Oxford Oral History

Imagine a workplace where workers enjoyed a well-paid job for life, one where they could start their day with a pint of stout and a smoke, and enjoy free meals in silver service canteens and restaurants. During their breaks they could explore acres of parkland planted with hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs. Imagine after work a place where employees could play more than thirty sports, or join one of the theater groups or dozens of other clubs. Imagine a place where at the end of a working life you could enjoy a company pension from a scheme to which you had never contributed a penny. Imagine working in buildings designed by an internationally renowned architect whose brief was to create a building that "would last a century or two." This is no fantasy or utopian vision of work but a description of the working conditions enjoyed by employees at the Guinness brewery established at Park Royal in West London in the mid-1930s. In this book, Tim Strangleman tells the story of the Guinness brewery at Park Royal, showing how the history of one plant tells us a much wider story about changing attitudes and understandings about work in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

President Bill Clinton led a remarkably productive White House that nearly ended in catastrophic failure. Yet because of the office's traditional climate of confidentiality, many details of his behind-the-scenes activities-including successes and failures-have remained absent from the written record, until now. How did the administration manage the horrific conflicts in Haiti and the Balkans that came to a head shortly after the president took the oath? How did he help bring peace to Northern Ireland, taking the initiative over the objections of his own State Department and attorney general? What motivated the president to place First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at the helm of the ill-fated Health Security Act in 1993? And how did the president's closest confidantes and aides respond to the outbreak of the devastating scandal that resulted in his impeachment? Inside the Clinton White House offers an intimate perspective on these questions and many more, granting readers unprecedented access to the sensitive Oval Office banter that changed the course of history. Bringing together material from 400 hours of candid conversations with over sixty individuals, respected oral historian Russell L. Riley weaves this illuminating testimony with important contextual information to form an irresistible narrative, taking the listener from Clinton's first potential White House bid in 1988 to the final days of his controversial public career. Extended sections of the book are devoted to important domestic and foreign policy campaigns, the complicated politics of the president's two terms and impeachment, and portraits of important personalities in the administration, including Vice President Al Gore and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. These forthright and often surprising accounts-including here, for the first time, observations from a new interview with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair-add a layer of nuance to an iconic figure in America's recent history, in the words of the people who knew him best.