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Jilly Cooper

Jilly Cooper's witty thumbnail sketch of office life - part valentine, part poison pen letter - offers a vivid evocation of the world in which many of us spend a large part of our lives. There will be few office workers, whether they are bosses, sekketries or office crones, who do not recognize the Machiavellian politics and the lunacies she describes. The topics covered by this survival guide range from 'The Hierarchy' and 'Office Happenings' to 'Extra-mural Activities' and 'The Firing Squad'. Early in her career the author worked in an office and she has many friends, including a husband, who still do: but it will come as no surprise to readers of this classic volume to learn that since its publication she has been self-employed.

How To Survive From Nine To Five

Azar Nafisi

Azar Nafisi, author of the international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.A girl's pain over family secrets; a young woman's discovery of the power of sensuality in literature; the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by political upheaval - these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir. 
 
Nafisi's intelligent and complicated mother, disappointed in her dreams of leading an important and romantic life, created mesmerising fictions about herself, her family, and her past.But her daughter soon learned that these narratives of triumph hid as much as they revealed.Nafisi's father escaped into narratives of another kind, enchanting his children with classic tales like the Shahnameh, the Persian Book of Kings.When her father began to see other women, young Azar began to keep his secrets from her mother.Nafisi's complicity in these childhood dramas ultimately led her to resist remaining silent about other personal - as well as political, cultural, and social - injustices. 
 
Reaching back in time to reflect on other generations in the Nafisi family, Things I've Been Silent About is also a powerful historical portrait of a family that spans the many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79.It is, finally, a deeply personal reflection on women's choices, and how Azar Nafisi found the inspiration for a different kind of life.This unforgettable portrait of a woman, a family, and a troubled homeland is a stunning book that readers will embrace, a new triumph from an author who is a modern master of the memoir.

Things I've Been Silent About

Memories

Gay Talese

UNTO THE SONS is Gay Talese's stirring epic of his family's exodus from a tiny village in southern Italy, caught up in the tide of young men who crossed the Atlantic to America at the end of the 19th century.

Unto The Sons

Simon Toseland

Martin Toseland

As long as there has been crime there has been crap crime. From the Garden of Eden onwards, most criminals must have been at least a bit crap - or else they wouldn't have been caught, right? OK, some real-life rogues like Bonnie and Clyde, or fictional villains like Moriarty, make breaking the law seem pretty glamorous. But not the failed felons banged up inside this book. 
 
Crap Crimes is a hilarious compendium of criminal stupidity - from the woman who went to the police to complain that she had been sold poor-quality cocaine, to the burglar who left his phone charging in his victim's house. If you need proof that crime does not pay - or you just want a good laugh - then this is the book for you.

Crap Crimes

Tales of Criminal Stupidity

Dorothy Otnow Lewis

WHAT MAKES A SERIAL KILLER? 
 
A psychiatrist and an internationally recognized expert on violence, Dorothy Otnow Lewis has spent the last quarter century studying the minds of killers. Among the notorious murderers she has examined are Ted Bundy, Arthur Shawcross and Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon. 
 
In this book, she shares her groundbreaking discoveries -and the chilling encounters that led to them. From a juvenile court in Connecticut to the psychiatric wards of New York City's Bellevue Hospital, from maximum security prisons to the corridors of death row, Lewis and her colleague, the eminent neurologist Jonathan Pincus, search to understand the origins of violence. 
 
Concluding with a chilling interview with an executioner - a killer sanctioned by the state - Guilty by Reason of Insanity is an utterly absorbing odyssey that will forever change the way you think about crime, punishment and the law itself.

Guilty By Reason Of Insanity

David Searcy

'A work of genius' Ben Fountain 
 
'A bittersweet book, but also a sharp and profoundly wise one' Herald 
 
'Searcy writes with an urgency that makes his essays matter. Where the shame comes in is not certain, but the wonder is that you begin a year having never heard of an author then, two weeks in, his words are lodged in your consciousness and you are telling everybody you know to read his book' Independent 
 
 
Like dispatches from another world, the twenty-one essays in David Searcy’s debut collection Shame and Wonder are unfamiliar, profound and haunting. 
 
In his late sixties, the Texan author David Searcy became drawn to non-fiction, writing ‘straight-up’, on note pad and manual typewriter, a series of disparate thoughts and interests. These unframed apprehensions, as he called them – of forgotten baseball fields, childhood dreams of space travel, the bedtime stories he’d invent for his young children – evolved into a sequence of extraordinary essays probing the pivots and pathways of his life, and puzzling out what they might mean. 
 
Expansive in scope, but deeply personal in their perspective, the pieces in Shame and Wonder forge beautiful connections that make the everyday seem almost extraterrestrial, creating intricate and glittering constellations of words and ideas. Radiant and strange and suffused with longing, this collection is a work of true grace, wisdom and joy.

Shame and Wonder

Paul Osborne

The full, true story of the dog featured on the cover of Clare Balding's HEROIC ANIMALS 
____________________ 
The incredible true story of Sherlock, the brave dog with a nose for saving lives. 
 
Firefighter Paul Osborne works with the Fire Investigation Dog unit, where he handles Sherlock - an excitable, bright-eyed cocker spaniel. 
 
What makes Sherlock different? He's the most talented investigative dog the Fire Brigade has ever produced, capable of identifying extraordinarily subtle traces and scents even after thousand-degree blazes - even when he has to wear special protective boots due to the dangerous environments. 
 
Today, Paul and Sherlock fearlessly plunge into the most dramatic fire scenes in London, helping to keep the capital safe around the clock. With remarkable insight into the life of London's most heroic working dog, this inspiring account of the London Fire Brigade's four-legged heroes will delight and amaze. 
 
Foreword by Dany Cotton, Commissioner for The London Fire Brigade 
____________________ 
Winners of the Mirror and RSPCA Animal Hero Awards 2017 
 
Written in collaboration with and with full support from the London Fire Brigade

Sherlock: The Fire Brigade Dog

Norma Stevens

Steven M. L. Aronson

Richard Avedon was arguably the world’s most famous photographer – as artistically influential as he was commercially successful. Over six richly productive decades, he created landmark advertising campaigns, iconic fashion photographs (as the star photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and then Vogue), groundbreaking books and unforgettable portraits of everyone who was anyone. He also went on the road to find and photograph remarkable uncelebrated faces, with an eye toward constructing a grand composite picture of America. 
 
Avedon dazzled even his most dazzling subjects. He possessed a mystique so unique it was itself a kind of genius – everyone fell under his spell. But the Richard Avedon the world saw was perhaps his greatest creation: he relentlessly curated his reputation and controlled his image, managing to remain, for all his exposure, among the most private of celebrities. 
 
No one knew him better than Norma Stevens, who for thirty years was his business partner and closest confidant. In Avedon: Something Personal – equal parts memoir, biography and oral history, including an intimate portrait of the legendary Avedon studio – Stevens and co-author Steven M. L. Aronson masterfully trace Avedon’s life from his birth to his death, in 2004, at the age of eighty-one, while at work in Texas for The New Yorker (whose first-ever staff photographer he had become in 1992). The story of his two failed marriages and the love affairs he kept hidden – Avedon was a man haunted by guilt – is told here for the first time. 
 
The book contains startlingly candid reminiscences by Mike Nichols, Calvin Klein, Claude Picasso, Renata Adler, Brooke Shields, David Remnick, Naomi Campbell, Twyla Tharp, Jerry Hall, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bruce Weber, Cindy Crawford, Donatella Versace, Jann Wenner and Isabella Rossellini, among dozens of others. 
 
Avedon: Something Personal is the confiding, compelling full story of a man who for half a century was an enormous influence on both high and popular culture, on both fashion and art – to this day he remains the only artist to have had not one but two retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during his lifetime. Not unlike Richard Avedon’s own defining portraits, the book delivers the person beneath the surface, with all his contradictions and complexities, and in all his touching humanity.

Avedon

Something Personal

Stephen Clarke

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR 
 
Bonjour cher reader, 
 
Ever since European history began, we Brits have been happily engaged in our national pastime - annoying the French. And the past couple of years have shown that this annoying never stops. To give just three examples: 
 
After a mid-Atlantic collision between French and British nuclear submarines, France's Minister of Defence seemed to blame the accident on ... shrimps. 
 
When French political superstar Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York, France's establishment was outraged. It soon emerged that sexual harassment was regarded as a basic human right by the country's male élite. (This theme provided so much excellent material that I decided to include it in the plot of my soon-to-be published novel, The Merde Factor.) 
 
And when David Cameron walked out of a Eurosummit, a French politician accused him of being 'like a man at a wife-swapping party who refuses to bring his own wife.' Yes, a very French image, and it just one of the many anti-Anglais insults that came flying across the Channel. 
 
You will find all this, and much more, in Annoying the French Encore! Because, for the French, the merde never ends. 
 
Yours historically, 
 
Stephen Clarke, Paris, August 2012 
 
 
‘Tremendously entertaining’ Sunday Times 
‘Relentlessly and energetically rude’ Mail on Sunday

Annoying The French Encore!

Robert Moynihan

Published at the beginning of Pope Benedict XVI's papacy in 2005, Let God's Light Shine Forth, introduced the world to his spiritual vision of hope. 
 
The election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as successor to Pope John Paul II aroused tremendous interest not only among Catholics but throughout the world. Formerly the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and known for his stand against liberation theology and social activism on issues such as homosexuality, in his first days as Pope demonstrated a pastoral and very human face to the world. His deep faith, his theological learning and his intellectual gifts are without peer, and provided the foundation for his Papacy until his abdication in 2013, 
 
This book, from the editor of Inside the Vatican, explores Benedict's beliefs and policies through his own writings. Robert Moynihan sets the scene for his momentous election and then surveys his writings: on Jesus, Mary and the Sacrements, on the wider issues of faith and spirituality, and on the world today. In conclusion he reveals Benedict XVI's views expressed since his election and shows how these relate to his spiritual vision for the Church and the world.

Let God's Light Shine Forth

The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI

T. Christian Miller

Ken Armstrong

Random House presents the audiobook edition of A False Report by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, read by Hillary Huber with an epilogue read by Ken Armstrong and an authors' note read by T. Christian Miller. 
 
Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists uncover the true story of Marie. She said she was raped; police said she lied. It was an easy case to close until two detectives cracked it back open. 
 
 On 11 August 2008, eighteen-year-old Marie reported that a masked man had broken into her home and raped her. Within days, police – and even those closest to Marie – became suspicious of her story: details of the crime just didn’t seem plausible. Confronted with the seeming inconsistencies, Marie broke down and said her story was a fabrication – a bid for attention. The police convicted her of making a false report. She was vilified as a liar. 
 
 More than two years later, some 1,600 kilometres away, detective Stacy Galbraith was assigned to a case of sexual assault. It bore an eerie resemblance to a rape that had taken place months earlier in a nearby town. Galbraith contacted the detective on that case, Edna Hendershot, and they joined forces. 
 
 Galbraith and Hendershot soon realised they were dealing with a serial rapist: a man who took calculated steps to erase all physical evidence, who photographed each of his victims, threatening to release the images online if the women went to the police. After weeks of meticulous investigation, they had a name. But they also had yet another victim – a young woman whose identity was a mystery, a possible missing link. It was imperative they find her. 
 
 Based on investigative files and extensive interviews with those involved, A False Report is a serpentine tale of doubt, lies and a hunt for justice. It unveils the disturbing reality of how sexual assault is investigated and the long history of scepticism towards its victims. But it is also the story of two women whose determined resolve and detective brilliance finally brought the truth to light.

A False Report

The chilling true story of the woman nobody believed

Rob Rinder

Too many lawyers spout jargon... I’m here to cut the bulls**t. Robert Rinder 
 
Have you had a holiday from hell? Been left with a hole in your floor by a dodgy builder? Fed up with fighting over who gets the dog after your divorce? 
 
Don't worry, criminal barrister Rob Rinder, star of the ITV hit show Judge Rinder and columnist for the Sun, is here to help you take action. From common legal woes to problems you may have, this is a collection of real-life stories of things gone wrong, for which he provides sound legal advice. 
 
With sections on jargon-busting, consumer rights and common mistakes, Rinder’s Rules provides a thorough guide to everyday legal issues that you can carry with you anywhere.This book is both incredibly informative and unbearably funny.

Rinder's Rules

Make the Law Work For You!

Muriel Burgess

Shirley Bassey is one of the all-time greats of the entertainment business. She has sold more records than any other British female singer and still commands massive audiences around the world. Now, after a career spanning decades, her life story can be told: the story of a triumph over enough tragedies to last several lifetimes. The personal hardships that have fuelled the emotionalism of her songs have never before been revealed. Here her poverty-stricken childhood in Wales is detailed: how her mother struggled to bring up seven children on Income Support after their Nigerian father was deported; how she worked in a saucepan factory when her first struggles for stardom were halted by her pregnancy at sixteen. Shirley had a series of tortured loves: she married a homosexual Cockney who died of an overdose; she had a highly publicised affair with actor Peter Finch; and her second marriage, to an Italian, also failed. The shocking death of her second daughter, Samantha, just before her 21st birthday caused Shirley to lose her voice for nearly a year. Behind the showbiz glamour and consummate professionalism lies a fiercely resilient and independent woman.

Shirley

John Glatt

The Chieftains have become international superstars as well as being an institution in Folk Music. They have performed and recorded with such stars such as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, The Rolling Stones, Mark Knopfler. . . . and others. This authorised biography will trace the history of the band and its members from its small beginnings in Ireland in the early 1960s to their current status, and will feature exclusive interviews with all the members of the band and many of their friends and collaborators, along with photographs and other memorabilia from the band's own collection.

The Chieftains

The Authorised Biography

Tony Benn

Tony Benn was one of the twentieth century's most charismatic politicians. The Benn Diaries, kept for almost seventy years, are a uniquely authoritative, fascinating and readable record of the political life of our times. 
 
This single-volume edition is the selected highlights of the complete diaries from Tony's schooldays in the 1940s until he ceased keeping a record of his day-to-day thoughts in 2009. 
 
The narrative starts with Tony as a schoolboy and takes the reader through his experience as a trainee pilot during the war, his tentative first days as a backbencher in Atlee's post-war government, through his battle to remain in the Commons after the death of his father. From cabinet posts and leadership battles, through election highs ands lows to becoming a retired widower. Tony Benn was a consistently radical voice campaigning for the causes he was passionate about. 
 
This volume is the definitive legacy of the best political diarist of our times.

The Benn Diaries

The Definitive Collection

Randy Blythe

The incredible memoir from Lamb of God frontman, Randy Blythe. 
 
In 2010, a nineteen-year-old super-fan rushed the stage during a Lamb of God concert in Prague. To protect himself, singer Randy Blythe pushed the fan away. Unbeknownst to Blythe, the young man hit his head on the floor when he fell and later died from the injury. Blythe was promptly incarcerated on charges carrying a prison term of five to ten years. Thirty-seven days later, he was released on bail to await trial. Although legal experts told him not to return to the Czech Republic to face the charges, Blythe explained that he “could not run away from this problem while the grieving family of a dead young man searched hopelessly for answers that [he] might help provide.” 
 
After a five-day trial, he was acquitted on March 5, 2013. 
 
In Dark Days, Blythe tells the story of his incarceration and the wild life that led up to it. As he explains, “Most substance abuse books end with the author getting sober. My book starts there.”

Dark Days

Charles Drazin

Sometime late in 1664, the musketeer D'Artagnan rode beside a heavily-armoured carriage as it rumbled slowly southwards from Paris, carrying his great friend Nicolas Fouquet to internal exile and life imprisonment in the fortress of Pignerol. There he would be incarcerated in a cell next door to the Man with the Iron Mask... 
 
From a glittering zenith as the King's first minister, builder of the breathtaking chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte, collector of books, patron of the arts and lover of beautiful women, Fouquet had fallen like Icarus. Charged with embezzlement, he was convicted and sentenced to banishment until the King intervened to change his sentence to life imprisonment. 
 
Charles Drazin's riveting account brings to life the rich and hazardous world in which Foucquet lived. As a child he learned from his devout mother how to mix herbal remedies for the patients at the Hotel-Dieu and from his father, a creature of Cardinal Richelieu, the demands of political life. Drazin tells of the young man's first adventures as a tax-collector, caught up in rebellion in the Dauphiné , of the loyalty and service that he gave to Cardinal Mazarin and of the financial wizardry that somehow kept France's finances together. The cunning, charisma and charm of Fouquet enchant and beguile while they reveal the seeds of his destruction. 
 
But it is in his downfall and incarceration, which he bore with great fortitude, courage and humour, that Fouquet's strength of character and grace emerge, as he somehow survives both solitary confinement and absence of books, pen and ink. The richness and contrasts of his remarkable story are done full justice in this compelling book.

The Man Who Outshone The Sun King

How has Gay Talese found his subjects? How has he gotten them onto the page? What drives him to write? These are some of the questions at the heart of the narrative that combines memory, reflection, explanation and a satisfying obsession. I his trademark prose - precise, beautifully crafted, elegant - Talese traces the paths his passionate interests have made through his life and writing. He talks about first becoming absorbed in issues of race as a student in Alabama, about covering the civil rights struggle and about a recent interracial wedding in Selma. He reflects on the changing American sexual mores he has written about over the last 50 years, and gives an incisive examination of the lives of Lorena and John Bobbitt. He talks about his legendary Esquire profile of Frank Sinatra - judged by the magazine to be the finest in its long history - and about the ordinary men and women whose stories led to some of his most memorable work. And as he delves into the life of a young female Chinese soccer player, we see his consuming interest in the world in its latest manifestation. In these and other recollections and stories, he gives us a fascinating picture of both the serendipity and meticulousness involved in getting a story, and getting it right. 
 
Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned - a dazzling book about the nature of writing in one man's life, and of writing itself.

A Writer's Life

Gerry Anderson

The critically acclaimed memoir from the well-loved broadcaster Gerry Anderson 
 
Gerry Anderson broadcast every day out of Londonderry, which once upon a time was called Doire Colmcille, evolving, under the influence of the English, into LondonDerry in the 17th century. On a dark night now, asked about your destination by a shadowy figure, 'Derry' might be the right answer or the wrong answer. 'Stroke City', on the other hand, addresses the issue with wry neutrality. Gerry Anderson was anything but neutral about his life, his country and his work. SURVIVING IN STROKE CITY is a sharp, evocative, often surreal meditation on a world that Anderson made uniquely his own.

Surviving In Stroke City

Earvin "Magic" Johnson

William Novak

My Life is the inspirational autobiography of Magic, the top-class athlete whose astonishing career is already a legend. He reflects on his boyhood in Michigan, his college career, his meteoric rise to basketball fame, the women he has met along the way and his most recent triumphs in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona with the larger-than-life 'Dream Team'. 
 
My Life is the deeply personal account of Magic, the exuberant personality who is one of the most beloved sports figures of our time. He talks movingly of his college sweetheart and his wife Cookie, his hopes, fears, and regrets, and now his brave fight against the HIV virus and for AIDS awareness. 
 
A remarkable story, My Life captures the strength of Magic's character, his dazzling career and his equally dazzling smile.

My Life

Susan Lewis

An inspirational collection of true stories, introduced and edited by Sunday Times bestselling author Susan Lewis and published in support of Breast Cancer Care. 
 
All of us face challenges in our lives and when things get really difficult we often need someone to help us through. That someone can be the person closest to us, or someone we least expected, or even, in some cases, a total stranger. 
 
The Stories of Support campaign was set up for people to share their story of how someone helped them, in order to raise awareness and funds for Breast Cancer Care. In Susan Lewis’s novel, Never Say Goodbye, two strangers are brought together by tragedy and the bond that develops between them profoundly changes both their lives. Through Stories of Support Susan wanted to acknowledge the remarkable people who have given their support to friends, family, colleagues or the community. 
 
The five women who wrote the stories in this collection were selected by Susan Lewis because of their moving accounts of the exceptional support they have experienced from selfless friends and family through the most difficult of times. With an introduction from Susan Lewis, Shelley, Kate, Julie, Jane and Jeanette show the restorative power of love and friendship in a collection of stories they hope will inspire many others. 
 
Includes the first chapter of Never Say Goodbye.

Stories of Support

A collection of inspirational true stories

Hugo Vickers

Harold Nicolson called her 'the greatest Queen since Cleopatra', while Cecil Beaton called her 'a marshmallow made on a welding machine'. Stephen Tennant said: 'She looked everything that she was not: gentle, gullible, tenderness mingled with dispassionate serenity, cool, well-bred, remote. Behind this veil she schemed and vacillated, hard as nails.' Who was she? 
The Queen Mother's story has not yet been properly told. This was partly due to her long life, and the difficulty that always exists when a biography of a living person is attempted, partly because she was a queen - and the real person gets hidden behind the perceived image - and partly because she is hard to pin down. 
From her privileged aristocratic childhood, to the abdication and the problems with Diana - this book questions how she faced her challenges and crises, assess her role, how powerful she was, and how she coped. This is a candid, personal portrait of one of Britain's most loved national treasures. 
Hugo Vickers, an acknowledged expert on the House of Windsor, has spent seventeen years researching this book, and observed the Queen Mother in public and private over a period of forty years.

Elizabeth, The Queen Mother

Anna Quindlen

What started as an ode to Quindlen's aging black Labrador in her Newsweek column has become a life-affirming short book about happiness, in the tradition of A SHORT GUIDE TO A HAPPY LIFE and BEING PERFECT. 
 
In this wise little book, Anna Quindlen writes: "The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter, more compressed." Quindlen continues, with her trademark wonderful writing, sound wisdom and humor, to explain how her life has unfolded in tandem with Beau, and how she's learned how to enjoy life, in the simplest of ways, by watching him. 
 
She writes, "When I was a mixed-breed puppy, I could never have imagined how simple and basic contentment could be. And that's what I've learned from watching Beau: to roll with the punches, to take things as they come, to measure myself not in terms of the past or the future but of the present, to raise my nose in the air from time to time and, at least metaphorically, holler, "I smell bacon!"

Life with Beau

A Tale of a Dog and His Family

Nikesh Shukla

Random House presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of The Good Immigrant, read by the authors. 
 
How does it feel to be constantly regarded as a potential threat, strip-searched at every airport? 
 
Or be told that, as an actress, the part you’re most fitted to play is ‘wife of a terrorist’? How does it feel to have words from your native language misused, misappropriated and used aggressively towards you? How does it feel to hear a child of colour say in a classroom that stories can only be about white people? How does it feel to go ‘home’ to India when your home is really London? What is it like to feel you always have to be an ambassador for your race? How does it feel to always tick ‘Other’? 
 
Bringing together 21 exciting black, Asian and minority ethnic voices emerging in Britain today, The Good Immigrant explores why immigrants come to the UK, why they stay and what it means to be ‘other’ in a country that doesn’t seem to want you, doesn’t truly accept you – however many generations you’ve been here – but still needs you for its diversity monitoring forms. 
 
Inspired by discussion around why society appears to deem people of colour as bad immigrants – job stealers, benefit scroungers, undeserving refugees – until, by winning Olympic races or baking good cakes, or being conscientious doctors, they cross over and become good immigrants, editor Nikesh Shukla has compiled a collection of essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreaking, polemic, weary and – most importantly – real.

The Good Immigrant

Stanley N Alpert

On the night before his thirty-eighth birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped by a car-full of gun-toting thugs. They were looking to use his ATM card, but when they learned his bank balance, the plan changed. They took him, blindfolded, to a Brooklyn apartment, with the idea of going to a bank the next day and withdrawing most of his money. His captors alternately held guns to his head, threatened his family, engaged him in discussions of gangsta philosophy and sought his legal advice before eventually releasing him in a manner which has to be one of the most bizarre occurrences in the history of crime. 
 
Told from Alpert's memory and notes; interviews with NYPD detectives, FBI agents and witnesses; videotaped confessions; and court records, Kidnapped reads like a thriller - but every word is true.

Kidnapped

A Story of Survival

Richard Bacon

Have you ever been stitched up to the national press by your best mate? 
 
Or unintentionally upset a band with a slip of the tongue on a live TV show? 
 
Or ruined a dinner party by transforming everything alcoholic into water? 
 
Hello. I’m Richard Bacon and this is A Series of Unrelated Events. All of the stories are true. All of them happened to me. I’ve made the mistakes so you don’t have to (you’re welcome). 
 
So now, if you should ever find yourself sobbing on top of a box of gherkins in the stockroom of a Mansfield McDonald’s… having a Twitter conversation with your mum while she’s pretending to be an illiterate dog… performing stand-up to an audience who are funnier than you are… or just letting down all of the children of Great Britain… 
 
…you’ll know exactly what to do.

A Series of Unrelated Events

The New Yorker Magazine

The 1950s are enshrined in the popular imagination as the decade of poodle skirts and “I Like Ike.” But this was also a complex time, in which the afterglow of Total Victory firmly gave way to Cold War paranoia. A sense of trepidation grew with the Suez Crisis and the H-bomb tests. At the same time, the fifties marked the cultural emergence of extraordinary new energies, like those of Thelonious Monk, Sylvia Plath and Tennessee Williams. 
 
The New Yorker was there in real time, chronicling the tensions and innovations that lay beneath the era’s placid surface. In this thrilling volume, classic works of reportage, criticism, and fiction are complemented by new contributions from the magazine’s present all-star line-up of writers, including Jonathan Franzen, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jill Lepore. 
 
Here are indelible accounts of the decade’s most exciting players: Truman Capote on Marlon Brando as a pampered young star; Berton Roueché on Jackson Pollock in his first flush of fame. Ernest Hemingway, Emily Post, Bobby Fischer, and Leonard Bernstein are also brought to vivid life in these pages. 
 
Among the audacious young writers who began publishing in the fifties was one who would become a stalwart for the magazine for fifty-five years: John Updike. Also featured here are great early works from Philip Roth and Nadine Gordimer, as well as startling poems by Theodore Roethke and Anne Sexton. 
 
Completing the panoply are insightful and entertaining new pieces by present day New Yorker contributors examining the 1950s through contemporary eyes.

The New Yorker Book of the 50s

Story of a Decade

Wiley

‘Wiley is Wiley, and if you don’t know me, you don’t know much.’ 
 
*Winner of the NME Best Music Book Award 2018* 
 
A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 
A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 
A TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
'The greatest UK MC of all time' Noisey 
 
Wiley. Godfather of grime. He's one of Britain's most innovative musicians – and the movement he started in east London in the early 2000s is taking over the world. 
 
This is his story. This is ESKIBOY. 
 
'Perhaps the most influential musician working in Britain today' Guardian 
 
'Wiley is the pioneering force of grime, the most revolutionary musical movement in Britain since punk' The Times 
 
'A glimpse of the 21st-century rock'n'roll' Sunday Times

Eskiboy

In this, the fourth volume of Tony Benn’s diaries, the Labour Government continues its fight for survival. Important developments are occurring both at home and internationally. In Britain, Benn as Secretary of State for Energy is directly involved with Windscale and decisions about nuclear power and oil policy. Abroad, the Government is concerned with Carter’s reappraisal of American foreign policy, the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and problems of EEC membership. 
In the Labour party itself, new forces of radicalism and reform are emerging, resulting in changes in Labour’s policies and the ultimate formation of the SDP. 
Labour’s unsuccessful economic policy and the widening rift with the labour movement lead to the Winter of Discontent and a near state of emergency. With Labour voters defecting, the scene is set for the Thatcher years.

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