Three Vee Limited: 9 books

1966-1969, humorous short stories centred on a British university in the late 60s. Steve Bury is a bass playing English and Drama student at a Northern university. Tales of rock, romance, theatre. It's all here: ghostly events, savage dogs, the Six Days war, theatrical disaster, lots of hitch-hiking,...

Between 1970 and 2015,  400,000 and 700,000 foreigners per year studied English in England. English as a Foreign Language hovers somewhere between business and education. But … The story takes place at World English Centre, a large language school in Bournemouth in 1972. A...

Graham Donaldson, the testy, irritable and world-famous author of “Intercourse” (it’s an ELT textbook), is off on a tour of Greece, bookended by conferences in Athens and Thessaloniki. The fierce lady who latches onto him on the flight out to Greece is the wife of a very important man. Why is...

Second Fiddle is a graded ELT / ESL reader at 1500 word level, for intermediate learners of English, written by Peter Viney. It follows the story of Sophie, who is touring South Africa in a British classical orchestra. She is the youngest member. After their conductor has a heart attack onstage, the...

Book three of the Sixties Trilogy. It’s the autumn of 1969. Steve has left university to work as a roadie for Epsilon, a moderately successful rock band, which includes Chas and Bud from The Sheriffs. Epsilon is led by Antoine DeMilo, the “enigmatic American organist”...

Home Affairs takes place ten years after Foreign Affairs, in 1982. It’s a crisis point for language schools. The Iranian revolution left many with unpaid fees. Argentina has just invaded The Falklands and Britain is not that popular in Latin America. World English Centre (see Foreign...

It’s the summer of love. 1967. Sergeant Pepper, the Stones bust, the death of Brian Epstein, war in Biafra. But this is all a long way from this summer in sunny sedate seaside Sandbourne. Steve is a student who gets a holiday job doing lights at the Maxie Vincent Show. This is not a seedy end-of-the-pier...

Part two of the Sixties Trilogy. It’s the Spring of 1968. Revolution is the air. It’s the time of the Vietnam War demo in Grosvenor Square, riots at the Sorbonne in Paris, students being clubbed and thrown into the River Seine, the assassination of Robert Kennedy and sit-ins at many British...