A farmers son with inspiration and developing insights was able to separate himself from the country site and the potato industry to start an international career in the oil and gas industry. He did not get discouraged by setbacks by tapping willpower from his strive for a higher plan he dreamed about at a young age and by looking for the potential life could offer and most of all how he could enjoy it. His hart was with engineering but realized he had to study languages to reach the big world, to travel and to get to know other countries and cultures in order to enrich his life and make his dream come true. An international company with headquarters in Houston Texas offered him the opportunity. The 160 stories about his life and career can be an inspiration for many.

The Chronicle of Charles Weatherby is set in the early 1980s and tells the tale of Charles, who drifts into a job in the City for which he is wholly unsuited and, failing to read the politics at the long established Stones & Co., finds himself peremptorily fired. Unemployed and rusticated, Charles agrees to go to India on an errand for a friend of his wife's family. Here his grip on reality slips and he believes that someone is trying to kill him.Eventually, he manages to get back to England and is reunited with his wife. Life settles down but it isn’t long before his old employer is in the news – for all the wrong reasons. Charles feels that something that he has done in India may be to blame, but he fails to take into account the Machiavellian machinations of one of his former colleagues. This person offers him a job but he ends up buying a bookshop, made possible by the deviousness of the person who sent him to India. With his career resolved, other aspects of Charles’ life start to resolve themselves and he discovers some startling information about his wife’s family. Ironically, it is this that has lead, indirectly, to his transformation from failed yuppie into contented bookshop proprietor. It would be nice to say that Charles’ enemies are confounded and his friends prosper, but life is rarely as clean cut as that...The Chronicle of Charles Weatherby is a work of humorous fiction that will appeal to fans of Evelyn Waugh, William Trevor and William Boyd, all of whom have inspired author Bill.

In the years 1849 and 1850, Henry Mayhew was the metropolitan correspondent of the Morning Chronicle in its national survey of labour and the poor. Only about a third of his Morning Chronicle material was included in his later and better known, publication, London Labour and the London Poor. First published in 1981, this series of six volumes constitutes Henry Mayhew’s complete Morning Chronicle survey, in the sequence in which it was originally written in 1849 and 1850. It addresses a wealth of topics from cholera in the Jacob’s Island area to the food markets of London. The publication of this complete survey represented the first time in which the whole of Mayhew’s pioneering work was available in one place. The set is introduced by Dr Peter Razzell, who was co-editor of the national Morning Chronicle survey. This second volume contains letters from November 1849 to January 1850. This series will be of interest to those studying the history of social welfare, poverty and urbanisation.