Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

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The one criticism I will level at Paxman is that he's political views can sometimes become all too clear I think he should have taken a more neutral view at times.

Just the initial walk from shaft to coalface, much of it spent stooping, crouching or crawling, reduced him – a fit 32-year-old – to agony. As Engels put it: 'there is no occupation in which a man may meet his end in so many diverse ways as this one'. This means, in particular, that they lay a heavy emphasis on the report that Nicholas Ridley (later a minister in the Thatcher government) drew up in 1977 for tackling strikes in nationalised industries, extracts of which were leaked to the press. Before gas lighting was available, people either accepted the dark or depended upon candlelight and lanterns. As she explains, “ Extraction Technologies sets out to show that industrialization of underground resource extraction shaped literary form and genre in the first century of the industrial era, from the 1830s to the 1930s, just as literary form and genre contributed to new ways of imagining an extractive earth.I don’t find that the absent or non-existent treasure in the “empty” pit in Treasure Island is “exhausted” or that it “explodes the fantasy of open-handed nature” (110), nor do I find convincing that Nostromo, a novel in which a supposedly exhausted mine turns out to be rich in silver, fits her scheme, in large part because of the book’s emphasis upon its protagonist and Decoud. a really comprehensive history of coal mining in Britian, albeit a little lacking when discussing the 1984/85 miners strike but that's likely down to my personal interest. Paxman's book could hardly be more colourful, and I enjoyed each page enormously' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, SUNDAY TIMES 'Vividly told . Having previously read Jeremy's books on the British Empire and the First World War and found them very rewarding to read, I was happy to give a chance to what otherwise sounded like a book regarding a niche. He had never smoked in his life, but had worked down the pit since the age of 14; surviving the hard graft and toil and seeing his brother buried by a rock fall.

As someone who can't imagine anything worse than having to work underground in dark, hot, cramped spaces, the thought of this is unbearable. I found the writing style to be generally readable although the economic bits were a little dry and there were some odd figurative phrases. Beynon and Hudson, however, are unsentimental about the lives of miners and sceptical of the notion that the nationalisation of the mines in 1947 produced a golden age for those who worked in them.And then we come to the most dreadful woman in Britain's political history and her brutal vindictive and duplicitous behaviour is starkly brought into the light. Paxman also examines the role that coal played in the insustrial revolution and the military, economic and political importance of coal to the development of Britain.