Ed Glinert – författare

As a dense yellow fog swirls through the streets of London, a deep melancholy has descended on Sherlock Holmes, who sits in a cocaine-induced haze at 221B Baker Street. His mood is only lifted by a visit from a beautiful but distressed young woman - Mary Morstan, whose father vanished ten years before. Four years later she began to receive an exquisite gift every year: a large, lustrous pearl. Now she has had an intriguing invitation to meet her unknown benefactor and urges Holmes and Watson to accompany her. And in the ensuing investigation - which involves a wronged woman, a stolen hoard of Indian treasure, a wooden-legged ruffian, a helpful dog and a love affair - even the jaded Holmes is moved to exclaim, 'Isn't it gorgeous!'

The streets of London resonate with secret stories, from East End lore to Cold War espionage, from tales of riots, rakes, anarchy and grisly murders, to Rolling Stones gigs, gangland drinking dens, Orwell's Fitzrovia and Lenin's haunts. Ed Glinert has walked the length and breadth of the city to unravel its mysteries, travelling through time from the Romans' London wall to the new Olympic site at Stratford. This is London as you have never seen it before.

Ed Glinert has written the first ever epic,detailed, exciting, accurate history of theworld's first modern city - the industrialstrength city - from the Romans to 21stcentury renaissance, from cotton machines to cultural richness, from Gothic to Gotham.A volume that takes the reader back two thousand years, to the first stirrings of "Maenwicken", and ends now, in the 2020s. This is a spectacular story, a remarkable history that takes the reader from the Romans and ancient religious mystics to the machine makers of the industrial revolution, to the Victorian cotton merchants, the creators of the Gothic city and revered figures such as Emmeline Pankhurst, L. S. Lowry, Alan Turing, George Best, Tony Wilson and hundreds more pioneers who have created one of the world's greatest cities.This is a history of the world's first industrial metropolis to rival the great city biographies, such as Peter Ackroyd's London and Simon Sebag Montefiore on Jerusalem, crafted by Manchester's best researched and most entertaining writer.This is the book to captivate the public and secure Manchester's place among the world's best known cities.

Mediaeval no-go zone, Victorian hell-hole, war-ravaged bomb site, 21st century shining city, the most exciting area in one of the most exciting cities in the world - the East End has often been London's strange alter ego. Ed Glinert trawls through the strange stories, the crazed characters, the violent vignettes, the dried-up docks, the imaginative immigrants, the proud philanthropists to give a different history of the most misunderstood sector of the capital, from the Princes in the Tower to the Ratcliffe Highway murders; from Jack the Ripper to the Kray twins; the Jewish ghetto to Banglatown; Cable Street to Canary Wharf; Mahatma Gandhi to George Orwell.

They call Yorkshire God’s own country. This is because England’s biggest county is also England’s most epic and most historically exciting. It has everything: unimaginably beautiful countryside, derelict castles, cliff-hugging coastlines, brutally bleak moors, quirkily quaint villages, wondrously winding waterways and industrial monsters of cities. Many of the most interesting episodes in English history have happened here: the Wars of the Roses, the English Civil War, the birth of the industrial revolution, the rise of the Labour movement. But when people think of Yorkshire they also think of the unusual and the unsung: Bettys delightful tea rooms, cricket at Scarborough, the windswept steps of Whitby Abbey, the steam railway of the Railway Children, Mother Shipton’s Cave, and racing at Doncaster and York.Yorkshire has also given birth to some of the greatest and most talented figures in English history: Brian Clough, Harold Wilson, John Wycliffe, William Wilberforce, the Brontë Sisters, David Hockney and Barbara Hepworth.

“Good evening. I’m from Essex, in case you couldn’t tell.” Thus spoke the inimitable punk poet of the flat lands, Ian Dury, in 1977. Few other parts of England have so distinctive an identity, sent up by a hundred comedians since the 1990 birth of Essex Man, epitomised by the rise of the ‘Mockney’ radio celeb, and incarcerated through their hideous offspring in TV’s The Only Way is Essex. It’s not just an accent, it’s a way of life, a culture shaped by the Diaspora from London generation after generation, the lure of the sea and powerful Thames estuary, the encroaching of the waters from innumerable creeks and inlets, the dream seaside resort of Southend, the longing for the most succulent of seafood indulgences, the delicious countryside of copses and boughs painted by Constable, but also the threat of invasion by hostile forces repelled by Britain’s most formidable forts. It’s Essex. You can tell.