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Reading lists

Books to read if you love David Bowie

A journey through Britain then and now

Long Road from Jarrow

Sunday Times bestseller: Maconie walks North to South through Brexit Britain, retracing the route of the 1936 Jarrow Crusade. 80 years on he finds a divided, complex country that in some ways hasn't change at all and in others, is completely unrecognisable.

Maconie’s book is not only a heartfelt tribute to Wilkinson and the marchers, but a reaffirmation of the role of the personal within the political, and a rallying call for anyone stirred by the story of Jarrow

With yet another conservative government refusing to budge it is hard to avoid Maconie’s conclusion that persuading the uncommitted is as vital as ever

The result is this rich, evocative book. Part travelogue, part history, part examination of a nation in flux. It is all a delight ****

Footsore in spacetime, hiking simultaneously through memory and landscape, in Long Road from Jarrow Stuart Maconie shadows the defiant, desperate and dignified crusade of 1936 through a modern world where everything has changed except for the austerity, the poverty, the national and global instability, the worrying ascendancy of fascism, and the resilient decency of ordinary people. This is a necessary book; a necessary journey through English identity, and one which you’ll be glad that you embarked on. Now, yes, now is the hour.

An insightful impassioned and witty voyage through Brexit Britain that serves as both travelogue and social commentary

Stuart Maconie is a writer, broadcaster and journalist familiar to millions from his work in print, on radio and on TV. His previous bestsellers have included Cider with Roadies, Pies and Prejudice and Adventures on the High Teas, and he currently hosts the afternoon show on BBC 6music with Mark Radcliffe as well as weekly show The Freak Zone. Based in the cities of Birmingham and Manchester, he can also often be spotted on top of a mountain in the Lake District with a Thermos flask and individual pork pie.

The Sunday Times Bestseller 
 
'A tribute and a rallying call' - Guardian 
 
Three and half weeks. Three hundred miles. I saw roaring arterial highway and silent lanes, candlelit cathedrals and angry men in bad pubs. The Britain of 1936 was a land of beef paste sandwiches and drill halls. Now we are nation of vaping and nail salons, pulled pork and salted caramel. 
 
In the autumn of 1936, some 200 men from the Tyneside town of Jarrow marched 300 miles to London in protest against the destruction of their towns and industries. Precisely 80 years on, Stuart Maconie, walks from north to south retracing the route of the emblematic Jarrow Crusade. 
 
 Travelling down the country’s spine, Maconie moves through a land that is, in some ways, very much the same as the England of the 30s with its political turbulence, austerity, north/south divide, food banks and of course, football mania. Yet in other ways, it is completely unrecognisable. 
 
 Maconie visits the great cities as well as the sleepy hamlets, quiet lanes and roaring motorways. He meets those with stories to tell and whose voices build a funny, complex and entertaining tale of Britain, then and now.

In Search of the North at Play

The Pie At Night

Join Stuart Maconie as he clock off in the north of England

Maconie's enjoyment ... is obvious, and he makes it just as enjoyable for his readers

Maconie's engaging, conversational prose is full of telling detail, jokes and deft quotation ... [he has a] rare ability to convey the sense of people having a really good time'

His engaging, conversational prose is full of telling detail, terrific jokes and unfailingly deft quotation

History and politics are lightly woven through this account of a changing society, told with Maconie's typical gusto

Maconie's latest love letter to the North of England...is infectious, enlivened by terrific jokes

Factory, mine and mill. Industry, toil and grime. Its manufacturing roots mean we still see the North of England as a hardworking place. But, more than possibly anywhere else, the North has always known how to get dressed up, take itself out on the town and have a good time. After all, working and playing hard is its specialty, and Stuart Maconie is in search of what, exactly, this entails what it tells us about the North today. 
 
Following tip offs and rumour, Stuart takes trip to forgotten corners and locals’ haunts. From the tapas bars of Halifax to the caravan parks of Berwick Upon Tweed, from a Westhoughton bowling green to Manchester’s curry mile, via dog tracks and art galleries, dance floors and high fells, Stuart compares the new and old North, with some surprising results. 
 
The Pie at Night could be seen as a companion to the bestselling Pies and Prejudice, but it is not a sequel. After all, this is a new decade and the North is changing faster than ever. This is a revealing and digressive journey and a State of the North address, delivered from barstool, terrace, dress circle and hillside.

The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records

The People’s Songs

An original book to accompany Stuart Maconie's landmark Radio 2 series: a history of post-war Britain through pop music

One of the most insightful and purely readable books on pop music I think I have ever encountered

An unequivocal pleasure and highly recommended

The blend of research and conjecture is impressive

Maconie succeeds in being at once elegant and approachable, definititive but also self-deprecating

A fine writer: sharp, funny, tender and thoughtful

An engaging musical history lesson full of dry Wigan wit.

If there’s a purer, more  joyous and affectionate tribute to the power of popular songs, then I’d like to read it…

Maconie’s history of modern Britain filtered through pop songs is a fine example of a perfect marriage: Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again conjures up the British wartime resilience while The Strawbs’ Part of the Union sums up the bitter industrial conflict that defined the 1970s

These are the songs that we have listened to, laughed to, loved to and laboured to, as well as downed tools and danced to. 
 
Covering the last seven decades, Stuart Maconie looks at the songs that have sound tracked our changing times, and – just sometimes – changed the way we feel. Beginning with Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’, a song that reassured a nation parted from their loved ones by the turmoil of war, and culminating with the manic energy of ‘Bonkers’, Dizzee Rascal’s anthem for the push and rush of the 21st century inner city, The People’s Songs takes a tour of our island’s pop music, and asks what it means to us. 
 
This is not a rock critique about the 50 greatest tracks ever recorded. Rather, it is a celebration of songs that tell us something about a changing Britain during the dramatic and kaleidoscopic period from the Second World War to the present day. Here are songs about work, war, class, leisure, race, family, drugs, sex, patriotism and more, recorded in times of prosperity or poverty. This is the music that inspired haircuts and dance crazes, but also protest and social change. 
 
The companion to Stuart Maconie’s landmark Radio 2 series, The People’s Songs shows us the power of ‘cheap’ pop music,­ one of Britain’s greatest exports. These are the songs we worked to and partied to, and grown up and grown old to – from ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ to ‘Rehab', ‘She Loves You’ to ‘Star Man’, ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’ to ‘Radio Ga Ga’.

A People’s History of Modern Britain

Hope and Glory

Stuart Maconie travels around Britain, delving into the history of the 20th century to find the key moments that shaped us as a nation

A very engaging writer with a remarkably broad frame of reference

...compelling and often witty insight into the customs and mindsets of overlooked corners of Britain ... Maconie is an engaging and illuminating guide throughout

More serious than you might expect, copies should be available in every school

In Hope and Glory Stuart Maconie goes in search of the days that shaped the Britain we live in today. Taking one event from each decade of the 20th century, he visits the places where history happened and still echoes down the years. Stuart goes to Orgreave and Windsor, Wembley and Wootton Bassett, assembling a unique cast of Britons from Sir Edmund Hillary to Sid Vicious along the way. 
 
It’s quite a trip, full of sex and violence and the occasional scone and jigsaw. From pop stars to politicians, Suffragettes to punks, this is a journey around Britain in search of who we are.

Travels in pursuit of the key moments of 20th century that have shaped us as a nation

Brought to you by Penguin. 
 
In Hope and Glory Stuart goes in search of the places, people and events of the century we have just left behind that have shaped the look and character of modern Britain. From the death of Victoria to the demise of New Labour, he takes a single event from each decade of the 20th century that offers up a defining moment in our history and then goes in search of its legacy today. The death of a queen, a bloody war, a nation on strike, a first broadcast, a ship coming into land, reaching for the top of the world, an epic football match, a youth rebellion, a pop concert and an election - each event in turn has shaped our national culture and spirit to make us who we are. Some were glorious days, some tragic, even shameful, but each has played its part - from sport to music, politics to war, industrial relations to exploration - in making modern Britain. 
1901 - the death of Victoria and the rise of British women; 1916 - the First World War in the national psyche; 1926 - the General Strike and industrial conflict; 1936 - how the British invented television; 1948 - the docking of the Empire Windrush and multi-cultural Britain; 1953 - Edmund Hillary's ascent of Everest and the tradition of British adventure; 1966 - how we won the World Cup and our continued obsession with the game we gave the world; 1977 - Royalists and Rebels, the Queen's Silver Jubilee and the rise of punk; 1985 - how Live Aid gave birth to celebrity culture; 1997 - the rise and fall of Blair's spin revolution.

Lives Less Ordinary

How to Survive on Tour with a Rock Band

The Lives Less Ordinary series brings you the most exciting, adventurous and entertaining true-life writing that is out there, for men who are time-poor but want the best. Lives Less Ordinary drops you into extreme first-hand accounts of human experience, whether that's the adrenaline-pumping heights of professional sport, the brutality of the modern battlefield, the casual violence of the criminal world, the mind-blowing frontiers of science, or the excesses of rock 'n' roll, high finance and Hollywood. Lives Less Ordinary also brings you some of the finest comic voices around, on every subject from toilet etiquette to Paul Gascoigne. 
 
Anyone who every dreams of being in the music business thinks that 'being with the band' is an instant passport to free drugs, women and hedonistic, rock 'n' roll good times. But Stuart Maconie hilariously tells a different story of the slow-drip hell of continental travel in the claustrophobic confines a small van with a certain death metal trio. 
 
This digital bite has been extracted from Stuart Maconie's brilliant book Cider with Roadies.

In Search of Middle England

Adventures on the High Teas

The Sunday Times bestselling author is back and in search of Middle England

Adventures on the High Teas is magnificent: sprawling in its research, illuminating, quirky, saddening, fun, often angry and always intensely readable.

Stuart Maconie discovers whether Middle England is a place or a feeling... all described with his usual charm and wit.

Maconie's gift is finding beauty in the most unexpected places and after reading this you'll want to call up Google maps and plan your own journey. It's a wonderfully enriching read.

Taken as a whole, the book amounts to a time capsule of England as it is now; it is, in its quirky offbeat way, a celebration of this country's extra-ordinary capacity to accomodate change while remaining essentially the same.

It is these juxtapositions of the high and the low, the hip and the furiously unfashionable, or, if you like, the sublime and the ridiculous, that make Maconie such an entertaining tour guide.

I love Stuart Maconie - he's one of Briatin's truest and most comforting voices. In High Teas... he explodes the myths and stereotypes of Middle England. My own preconcived notions were banished with this delightful, warm postcard from some of England's most eccentric places.

Puffed up and preposterous, but Piers is the Pepys of the celebrity age.

Everyone talks about 'Middle England'. Sometimes they mean something bad, like a lynch mob of Daily Mail readers, and sometimes they mean something good, like a pint of ale in a sleepy Cotswold village in summer twilight. But just where and what is Middle England? Stuart Maconie didn't know either, so he packed his Thermos and sandwiches and set off to find out... 
 
Is Middle England about tradition and decency or closed minds and bigotry? Is it maypoles and evensong, or flooded market towns and binge drinkers in the park? And is Slough really as bad as Ricky Gervais and John Betjeman make out? From Shakespeare to JK Rowling, Vaughan Williams to Craig David, William Morris to B&amp;Q, Stuart Maconie leads the expedition, with plenty of stop-offs for tea and scones, to discover the truth.

In search of the North

Pies and Prejudice

A hilarious journey in search of the real North, northerners and northernness, from the bestselling author of Cider With Roadies

Stuart Maconie is the best thing to come out of Wigan since the A58 to Bolton

An heir to Alan Bennett ... stirring and rather wonderful

Funnier than Bill Bryson. There's lots to love about Maconie's North - even for Southern Jessies

Maconie makes a jovial, self-deprecating narrator. Sharp and funny

A lyrical, passionate, humorous and argumentative tour du force ... Imagine Nick Danzinger meets Nik Cohen meets Ricky Tomlinson and you've got the perfect blend of humorously incisive northern-travel writing. An early contender for best travel book of the year.

Affectionate, informed, conversationally honest, polemical

One of the delights of Pies and Prejudice is Maconie's prose...behind Maconie's crafted wordplay is a serious thesis: that the North is more than its image

Witty and wise, with more good lines than the Angel of the North

Lyrical, passionate, humorous and argumentative tour de force...an early contender for the best travel book of the year

The books succeeds...because of his care and wit in revealing something of these wonderful cities

Something far more thoughtful here than just a travelogue played for laughs.

[Stuart Maconie's] search for his northern soul has just the right balance of pies and prejudice to be right good

A Northerner in exile, Stuart Maconie goes on a journey in search of the North, attempting to discover where the clichés end and the truth begins. He travels from Wigan Pier to Blackpool Tower and Newcastle's Bigg Market to the Lake District to find his own Northern Soul, encountering along the way an exotic cast of chippy Scousers, pie-eating woollybacks, topless Geordies, mad-for-it Mancs, Yorkshire nationalists and brothers in southern exile. 
 
The bestselling Pies and Prejudice is a hugely enjoyable journey around the north of England.

Cider With Roadies

The hilarious coming-of-age memoir from the bestselling author of Pies and Prejudice

The perfect pop fan's life ... effortlessly articulate

If you only read one personal music odyssey, make it this one

A working class boy who now, on air, challenges Stephen Fry's spry wit, Maconie celebrates his younger self modestly and fluently, pausing only for regular rib-ticklers

Exuberantly anecdotal, witty and poignant

Cider with Roadies is the true story of a boy's obsessive relationship with pop. A life lived through music from Stuart's audience with the Beatles (aged 3); his confessions as a pubescent prog rocker; a youthful gymnastic dalliance with northern soul; the radical effects of punk on his politics, homework and trouser dimensions; playing in crap bands and failing to impress girls; writing for the NME by accident; living the sex, drugs (chiefly lager in a plastic glass) and rock and roll lifestyle; discovering the tawdry truth behind the glamour and knowing when to ditch it all for what really matters. 
 
From Stuart's four minutes in a leisure centre with MC Hammer to four days in a small van with Napalm Death it's a life-affirming journey through the land where ordinary life and pop come together to make music.

Stuart Maconie

A Story of Britain and How to Save it

'He is as funny as Bryson and as wise as Orwell' Observer 
 
It was the spirit of our finest hour, the backbone of our post-war greatness, and it promoted some of the boldest and most brilliant schemes this isle has ever produced: it was the Welfare State, and it made you and I. But now it's under threat, and we need to save it. 
 
In this timely and provocative book, Stuart Maconie tells Britain’s Welfare State story through his own history of growing up as a northern working class boy. What was so bad about properly funded hospitals, decent working conditions and affordable houses? And what was so wrong about student grants, free eye tests and council houses? And where did it all go so wrong? Stuart looks toward Britain’s future, making an emotional case for believing in more than profit and loss; and championing a just, fairer society.

The Nanny State Made Me

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