Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Rick Wakeman

Around about August 1948, Mr and Mrs Cyril Wakeman had an early night and some time later, at Perivale in Middlesex, Mrs Wakeman produced a bonny baby son. They named him Richard, but he quickly became known as Rick. 
 
Rick was a likeable little fellow who had a talent for the piano and for making trouble. Music became Rick's life - he joined a popular music group called Yes and became a legend. Much later he became a Grumpy Old Man who appears on Countdown, hosts a hugely popular radio show on Planet Rock and performs a one-man show telling stories about his rather extraordinary life. 
 
Which is where this book you are holding comes in. Mr Wakeman is simply one of the great storytellers of our age - let's face it, he has some fabulous material. It seemed a shame that some of the funniest yarns should not be more widely known. So he accepted some cash and here we are. 
 
Curl up by the fire with a Grumpy Old Rock Star and your nearest and dearest. We defy you not to want to read it aloud and laugh.

Grumpy Old Rock Star

and Other Wondrous Stories

Robert Sellers

'God put me on this earth to raise sheer hell.' Richard Burton 
'I was a sinner. I slugged some people. I hurt many people. And it's true, I never looked back to see the casualties.' Richard Harris 
'Booze is the most outrageous of all drugs, which is why I chose it.' Peter O'Toole 
'I don't have a drink problem. But if that was the case and doctors told me I had to stop I'd like to think I would be brave enough to drink myself into the grave.' Oliver Reed 
 
This is the story of four of the greatest thespian boozers who ever walked - or staggered - off a film set into a pub. It's a story of drunken binges of near biblical proportions, parties and orgies, broken marriages, drugs, riots and wanton sexual conquests. They got away with it because of their extraordinary acting talent and because the public loved them. They were truly the last of a breed, the last of the movie hellraisers.

Hellraisers

The Life and Inebriated Times of Burton, Harris, O'Toole and Reed

Lisa Jardine

'I want to use the moment as a springboard for some big ideas. I want to use the past and present to stimulate and challenge the listener and seduce them into thinking differently.' Lisa Jardine 
 
Provocative and inspirational, Lisa Jardine is one of our pre-eminent thinkers. A leading academic, she is a polymath who embraces both the arts and the sciences with equal passion and has that rare gift of being able to make her subject and her thinking accessible to a mainstream audience. 
 
Lisa presents 'A Point of View' on Radio 4 on Sunday mornings, replacing Alistair Cooke's 'Letter From America'. Another Point of View is a collection of twenty-two of the hugely popular and critically-acclaimed talks from the programme, on subjects as wide-ranging and topical as commuting, national identity, Christmas, Latin, knife crime, the mortgage crisis and the credit crunch. 
 
The book contains drawings by Nick Wadley.

Another Point of View

Iain Pattinson

The I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue team of Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, in the company of their esteemed chairman Humphrey Lyttelton, have been recording their BBC radio show around the UK for longer than any of them can remember ... that's about a week - or twenty minutes in the case of Barry Cryer. At each venue Humph would present a short history of the location, written by Iain Pattinson, to the mutual delight of the audience, the team and their delightful scorer Samantha (who somehow always found time for a rewarding poke around the area's backstreets). 
 
We are privileged to present, in gazetteer form, the very best of Humph's local histories form Radio 4's multi award-winning 'antidote to panel games'. As accurate as Wikipedia and as comprehensive as Reader's Digest, this unique guide tells you everything you never knew you wouldn't ever need to know about the background and inhabitants of Britain's most prominent towns and cities. The intelligent reader will waste no time in adding it to their collection. 
 
Bristol 
It was from Bristol in 1497 that John Cabot set off to find a new route to the Spice Islands by sailing north-west. He instead discovered a strange, hostile world which he named 'Newfoundland', until the natives explained that they actually called it 'Swansea'. 
Nottingham 
It's well documented in official records that the city's original name was 'Snottingham' or 'home of Snotts', but when the Normans came, they couldn't pronounce the initial letter 'S', so decreed the town be called 'Nottingham'or the 'home of Notts'. It's easy to understand why this change was resisted so fiercely by the people of Scunthorpe. 
Brighton 
A settlement is first recorded in Brighton as long as ago as 3000 BC, when Celtic Druids practised their ancient worship of oaks, mistletoe and virgins, and indeed, oaks and mistletoe are still plentiful in Brighton.

Lyttelton's Britain

A User's Guide to the British Isles as heard on BBC Radio's I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue

Bob McCabe

For eighty years, Pinewood Studios has made dreams a reality. Billions of people across the globe, of all ages, from all walks of life have read six words on cinema or television screens: 'Made at Pinewood Studios, London, England'. From hosting super spies and superheroes, Pinewood has been home to a galaxy far, far away, helping create the movies that have made audiences laugh and cry in equal measure. Some of the most glittering careers on both sides of the camera have been launched behind the iconic gates of Pinewood. 
 
From James Bond to Star Wars, the modern age of Marvel and the re-imagining of the Disney classics, Pinewood Studios and Shepperton Studios have played host to the greatest and most cherished movies of all time. Complete with many exclusive behind-the-scenes images from those classic movies, this beautiful new book offers insight, anecdotes and interviews with some of the producers, directors and acting talent who have worked at the studios, including Ridley Scott, Barbara Broccoli, Tim Burton and Sir Roger Moore.

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