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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Robert Kyncl

Maany Peyvan

***Axiom Business Book Award Winner!*** 
 
 
 
Something massive is shifting in the world of entertainment. 
 
Across the planet, humans spend more of their free time watching video than doing anything else. But increasingly it’s not TV they're watching, but online video. In 2016, Swedish vlogger PewDiePie made a record $15 million from his YouTube videos, beating Hollywood A-listers like Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts and Amy Adams. Something massive is shifting in the world of entertainment. 
 
Since its founding in 2005, YouTube has become the first and only truly global media platform, with over a billion users worldwide. It has changed the media industry as profoundly as the development of radio, film and television. In Streampunks, YouTube’s Chief Business Officer Robert Kyncl gets to the heart of this creative revolution through behind-the-scenes stories of its biggest stars – YouTubers like Tyler Oakley, Lilly Singh, and Casey Neistat—and the dealmakers brokering the future of media, like Scooter Braun, who scouted 12-year old Justin Bieber on YouTube, and Vice media mogul Shane Smith who used the platform to turn young people onto news and current affairs. 
 
By giving anyone with a smartphone their own TV channel, YouTube is fuelling a new creative boom. Not only is it generating the new faces of entertainment, but also changing how students are taught, how social issues are discussed and how small businesses advertise and develop. 
 
Streampunks is the definitive book on the modern pop-culture juggernaut Youtube, the platform remaking the face of entertainment.

Streampunks

How YouTube and the New Creators are Transforming Our Lives

Cliff Goodwin

Richard Harris was never an easy person to get along with. He was a difficult schoolboy (and was later disowned by his Limerick teachers), then he went to work in the family flour and milling business - where he organised a strike against his father. 
 
It was as a gifted and compelling actor that Richard Harris dominated stage and screen for more than four decades. He was nominated for an Oscar twice: for his earthy portrayal of a rugby player in This Sporting Life and as a dominant and bullish Irish farmer in The Field. More recently he delivered gripping screen performances in Gladiator and two Harry Potter films. 
 
But it was his violent, drunken, womanising private life that fed the public myth and made Harris, one of a new breed of rogue male actors, an international celebrity. Married and divorced twice, with three sons - two actors, one a film director - he claimed the only time he had been miscast was as a husband. His lovers included legends such as Merle Oberon, Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner and Vanessa Redgrave.

Behaving Badly: Richard Harris

Tony Curtis

The Lives Less Ordinary series brings you the most exciting, adventurous and entertaining true-life writing that is out there, for men who are time-poor but want the best. Lives Less Ordinary drops you into extreme first-hand accounts of human experience, whether that's the adrenaline-pumping heights of professional sport, the brutality of the modern battlefield, the casual violence of the criminal world, the mind-blowing frontiers of science, or the excesses of rock 'n' roll, high finance and Hollywood. Lives Less Ordinary also brings you some of the finest comic voices around, on every subject from toilet etiquette to Paul Gascoigne. 
 
'"I first saw her at Universal just walking down the street. She was breathtakingly voluptuous in a see-through blouse that revealed her bra ... I said to this beautiful girl, "My name is Tony." "My name is Marilyn," she said.' 
 
Tony Curtis, one of the great Hollywood heartthrobs, was friends with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant and James Dean. He romanced a string of screen sirens including Janet Leigh, Natalie Wood, and of course, Marilyn Monroe. Here, Curtis shares his stories of some of those legendary seductions. 
 
This digital bite has been extracted from Tony Curtis's autobiography American Prince.

How to Seduce Marilyn Monroe

Lives Less Ordinary

Jody Tressider

Hugh Grant is the quintessential English movie star. He is also a man of opposites; his easy charm belies a malicious wit and as heart throb star of Four Weddings and a Funeral he shocked the world when police found him enjoying the services of a Sunset Boulevard prostitute. 
 
Jody Tresidder, who has written this first, hugely revealing biography of Britain's most famous film star, was a teenage love of Hugh Grant's. She has uncovered all facets of the man - his boyish appeal, his glamorous relationship with Liz Hurley and the darker side that he can longer conceal.

Hugh Grant: The Unauthorised Biography

Stephen Lavington

Three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone is one of the most controversial and well-known contemporary American directors. He began his professional life as a screen writer and was responsible for the scripts of Midnight Express and Scarface. As a director he made one of the all-time great Vietnam war movies, Platoon, and went on to helm such definitive cinematic works as Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Natural Born Killers and, most recently, Alexander - an epic biography of the legendary Greek king starring Colin Farrell and Anthony Hopkins. 
This indispensable guide takes each of Stone's writing and directoial features in chronological order, discussing them within categories such as Casting, Cut Scenes, Music Conspiriacy Theory? and Controversy. It looks at the inspiration behind his work, its connection with the real world and the story behind each film's development. 
Whether the subject is war, politics, sport or the defining aspects of an era, Stone is an expert at polarising audience views. This is an essential reference for all fans of Oliver Stone, writer, director and one of the most influential filmmakers of the last twenty-five years.

Virgin Film: Oliver Stone

Billy Bob Thornton

Kinky Friedman

There is – and could only ever be – one Billy Bob Thornton: actor, musician, Academy Award-winning screenwriter, and accidental Hollywood badass. In The Billy Bob Tapes, he spins colourful tales of his dirt-poor Southern upbringing, his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (fear of komodo dragons and antiques), his life, his loves (including his marriage to fellow Oscar winner Angelina Jolie), and, of course, his movie career. 
 
The Billy Bob Tapes is full of incredible stories and righteous philosophical rants, told with the help of his close friend, legendary country music star and bestselling author, Kinky Friedman. Put these two iconoclasts together and you get a story that’s not just a celebrity memoir, but a unique, hilarious and insightful pop culture manifesto.

The Billy Bob Tapes

A Cave Full of Ghosts

Bruce Crowther

With the advent of the Second World War a new mood was discernible in film drama - an atmosphere of disillusion and a sense of foreboding, a dark quality that derived as much from the characters depicted as from the cinematographer's art. These films, among them such classics as Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window, Touch of Evil and sunset Boulevard, emerged retrospectively as a genre in themselves when a French film critic referred to them collectively as film noir. 
 
Bruce Crowther looks into noir's literary origins (often in the novels of the so-called 'hard-boiled' school typified by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich), and at how the material translated to the screen, noting in particular influences from German expressionist films and the almost indispensable techniques of flashback and voice-over narration. 
He also assesses the contribution made by the players - by actors such as Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, Alan Ladd and John Garfield and actresses such as Barbara Stanwyck, Lizabeth Scott, Joan Crawford and Gloria Grahame, together with a roll-call of supporting players whose screen presence could lend almost any film the noir imprimatur. 
 
Noir was in its heyday from 1945 to 1955, a time when paranoia and disillusion, anxiety and violence could be said to have been part of the fabric of American, and particularly Hollywood, society, yet its impact and its influence are with us still - in films as diverse as The French Connection, Chinatown and Body Heat. This Book commemorates a special period in film-making and a unique combination of talent resulting in a spectrum of films that are as welcome today on their small-screen airings as they were when first shown in cinema.

Film Noir

James Clarke

This indispensable guide provides a thorough chronological examination of Ridley Scott's directorial career. All of Scott's films are included, along with information on his frequent collaborators, his thoughts on his own films, and a section on his unrealised projects. This is the essential reference guide to one of mainstream cinema's most diverse directors.

Virgin Film: Ridley Scott

Keith Topping

Leaving behind his life in Sunnydale and his relationship with Buffy Sunners, Angel atones for his sins by fighting for humanity in the dark seedy underworld of the superficially glamorous city of L.A. Angel Investigations has moved from the Hyperion Hotel to running Wolfram &amp; Hart, but has their conviction to be champions survived the upheaval? 
In his comprehensive unofficial guide to Season Five of Angel's world, Keith Topping, bestselling author of Slayer, the unofficial guide to Buffy, looks at each episode in turn, considering the links and cross-references between Angel and Buffy, draws attention to logic flaws, points out numerous pop-culture references and discusses recurrent themes and coverage of Angel on the Internet. 
This essential guide to the final season of the popular show explores the world of Angel, Wesley, Gunn, Fred, Lorne and Spike as they fight their own personal demons and the loneliness of the Big City in their search for redemption.

Hollywood Vampire: The Apocalypse - An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Final Season of Angel

John Collis

The United Kingdom had never seen anything like it, as two rock'n'roll legends rampaged around the country on Britain's first-ever rock tour. Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran lived the rock'n'roll lifestyle to the full, bringing to an end the monochrome 1950s and ushering in the swinging 60s. 
 
John Collis has traced the story of the UK tour that was a defining moment in British popular culture to its tragic climax with the death of Eddie Cochran. He looks back on the contrasting backgrounds of the two stars, follows the tale onwards to Gene Vincent's death from alcohol and drug abuse, and examines the lasting legacy of their music.

Gene Vincent & Eddie Cochran

Elaine Constantine

Gareth Sweeney

The story of Northern Soul is one of practically total immersion, dedication and devotion, where the plain concept of the ‘night out’ was elevated to sacramental dimensions. Where devotees pushed their bodies, their finances and sometimes their minds to brutal and unforgiving extremes. For those who went through that involvement every test of faith or endurance was worth bearing. 
 
- From Northern Soul: An Illustrated History. 
 
‘It was a drugs scene, it was a clothes scene. It was about dancing. It came out of this thing. It was about pills that made you go fast. To go fast to make the scene happen.’ - Chris Brick 
 
In the late 1960s, a form of dance music took a feverish hold on the UK, finding its heart in the north of England. The music of 1960s-70s black American soul singers combined with distinctive dance styles and plenty of amphetamines to create what became known as Northern Soul – a scene based around all night, alcohol-free club nights, arranged by the fans themselves – setting the blueprint for future club culture. Northern Soul tapped into a yearning for individual expression in northern teenagers, and exploded into a cultural phenomenon that influenced a generation of DJs, songwriters and designers for decades to come. 
 
Acclaimed photographer and director Elaine Constantine has brought the movement to life in her film Northern Soul – and that film was the starting point for this book, Northern Soul: An Illustrated History. 
However, what started out as a project largely comprising of Constantine’s stunning on-set photography, featuring her young, talented cast and highly authentic production, has turned into a unique illustrated history of Northern Soul. In its final form, the beautiful new photography holds the book together thematically, but its real depth lies in the material from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that Elaine and Gareth have researched and pulled together. 
 
Of course, no book can claim to represent everything about a culture. But Northern Soul: An Illustrated History concentrates on individuals’ personal stories from that heady era, as well as being crammed full of truly atmospheric contemporaneous photography – not from press photographers, but from the kids themselves. Be it snaps of soul fans in car parks, hitching a lift or mucking around in photo booths, the combination of real people plus real (and often very dramatic) stories – not to mention the complete absence of label scans and DJ’s top tens – means that the book stands out as a very different proposition from anything yet published on Northern Soul. 
 
We would like to think that above all, this book attempts to give you a feel for what it was really like to be there at the time.

Northern Soul

An Illustrated History

War films have existed since the birth of cinema, typically gung-ho tales of macho derring-do. But war films are not always about bravado and bravery, they also detail the horrors of war, the sadness, the brotherhood of soldiers and comedy that can be found in the bleakest of situations, as well as the excitement of the battlefield. War Films explores defining movies of the genre in sections covering different wars as well as wars with other worlds. 
The book also offers links between the different films, historical and cinematic worth and profiles of key actors and directors. Among the films included are Saving Private Ryan, Dr Strangelove,Welcome 
to Sarajevo, The Dam Busters, Gallipoli, The Deer Hunter and Ran.

Virgin Film: War Films

Ben Marshall

Pete Townshend

Roger Daltrey

Featuring personal, never-before-published photographs, fan memorabilia and anecdotes, captions from Pete, newly discovered gems from The Who archive, an introduction by legendary Who manager Bill Curbishley and further contributions from friends, colleagues and family, this landmark illustrated book celebrates 50 years of anthemic, era-defining music and an extraordinary career.

The Who

The Official History

James Marriott

From the Slick horror of Alien, Scream and The Ring and the cult classics Dracula, Frankenstein and The Mummy to the slasher icons Jason, Freddy and Leatherface, horror just won’t stay dead. The genre has earned its place in the moviegoing psyche, with many of the key films spawning numerous copycats. But what are the 20 most influential horror films of all time? And what made them so important? 
 
James Marriott give an incisive account of the definitive works (and the most influential directors) of the genre over the last 80 years – from silent Expressionist classics to Japanese wraiths. The book reveals the inspiration behind each film and examines the choice of director, cast, soundtrack and marketing. Marriott analyzes the critical reception of each film and examines the subsequent impact on the industry and the public worldwide.

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