Rees John

For nearly 2,000 years, London has been a breeding ground for radical ideas, home to thinkers, heretics and rebels. A People's History of London presents fascinating portraits of the heroic idealists who made the city their home. Lindsey German and John Rees bring to life the dissident priest John Wycliff and the Levellers' Civil War struggle. They delve into the travails of the silk weavers, match girls and dockers who crusaded for workers' rights. And they recount the Battle of Cable Street, where East Enders took on Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts. This updated edition recounts the battles of recent years: the Grenfell disaster, the inspiring Palestine movement, and the fight for a city fit for its people, not one hobbled by developers and landlords.

<i>The Fiery Spirits</i> tells the story of the MPs in parliament and the protestors in the streets who played a pivotal role in the English Civil Wars. Through their stories, John Rees reveals the hidden history of the republicans who brought a desperate nation to the brink of revolution.<br><br>At the start of the English Civil Wars, very few could have imagined that the country would soon become a republic. Practically alone in his republicanism was Henry Marten, MP and future regicide. But he soon gathered around him a group of radical Parliamentarians that included William Strode, the parliamentary firebrand, Alexander Rigby, the formidable soldier, and Sir Peter Wentworth, descendant of a long line of opponents of monarchy. They formed the nucleus of a group that allied itself to a popular movement outside parliament to defeat the king politically and militarily.<br><br>In <i>The Fiery Spirits</i>, Rees tells how Marten and his radical allies overcame both moderate Parliamentarians and Royalists to change the face of England forever, establishing a kingdom without a crown.

Excerpt:The voice of the clergyman intoned the last sad hope of humanity, the final prayer was said, and the mourners turned away, leaving Mrs. Turold to take her rest in a bleak Cornish churchyard among strangers, far from the place of her birth and kindred.The fact would not have troubled her if she had known. In life she had been a nonentity; in death she was not less. At least she could now mix with her betters without reproach, free (in the all-enveloping silence) from the fear of betraying her humble origin. Debrett’s Peerage was unimportant in the grave; breaches of social etiquette passed unnoticed there; the wagging of malicious tongues was stopped by dust.

Murder mystery set in a remote country inn at Norfolk, England.

Excerpt:Seen in the sad glamour of an English twilight, the old moat-house, emerging from the thin mists which veiled the green flats in which it stood, conveyed the impression of a habitation falling into senility, tired with centuries of existence. Houses grow old like the race of men; the process is not less inevitable, though slower; in both, decay is hastened by events as well as by the passage of Time.The moat-house was not so old as English country-houses go, but it had aged quickly because of its past. There was a weird and bloody history attached to the place: an historical record of murders and stabbings and quarrels dating back to Saxon days, when a castle had stood on the spot, and every inch of the flat land had been drenched in the blood of serfs fighting under a Saxon tyrant against a Norman tyrant for the sacred catchword of Liberty.