Product Description

Quite simply the most authoritative, reliable and highly regarded reference book available today, Whitaker's Almanack, contains the latest information on the social, political and economic infrastructure of the UK and the rest of the world - all in one single volume.
Look back over the year's news in month-by-month summaries, check who is the MP for any UK constituency, find out time zones, currencies and exchange rates, or look up laws on births, deaths, marriages, employment, consumer and property rental. Find contact details for a university, museum or society, and search directory listings of newspapers, magazines and book publishers. Answer questions like 'Where is the largest lake, highest volcano, tallest building in the world?'. With details of bank holidays and special events throughout 2003 you can even use it to help plan next year's holiday!
This year's edition includes hundreds of essential facts and figures on the following subjects:
- Current Affairs
- Heritage, conservation and environment
- Government and Politics
- The Legal System
- Industry

- Countries of the world
- Education
- Finance
- Media and Communications
- Religion
- Royalty and the Peerage
Whitaker's Almanack 2003 is available in standard, concise and leatherbound editions - and is the ultimate guide to what's what in the world today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #551154 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-31
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1300 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
The glorious thing about this fat and enticing old friend is that it brims over with facts. Turn to Whitaker's Almanack 2003 for all the things you think you should know, the things you once knew but have forgotten and the things you didn't think you needed to know but which are somehow fascinating. Did you, for example, know that Dr Benjamin Spock was born just a few days before the death of Paul Gaugin in May 1903? Or that the Lord Lieutenant of Kincardineshire is JDB Smart or that the national anthem of Swaziland is Ingoma Yesive?

Having begun life in 1868 as a journalist's fact book, Whitakers has gone from strength to strength through its 135 annual editions. It's useful on history and social structure--like a mini Debretts--and it details most of the UK's institutions with names and contact details. As always there's extensive data about every country in the world as well as maps, recent obituaries and a run down on last year's main news stories with pictures.

"A calendar, a calendar. Look in the almanac. Find out moonshine. Find our moonshine", cries Bottom excitedly in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Shakespeare's day that's all an almanac was. Although the traditional calendars, astronomical and tidal information is all proudly still there, Whitaker's has taken and developed the almanac concept for so long that it has evolved into one of the most exciting indispensable, eclectic, accessible, modern reference books available. If you could have only one single volume information book, there's simply no contest. Whitaker's it would have to be. --Susan Elkin

Jonathan Dimbleby
`A source of delight as well as a gold-mine of information'

Trevor McDonald
`Indispensable to all journalists'