This delightfully playful history uses 36 of our most expressive quirky beautiful & sometimes baffling stamps to tell us the story of Britain through Dickens & the potato famine to Thatcher & punk. Stamps tell a story. Since the Penny Black first burst on the scene in 1840 they have made & mirrored history as it happens
- from the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 to the Austerity Olympics of 1948 from the Coronation to the death of Diana from the advent of computers to the new Millennium. Chris West is a stamp-obsessive. He has picked his favourites to tell hugely entertaining & idiosyncratic history. We learn about the Penny Lilac which united a nation in 1881; the controversial schoolboy-designed Edward VIII stamp of 1936; the day the Queens head was nearly chopped off in 1966; the first non-white Briton to grace a stamp in 1982 & many more. Each lovingly-designed stamp is a vintage specimen & a tantalising window onto an era.