NORTHERN FOLK: PEOPLE WHO SHAPED THE HISTORY OF OUR REGION by Bernard McCormick (Business Education Publishers Ltd, £8.95).

THIS is Bernard McCormick's magnum opus. From Newton Aycliffe, he has published many local history books about his home village of Coxhoe and the wider County Durham coalfield. Now comes his collection of potted biographies of about 20 Northern industrialists.

It is an esoteric collection of people, from the Pease family of south Durham to the Dixons of Cockfield and then on to William Wilberforce of Hull and even Sir Edwin Roe, the aircraft pioneer from Manchester. The only criterion for inclusion seems to be that their stories fascinate McCormick.

These fascinations come across to the reader. Each biography is packed with enthusiastic detail. We learn that a young Jeremiah Dixon fell in with the eccentric Hurworth mathematician Emerson. Emerson taught Jeremiah much about maths and his other great love - ale. In fact, Emerson taught Jeremiah so much about ale that the Quaker record book of 1760 notes that Jeremiah was disowned by his parents for drinking to excess.

Three years later, the boy was over in the United States surveying the Mason-Dixon line which separated the territories of the feuding families of Penn and Baltimore. Later, the line would come to divide the slave-owners from the free states.

For all its bouncing about all over the North, and its endearing over-use of commas and under-employment of apostrophes, this book is a welcome addition to any reference bookshelf as it contains the valuable and easily-digestible tales of people who really did shape our history.

Published: 21/03/2006