The Crash that Stopped Britain


Book Description

The Hatfield train crash on October 17th last year killed four people and caused several months of social chaos. This is the frightening story of the unnecessary ruin of the British rail system.




The Quintinshill Conspiracy


Book Description

It was the railway's Titanic. A horrific crash involving five trains in which 230 died and 246 were injured, it remains the worst disaster in the long history of Britain's rail network.The location was the isolated signal box at Quintinshill, on the Anglo-Scottish border near Gretna; the date, 22 May 1915. Amongst the dead and injured were women and children but most of the casualties were Scottish soldiers on their way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign. Territorials setting off for war on a distant battlefield were to die, not in battle, but on home soil victims, it was said, of serious incompetence and a shoddy regard for procedure in the signal box, resulting in two signalmen being sent to prison. Startling new evidence reveals that the failures which led to the disaster were far more complex and wide-reaching than signalling negligence. Using previously undisclosed documents, the authors have been able to access official records from the time and have uncovered ahighly shocking and controversial truth behind what actually happened at Quintinshill and the extraordinary attempts to hide the truth.As featured in Dumfries & Galloway Life magazine, January 2014.




The Real Crash


Book Description

You might be thinking everything's okay: the stock market is on the rise, jobs are growing, the worst of it is over. You'd be wrong. In The Real Crash, New York Times bestselling author Peter D. Schiff argues that America is enjoying a government-inflated bubble, one that reality will explode . . . with disastrous consequences for the economy and for each of us. Schiff demonstrates how the infusion of billions of dollars of stimulus money has only dug a deeper hole: the United States government simply spends too much and does not collect enough money to pay its debts, and in the end, Americans from all walks of life will face a crushing consequence. We're in hock to China, we can't afford the homes we own, and the entire premise of our currency—backed by the full faith and credit of the United States—is false. Our system is broken, Schiff says, and there are only two paths forward. The one we're on now leads to a currency and sovereign debt crisis that will utterly destroy our economy and impoverish the vast majority of our citizens. However, if we change course, the road ahead will be a bit rockier at first, but the final destination will be far more appealing. If we want to avoid complete collapse, we must drastically reduce government spending—eliminate entire agencies, end costly foreign military escapades and focus only on national defense—and stop student loan or mortgage interest deductions, as well as drug wars and bank-and-business bailouts. We must also do what no politician or pundit has proposed: America should declare bankruptcy, restructure its debts, and reform our system from the ground up. Persuasively argued and provocative, The Real Crash explains how we got into this mess, how we might get out of it, and what happens if we don't. And, with wisdom born from having predicted the Crash of 2008, Peter Schiff explains how to protect yourself, your family, your money, and your country against what he predicts.




Crashed


Book Description

WINNER OF THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK "An intelligent explanation of the mechanisms that produced the crisis and the response to it...One of the great strengths of Tooze's book is to demonstrate the deeply intertwined nature of the European and American financial systems."--The New York Times Book Review From the prizewinning economic historian and author of Shutdown and The Deluge, an eye-opening reinterpretation of the 2008 economic crisis (and its ten-year aftermath) as a global event that directly led to the shockwaves being felt around the world today. We live in a world where dramatic shifts in the domestic and global economy command the headlines, from rollbacks in US banking regulations to tariffs that may ignite international trade wars. But current events have deep roots, and the key to navigating today’s roiling policies lies in the events that started it all—the 2008 economic crisis and its aftermath. Despite initial attempts to downplay the crisis as a local incident, what happened on Wall Street beginning in 2008 was, in fact, a dramatic caesura of global significance that spiraled around the world, from the financial markets of the UK and Europe to the factories and dockyards of Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, forcing a rearrangement of global governance. With a historian’s eye for detail, connection, and consequence, Adam Tooze brings the story right up to today’s negotiations, actions, and threats—a much-needed perspective on a global catastrophe and its long-term consequences.




Transport in Britain


Book Description

British transport, 1750-2000.




The Real Crash


Book Description

Bestselling financial author and economist Schiff warns of the inevitable bankruptcy facing America and lays out not only how the U.S. got here, but what our government can do about it.




Mobilities


Book Description

Issues of movement – of people, things, information and ideas – are central to people's lives and to most organisations. From oil wars to SMS texting, from airport expansion controversies to the decline of walking, from slave-trading to global terrorism, from global warming to teleworking, issues of ‘mobility’ are centre-stage upon many academic and policy agendas. These topics and issues are increasingly analysed as part of a concern with ‘mobility’ which this wide-ranging book both describes and seeks to develop. John Urry has been at the centre of these debates and he draws upon an extensive array of new research and material to develop what he calls the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ for the social sciences. He shows how this paradigm makes comprehensible social phenomena which were previously opaque. He examines how ‘mobilities’ each presuppose a ‘system’ that permits predictable and relatively risk-free repetition. The book outlines various such systems and then analyses their intersecting implications for social inequality, for social networks and meetings, for the nature of places and for alternative mobility futures. Mobilities is thus both an analysis of different mobilities historically and in the present and an argument that the social world will be analysed quite differently once peoples’ lives, organisations, states and global institutions are seen to be dealing with extensive and hugely contested mobility processes. This book rewrites social science through a mobilities paradigm.




Dear Austen


Book Description

Accidents happen to other people. But on On May 10th 2002, Nina Bawden discovered what it feels like to be one of the 'other people'. It was to be a lovely outing to Cambridge for a friend's birthday party. Nina Bawden and her husband Austen Kark boarded the 12:45 from Kings Cross and settled down with their books and papers. A few minutes later the train derailed. Seven people were killed and 76 badly hurt. Nina Bawden was gravely injured and Austen was killed instantly. In this powerful and poignant letter to her husband, Nina Bawden uses her considerable writing skills to try and make sense of it all. She explains how she - now in her late 70s - found herself the outspoken spokesperson for the survivors of the crash, interviewed here and abroad and even one of the characters portrayed in David Hare's The Permanent Way. Although liability has finally been admitted, as of October 2004, there has been no resolution to this tragedy, nor a public enquiry into how it happened.




Britain's Railway Disasters


Book Description

Passengers on the early railways took their lives in their hands every time they got on board a train. It was so dangerous that they could buy an insurance policy with their ticket. There seemed to be an acceptance that the level danger was tolerable in return for the speed of travel that was now available to them.??British Railway Disasters looks at the most serious railway accidents from the origins of the development of the train up to the present day. Seriousness is judged on the number of those who died. Information gleaned from various newspaper reports is compared with official reports on the accidents.??The book will appeal to all those with a fascination for rail transport as well as those with a love of history.??Michael Foley examines the social context of how injuries and deaths on the railways were seen in the early days, as well as how claims in the courts became more common, leading to a series of medical investigations as to how travelling and crashing at high speed affected the human body




Reappraisals


Book Description

“Exhilarating . . . brave and forthright.” —The New York Times Book Review “Perhaps the greatest single collection of thinking on the political, diplomatic, social, and cultural history of the past century.” —Forbes We have entered an age of forgetting. Our world, we insist, is unprecedented, wholly new. The past has nothing to teach us. Drawing provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from Jewish intellectuals and the challenge of evil in the recent European past to the interpretation of the Cold War and the displacement of history by heritage, the late historian Tony Judt takes us beyond what we think we know of the past to explain how we came to know it, showing how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth—making over understanding and denial over memory. Reappraisals offers a much-needed road map back to the historical sense we urgently need. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.