Black Gold: The History of How Coal Made Britain

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Paxman's book could hardly be more colourful, and I enjoyed each page enormously' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, SUNDAY TIMES 'Vividly told .

This suited the Department of Health and Social Security, since men defined as suffering from long-term illnesses were removed from the unemployment statistics. Equally important, Britain’s main interest in Africa lay much farther north because it needed to protect Egypt and the Suez Canal, the lifeline to its richest colony, India. It was a "place where you slept and ate, visited the doctor, fell in love, had your children and entertained yourself".It also seems, as I pretty much knew, that safety was very much compromised in many pits and on many occasions leading not only to the massive death tolls on major disasters, but also the more random times death and serious injury was inflicted on miners in ones and twos.

Paxman also has a Taylor-esque propensity to skate over awkward complexities that might slow the pace of the narrative. Coal and the mining of it may be old-fashioned and something we prefer not to think about, but it mustn't be forgotten. As someone who can't imagine anything worse than having to work underground in dark, hot, cramped spaces, the thought of this is unbearable. and that “at the front lines of extractive imperialism, anthroturbation becomes cultural practice” (136).For example, at one point Miller dismisses India as a source of diamonds apparently unaware that before the discovery of diamonds at Kimberly Rajastan was the chief source of diamonds in the world.

The involvement and descriptions of the politicians that are part of the story of coal are dealt with in a very Paxmanesque style and I loved this. She makes an interesting observation when she points to the fact that “the overlap between adventure and children’s literature is important because of adventure literature’s reliance on the epistemology of the constrained narrator; child narrators can easily inhabit such a role, as with Jim Hawkins, but even adult narrators of adventure literature are touched by the genre’s association with naivete” (123). Men hunched over many miles down below, their back scraping against the rocky walls above in darkness.In former mining areas, the young sometimes had little to do: in one Welsh village, the authors say, they could be found smoking dope and drinking cider while sitting on the ‘dole wall’ behind the bus station. His regular appearances on the BBC2's Newsnight programme have been criticised as aggressive, intimidating, condescending and irreverent, and applauded as tough and incisive. I had no problem in understanding what he was saying and my hearing isn't the best, being no spring chicken myself!