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‘THERE'S NOBODY CAN SERVE YOU BETTER with grindstones 62″ high than I can do; the prices of such size on your key will be 21 guilders each.’

I EDMUND BOGG must have been one of the most untiring of dales' walkers to judge from the titles of his books: Two Thousand Miles in Wharfedale, From Eden Vale to the Plain of York: a Thousand Miles in the Valleys of the Nidd and Yore, Richmondshire and the Vale of Mowbray, The Old Kingdom of Elmete, and The Border Country.

HISTORY, so it is said, is told in the lives of the great; but the lives of the ‘mute inglorious Miltons’, if but only dimly recorded, are evocative of the ordinary, the circumstantial, and give somehow a more real picture of a period.

THE RECENT CLOSURE of the last of Boots' Booklovers' Libraries has seemingly brought us near the end of a long and fascinating chapter of library history. I call it a ‘chapter’ strictly in the figurative sense, as the story of the commercial circulating libraries remains virtually untold, largely because much of what we would like to know about them has been irretrievably lost, or else lies buried in the archives of the firms which operated them.

Britain is now one of the few EC countries without some form of military representative body. Yet, probably the first military trade union was formed in the British Armed Forces in 1919. At the outset, the organisation grew rapidly with the formation of 49 branches and an estimated membership of 10,000 (Englander, 1989, p. 10). But the efforts of the Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Airmens’ Union (SSAU) to organise the armed forces and secure a right of representation were short-lived. The authorities were quick to react to the perceived socialist threat by demobilising and discharging “men who [were] largely imbued with unionism tinged with socialism” (Englander, 1989, p. 11) and, following a raid by the intelligence services on the SSAU headquarters, the union rapidly disappeared.