Bumper Book of Dinosaurs

Think you know all there is to know about dinosaurs? Think again. A fun, fact-filled and thoroughly modern book of dinosaurs – for all the family.

Packed with fine illustrations and all the information they didn’t tell you in Jurassic Park

His hard work shows on every page of this lively, colourful and informative 352-page volume

As a small boy in the early 1980s nothing seemed more exciting to Keiron Pim than a visit to the Natural History Museum, where he would gaze up at the Diplodocus skeleton and later depart clutching some little dinosaur-related memento: a pencil rubber shaped like Stegosaurus, a lurid poster of a Jurassic scene, or a book crammed with dino-facts. It would have blown his four-year-old mind to know that thirty years later at book on dinosaurs would be his first publication. Keiron is a writer and journalist based in Norfolk, England. Married with three young daughters, he is writing a biography of David Litvinoff for Jonathan Cape.

Dinosaurs are back. Say hello to the Giganotosaurus, the Velociraptor, and Tyrannosaurus rex. Ready yourself for the deadly horns of the Zuniceratops and the razor sharp tail of the Tuojiangosaurus. But above all, be sure to expect the unexpected. 
 
Armed with a host of stunning recent discoveries, Keiron Pim re-introduces us to these mind-boggling creatures in mesmerizing detail. As we live through a ‘golden age’ of discovery, the rise and fall of the dinosaur is once again staking its claim as Nature’s most spectacular phenomenon. 
 
For decades, these weird and wonderful creatures have roamed the imaginations of adults and children alike; now they are brought to life before our very eyes. If you think you know the world of Dinosaurs, then think again, for it grows stranger and more fascinating all the time. Filled with fun facts and gory details, with ancient history and modern discovery, and with stunning design and illustrated throughout, this book is sure to delight readers of all ages.

Keiron Pim

You’ll worry at your hunger to keep on reading, but you won’t be able to stop.

The rock'n'roll legend of David Litvinoff is given its definitive account. A considerable work of detection and human sympathy unpicking old myths and making them new.

This surely has the most startling beginning of any biography to be published this year… Vivid, engrossing… Pim gives an all too graphic picture of the seedy 1950s… He is compassionate and humane at every moment. His prose is always careful and stylish.

Blending pop culture, social history and interviews with raddled survivors, Pim reconstructs every scene in Litvinoff’s twisted history… Jumpin’ Jack Flash provides the missing piece of Swinging London’s social jigsaw.

Fascinating biography… Pim has a thorough knowledge of his subject and his milieu and is painstaking in his research… Against the odds, Keiron Pim has written a very good book about a very bad man.

A captivating and prodigiously well-researched account of that legendary 1960s London sub-world where criminality and bohemianism met head-on.

Pim’s account of this extraordinary character is a magisterial work of scholarship.

Revelatory... The impressive list of character references in this extraordinary book gives some indication of just how singular a creature [David Litvinoff] was, and the mind-boggling diversity of the worlds in which he moved.

Keiron Pim has grafted long and hard to separate the facts from the heady fictions… Pim does a great job of bringing the era and some of its most colourful characters to life.

Litvinoff was a shape-shifter whose story...offers a window into a secret side of the 60s.

Keiron Pim's Jumping Jack Flash is an outstanding study of a remarkable, but until now wholly elusive figure. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Pim's work is the first to bring us the story of David Litvinoff, that real-life Zelig of post-war British bohemia. And via the magnesium flare of his subject's story, Pim illumines the multifaceted world through which he moved: East End gangsters, Chelsea aristos, Soho artists and Notting Hill hippies. Litvinoff, for so long the missing piece of so many cultural jigsaws, finally gets a story of his own and it's even more bizarre than one might have hoped. This will be an indispensable read for anyone who appreciates that mad, alluring, myth-filled world.

Jonathon Green, author of 'Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground'

Assembled with skill and serious legwork... Jumpin' Jack Flash brings a familiar period of cultural history into sharp new relief.

Keiron Pim’s Jumping Jack Flash is a kaleidoscopic ride through the acid-fields of Fities and Sixties London in search of David Litvinoff, a brilliant, desolate, unforgettable yet hard-to-focus gay Jewish grifter. Ironic stereotype and rebel at once, Litvinoff chars the car-crash societies he moves through. Mick Jagger, Lucian Freud and the Kray twins flash past in the throng, all sustained by drugs, sex, art, film and a great deal of rock'n’roll. Litvinoff is dazzling. Pim’s pilgrimage is appropriately and meticulously dazzled.

Pim is a skilful and erudite writer.

Pim has set out to write the definitive biography of a man who was the very definition of an unreliable narrator… Fascinating.

A tour-de-force of biography, a beautifully written account of a compelling but often repulsive man. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting closer to the truth than Keiron.

Keiron Pim has done a marvellous job of bringing to light a character so outlandish that he reads like a fictional conflation of every colourful star from that swinging decade… Pim tells his story - piecing together the fragments to build a myth - quite brilliantly.

Pim has written not just an engrossing account of a character who flitted easily between the underground and underworld of Swinging London, but also one of the best books I’ve ever read about the period… A compelling portrait of the dark side of the Sixties.

Pim proves an intelligent…guide to this protean world, mixing a Quest for Corvo model with Iain Sinclair’s psycho-geography.

Pim’s remarkable book pulls from the shadows the story of a man who did his best to leave no trace.

Vibrant, colourful, revealing, often violent and one of the most absorbing biographies in a long time.

This book is written extremely well, descriptively astute throughout, with a few pictures to help the reader better understand the narrative. The author has achieved a remarkable book, which others have tried to write in the past and failed. It is an altogether fascinating treatise on a little remembered man, who’s star burned bright, mainly in the 1960s, but carried resonance wherever and whenever he went.

David Litvinoff and the Rock’n’Roll Underworld

'REVELATORY' - DAILY TELEGRAPH ***** 
'FASCINATING' - OBSERVER 
'ENGROSSING' - DAILY MAIL 
 
'You’ll worry at your hunger to keep on reading, but you won’t be able to stop' - GUARDIAN, Book of the Year 
 
David Litvinoff was one of the great mythic characters of ‘60s London. 
 
Flitting between the worlds of music, art and crime, he exerted a hidden influence that helped create the Krays twins’ legend, connected the Rolling Stones with London’s dark side, shaped the plot of classic film Performance – and saw him immortalised in a portrait by Lucian Freud. 
 
Litvinoff’s determination to live without trace means that his life has always eluded biographers, until now. Intent on unravelling the enigma of Litvinoff, Keiron Pim conducted 100 interviews over five years, speaking to Eric Clapton and Marianne Faithfull, James Fox and ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser. The result is an extraordinary feat of research that traces a rogue’s progress amongst aristocrats, gangsters and rock stars.

Keiron Pim

Praise for Jumpin' Jack Flash

You’ll worry at your hunger to keep on reading, but you won’t be able to stop.

The rock'n'roll legend of David Litvinoff is given its definitive account. A considerable work of detection and human sympathy unpicking old myths and making them new.

This surely has the most startling beginning of any biography to be published this year… Vivid, engrossing… Pim gives an all too graphic picture of the seedy 1950s… He is compassionate and humane at every ...

You’ll worry at your hunger to keep on reading, but you won’t be able to stop.

The rock'n'roll legend of David Litvinoff is given its definitive account. A considerable work of detection and human sympathy unpicking old myths and making them new.

This surely has the most startling beginning of any biography to be published this year… Vivid, engrossing… Pim gives an all too graphic picture of the seedy 1950s… He is compassionate and humane at every ...

You’ll worry at your hunger to keep on reading, but you won’t be able to stop.

The rock'n'roll legend of David Litvinoff is given its definitive account. A considerable work of detection and human sympathy unpicking old myths and making them new.

This surely has the most startling beginning of any biography to be published this year… Vivid, engrossing… Pim gives an all too graphic picture of the seedy 1950s… He is compassionate and humane at every ...

Books by Keiron Pim

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