Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

Where would Britain be without coal? In brilliant social history, Jeremy Paxman tells the story of how the black stuff has shaped every aspect of Britain. Coal mining in the UK dates back to Roman times, but in the twenty-first century has practically disappeared. In this history, Jeremy Paxman charts our vital relationship with coal and all the extraordinary change it has fuelled. Told through the stories of real people, Paxman travels the regions of the UK where communities were built around coal, to the industrial revolution, to the beginnings of time and coal's geological formation, to the great tragedies such as Aberfan, and to the picket lines of the miners' strike. In the brilliantly intelligent and attentive style of his bestselling book The English, Paxman here offers a fascinating and diverse history of British identity and social class, of high ambition and hard manual labor.