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Books > Humanities > History > British & Irish history
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Wales
(Hardcover)
Alison Jenkins
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R289
R228
Discovery Miles 2 280
Save R61 (21%)
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Ships in 12 - 19 working days
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Amazing and Extraordinary Facts: Wales takes you on an absorbing
journey around Wales to unearth the adventures, inventions,
legends, firsts and birthplaces that have shaped the unique history
of Wales. From the ancient mines of the Great Orme to the Severn
crossing, the tsunami of the 1600s to the Turlough Lake, from bog
snorkelling to Tom Jones' phone box, this intriguing compendium of
facts and stories will give you a captivating insight into the Land
of Song and the ideas and events that have shaped the individual
identity of this remarkable country. Brief, accessible and
entertaining pieces on a wide variety of subjects makes it the
perfect book to dip in to. The amazing and extraordinary facts
series presents interesting, surprising and little-known facts and
stories about a wide range of topics which are guaranteed to
inform, absorb and entertain in equal measure.
For much of his half-century career in the House of Commons, Tony
Benn has been the most loved and loathed man in British politics.
He has been idolized by the left, and reviled with equal measure by
the Westminster establishment, not least by New Labour. Once tipped
to lead the Labour Party, Benn's growing disillusionment with what
he regarded as the democratic deficit infecting politics,
reinforced his resolve to continue playing the role he valued most,
as a good House of Commons Man.David Powell's fascinating new
biography traces Tony Benn's extraordinary fifty year political
career from the day he first entered the House in 1950. He argues
that Benn's commitment to the House of Commons was fortified by his
experiences during the thirty months when he fought to renounce his
peerage and remain an MP; then during the twelve years he spent in
government, and finally during the two decades he spent on the back
benches, having been defeated in the bruising campaign for the
Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party. Each was to provide him with
an insight into the workings of power and cumulatively they were to
convince him of the charade that passed for democracy not only in
Westminster and in the Labour Party, but in the European Union and
in the wider in the global context, with democratic ideals
subordinated to the political and economic power of the United
States. Benn has always a controversial figure. He was widely
caricatured as Bogey Benn by the Tories during the 1970s and was
more recently anathematised by Tony Blair as the man who almost
knocked the Labour party over the edge of the cliff into
extinction. Nonetheless many of the policies he championed, and for
which he was widely belittled, have since entered the statute
books. Indeed, if history is a chronicle of ironies, there can have
been little more ironic than when, following Benn's valedictory
speech in the Commons in 2001, a Tory backbencher commended him to
fellow MPs as Britain's greatest living Parliamentarian.
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