'People always get the wrong idea about Essex don't they?' Len's on his death bed and the family gather to say their final farewells. His sisters still aren't speaking after nearly 20 years, his nephew's trying for a baby - and a bigger house, while his best mate Ken remembers 'Bas-vegas' when it was a village. As the spread is laid out and the ham sandwiches sit next to the wreaths, it's hard to see who's hungry and who's just greedy. In Basildon is full of explosive family dynamics and knotty relationships, embracing history, emotion and a strong sense of homeland. This depiction of indigenous Essex dwellers is uncompromising and at times harsh, but Eldridge also elicits deep sympathy for his characters as they face death, grief and crumbling familial bonds. The play is an epic family drama exploring inheritance and the myth of place.

The papers that comprise this volume reveal how people are intent on preserving not only their wealth but culture too. The individual contributions identify the key arguments used to coax voters, whose natural sympathies might gravitate to the left, to vote for the Conservative Party en masse.

The Almanac of British Politics is a guide to the political status of the United Kingdom. It covers in detail each of the constituencies sending representatives to the House of Commons. It includes sketches of all serving MPs.

Bernard O'Mahoney was a key member of the Essex Boys firm - one of the most violent criminal gangs in Britain. In December 1995, the three leaders of the gang were executed as they sat in their Range Rover down a deserted farm track. For many, this meant that the horror of the gang's brutal reign was over. For Jack Whomes and Michael Steele, the nightmare had just begun. Convicted of the murders on the word of a supergrass, these two men have spent more than a decade in prison for crimes they claim they did not commit. In Bonded by Blood, O'Mahoney goes back to exorcise his ghosts and lay the past to rest. He returns to the scene of the murders and relives the bloody encounters that marked his time as a gang member. Divided by greed, bonded by the blood of their victims, the Essex Boys' rise to the top of the criminal underworld was as dramatic as their final fall.

Depeche Mode's 101 is, at first glance, a curious thing: a live double-album by a synth band. A recording of its “Concert for the Masses,” 101 marks the moment when doomy, cultish, electronic Depeche Mode, despite low American album sales and a lack of critical acclaim, declared they had arrived and ascended to the rare air of stadium rock. On June 18, 1988, 65,000 screaming, singing Southern Californians flocked to Pasadena's Rose Bowl to celebrate DM's coronation. The concert also revealed the power of Southern California radio station and event host KROQ, which had turned Los Angeles into DM's American stronghold through years of fervent airplay. KROQ's innovative format, which brought “new music” to its avid listeners, soon spread across the country, leading to the explosion of alternative rock in the 1990s. Eight years after its founding in Basildon, Essex, Depeche Mode, rooted in 1970s Krautrock, combined old-fashioned touring, well-crafted songs, and the steadfast support of KROQ to dominate Southern California, the United States, and then the world, kicking open the doors for the likes of Nirvana in the process. 101 is the hidden-in-plain-sight hinge of modern music history.

ESSEX BOYS is the brand new edition of the shocking bestseller known as SO THIS IS ECSTASY?. It is the true story of the rise of one of the most violent and successful criminal gangs of the 90's whose reign of terror was finally terminated when the three leaders were brutally murdered in their Range Rover one winter's evening. On their way they had built the drug-dealing organisation that which supplied the pill that killed Leah Betts. They were responsible for a wave of intimidation, beatings and murder. Until, it seems, they took one step too far. Now there is compelling evidence that the men convicted of shooting the dead men are innocent. Which means the real murderers are still at large. Bernard O'Mahoney was a key member of what has been one of the most feared gangs of the decade. His inside account of their cold-blooded violence reveals that facts can be more terryfing than fiction.