This wonderful book will be our bestseller over October, November and December. And deservedly so. Indeed no-one with an interest in Warwickshire can afford to be without it. For not only is it a delight to dip into, as I have found out, but it also repays close study if you want to know more about Warwickshire’s environment let alone it’s wildflowers. It explains how the local landscape has come to look the way it does, and how wildflowers have adapted to the challenges and opportunities associated with some six thousand years of local human activity. Whether it’s a section on the history and structure of the county’s arable farmland or one on where to find wetlands of all kinds and what you will find there, you’ll never be short of something to add to your knowledge, and above all make you want to get out and about. For the expert the information contained in the book is obviously incomparable, but for someone like myself it will continue to add interest and enjoyment to my own casual forays into the countryside. I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to buy this book. The photographs are magnificent, and at just £15.95 it’s terrific value.

A Review by Frances Smith

Unlike many celebrity memoirs, this book really is written by Sheila Hancock which is probably one of the reasons for its success. Telling their two stories, her own and John Thaw’s from early childhood, Sheila intersperses each chapter with diary entries from the recent past. Thus towards the end of the book, we reach the time of John’s illness and his death, already knowing much of the background to these events. The stories are told with candour and love. We learn that Hancock herself was a clever child, and this intelligence has shown itself throughout her acting career and also now in her writing. The book is moving, funny and informative. I understand much more now about stage fright, about depression, alcoholism, faith and love as well as about John and Sheila themselves.

A Review By Keith Smith

I reviewed this in hardback a few months ago and since then we have been lucky enough to have Chris Mullin as one of our visiting speakers in October 2009. What a charming man he is and of course what interesting tales he has to tell. I am a sucker for diaries and autobiographies in any case. I can’t get enough of them, whether it’s the splendid childhood memoirs of Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, or the letters of the Mitford sisters, or the Alan Clark diaries…they have such an immediacy, and force us to pass judgement all the time. Chris Mullin’s diaries have been so positively reviewed it must be embarrassing for him…to have the Leader of The Opposition say they are destined to be handed out as leaving presents in offices all over Whitehall for years to come is praise indeed, or is there a little double entendre?

What strikes me most in the diaries is what it reveals of the apparatus of government and how little one can influence it, especially from the position of Minister. This is an old refrain, and I think back to the Crossman Diaries where we see him becoming increasingly frustrated at his total inability to change events. With Chris Mullin it is almost a resigned acceptance of the lack of power and a fascination with watching the levers really being pulled at the top of the centrally-controlled machine. In fact Chris’s friends and colleagues couldn’t understand why he wanted to give up being a powerful Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee with regular and constant access to ‘the man’ for the veneer of a Ministerial desk. It certainly wasn’t the Ministerial car he wanted as he had to fight tooth and nail not to be driven in one!

Do the diaries tell us anything we don’t know about the Blair years? Possibly nothing spectacular, but they do tell us what it was like, how it all worked, how the personalities got on with each other (or didn’t), and indeed how it all looked from the inside or, as Chris modestly puts it, from the foothills. They also reveal much of the daily grind of being a constituency MP with all the responsibilities that involves (and which we almost always forget). If they move the chief political commentator for The Times to declare that “they deserve to become the central text for understanding the Blair years” then they deserve our attention. They are honest, critical, elegant, revealing, humorous and modest. To the apoplexy of the whips, Chris Mullin was for a time the only person appointed to government who voted against the Iraq War. That in itself tells us a lot (about him and his colleagues).

If you haven’t read them yet, the issue of the paperback is the ideal time. You won’t be disappointed.

A Review by Louise Blake

I had to deliberately slow down my reading of Wolf Hall because I just did not want it to end. I was transported to 16^th Century London and experienced all the characters in living colour. Many of us will be familiar with the names: Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Wolsey, the Duke of Norfolk, Anne Boleyn and King Henry VIII.  However, Hilary Mantel breathes life into these famous names from history and from her pages they become three dimensional. The protagonist is Thomas Cromwell. Here is someone, unsure of his birth date, who ran away from his abusive blacksmith father when still a child, fought as a soldier for the French, went into trade and banking in Europe, returned to England and fell under the patronage of Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York.  Through sheer hard work, iron will, charm and intellect, Thomas Cromwell became instrumental in reshaping England  to reflect Henry VIII’s desires. I couldn’t help but admire the character and even sought out the portrait of Thomas Cromwell by Hans Holbein. I savoured every  page and twist and turn of this tale. If you enjoy historical fiction, history or just a darn good read, then choose Wolf Hall.