Looking Back

In the first part of this book, her first since "Time Zones" (OUP, 1991), Adcock looks at some of her ancestors, from relatively recent figures struggling with hardship and family tragedies in 19th-century Manchester, through rural lives in Midlands villages, to a few prominent heroes and villains in Elizabethan and medieval times. In the second section, the scene is more recent and the subjects various.