Allen & Unwin Britain's Really Rottenest Years book English Paperback 224 pages

As this horrible history of Britain shows, whatever life is throwing at us in the 21st century, our ancestors had it a whole lot worse. Try 1349 (the Black Death), or 1536 (the year the King went mad .), or 1720 (when a biblical fog descended on England for months and literally laid waste to the nation). The fact is that rat for rat, recession for recession, gory death for gory death, the ten really worstest years featured in this book defy the modern imagination. War, terror, economic collapse . Britain has been there before. And for the likes of the Celts, or the Tudors, or the Georgians, these catastrophes were much harder to bear. But Derek Wilson's Britain's Really Rottenest Years is not just a bad news story. It is a fantastically readable leapfrog through British history which takes us, via the interesting bits, from the misery of the Roman invasion of AD60 (when 50,000 Roman thugs invaded) to the Thatcherite year of discontent of 1981 - a cheering gift for anyone who needs reminding how truly awful life can be .