“The Indefatigable Asa Briggs”

ISBN 978-0-00-855641-9 (William Collins, imprint HarperCollins, 2025)

Out on the 14^th August, this first, comprehensive biography of Asa Briggs has received excellent reviews in the press. Find out how this scholarship boy at Keighley Boys’ Grammar School became, “one of the best-known historians of his generation, his name on a cover a guarantee of substantial sales,” champion of the Open University and the WEA.

Written by critically acclaimed biographer Adam Sisman, who visited Keighley Local Studies for local research, this biography is impressive in detail but reads well and entertainingly, as is to be expected from an acclaimed biographer of historians, Huge Trevor-Roper, A.J.P. Taylor as well as other important cultural and literary figures Boswell, Wordsworth and Shelley and most recently John Le Carré.

Particularly fascinating is Sisman’s careful reveal of the developing historian from student through to maturity – from his own background in the newly urbanised non-conformist culture, economy and local politics of his Northern hometown through WW2 events, global travel and study and the influence of other working historians during his time at, among others, Cambridge, Oxford and Leeds Universities.  Later, one can also draw parallels with the champions of Keighley Mechanics’ Institute, of which Briggs’ grammar school was a part, and Briggs’ own championing of the value of education for all, through his dedicated involvement with the Open University, the WEA and the Commonwealth of Learning.

Briggs may have felt frustrations in his life that this biography does not ignore, but he still achieved much and was one of the great visionaries who fuelled the meritocratic changes in post war England, widened the scope of educational opportunities for generations, and wrote history that was about the many, and written for everyone to consider and interpret, not just a privileged few. A fine legacy indeed.

Comments:

His work remains significant, and his life story offers valuable insights into the intellectual and social history of his time. Summary comment William Whyte, Literary Review, August 2025

“The historian Asa Briggs was both a jet-setter and a grafter, as this superb biography shows…”

Ian Sansom, the Daily Telegraph, 2 August 2025

“Let Me In: The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar”

ISBN:  978-1-91-422779-0(Great Northern Books Ltd, 2025)

Ann Dinsdale (author and Principal Curator of Haworth Parsonage Museum) and Sharon Wright author (“The Mother of the Brontes”), journalist, and playwright, have joined their great knowledge and expertise and buddied up to produce a lively, beautifully illustrated and fascinating book on some of the buildings that inspired the Brontë sisters and their writing and housed the remarkable and challenging lives of Brontë family members.

Their journey takes them around Britain and Ireland as they get privileged access to private houses and reveal the history of these buildings and their inspiration for the Brontës. Brontë Parsonage secrets and those of their Thornton birthplace are revealed, as are the legends and ghosts of the real Wuthering Heights. We go to Ulster and Cornwall to look at their family heritage influences and these literary supersleuths even follow Branwell on a Victorian pub crawl around the inns and taverns that he visited.

The book is beautifully written in the voices of these two acclaimed authors who have certainly done their homework, providing an entertaining and always well researched read. If you needed any kind of bonus, there is an exclusive interview with award-winning writer and director Sally Wainwright who reveals why and how she built an eerie replica of Haworth Parsonage in the 1840s on the moors for her BBC biopic, “To Walk Invisible” and the foreword to this classic is written by Rebecca Fraser, author and broadcaster. For those of you who wonder where Brussels is in all this, there are masterly plans afoot for a sequel investigation so don’t put away your travelling cape and magnifying glass yet.

Comments:

‘A gripping tour through time with the Brontë house detectives.’ Araminta Hall

‘Personal and poetic, authoritative and richly evocative, this is a biography like no other: a family history laid out in brick and stone.’ Kathryn Sutherland

‘Full of insight, compassion and exciting new discoveries’ Stacey Halls