Showing 145–156 of 188 resultsSorted by latest
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£16.99
Comprised of letters written over the course of 30 years, it describes in vivid, painterly detail the remarkable courage and limitless imagination of a young girl growing up with nothing. Emma was an illegitimate child, raised in a windowless room in Bogota with no water or toilet and only ingenuity to keep her and her sister alive. Abandoned by their mother, she and her sister moved to a convent housing 150 orphan girls, where they washed pots, ironed and mended laundry, scrubbed floors, cleaned bathrooms, and sewed garments and decorative cloths for church. Illiterate and knowing nothing of the outside world, Emma escaped at age nineteen, eventually coming to have a career as an artist and to befriend the likes of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
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£12.99
‘My future mother-in-law burst into tears when she heard her son was to marry an actress. There’s still something disturbing, I grant you, about the word “actress”. If an MP or some other outstanding person plays fast and loose with an actress the world is unsurprised. She is certainly no better than she should be, and probably French?’
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£8.99
This is a work of narrative non-fiction based on the last days of the fugitive Raoul Moat, a Geordie bodybuilder and mechanic who became nationally notorious in Britain one hot summer’s week when, after killing his ex-girlfriend’s new lover, shooting her in the stomach, and blinding a policeman, he disappeared into the woods of Northumberland, evading discovery for seven days – even when TV tracker Ray Mears was employed by the police to find him. Eventually, cornered by the police, Moat shot himself. Here, Andrew Hankinson tells Moat’s story in the second person, which means that the reader is uncomfortably close at all times to Raoul Moat.
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£10.99
Patrick Leigh Fermor was hailed as the greatest travel writer of his generation. His letters are often entertaining and sometimes instructive. They exhibit many of his most endearing characteristics: his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his keen sense of place, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of words, his fluency in a remarkable range of languages, his lack of self-importance, his boyish exuberance, and his sense of fun. They draw on his wide reading, and his unflagging enthusiasm for learning.
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£9.99
Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Shulman kept a diary of British Vogue’s Centenary year. And what a year. She reveals the emotional and logistical minefield of producing the 100th anniversary issue (that Duchess of Cambridge cover surprise), organizing the star-studded Vogue 100 Gala, working with designers from Victoria Beckham to Karl Lagerfeld and contributors from David Bailey to Alexa Chung. All under the continual scrutiny of a television documentary crew. But narrowly-contained domestic chaos hovers – spontaneous combustion in the kitchen, a temperamental boiler and having to send bin day reminders all the way from Milan fashion week. For anyone who wants to know what the life of a fashion magazine editor is really like, or for any woman who loves her job, this is a rich, honest, and sharply observed account of a year lived at the centre of British fashion and culture.
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£20.00
The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can’t. Won’t people turn away if they know the real me? You wonder. The me that hates my own child, that put my perfectly healthy dog to sleep? The me who thinks, deep down, that maybe The Wire was overrated? For nearly four decades, David Sedaris has faithfully kept a diary in which he records his thoughts and observations on the odd and funny events he witnesses. Anyone who has attended a live Sedaris event knows that his diary readings are often among the most joyful parts of the evening.
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£9.99
The violent racism of the American South drove Wayne Flynt away from his home state of Alabama, but the publication of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, Harper Lee’s classic novel about courage, community and equality, inspired him to return in the early 1960s and craft a career documenting and teaching Alabama history. His writing resonated with many Alabamians, in particular three sisters: Louise, Alice and Nelle Harper Lee. Beginning with their first meeting in 1983, a mutual respect and affection for the state’s history and literature matured into a deep friendship between two families who can trace their roots there back more than 5 generations. Flynt and Nelle Harper Lee began writing to one other while she was living in New York. This is a collection of their correspondence and a compelling look into the mind, heart and work of one of the most admired authors in modern literary history.
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£8.99
In 2007 Michael Maitland left home for university and in the years that followed he developed depression, OCD and, almost fatally, anorexia. It was only when Michael was taken to hospital in 2012, his body shutting down and his organs failing, that the family realised exactly what was happening. Later, Iain was given a bundle of letters that had been carefully saved and tucked away in a drawer – the letters he had written to Michael regularly from the autumn of 2007 when he went to university.
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£9.99
‘Dear Mama, I am having a lovely time here. We play football every day here. The beds have no springs’ So begins the first letter that a nine-year-old Roald Dahl penned to his mother, Sofie Magdalene, under the watchful eye of his boarding-school headmaster. For most of his life, Roald Dahl would continue to write weekly letters to his mother, chronicling his adventures, frustrations and opinions, from the delights of childhood to the excitements of flying as a World War II fighter pilot and the thrill of meeting top politicians and movie stars during his time as a diplomat and spy in Washington. And, unbeknown to Roald, his mother lovingly kept every single one of them. Sofie was, in many ways, Roald’s first reader. It was she who encouraged him to tell stories and nourished his desire to fabricate, exaggerate and entertain.
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£7.99
After a trip to the museum, Max writes a letter to his favourite dinosaur, the mighty T. Rex – and the T. Rex writes back! So begins a very unusual friendship in this interactive picture book with letters and cards to open, and dinosaur facts to discover along the way.
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£25.00
Alan Bennett’s third collection of prose ‘Keeping On Keeping On’ follows in the footsteps of the phenomenally successfully ‘Writing Home’ and ‘Untold Stories’, each published ten years apart. The latest collection contains Bennett’s peerless diaries 2005 to 2015, reflecting on a decade that saw four premieres at the National Theatre, a West End double-bill transfer, and the films of ‘The History Boys’ and ‘The Lady in the Van’.
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£30.00
Patrick Leigh Fermor was hailed as the greatest travel writer of his generation. His letters are often entertaining and sometimes instructive. They exhibit many of his most endearing characteristics: his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his keen sense of place, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of words, his fluency in a remarkable range of languages, his lack of self-importance, his boyish exuberance, and his sense of fun. They draw on his wide reading, and his unflagging enthusiasm for learning.
