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London Lives > History and Politics
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London Lives has been created in association with the National Portrait Gallery - check out the pictures where you see the National Portrait Gallery logo.
Sutton Publishing, ISBN: 0750937033
The Sunday Times, July 2003: The biggest problem facing any biographer of Amy Johnson is that Constance Babington Smith got there first. Her seminal life, written in 1966, told most of what there is to tell about Amy in elegant prose. In May, 1930, Amy Johnson took off from Croydon Airport with a thermos flask and a packet of sandwiches to try and beat the world solo record to Australia. She arrived after weeks of flying a second-hand, open-cockpit biplane with no radio communication and the most basic of maps. Her adventures inspired the nation following the Great War. Her career was followed by millions, until her plane disappeared over the Thames Estuary, sparking rumours which are still being investigated today. Her body has never been found.
-- Brent
Claudia Jones: A Life in exile - Marika Sherwood
Lawrence and Wishart, ISBN: 0853158827
Friends, followers and aficionados of Claudia Jones, the mother of Carnival in Britain, have been waiting eagerly for this book since a 1996 London symposium on her life inspired the author, Marika Sherwood, to undertake an intensive period of research into the public records of Trinidad, Britain, USA and the former Soviet Union and into the archives of their various communist parties. The result is a fascinating story of the immense courage of one of the greatest Black women in the 20th century and her battles against racism, bureaucracy and sinister attempts by politicians and security forces of the East and West to silence her. And all the while she was having to cope with severe heart disease and the aftermath of TB contracted in the desperate poverty of a 1930s Harlem ghetto apartment.
-- LambethDawn to dusk - passion, policies & politics of Bernie Grant MP -
Ituni Books, ISBN: 0955207703
A biography of Bernie Grant. Former Leader of Haringey Council and and among the first black Members of Parliament elected in 1987. He served as MP for Tottenham til his death in 2000.
-- HaringeyGeorge Carey - Know the truth
HarperCollins, ISBN: 0007120303
George Carey, 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, was born in 1935. His family were bombed out during the Second World War and moved to Dagenham. After attending Bifrons Secondary School, Barking, he left school at 15 with no qualifications. He was converted to Christianity in 1953 and, after completing national service, decided to train for the church. He was married at Dagenham Parish Church in 1960. Dr Carey has written: "Although I am - sadly - not able to return regularly to Dagenham, I continue to be grateful for all it has meant to me during my childhood and teenage years".
-- Barking and DagenhamHogarth: A Life and a World - Jenny Uglow
Faber, ISBN: 0571193765
He's fascinated for centuries through his paintings and engravings: we've been invited to linger in streets and drawing-rooms of 18th Century London, but who was William Hogarth? As this Whitbread-winning biography reveals, he moved in a number of interesting circles; both cultural and political.
-- HounslowA Host of Voices - Doris Stokes
Time warner, ISBN: 075153059x
A former Lewisham resident with extraordinary gifts - whether or not you considered those powers to have been psychic or for storytelling is down to you. This compulsive read is available both in large and ordinary size print.
-- LewishamThe Jewish Dickens: Israel Zangwill and the Wanderers of Kilburn - Jewish Museum of London
Jewish Museum of London, ISBN: 1871447070
Born in London in 1864, Israel Zangwill can certainly be said to have left his mark in the world. Fiction writer, dramatist, essayist and political activist, he was the father of modern British-Jewish literature. From his first book, Motza Kleis (Matzoh Balls), written together with a fellow student, he analyzed, even if humorously, life in the poorest Jewish quarters of London and his heavy use of Yiddish created controversy. At the turn of the century he married Edith Ayrton (1903), and became extremely involved in politics. He was a so-called spokesman for Anglo Jewry and fought many battles for the creation of a Jewish state as well as for women's suffrage and pacifism. He did not stop writing: plays, a collection of poems and the novel Ghetto Tragedies he died in 1926 following a nervous breakdown.
-- BrentPeter Owen, ISBN: 0720610737
There are few more important figures in the early history of modern gardening than John Tradescant the elder and his son, who were responsible for introducing many new plants to Britain. This is a definitive study of these two men.
-- LambethJosephine Butler - Jane Jordan
John Murray, ISBN: 0719555841
I have looked into Hell, said Josephine Butler.
-- MertonPhoenix (Orion), ISBN: 185799972x
Using a very wide range of sources, Kenneth Morgan examines the emergence of the Labour party in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the rise to a dominant and revered position within it of Keir Hardie, pacifist, internationalist, feminist, radical and socialist, yet an outsider in British piblic life to the end.
-- NewhamMotion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge. - Rebecca Solnit
Bloomsbury, 04/04, ISBN: 0074758413
The remarkable story of a true pioneer and innovative man, whose discovery made cinematic pictures possible.
-- KingstonViking, ISBN: 0670885681
A full-scale biography of naval administrator Samuel Pepys, who was well-known for being the friend of the famous and powerful. This text, which draws on Pepys' own personal diary, covers his childhood and young adulthood. It moves through the famous diary years and beyond, to the death of his wife and the setting up of a new household. While using the diary as a source, the author goes beyond its narrative to the inner man, at the same time revealing life as a young man in Restoration London. Explored within are Pepys' relations with women, his fears and ambitions, his political shifts and his agonies and delights.
-- City of London