• RELATED STORIES

• Friday Project signs up paramedic's tale

  The Friday Project has sign...

• Hubert made Book Aid director

  Alison Hubert, previously o...

• Bloomsbury: e-books at 9% of adult trade sales in 2010/11

  E-books accounted for 9% of...

• 'Robust' Bloomsbury looks to academic growth

  Bloomsbury has announced an...

• Orange to cease sponsorship of Fiction Prize

  Orange will not renew its t...

Sykes makes history donation to London schools

20.01.12 | Benedicte Page

Author Adrian Sykes, with his publisher David Campbell, of Everyman's Library, is to donate a copy of his history book Made in Britain to all 448 London state secondary schools. 

The gift is being made in response to the London Evening Standard's campaign against illiteracy in London schools, and to historian David Cannadine's call for pupils to learn history up to the age of 16.

Sykes said he was inspired to write Made in Britain: The Men and Women who Shaped the Modern World following a reported 2009 survey which claimed that one in 10 people thought Churchill was Prime Minister during the First Gulf War, and 20% did not know that D-Day took place in the 1940s.  

“It gives me enormous pleasure to give a copy of Made in Britain to every London state secondary school, in the hope that it will encourage young people to love history as much as I do,” he said.

Made in Britain, published by Everyman Library imprint Adelphi, is described as history "approachably and entertainingly told through short biographies of the 3000 men and women, native and immigrant, who through sheer grit, genius and energy, shaped both our history and much of the modern world globally." 

Campbell, who set up charitable trust The Millennium Library Trust, giving away 300 Everyman books to every state secondary school in the UK between 1998 and 2006, added: “As with the Millennium Library, our objective will be met if just a few pupils in every school are turned on to history by this very original and remarkable book. My suspicion is that, as with the Millennium Library, very many more will benefit.”

• Adrian Sykes
• Benedicte Page
• David Campbell
• Everyman's Library
• Schools
• Todays Picks