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Alex Ross, renowned author of the international bestseller The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics-an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.
Award-winning actor, creator of a myriad of memorable characters from Lady Whiteadder to Professor Sprout, Miriam Margolyes is a national treasure. Now, at last, at the age of 80, she has finally decided to tell her extraordinary life story. And it’s far richer and stranger than any part she’s played. Find out how being conceived in an air-raid gave her curly hair; what pranks led to her being known as the naughtiest girl Oxford High School ever had; how she ended up posing nude for Augustus John aged 17, being sent to Coventry by Monty Python and the Goodies and swearing on University Challenge (she was the first woman to say F*** on TV). This book is packed with unforgettable stories from why Bob Monkhouse was the best (male) kiss she’s ever had to being told off by the Queen.
London, 1938. In the suburbs of the city, an ordinary young housewife has become the eye in a storm of chaos. In Alma Fielding’s modest home, china flies off the shelves, eggs fly through the air; stolen jewellery appears on her fingers, white mice crawl out of her handbag, beetles appear from under her gloves; in the middle of a car journey, a terrapin materialises on her lap. Nandor Fodor – a Jewish-Hungarian refugee and chief ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical Research – reads of the case, and hastens to the scene of the haunting. But when Fodor starts his scrupulous investigation, he discovers that the case is even stranger than it seems. By unravelling Alma’s peculiar history, he finds a different and darker type of haunting: trauma, alienation, loss – and the foreshadowing of a nation’s worst fears.
A bumper book of puzzles celebrating every aspect of Britain and Britishness – perfect to relax, de-stress and unwind, perhaps with a cup of tea!
Graham Greene (1904-91) wrote of Pinkie the mobster, Harry Lime, and the whisky priest, but his own life was the strangest of all his stories. Surviving a tortured adolescence, he sought distraction in Russian Roulette, women, espionage, jungle treks, war reporting, and opium. A Catholic convert, he refused to separate sin and holiness, belief and disbelief. A victim of bipolar illness, he repeatedly came to the point of suicide, and yet survived. Immensely funny, he conducted a lifelong war against boredom and despair by wisecracks and practical jokes. By the end of his life he was commonly regarded as the greatest novelist in the English language and had become an indispensable advocate for human rights throughout the world. This new biography tells the story one of the most remarkable lives of modern times.
Raised in the era of the ‘White Australia’ policy and widespread racism, Dianne grows up believing her adoptive mother, Val, is her birth mother. Val promises Dianne that when she turns fifteen, she will ‘tell her a story’. But just months before Dianne’s fifteenth birthday, Val dies. Abandoned by her stepfather, Dianne is raped, sentenced to a girls’ home and later forced to marry her rapist. She gives birth to a baby girl – the first of seven children – and goes on to endure years of horrific domestic violence at the hands of different partners, drug and alcohol addiction, and cruel betrayal by those closest to her. But miraculously her fighting spirit is not extinguished. At the age of twenty-nine, Dianne learns she is Aboriginal and that her grandfather was William Cooper, a famous Aboriginal activist and community leader. She chooses to forgive the past and becomes a leader in her own right.
This is Seamas O’Reilly’s memoir of growing up as one of eleven children in rural Northern Ireland in the 1990s after the death of their mother when Seamas was five. He delves into his family – his pleasingly eccentric, reticent but deeply loving father; his rambunctious siblings, intent on enforcing a byzantine age-based hierarchy; and the numerous bewildering friends, relations, and neighbours who blew in and out to ‘help’. Seamas describes how his mother’s death changed his childhood relationships with everyone and everything, as knowledge of his tragic experience preceded him.
In 1889, Victorian impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte opened The Savoy, Britain’s first luxury hotel. Allowing the rich to live like royalty, it attracted glamour, scandal and a cast of eccentric characters, with the D’Oyly Carte family elevated to a unique vantage point on high society. This book tells their story through three generations: Richard (a showman who made his fortune from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas), Rupert (who expanded the D’Oyly Carte empire through two world wars and the roaring twenties), and Bridget (the reluctant heiress and last of the family line).
As Enid Lindeman gallivanted through life she accumulated four husbands, numerous lovers, and during the inter-war years her high-jinks dominated British gossip columns. Born into the Lindeman wine dynasty, Enid’s first marriage was short-lived but left her a multi-millionaire; as a dare she reportedly slept with her second husband’s entire regiment. She met Lord Carnarvon (another of her lovers) on his famous dig of King Tutankhamen’s tomb, and was one of the first to be taken down to the discovery. When Caviar died in Paris, she met and married Marmaduke ‘Duke’ Furness, the 1st Viscount Furness, whose ex-wife, Thelma, was a lover of the Prince of Wales. Enid held court at Furness’s villa, La Fiorentina, in the south of France. A sensation wherever she went, it was said that people stood on chairs in the lobby of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo just to catch sight of her as she passed through.
In 1975, a gangly black 16-year-old from Dudley, decked out in floppy bow tie and Frank Spencer beret, appeared on our TV screens for the first time. So began the transformation from apprentice factory worker to future national treasure of Sir Lenny Henry. In his long-awaited autobiography, Lenny tells the extraordinary story of his early years and sudden rise to fame. Born soon after his Jamaican parents had arrived in the Midlands, Lenny was raised as one of seven siblings in a boisterous, hilarious, complicated working household, and sent out into the world with his mum’s mantra of ‘H’integration! H’integration! H’integration!’ echoing in his ears. A natural ability to make people laugh came in handy. At school it helped subdue the daily racist bullying. In the park, it led to lifelong friendships and occasional snogs.
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