Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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David Nasaw

In this pioneering new work, celebrated historian David Nasaw examines the life of Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder of the twentieth century's most famous political dynasty. Drawing on never-before-published materials from archives on three continents and interviews with Kennedy family members and friends, Nasaw tells the story of a man who participated in the major events of his times: the booms and busts, the Depression and the New Deal, two world wars and the Cold War, and the birth of the New Frontier. In studying Kennedy's life, we relive the history of the American century. 
 
"Riveting...The Patriarch is a book hard to put down...As his son indelibly put it some months before his father was struck down: 'Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your county.' One wonders what was going through the mind of the patriarch, sitting a few feet away listening to that soaring sentiment as a fourth-generation Kennedy became president of the United States. After coming to know him over the course of this brilliant, compelling book, the reader might suspect that he was thinking he had done more than enough for his country. But the gods would demand even more." - New York Times Book Review

The Patriarch

The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy

Simon Winchester

Before fate intervened, Joseph Needham was a distinguished biochemist at Cambridge University, married to a fellow scientist. In 1937 he was asked to supervise a young Chinese student named Lu Gwei-Djen, and in that moment began the two greatest love affairs of his life - Miss Lu, and China. 
 
Miss Lu inspired Needham to travel to China where he initially spent three dangerous years as a wartime diplomat. He established himself as the pre-eminent China scholar of all time, firm in his belief that China would one day achieve world prominence. By the end of his life, Needham had become a truly global figure, travelling endlessly and honoured by all - though banned from America because of his politics. And in 1989, after a fifty-two year affair, he finally married the woman who had first inspired his passion. 
 
The Magnificent Barbarian is Simon Winchester at his best - at once a magnificent portrait of one man's remarkable life and a riveting exploration of the country that so engaged him.

Bomb, Book and Compass

Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China

Josef Lewkowicz

Michael Calvin

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
'A riveting, compelling, mesmerizing journey. Josef Lewkowicz is a hero in every sense of the word. The Survivor both terrifies us and inspires us. It's a must read.' 
Tova Friedman, author of The Daughter of Auschwitz. 
 
One of the last great untold stories of the Holocaust, The Survivor is an astonishing account of one man's unbreakable spirit, unshakeable faith, and extraordinary courage in the face of evil. 
 
At only sixteen years old, Josef Lewkowicz became a number, prisoner 85314. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he and his father were separated from their family and herded to the Kraków-Plaszów concentration camp. Forced to carry out hard labour in brutal conditions, and to live under the constant threat of extreme violence and sudden death, before the war was over Josef would witness the unique horrors of six of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee. 
 
From salt mines to forced marches, summary executions to Amstetten, where prisoners were used as human shields in Allied bombing, Josef lived under the spectre of death for many years. When he was liberated from Ebensee at the end of the war, conditions were amongst the worst witnessed by allied forces. 
 
With his freedom, Josef returned home to find that he was the only one left alive in an extended family of 150. Compelled by the need to do something to avenge that loss, he joined the Jewish police while still in a displaced persons' camp, and was recruited as an intelligence officer for the US Army who gave him a team to search for Nazis in hiding. 
 
Whilst rounding up SS leaders, he played a critical role in identifying and bringing to justice his greatest tormentor, the Butcher of Plaszow, Amon Göth, played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. He then committed his life to helping the orphaned children of the Holocaust rebuild their lives. 
 
The Survivor is Josef's extraordinary testimony.

The Survivor

How I Survived Six Concentration Camps and Became a Nazi Hunter

Judith Flanders

The Macdonald sisters -- Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa -- started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes, with little prospect of social advancement. But as wives and mothers they made a single family of the poet Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy, and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. In telling their remarkable story, Judith Flanders displays the fluidity of Victorian society, and explores the life of the family in the 19th century.

A Circle of Sisters

Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin

Sarah Burton

The little known story of the inseparable brother and sister, lights of the Romantic circle, privately haunted by madness 
 
Wordsworth thought that if there were such a thing as a good man, it would be Charles Lamb, while Hazlitt believed Mary Lambto be the only sensible woman he knew. The couple's literary reputation rested partly on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. And yet there was an unhappier side: Charles was an alcoholic and Mary, in an attack of insanity, stabbed their mother to death. 
 
This fascinating account reaches to the heart of early nineteenth century London, meeting its eccentrics and its literary giants. It also visits the city's darker corners, where poverty stalks rented rooms and madhouses conceal terrible abuse.

A Double Life

A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb

Joe Dunthorne

Joe Dunthorne had always wanted to write about his great-grandfather, Siegfried: an eccentric scientist who invented radioactive toothpaste and a Jewish refugee from the Nazis who returned to Germany under cover of the Berlin Olympics to pull off a heist on his own home. 
 
The only problem was that Siegfried had already written the book of his life – an unpublished, two-thousand page memoir so dry and rambling that none of his living descendants had managed to read it. And, as it turned out when Joe finally read the manuscript himself, it told a very different story from the one he thought he knew… 
 
Thus begins a mystery which stretches across the twentieth century and around the world, from Berlin to Ankara, New York, Glasgow and eventually London – a mystery about the production of something much more sinister than toothpaste. On the trail of one ‘jolly grandpa’ with a patchy psychiatric history and an encyclopaedic knowledge of poison gases, Joe Dunthorne is forced to confront the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family. Can we ever understand where we come from? Is every family in the end a work of fiction? And even if the truth can be found – will we be able to live with it? 
 
Children of Radium is a remarkable, searching meditation on individual and collective inheritance. Witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising, it considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.

Children of Radium

A Buried Inheritance

Anthony McCarten

From the prize-winning screenwriter of The Theory of Everything and Darkest Hour, The Two Popes is a fascinating, revealing and gripping tale of two very different men whose destinies converge with each other - they both live in the Vatican - and the wider world. 
 
On 28 February 2013, a 600-year-old tradition was shattered: the conservative Pope Benedict XVI made a startling announcement. He would resign. Reeling from the news, the College of Cardinals rushed to Rome to congregate in the Sistine Chapel to pick his successor. Their unlikely choice? Francis, the first non-European pope in 1,200 years, a one time tango club bouncer, a passionate football fan and a man with the common touch. 
 
How did these two men become two of the most powerful people on Earth? 
What's it like to be the Pope? 
What does the future hold for the Catholic Church and its 1 billion followers? 
 
The Two Popes is a dual biography that masterfully combines these two popes' lives into one gripping narrative. From Benedict and Francis' experiences of war in their homelands - when they were still Joseph and Jorge - and the sexual abuse scandal that continues to rock the Church to its foundations, to the intrigue and the occasional comedy of life in the Vatican, The Pope glitters with the darker and the lighter details of life inside one of the world's most opaque but significant institutions.

The Two Popes

Thomas Cogswell

James's reign marked one of the very rare major breaks in England's monarchy. Already James VI of Scotland and a highly experienced ruler who had established his authority over the Scottish Kirk, he marched south on Elizabeth I's death to become James I of England and Ireland, uniting the British Isles for the first time and founding the Stuart dynasty which would, with several lurches, reign for over a century. Indeed his descendant still occupies the throne. 
 
A complex, curious man and great survivor, James drastically changed court life in London and presided over such major projects as the Authorized Version of the Bible and the establishment of English settlements in Virginia, Massachusetts, Gujarat and the Caribbean. Although he failed to unite England and Scotland, he insisted that ambassadors acknowledge him as King of Great Britain and that vessels from both countries display a version of the current Union Flag. 
 
He was often accused of being too informal and insufficiently regal - but when his son, Charles I, decided to redress these criticisms in his own reign he was destroyed. How much of the roots of this disaster were to be found in James's reign is one of the many problems dramatized in Thomas Cogswell's brilliant and highly entertaining new book.

James I (Penguin Monarchs)

The Phoenix King

Helen Castor

Richard of Bordeaux and Henry Bolingbroke were first cousins, born just three months apart. Their lives were from the beginning entwined. When they were still children, Richard was crowned King Richard II with Henry at his side: a ten-year-old lord in the service of his ten-year-old king. Yet they soon grew up to be opposites: Richard was the white hart, a thin-skinned narcissist, and Henry the eagle, a chivalric hero, a leader who inspired loyalty where Richard inspired only fear. Increasingly threatened by his charismatic cousin, Richard became consumed by the need for total power, and the stage was set for a final confrontation. This is a story about a nation brought to the brink of catastrophe – and two men whose lives were played out in parallel, to devastating effect.

The Eagle and the Hart

The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV

Joanne Paul

Was the House of Dudley out to steal the throne? 
 
This was the question on the mind of Elizabeth I's courtiers when a forbidden book accused generations of the Dudley family of poisonings, plottings, murders, treason, incitement and other 'evil stratagems.' 
 
For decades, the Dudleys had been close to the throne, rising from nobodies to the land's highest offices. Under Henrys VII and VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and, finally, Elizabeth, they risked execution and imprisonment as they audaciously stole, murdered and swindled in the name of the monarch. 
 
But were they loyally protecting the crown, or did they secretly covet it for themselves?

The House of Dudley

A New History of Tudor England. A TIMES Book of the Year 2022

Alistair Wood

As a boy, Alistair Wood lived within the walls of an MI6 training camp. After all, he was family. His mother was one of a handful of women to have operated behind the lines in post-war Berlin. His father, once one of Britain’s most highly-regarded intelligence officers, was an absent and perplexing figure, the reasons for his sudden departure from the Service still classified to this day. 
My Family and Other Spies is a gripping exploration of an extraordinary family, a globe-trotting spy story spanning pre-Second World War to the fall of Communism, and a son’s reckoning with the secrets of the past.

My Family And Other Spies

John Stubbs

John Donne's life story is inextricably tied up with the fabric of a society in the throes of religious persecution. His family had long been subject to the terror inflicted upon Catholics under the reign of Elizabeth I, and while his brother languished in prison, and his mother and uncles fled to exile in Europe, Donne was consumed by the question of his own faith and by trying to figure out what it is that connects human beings - and keeps them apart. 
 
In his biography of Donne, John Stubbs chronicles not only a long and bitter sectarian conflict, but also the love story of a young couple who broke the rules of their society, and paid the ultimate price. 
 
From the raucous streets of late sixteenth-century London to the personal and political intrigues of Donne's family and public life, from the horrors of the Reformation to the delight of Donne's poetry, John Stubbs' book is a vivid, dazzling biography of an extraordinary man, as well as a compelling portrait of England at a time of bewildering transformation..

John Donne

The Reformed Soul

Sean O'Driscoll

She grew up in a Chelsea townhouse and on a Devon estate. She was presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace as a debutante in 1958. She trained at Oxford as an academic economist and had a love affair with a female professor (who was on the rebound from Iris Murdoch). At thirty, she commenced giving her inheritance away to the poor. 
 
In 1972, the deadliest year of the Northern Irish Troubles, she travelled to Ireland and joined the IRA. 
 
Sean O'Driscoll's Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber tells the astonishing story of Rose Dugdale, who went on to become a committed terrorist, participating in a major art heist and a bombing raid on a police and army barracks; who kept a pregnancy secret for nine months in prison and gave birth there; and who ended up at the heart of the IRA's bomb-making operation during its deadly final spasms in the 1990s. Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber is both the page-turning biography of a remarkable woman and a groundbreaking account of the inner workings of a terrorist organization.

Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber

The Extraordinary Life of Rose Dugdale

David Womersley

'James was a king tragically trapped by principle. Yet was it wise to attempt to change the national religion?' 
 
The short reign of James II is generally seen as one of the most catastrophic in British history, ending in his exile after he unsuccessfully tried to convert England to Catholicism, a crisis that would haunt the monarchy for generations. Ultimately, David Womersley's biography shows, James was a man whose blindness to subtlety and political reality brought about his ruinous downfall.

James II (Penguin Monarchs)

The Last Catholic King

Trevor White

Alfie Byrne was that rarest of things: a genuinely popular politician, and a genuine independent. He is still a figure of legend in Dublin, where he was elected Lord Mayor ten times. He was also a TD and a Senator; and only a backroom deal prevented him from becoming the first President of Ireland in 1938. Rising from inner city Dublin to become known as the 'Lord Mayor of Ireland', he was a truly remarkable figure. And yet there has never been a biography of Alfie Byrne - until now. 
 
Trevor White's sparkling book tells the story of a man of many parts and contradictions. He was an urbane man of the world who left left school at thirteen. He was a teetotal publican. He was a Parnellite who opposed violence, but he was sympathetic to the Easter rebels. His politics were fundamentally conservative, but he was deeply devoted to the poor of his native city. 
 
This is the story of an energetic young man who offered to lead his community and refused to stop governing for forty years. His ambition and charm won admirers in the great capitals of the world - and in the tenements of Ireland's capital. At his best, he represented and encouraged a broader understanding of what it means to be Irish. And, through it all, he was a great personality, an embodiment of all that is best about Dublin.

Alfie

The Life and Times of Alfie Byrne

Kate Thompson

While the men were away at war it was strong women like Joan, Marie, Babs, Beattie and Minksy who ruled the streets of the East End. Kate Thompson tells the real stories of the war experienced by these matriarchs, a tribe of working-class women in the stinking slums, teeming tenements and sweatshops of East London. 
 
Forget church halls and jam-making, these powerfully authentic stories will have you questioning what you thought you knew about wartime women. From standing up to the Kray twins, to taking over the London Underground and crawling out of bombsites, these women fought to survive and protect their community in some of our country's darkest hours.

The Stepney Doorstep Society

The remarkable true story of the women who ruled the East End through war and peace

Mary McAleese

When a young Mary McAleese told a priest that she planned to become a lawyer, the priest dismissed the idea: she knew no one in the law, and she was female. The reality of what she went on to achieve - despite those obstacles, and despite a sectarian attack that forced her family to flee their home - is even more improbable. 
 
In this luminous memoir, Mary McAleese traces that astonishing arc: from the tight streets of north Belfast, to a professorship in Dublin while still in her twenties, behind-the-scenes work on the peace process, and two triumphant terms as President of Ireland. She writes of her encounters with prime ministers, popes and royalty with the same easy candour and intimacy with which she describes her childhood. And her account of the latest act in her remarkable career - quietly pursuing a doctorate, and loudly opposing the misogyny of the Church - is inspiring. 
 
Here's the Story is warm, witty, often surprising and relentlessly fascinating: an extraordinarily intimate memoir by one of the most remarkable public figures of our time.

Here’s the Story

A Memoir

Sarah Bradford

The definitive biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - a fascinating account of an extraordinary life. 
 
Jackie Bouvier's privileged upbringing instilled rigid self-control, while her expedient marriage into the Kennedy clan consolidated her determination. Revealing new testimony from many of the couple's closest friends show the profound complexities both of this very public relationship, including the affairs that threatened it, and of her controversial marriage to Onassis. Here is the private Jackie - neglected wife, vigilant mother, obsessive shopper and working widow - whose fascinating nature is illuminated by all that Bradford has discovered.

America's Queen

The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Michael Palin

Discover Michael's new travel adventure, Michael Palin in Venezuela, available now. 
 
'I cannot remember the last time I read a book so immediately absorbing and affecting. Michael Palin has never been better – which is, of course, saying a great deal.' BILL BRYSON 
___________________________________ 
 
From the time, many years ago, when Michael Palin first heard that his grandfather had a brother, Harry, he was determined to find out more about him. 
 
The quest that followed involved hundreds of hours of painstaking detective work. Michael dug out every bit of family gossip and correspondence he could. He studied every relevant official document. He tracked down what remained of his great-uncle Harry's diaries and letters, and pored over photographs of First World War battle scenes to see whether Harry appeared in any of them. He walked the route Harry took on that fatal, final day of his life amid the mud of northern France. And as he did so, a life that had previously existed in the shadows was revealed to him. 
 
Great-Uncle Harry is an utterly compelling account of an ordinary man who led an extraordinary life. A blend of biography, history, travelogue and personal memoir this is Michael Palin at his very finest. 
___________________________________________ 
 
PRAISE FOR EREBUS: 
 
'Beyond terrific. I didn't want it to end.' BILL BRYSON 
 
'Magisterial . . . Palin brings energy, wit and humanity to a story that has never ceased to tantalise people.' THE TIMES 
 
'Everybody's talking about it . . . A brilliant book.' CHRIS EVANS 
 
'I absolutely loved it: I had to read it at one sitting.' LORRAINE KELLY

Great-Uncle Harry

A Tale of War and Empire

Charlotte Moore

Hancox is the Tudor hall house in rural Sussex where Charlotte Moore grew up, and where she lives today. It's been in the family since her ancestor Milicent Ludlow, young, single and an orphan, took it on in 1891 and began to enlarge the house and manage the farm. Hancox tells the story of the house and the family over the following thirty years, in the long run-up to the First World War. 
In one sense it's a rural idyll: the arrival of the car disturbs this peaceful agrarian world, but apart from that the rhythms of the countryside go on as they had for centuries before. But all was not quite as it seemed: Milicent made a distinguished marriage but her husband harboured a secret. Milicent herself gradually succumbed to religious fanaticism. And the death of the youngest boy at Ypres devastated the family, bringing the idyll to a painful end. 
Using extraordinary archive material held at Hancox today, Charlotte Moore weaves an Edwardian tale of madness and jealousy, love and loss, heroism and tragedy.

Hancox

Jo Wheeler

While their husbands, brothers and sweethearts fought in Europe and their mothers, sisters and friends kept the home fires burning, for the first time, a group of remarkable women took to the skies. They weren't allowed into combat but risked their lives in bad weather and without radios to bring our boys the aircraft they so vitally needed. 
 
Employed by the Air Transport Auxiliary, these women were known as 'attagirls'. They proved that women too could master Spitfires, Mosquitoes and Hawker Hurricanes, forging a new path in aviation. 
 
The Hurricane Girls is the fascinating, moving and inspirational story of bravery, determination and remarkable women.

The Hurricane Girls

The inspirational true story of the women who dared to fly

Luca Crippa

Maurizio Onnis

When Germany invaded Wilhelm Brasse's native Poland in 1939, he refused to swear allegiance to The Wehrmacht. He was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp as political prisoner number 3444. A trained portrait photographer, he was ordered by the SS to record the inner workings of the camp. He began by taking identification photographs of prisoners as they entered, went on to capture the criminal medical experiments of Josef Mengele, and also recorded executions. Between 1940 and 1945, Brasse took around 50,000 photographs. He took them because he had no choice. Brasse's conscience wouldn't allow him to hide behind his camera forever. First he risked his life by joining the camp's Resistance movement, faking documents and trying to smuggle images to the outside world to reveal the horror. Then, as Soviet troops advanced on the camp to liberate it, Brasse refused SS orders to destroy his photographs. 'Because the world must know,' he said. For readers of The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz, this extraordinary true story of hope and courage lies at the very centre of Holocaust history.

The Auschwitz Photographer

The powerful true story of Wilhelm Brasse prisoner number 3444

Stephanie Williams

Olga Yunter was born in July 1900 in a remote frontier post in southern Siberia. A girlhood played out against the backdrop of the China trade changed forever, when, at seventeen, Olga joined her brothers in their fight against the Bolsheviks. Death and retribution followed. Olga was forced to flee to China, rubies sewn into her petticoats. Twice more Olga would be forced to leave everything behind - first to escape Mao's Communists, and again when Japan invaded China during World War II. 
 
From the comfort of her family to the terror of revolution, war and exile, Olga's Story is the heartbreaking tale of the author's grandmother.

Olga's Story

Jeremy Dronfield

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis. Along with his teenage son, Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved and forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in. 
 
When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz, a certain death sentence, Fritz refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering they endured, there was one constant that kept them alive: the love between father and son. 
 
Based on Gustav's secret diary and meticulous archive research, this book tells his and Fritz's story for the first time - a story of courage and survival unparalleled in the history of the Holocaust.

The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

The Number One Sunday Times Bestseller

Evelyn Juers

When the Nazis began destroying lives across Europe and artists became state enemies, Nelly Kroeger, a tall, blonde ex-barmaid, and writer and political activist Heinrich Mann - twenty-seven years her senior and top of the list at Goebbels's book-burnings - fled together, first to France, then to Los Angeles. 
 
Interweaving stories from their friends, relatives and literary contemporaries - Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf - House of Exile tells the remarkable story of Nelly and Heinrich, a couple divided by class and their own families, and of their unconventional love in a time of war.

House of Exile

Stephen Alford

Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII, became king at the age of nine and died wholly unexpectedly at the age of fifteen. All around him loomed powerful men who hoped to use the child to further their own ends, but who were also playing a long game - assuming that Edward would long outlive them and become as commanding a figure as his father had been. 
 
Stephen Alford's wonderful book gives full play to the murky, sinister nature of Edward's reign, but is also a poignant account of a boy learning to rule, learning to enjoy his growing power and to come out of the shadows of the great aristocrats around him. England's last child monarch, Edward would have led his country in a quite different direction to the catastrophic one caused by his death.

Edward VI (Penguin Monarchs)

The Last Boy King

Miranda Carter

Three cousins. Three Emperors. And the road to ruin. 
 
As cousins, George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the last Tsar Nicholas II should have been friends - but they happened also to rule Europe's three most powerful states. This potent combination together with their own destructive personalities - petty, insecure, bullying, absurdly obsessive (stamp collecting, uniforms) - led not only to their own dramatic fallouts and falls from grace, but also to the outbreak of the First World War. 
 
Miranda Carter's riveting account of how three men who should have known better helped bring down an entire world is a gripping story of abdication, betrayal and murder.

The Three Emperors

Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One

Minoo Dinshaw

At the Inns of Court, the intellectual, literary, and social heart of early 17th century London, many pivotal friendships were forged: few closer than that of Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward (Ned) Hyde. Both young men were lively characters, industrious, well-connected, principled and optimistic. They dreamed of reforming the government of Charles I, a young court with age-old problems, by restoring the traditional harmony of Crown and Parliament. This is the story of how their hopes climbed, overreached, and fell into an abyss of relentless civil war. 
 
This highly original, vivid and engaging book recreates the atmosphere, drama, players and ideas of what is arguably England’s (and Britain’s) most crucial and traumatic formative period. Through the stories of his two protagonists, Minoo Dinshaw shows how subtle religious and political differences, careful personal judgments, and mere happenstance combined to place these two friends, most reluctantly, on opposite sides in the English Civil Wars. They would both survive, unlike many thousands of others, into old age; both would become influential historians, shaping how we still understand the conflicts of their age. But their friendship, like the once hopeful country in which it had first flourished, would be forever changed: permanently marred by what both men believed to be senseless and unnecessary civil strife.

Friends in Youth

Choosing Sides in the English Civil War

Miriam O'Callaghan

I started writing this book as an exclusively work memoir but the work and the personal kept overlapping. I don’t know if that’s because I’m a woman or a mother or both, or none of those reasons. I just know that for my story to be authentic and truthful, I couldn’t simply focus on the work side of my life. 
Miriam O'Callaghan is one of Ireland's best-known broadcasters, covering every election, referendum, major controversy and important public event for TV, and hosting an award-winning radio show. Combining career success, high-octane glamour and being a mother-of-eight makes her a truly unique figure in Irish public life. 
In her absorbing memoir, Miriam shares touching stories from her personal life – from the life-changing impact of losing her beloved sister and father in a matter of months, and the end of her first marriage that same year, to the joys and challenges of bringing eight children into the world and juggling a frenetically busy life (‘give up on perfection’ is her wise advice!). 
Miriam includes fascinating insights into a career that has given her a ringside seat to a changing Ireland. Like attending Bobby Sands’ wake even before she was a journalist, and life coming full circle when she championed John Hume to be declared the greatest figure in Irish history. She describes extraordinary debates, important and heart-breaking conversations with people in the eye of a media storm, and how she goes after and prepares for the big interviews – as well as what happens when things go wrong. Miriam also addresses the recent RTÉ controversies that cast a shadow over its high-profile presenters, not least herself. 
Miriam is an exceptionally honest and personal memoir from one of Ireland’s most esteemed broadcasters

Miriam

Life, Work, Everything

Claire Tomalin

Acclaimed as the greatest comic actress of her generation, Dora Jordan played a quite different role offstage as the mistress of one of the sons of George lll. Dora bore him ten children, and they lived in quiet happiness in Bushy Park on the Thames until the unexpected news arrived of his ascendancy to the throne as William lV - at which point he was forced to abandon her. 
Claire Tomalin vividly recreates the political, theatrical and royal worlds of the late eighteenth century. The story of how Dora moved between stage and home, of how she battled for career and family, makes for a classic tale of royal perfidy and womanly courage.

Mrs Jordan's Profession

The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King

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