The Spiv

Download or read book The Spiv written by Jeff Hopkins and published by MoshPit Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-26 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A retired sports’ journalist who we come to know only by his nickname, ‘Lumpy’, decides to tell the life story of one of his earliest and most interesting friends, Robbie Sparrow. The writer is caught in a dilemma; should he ‘tell it like it was’, or sanitise a life for a more palatable product. After consultation with the subject of the proposed book, ‘Lumpy’ finally decides to recount the story ‘warts and all’. So we share Robbie’s naughty, and sometimes wicked childhood, his adventurous and experimental teenage years, and the early part of his working life, which sees him fishing commercially up and down the West Australian coast. The last fishing trip results in a period of incarceration in Fremantle Gaol. Called up for National Service, Robbie subsequently does a year-long tour of duty in Vietnam. Upon his return he retreats to a bush block in the great southern of Western Australia. ‘Lumpy’ helps his friend develop the block and build his house, and meets Angela for the first time. Then with commitments at two America’s Cups, ‘Lumpy’ and Robbie lose touch. When there is a ‘twitch on the thread’ everything has changed, and not for the better. A previous ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ between Robbie and Cliff Birmingham, honoured years before, is now paid back in spades, and Robbie Sparrow has some ‘golden years’, and a positive influence on some young lives. ‘Lumpy’ gets an ending to his book, but it really wasn’t the one he wanted.

Download or read book The Spiv and the Architect written by Richard Quentin Donald Hornsey and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how London's queer culture was influenced by postwar efforts to create model citizens ...

Download or read book Black Market Britain written by Mark Roodhouse and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2013-03-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain's underground economy flourished during the 1940s and early 1950s thanks to rationing and price control, producers, traders, and professional criminals helped consumers to get a little extra on the side, from under the counter, or off the back of a lorry. Yet widespread evasion of regulations designed to ensure fair shares for all did not undermine the austerity policies that characterised these years and its vital role in securing compliance with economic regulation. In Black Market Britain, Mark Roodhouse argues that Britons showed self-restraint in their illegal dealings. The means, motives, and opportunities for evasion were not lacking. The shortages were real, regulations were not watertight, and enforcement was haphazard. Fairness, not patriotism and respect for the law, is the key to understanding this self-restraint. By invoking popular notions of a fair price, a fair profit, and a fair share, government rhetoric limited black marketeering as would-be evaders had to justify their offences both to themselves and others. Black Market Britain underlines the importance of fairness to those seeking a richer understanding of economic life in modern Britain.

Download or read book The Bebop Scene in London's Soho, 1945-1950 written by Ray Kinsella and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-23 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to tell the story of the bebop subculture in London’s Soho, a subculture that emerged in 1945 and reached its pinnacle in 1950. In an exploration via the intersections of race, class and gender, it shows how bebop identities were constructed and articulated. Combining a wide range of archival research and theory, the book evocatively demonstrates how the scene evolved in Soho’s clubs, the fashion that formed around the music, drug usage amongst a contingent of the group, and the moral panic which led to the police raids on the clubs between 1947 and 1950. Thereafter it maps the changes in popular culture in Soho during the 1950s, and argues that the bebop story is an important precedent to the institutional harassment of black-related spaces and culture that continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book therefore rewrites the first chapter of the ‘classic’ subcultural canon, and resets the subcultural clock; requiring us to rethink the periodization and social make-up of British post-war youth subcultures.

Download or read book The Home Front in Britain written by Janis Lomas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-29 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Home Front in Britain explores the British Home Front in the last 100 years since the outbreak of WW1. Case studies critically analyse the meaning and images of the British home and family in times war, challenging prevalent myths of how working and domestic life was shifted by national conflict.

Download or read book Classes and Cultures written by Ross McKibbin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book McKibbin investigates the ways in which class culture characterised English society and intruded every aspect of life, during the period 1918-1951. He also shows the increasing effects of Americanisation on this culture.

Download or read book We Can Take It! written by Mark Connelly and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: `We Can Take It!' shows that the British remember the war in a peculiar way, thanks to a mix of particular images and evidence. Our memory has been shaped by material which is completely removed from historical reality. These images (including complete inventions) have combined to make a new history. The vision is mostly cosy and suits the way in which the Britons conceive of themselves: dogged, good humoured, occasionally bumbling, unified and enjoying diversity. In fact Britons load their memory towards the early part of the war (Dunkirk, Blitz, Battle of Britain) rather than when we were successful in the air or against Italy and Germany with invasions. This suits our love of being the underdog, fighting against the odds, and being in a crisis. Conversely, the periods of the war during which Britain was in the ascendant are, perversely, far more hazy in the public memory.