Books by Alan Davies

A powerful, moving and darkly comic memoir from the brilliant comedian, actor and broadcaster Alan Davies, star of QI and Jonathan Creek.

Located close to the Ellesmere Colliery, the Walkden Yard ultimately became the NCB Central Workshops for Lancashire. From here the workshops served the Bridgewater Trustees' collieries, providing engineering support as well as maintaining the numerous railway locomotives and the many hundreds of wagons that the company owned. Opened in 1878, Walkden Yard transferred to the National Coal Board upon nationalization after the Second World War and its importance grew as it served the other Lancashire collieries too. At Walkden there were a machine shop, joiners' shop, electricians' shop, paint shop, tinsmiths', locomotive repair shop, wagon sheds and wagon machine shop. The yard itself employed hundreds of men and boys but was closed in 1986 with the decline of the Lancashire coalfield. A housing estate now sits atop the site of the Walkden yard and it is hard to remember that the site once serviced the many locomotives that belonged to the NCB, or that the Coal Board and its predecessors operated many locomotives over their own lines as well as the railway company ones and that a huge industry was maintained at Walkden yard, repairing locomotives and rolling stock. In this book, Alan Davies tells the story of the Walkden yard and the locomotives of the Lancashire coalfield.

When Alan Davies was growing up he seemed to drive his family mad. 'What are we going to do with you?' they would ask - as if he might know the answer.Perhaps it was because he came of age in the 1980s. That decade of big hair, greed, camp music, mass unemployment, social unrest and truly shameful trousers was confusing for teenagers. There was a lot to believe in - so much to stand for, or stand against - and Alan decided to join anything with the word 'anti' in it. He was looking for heroes to guide him (relatively) unscathed into adulthood.From his chronic kleptomania to the moving search for his mother's grave years after she died; from his obsession with joining (going so far as to become a member of Chickens Lib) to his first forays into making people laugh (not always intentionally); Teenage Revolution is a touching and funny return to the formative years that make us all.

A history of the pit brow women of Wigan Coalfield

AJ Cronin, author of some of the best-loved novels of the mid-twentieth century and the creator of Dr Finlay, has been unjustly overlooked by literary biographers. This title tells the story of Cronin's Scottish childhood as the son of a Protestant mother and Catholic father, his subsequent medical career, and his rise to literary prominence.

This volume offers an explanatory account of the progress of academic language proficiency testing in the UK.

Through documents, the Wigan area can trace its coal mining activities as far back as 650 years, and for a brief spell in the late 19th century Wigan itself was proudly known as 'Coalopolis'. This book provides an insight into the lives and working conditions of Wigan area miners, and offers a testament to the region and its coal mining legacy.

Applied linguistics is understood to deal with language in use, particularly where institutions and interventions are involved. This alphabetic guide provides definitions and discussion of key terms used in the field. The selection of items offers a view of applied linguistics as an activity in its own right and therefore helps define it.