Tarmac Group 1964, now group managing director, Martin acquired key quarrying assets, including Cliffe Hill Granite, Rowley Regis Granite and Hillhead Hughes. In 1968, Martin engineered the three way merger between Tarmac, Derbyshire Stone and the Scottish Asphalt company, William Briggs, creating the country's "largest roadstone and construction group". The group was briefly known as Tarmac Derby but the Derby name was later dropped. Further acquisitions were to come. Permanite, Britain's biggest roofing felt manufacturer, and Limmer, a quoted asphalt company, were bought in 1971, while the 1973 purchase of Mitchell Construction (which had foundered on the Kariba Dam) strengthened the construction
The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is a quotation from Naipaul's book "A Bend in the River". "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." French deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage