The transition of British secondary schools from predominantly selective to predominantly comprehensive started with the issuing of Circular 10/65 by the Department of Education and Science under a Labour government in 1965. The intention was to transform a highly stratified system into a more equal one. However, this study shows that the new system was in fact highly diverse and retained features of the selective system, thus preserving the middle-class advantage into the comprehensive era. This overview draws on a range of sources, including information collected from the National Child Development Study of pupils born in 1958.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the growth of interest in the urban past was one of the most prominent developments in historical studies in the United Kingdom. In large part, this was due to the work of the late H. J. Dyos, Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester, as teacher, writer and propagandist. This book brings together some of Dyos's most important and influential essays, written over nearly thirty years. At one level, this book may be read as a fitting memorial to the work, influence and writings of a first-rate historian; at another, it furnishes an indispensable guide to the study of urban development and the nineteenth-century city and to the perspective which that study affords on the urban present.

'Toccata and Fugue (ignite the sky)' is a book for the inquisitive, the contentious, the aficionado of ideas, and anyone else wielding opinions on why we are who we are. Douglas, a wealthy socialite with mother issues, lacks all conviction, but is full of certainty, especially about the value of gender lopsided sexual gatherings and other men's wives. His young friend, Robert, has doubts about everything, especially himself, but believes that there is, or should be, a moral order to life, although he isn't sure what it is. Starting from Douglas' position of certainty and Robert's of doubt, there follows the first of three conversational chains, each chain comprising one day, that passing from one set of characters to the next, roams through ideas that, consciously or unconsciously, form a complex of interrelated concepts that animate and determine individual, social, and national perspectives. This is, perhaps, an improbable book; a mad, nimble, questionable book that questions much that is generally believed to be beyond questioning, and should anyone be persuaded to any presented point or perspective, its final conversation provides means to oppose its own presentations, as should any honest argument. Unlikely of a book as it may be, frequently skirting the outside of the social fringe of normal conversational material, it nonetheless holds true to its underlying concern: Who are we and why are we who we are?