This book is about an unusual journey: a unique journey through everyday surroundings. Rob Walters decided to become a shoeshine boy. He stowed his shoeshine kit, a tent, and a few items of clothing in a trailer, connected the trailer to his push bike and set off from Oxford to visit the old shoe-making cities of middle England. Along the way he polished many shoes, met lots of interesting people, pedalled many miles, and gained a fascinating insight into his own country from a rather unique perspective. Rejected by some, welcomed by many, he polished shoes in shopping centres, solicitor's offices, a kite festival, railway stations, campsites, street corners, and a bewildering selection of pubs. He polished the shoes of dossers, company directors, criminals, Morris dancers, publicans, bikers, policemen, schoolboys, reporters, a bowling green groundsman, an Icelander, and a Latvian - to name just a few. He slept in fields, in woods, and on the edge of golf courses. He was ejected from the Norfolk Show and welcomed into the offices of lawyers and fruit importers. During his journey he met members of the Household Cavalry, topless protestors, a homeless joss stick seller, a man who stole baths in hotels, a submariner, a beaten housewife, a disenchanted solicitor, a rubber recycler, a toyshop owner, and two ghost guides - amongst others. All of them had a story to tell: some sad, some amusing. It is their tales and Rob's own incisive observations that are related in this unusual book. Reading it will transport you to Northampton, the centre of the English shoe making tradition; then through the Fens to East Anglia; back across the country to the Midlands; down along the River Severn to Gloucester; and then over the Cotswolds to Oxford. Progress is at a comfortable cycling pace along the country roads and through the sleepy villages, yet interrupted regularly by diversions into the vibrancy of the cities.

Reviews It's good, very good Peter Ashby FRSA, Consultant. I read the first few chapters of Margaret and Dorothy in Conversation last night and enjoyed it - on a number of levels: the well-told and absorbing story of a developing relationship; the lesser-known biographical details (well, lesser known to me anyway); the content of the discussions -fundamental opposing political ideas discussed intelligently and without rancour. D'Arcy Vallance, Author and ELT Consultant Really enjoyed the book. The subject matter is fascinating, whetted my appetite to read more ... haven't read anything on Margaret (the blood might boil ) and limited stuff on Dorothy. Maureen Minton, Oxford City Guide. ...it's the topics of conversation which make it an interesting read. Most of the subjects are still with us and contentious like the social issues of gender, bringing up children, education and women's equal place in society, the morality of science. Bjorn Runngren. Swedish Anglophile. Overview A fascinating set of fiction from fact conversations between two extraordinary women. Margaret Thatcher is known to all. Dorothy Hodgkin should be: she is Britain's only female scientific Nobel Prize winner, a reward for her groundbreaking work in determining the structure of penicillin and vitamin B12. It is difficult to imagine women more different in character and political beliefs, yet their lives were closely linked: Dorothy was Margaret's tutor when the younger woman studied chemistry at Oxford University; Margaret, as Prime Minister, invited her old tutor to lunch at Chequers. The setting for the conversations is Margaret's fourth year at Oxford while she carried out research work in Dorothy's crystallography lab. They range widely over topics from socialism to sexual freedom. No one knows exactly what they did discuss, but the conversations are soundly based in the factual world of post war Britain and reflect the characters of these two very interesting women."

This popular book was updated in 2013 just thirteen years after the death of the glamourous film star Hedy Lamarr. She was a famous Hollywood star and the first woman to appear naked on film. George Antheil was a piano player and composer. So just how did these two come to invent the latest technology used by the mobile phone? Or did they? She was labelled 'the most beautiful girl in the world' and he 'the bad boy of music' yet way back in 1942 they took out a patent covering the vital radio technique that we now call spread spectrum.

This absorbing book traces the eventful and sometimes scandalous lives of Hedy and George. It tells the fascinating story of radio and the ongoing battle to make it secure and of similar quality to wired communication. Spread spectrum emerged from that battle to become the solution of choice for anything from mobile phones to wireless computer networks.

England has been at peace for as long as most people can remember - but there are still battles being waged in its towns and villages. Nearly 400 years ago Sir Jacob Astley set out for Oxford from the town of Bridgnorth with a small army raised from Wales and the West. He was the king's last hope in a disastrous civil war. But Astley did not reach the Royalist capital. His force was attacked by Parliamentarian forces near to Stow on the Wold where the survivors were locked in the local church and where blood fl owed through the streets. In today's battles there is little or no bloodshed - though blood pressure sometimes runs dangerously high. In this book, the historic Battle of Stow provides the backcloth to the battles of today - battles that are taking place in many communities across the country. These are the battles waged between residents and their politicians, between ordinary people and big business, between the locals and the incomers, between those with roots and those who are just passing through. Here the foot soldiers are more likely to wield a pen or placard versus the pike or musket of the seventeenth century.

From heart-stopping accounts of apparitions, manifestations and related supernatural phenomena to first-hand encounters with ghouls and spirits, this collection of stories contains new and well-known spooky tales from around the historic city of Oxford.

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