Books by Peter Parker

The book, beautifully illustrated with old woodcuts, explains how and why plants have been named, includes handy lists of identifying adjectives, and takes the reader down some of the stranger byways of human endeavour and eccentricity.

A history of the men who were sentenced to hang in South Africa following the death of a deputy-mayor in Sharpeville in 1984. The authors focus on the trial, sentencing, and subsequent international campaign that eventually led to their release after a stay of execution was ordered only 18 hours be

Talks about notions of what it is - or perhaps was - to be "English". Such notions are highly relevant as Britain's involvement in the so-called war against terrorism promotes questions about what it means to be "British" in a multi-cultural, multi-faith society.

Why is it that for many people 'England' has always meant an unspoilt rural landscape rather than the ever-changing urban world in which most English people live? What was the 'England' for which people fought in two world wars? What is about the English that makes them constantly hanker for a vanished past, so that nostalgia has become a national characteristic?In March 1896 a small volume of sixty-three poems was published by the small British firm of Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr bner & Co. Ltd in an edition of 500 copies, priced at half-a-crown each. The author was not a professional poet, but a thirty-seven-year-old professor of Latin at University College, London called Alfred Edward Housman who had been obliged to pay 30 towards the cost of publication. Although slow to sell at first, A Shropshire Lad went on to become one of the most popular books of poetry ever published and has never been out of print. As well as being a publishing phenomenon, the book has had an influence on English culture and notions of what 'England' means, both in England itself and abroad, out of all proportion to its apparent scope. Housman Country will not only look at how A Shropshire Lad came to be written and became a publishing and cultural phenomenon, but will use the poems as a prism through which to examine England and Englishness. The book contains a full transcript of A Shropshire lad itself, also making it a superb present.

The definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's most significant novelists

Examines South Africa's system of criminal justice during the Apartheid era. Focusing on the case of the Sharpeville Six, the book analyzes the technicalities of the criminal law, as well as the quality of evidence and judicial reasoning in the case against the Six.