British Voices tells the story of Joe Hayman’s travels around the UK in the aftermath of the 2011 riots, speaking to over 1,000 members of the public about the state of British society – an approach unique amongst contemporary studies of the UK. Hayman undertook the three-month journey because he wanted the voices of ordinary citizens in Britain to be heard. Their views are reproduced faithfully and without judgment in this book and include: “It feels like the country is drifting; no one knows what to do.” Pensioner, Birmingham “If the politicians and bankers aren’t held accountable, the apathy extends across the whole country.”Student, Bangor“When I was young, we used to go out and kick a ball but it's all PlayStations now. We had three roads, but now it's a town and you have no idea who people are.” Man, Shetland Isles “It’s all moving at an astonishing pace now – strangely, my teenage years were actually much more peaceful in spite of the Troubles.” Woman, Belfast Tying these views together, Hayman concludes that the UK is a nation of kind, decent people but that confusion, loss and despair are all too common. British Voices is an uncompromising analyisis of the most pressing concerns of people at all levels of British society, that will appeal to those interested in politics and current affairs.

This volume discusses the lives and writings of five nonconformist women who comprised the heart of a vibrant literary circle in England between 1760 and 1840. Whelan shows these women's keen awareness and often radical viewpoints on contemporary issues connected to politics, religion, gender, and the Romantic sensibility.

Historians have long engaged with Roy Porter’s call for histories that incorporate patients’ voices and experiences. But despite concerted methodological efforts, there has simply not been the degree and breadth of innovation that Porter envisaged. Patients’ voices still often remain obscured. This has resulted in part from assumptions about the limitations of archives, many of which are formed of institutional records written from the perspective of health professionals. Patient voices in Britain repositions patient experiences at the centre of healthcare history, using new types of sources and reading familiar sources in new ways. Focusing on military medicine, Poor Law medicine, disability, psychiatry and sexual health, this collection encourages historians to tackle the ethical challenges of using archival material and to think more carefully about how their work might speak to persistent health inequalities and challenges in health-service delivery.

Voices and Books in the English Renaissance offers a new history of reading that focuses on the oral reader and the voice- or performance-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tones of voice especially—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit their readers' voices. The volume offers fresh readings of key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers including Anne Askew, William Baldwin, and Thomas Nashe. It rethinks what a printed book can be by searching the printed page for vocal cues and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process. Renaissance printed books have often been misheard and a preoccupation with their materiality has led to a focus on them as objects. However, Renaissance printed books are alive with possible voices, but we will not understand this while we focus on the silent reader.

‘A sheer delight’ Times Literary Supplement Ferdinand Mount has spent many years writing articles, columns and reviews for prestigious magazines, newspapers and journals. Whether reviewing great published works by some of England's finest authors and poets (both alive and dead) including Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, John le Carré, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Alan Bennett. He also analysed the works of a variety of our Masters covering the past four hundred years such as, of course, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Samuel Pepys. Whether it be holding up to account the writings of Winston Churchill, or celebrating the much-loved poems of Siegfried Sassoon, each essay reproduced in full here has been carefully chosen by Mount to weave a unique tapestry of the wealth of writings that have helped shape his own respected career as an author and political commentator. For anyone interested and passionate about writing and poetry across the centuries in the British Isles, this book will be a very welcome guide to the best one can pick up and read.

'The idea was simple. Take the most impassioned speeches about the fight for what is right and bring them to life for a new generation. The reason why it's so powerful is because it's about everything that matters to us: love and life, sex and death, justice and freedom. We've found some amazing speeches from the most unlikely places, British voices that have been ignored for centuries because history is a tale often told by the winners' COLIN FIRTH The People Speak tells the story of Britain through the voices of the visionaries, dissenters, rebels and everyday folk who took on the Establishment and stood up for what they believed in. Here are their stories, letters, speeches and songs, from the Peasants Revolt to the Suffragettes to the anti-war demonstrators of today. They are some of the most powerful words in our history. Compiled by the Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth, influential writer Anthony Arnove and the acclaimed historian David Horspool, The People Speak reminds us that democracy has never been a spectator sport.

Accents and dialects are constantly undergoing small variations over time, but evidence shows that change may have become increasingly rapid in the past few decades. 'Urban Voices' presents one of the few recent surveys of this phonological variation and change in urban accents across Great Britain and Ireland. Each of the specially commissioned chapters is divided into two parts. The first provides a detailed description of accent features within one or more urban centres, including information on social and stylistic variation and ongoing change. The second discusses a range of current theoretical and methodological issues. Some chapters present wholly new data based on fieldwork carried out specifically for inclusion in 'Urban Voices', while others summarise data from well-known research, up-dated and reanalysed in accordance with new findings. Containing copious illustrative and pedagogic material, this textbook presents a clear pathway to state-of-the-art research for students of sociolinguistics, dialectology, phonetics, and phonology at advanced undergraduate and graduate level. In addition, the detailed descriptive data and the accompanying cassette constitute a valuable resource for students and teachers of English, clinicians and speech therapists, forensic phoneticians, researchers in speech recognition and speech synthesis, and actors. Contributors: Deborah Chirrey, Edge Hill University College / Beverley Collins, Rijks Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands / Gerard J Docherty, University of Newcastle, UK / Paul Foulkes, University of Leeds, UK / Nigel Hewlett, Queen Margaret College / Raymond Hickey, University of Essen, Germany / Paul Kerswill, University of Reading, UK / Anne Grethe Mathisen, University of Oslo, Norway / Kevin McCafferty, Universitetet i Tromso, Norway / Inger Mees, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark / Lesley Milroy , University of Michigan, USA / Mark Newbrook, Monash University, Australia / James M Scobbie, Queen Margaret College, UK / Jana Stoddart, Olomouc, Czech Republic / Jane Stuart-Smith, University of Glasgow, UK / Laura Tollfree, Monash University, Australia / Peter Trudgill, University of Fribourg, Switzerland / Alice Turk, University of Edinburgh, UK / Clive Upton, University of Leeds, UK / Dominic Watt, University of Leeds, UK / J D A Widdowson, University of Sheffield, UK / Ann Williams, University of Reading, UK.