the contributors argue, parish worship in this period was of critical theological, cultural and even political importance. The volume's key themes are the interlocking importance of liturgy, music, the sermon and the parishioners' own bodies; the ways in which religious change was received, initiated, negotiated, embraced or subverted in local contexts; and the dialectic between practice and belief which helped to make both so contentious. The contributors - historians, historical theologians and literary scholars - through their commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, provide fruitful and revealing insights into this intersection of private and public worship. This collection is a sister volume to Martin and Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Together these two volumes focus and drive forward scholarship on the lived experience of early modern religion, as it was practised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The year is 1942, the British are stoical but fearful, the war could go either way. A boy is born in middle England on a small tenanted farm that might be lost to the Germans. He knows nothing of this nightmare since the early years are idyllic. Hating school and failing the crucial exam, the omens are not good. But he is bright and works hard and against the odds gets an office job aged 15 and is plunged headlong into an adult world. A world of steam trains and post-war characters. It will take a big push to penetrate the realms of accounting and finance, yet it can be done. A time long gone. An endeavour as relevant as ever. Wallow in 1940's and 1950's England, it will be worth it