The Full English: A Sunday Times bestseller

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It is the towns that seem to have fallen into the time slips that Priestley dramatised in his plays. Maconie said he started two urban legends: that Bob Holness, UK host of the game show Blockbusters, played the sax solo on Gerry Rafferty's hit single " Baker Street" [1] [12] and that David Bowie invented the board game Connect Four.

The Full English: Stuart Maconie - Birmingham Literature Festival The Full English: Stuart Maconie - Birmingham Literature Festival

If there is a queerer village in all England than this, I have never seen it,” he said about Shotton Colliery, in Co Durham. It features a 30-page chapter about the Potteries - and there are even some bottle ovens smoking away on the front cover. He was acutely conscious, however, that he was just breezing through and that he reports rather than critiques what he encounters.Because I think he is a rare example of someone who has almost disappeared from English cultural life.

Stuart Maconie Books | Waterstones Stuart Maconie Books | Waterstones

Throughout, Stevens deliberates on the concept of greatness as defined by the role of the butler in English society: “And yet, what precisely is this ‘greatness’? The Full English is an insightful and entertaining book that interrogates the state of England today, a ‘sustained lovers’ quarrel’ with a country that is at once home and yet – at times – unrecognisable. In Hanley he visits the Bethesda Chapel and pops into Terraces Menswear, while in Burslem he has a quick soft drink in the Clayhanger pub and laments the fiery passing of The Leopard. So how about getting some grown-up priorities, like the Scandinavians, of having a happy, healthy, progressive country? The book sees him explore several areas of the city, including Hanley, Burslem and Longton, and he enjoys a chat with many of the locals he encounters along the way.

I love the fact that you could be on a posh liner crossing the ocean and people from Stoke-on-Trent would be turning over the plates to see where they were made.