About BritainIn 1951, the Festival of Britain commissioned a series of short guides they dubbed 'handbooks for the explorer'. Their aim was to encourage readers to venture out beyond the capital and on to 'the roads and the by roads' to see Britain as a 'living country'. Yet these 13 guides did more than celebrate the rural splendour of this 'island nation', they also made much of Britain's industrial power and mid century ambition her thirst for new technologies,

fen and heath lie side by side

Barack Obama

During months-long journeys covering thousands of miles

one of an elite band of Fleet Air Arm fighter pilots

from richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves to the first Christian burial grounds in Wales

The average age of an RAF fighter pilot was just twenty years old

and for four years

He was embarrassed by their former relationship and wanted to cover it up

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis

this is the cyclist's secret manual

Sanghera shows how our past is everywhere: from how we live to how we think

fought over - a house his grandmother had desired until her death