The City of Coventry: A Twentieth Century Icon (2006)(en)(256s)

Shattered by bombing in the World War II, Coventry was to rise as a model of urban regeneration and imaginative urban planning. Adrian Smith mixes memoir and meticulous scholarship to describe how his native city has inspired film-makers like Humphrey Jennings, poets and painters such as Philip Larkin and Terry Jones, and musicians as varied as Benjamin Britten and The Specials. Attractively presented, highly readable and with broad appeal, City of Coventry is a lively re-examination of an iconic city of the twentieth century illuminating the profound changes that engulfed industrial England during and after the war.