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The title challenges our assumptions about Christian values – and about Jesus – by focusing on Jesus’s teachings in the Gospels, stripping away the religious elements such as the accounts of miracles or the resurrection of Christ.
Three years before he died, David Bowie made a list of the one hundred books that had transformed his life – a list that formed something akin to an autobiography. From ‘Madame Bovary’ to ‘A Clockwork Orange’, the ‘Iliad’ to the ‘Beano’, these were the publications that had fuelled his creativity and shaped who he was. In ‘Bowie’s Books’, John O’Connell explores this list in the form of one hundred short essays, each offering a perspective on the man, performer and creator that is Bowie, his work as an artist and the era that he lived in.
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.
We like to think we know the story of how Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, but there is one part of the story that has never been told. It features a group of MPs who repeatedly spoke out against their party and their government’s policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini. Remarkably, nearly all of them were gay or bisexual. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain hated them. He had them followed, harassed, spied upon and derided in the press, and called them ‘the glamour boys’ in reference to their sexuality. They suffered abuse, innuendo and threats of de-selection, yet they spoke out repeatedly against Hitler’s territorial ambitions and his treatment of political prisoners and the Jews. In doing so they risked everything, swimming against the overwhelming tide of public opinion at a time when even the suggestion of homosexuality could land you in prison.
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.
We all talk about them. We all plan our lives by them. We are all obsessed with the outlook ahead. The changing seasons have shaped all of our lives, but what happens when the weather changes beyond recognition? The author, Joe Shute, has spent years unpicking Britain’s long-standing love affair with the weather. He has pored over the literature, art and music our weather systems have inspired and trawled through centuries of established folklore to discover the curious customs and rituals we have created in response to the seasons. But in recent years Shute has discovered a curious thing: the British seasons are changing far faster and far more profoundly than we realise. This book aims to bridge the void between our cultural expectation of the seasons and what they are actually doing.
Anita Sethi was on a journey through northern England when she became the victim of a race hate crime. After the event Anita experienced panic attacks and anxiety. A crushing sense of claustrophobia made her long for wide open spaces; the Pennines – the ‘backbone of Britain’ – called to Anita with a magnetic force. Although a racist had told her to leave, she was intent on travelling freely and without fear. Anita’s journey through the landscapes of the North is one of reclamation, a way of saying that she belongs in the UK as a brown woman, as much as a white man does. Her journey transforms what began as an ugly experience of hate into one offering hope and finding beauty after brutality. Every footstep is an act of persistence. Every word written against the rising tide of hate speech is an act of resistance.
The extraordinary life of one of the world’s greatest music and literary icons, in the words of those who knew him best.
‘Cook, Eat, Repeat’ is a delicious and delightful combination of recipes intertwined with narrative essays about food, all written in Nigella’s engaging and insightful prose. Whether asking ‘What is a Recipe?’ or declaring ‘Death to the Guilty Pleasure’, Nigella’s wisdom about food and life comes to the fore, with tasty new recipes that readers will want to return to again and again.
Across America and around the world, people wander through flea markets to search for lost treasures. For decades, no such market was more renowned than the legendary Chelsea flea market, which sprawled over several blocks and within an old garage on the west side of Manhattan. Visitors would trawl through booths crammed with vintage dresses, rare books, ancient swords, glass eyeballs, Afghan rugs, West African fetish dolls, Old Master paintings, and much more. Acclaimed writer Michael Rips takes readers on a trip through this charmed world.
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz posed in 1963, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few. Then, at nearly 30, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered – as a writer – by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce 7 books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Now in her mid-70s, she’s on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as the essential L.A. writer.
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden, and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories.
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