The Great North Road: A Journey in History

The Great North Road itself is not physically impressive, nor was it particularly important to the Romans who built it two thousand years ago. It stretches only 400 miles from London north to Edinburgh. This segment of road, however, has behaved like no other piece of road anywhere, any time. After the Romans pulled out it acquired a violent drive. It began to work, as yeast works. To study the ferments of this "working" Road through its centuries of existence it to study the evolution of our civilization - where it came from, how it survived, how it changed and grew in complexity and strength."The Great North Road" is a product of a richly stocked, restlessly probing mind. The distillation of an intellectual lifetime, it is a wise evocative, passionate and unique inquiry born from the need to understand and to learn. Undimmed by the time, "The Great North Road" will be read with profit and pleasure by successive generations of English-speaking people.