Ah, the past. A time when children could play in the snow without a helmet, crampons and a risk assessment report. When footballs were made from rhino hide and cricket was played with one pad, if you were lucky.

“When I Were a Lad”…looks at the glorious – yet – risky childhoods of yesteryear before the Health and Safety officers told us we couldn’t do everything because it was too dangerous. It reflects on a time when children were allowed in with the animals at London Zoo; a time before the car seatbelt was invented (let alone used); a time when you were allowed to dress up endangered species in goalkeeping kit and take penalties against them. The authors have trawled through the major historic archives to find some glorious photo opportunities where the safety angle of the participants was the last thing anyone thought of.

Children perch happily on lethal, limbmangling machinery, stand all-smiles on live crocodiles, feed brown bears with their hands and get scooped from the street by passing tram conductors. In one photo they happily pose on recovered artillery shells.

Cerdic is the nephew of a great warrior who died a hero of the Anglo-Saxon country of Deira.

Growing up in a quiet village, he dreams of the glories of battle and of one day writing his name into the sagas. He experiences the true horrors of war, however, when his home is attacked, his sister kidnapped, his family betrayed and his uncle’s legendary sword stolen.

Cerdic is thrown into the struggles that will determine the future of 6th century Britain and must show courageous leadership and overcome treachery, to save his kingdom, rescue his sister and return home with his uncle’s sword.

Written by local author and GP.

Dawn and Frank wake up one wet November morning in the flat above their pub, the Old Spring. Today they have to meet the brewery representative, Tim Green, and track down an error in their books – or face the consequences. Richard Francis’ novel is full of sadness and laughter, celebrating the capacity of the English pub to weave together a community of seemingly random encounters. Readers can walk into its pages as if into the Old Spring itself and become surrounded by people’s jokes, hopes and fears, by lifes biggest issues and smallest joys. ‘A wonderfully boozy evocation and celebration of pub life’

CYCLE routes, including those between Rugby and Warwick, feature in a new Midlands guidebook launched by the AA and UK’s leading sustainable transport charity Sustrans.

The Midlands version is among eight new guidebooks released by the pairing, providing information about routes across the UK.

The Mespot letters of Frederick Witts, dating from December 1915 to December 1920, span a pivotal period of modern history in Iraq. As commander of No.2 Mobile Bridging Train, Witts was responsible for the crossing of the Tigrisat the Shumran bend in February 1917. This hugely difficult feat proved to be the beginning of the end to three hundred and fifty years of continuous Ottoman rule in Mesopotamia.

After the war Witts, as Brigade Major, was active in Kurdistan and on the Upper Euphrates, and later joined the staff of General Coningham, the most prominent British commander during the 1920 insurrection. Covering the peculiarities of day to day life in the officers’ mess, the harshness of the country and the ordeals of war against the Turk and Arab, Frederick Witts’ letters, written with affection to his aged mother in Upper Slaughter, give a compelling account of the life and thoughts of a British officer on service in Mesopotamia. Happily some letters from his mother to him also survive, and they give a vivid sense of the difficulties of life just after the first war for a Cotswold squarson family deprived of servants.