Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

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Steve Williams

One of the most successful caddies of the modern era, having amassed 150 wins, Kiwi Steve Williams has worked with some of the golfing world's best, including 13 years on the bag of Tiger Woods. Together, Woods and Williams won more than 80 tournaments – with 13 major championships among them. 
 
In this candid reflection on his years caddying for Tiger Woods, Greg Norman, Raymond Floyd, Terry Gale, Ian Baker-Finch and Adam Scott, Williams shares the highs and lows of their careers, explains the critical role of a caddy and offers a rare insider's view of the professional golfing world.

Out of the Rough

The Caddy's Story

Steve Benbow

At a time when the UK bee population is in decline there's no better way to make a difference than to start up your own beehive. 
 
Steve Benbow's enormous success with urban beekeeping show's how easy it is to keep bees, whether you're in the city or in the countryside, a beginner or an experienced beekeeper, and you'll never look back once you've tasted your very own sticky, golden honey, or lit a candle made from the beeswax from your beehive. 
 
Steve Benbow is a visionary beekeeper who started his first beehive ten years ago on the roof of his tower block in Bermondsey and today runs 30 sites across the city. His bees live atop the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, Fortnum &amp; Mason and the National Portrait Gallery, and he supplies honey to the Savoy tearooms, Harvey Nichols, Harrods and delis across London. His bees forage in parks, cemeteries, along railway lines and in window boxes, and because of the diversity of the plants and trees in the city, produce far richer honey and greater yields than they would in rural areas. 
 
The Urban Beekeeper is a fact-filled diary and practical guide to beekeeping that follows a year in the life of Steve and his bees and shows how keeping bees and making your own delicious honey is something anyone can do. It is a tempting glimpse into a sunlit lifestyle that starts with the first rays of the morning and ends with the warm glow of sunset, filled with oozing honeycomb, recipes for sensational honey-based dishes, and honey that tastes like sunshine. 
 
A hugely affectionate but practical diary of a beekeeper's year and the immense satisfaction of harvesting your own delicious honey. Read it and join the revolution.

The Urban Beekeeper

A Year of Bees in the City

Henry Hampton

Steve Fayer

Sarah Flynn

In this monumental volume, Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer draw upon nearly one thousand interviews with civil rights activists, politicians, reporters, Justice Department officials, and hundreds of ordinary people who took part in the struggle, weaving a fascinating narrative of the civil rights movement told by the people who lived it.

Voices Of Freedom

An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement From the 1950s Through the 1980s

Rosalind Belben

To George Lupus, Master of the Quarr Hounds, the fox is a 'gentleman'. The four children all hunt, and are tremendously keen. But Dorothy Lupus dislikes the sport that has been her beloved husband's passion. When a tragedy occurs, Dorothy finds she can't bear the proximity of the kennels across the park. Roguish, Rakish, Harebell, Arcady and Argot, Striver, Decorous, Fearless, Snowmaid... Dorothy wishes never to hear their hullabaloo again. She is adamant...

Hound Music

Fiona Campbell

Kenji Yamada has a critical wife, a hated mother-in-law and what he thinks is a job for life until his fortieth birthday teaches him otherwise. Initially too embarassed to tell his family that he has been fired, Kenji first befriends a travelling salesman with a passion for Elvis before taking up gambling, but his wife's outrage soon brings an end to this and sends him on a roller-coaster of misadventures. 
 
Via a bizarre chain of happenstance - including being struck by lightning while wielding a golf club - Kenji somehow finds himself responsible for a weirdly believable game show... 
 
Fiona Campbell's novel is a sparkling debut with graphic-novel sharpness, humour and poignancy.

Death of a Salaryman

Jason Fagone

Bill 'EL Wingador' Simmons, Sonya 'The Black Widow' Thomas, David 'Coondog' O'Karma, Bill 'EL Wingador' Simmons, Sonya 'The Black Widow' Thomas, David 'Coondog' O'Karma, Eric 'Badlands' Booker, Timothy 'Eater X' Janus - just a few of the stars of one of America's fastest growing sports: competitive eating. In a country in which a third of the population is clinically obese, competitive eating has made the leap from trestle tables and paper napkins to stadium arenas - in the past two years, more than 1.4 million households have tuned in to Nathan's hot dog contest on ESPN. 
 
 
Beginning with a trip to Japan in search of the elusive (and surprising slim-line) champion Takeru Kobayashi and ending up at the sport's annual grand finale in Coney Island, Jason Fagone spends a year with the stars of the scene, watching as they eat their way into (or out of) oblivion, and finding out just what compels a 'gurgitator' to force down forty-six dozen oysters in ten minutes. 
 
Wickedly funny and devastatingly insightful, Jason Fagone uses this weirdest of sports as a lens through which to examine the dark side of the American Dream - the never-ending quest for wealth, celebrity, possessions and food. And along the way, he uncovers the wonderfully human stories at the heart of this seemingly unnourished corner of American culture. Bigger, better, richer, fatter, Insatiable unlocks a world we all need to face up to. Dig In.

Insatiable

Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream

Andrew Baker

To the armchair fan, the life of the sports writer is one of unalloyed joy: all-expenses-paid trips to the most exciting events in the world, the best seats in the house, and one-on-one interviews with Anna Kournikova... Well, up to a point. 
 
Where Am I And Who's Winning? describes what it's really like to make your way through the world of sport, always on deadline, always between time zones, on a frantic, chaotic and hilarious tour of the planet's most famous and most bizarre sporting venues. There's football to be watched. And Formula One. And tennis. And two Olympics, two Commonwealth Games, ocean racing, curling, and of course the queen of sports - synchronised swimming. 
 
Permanently handicapped by jet-lag and ignorance, Andrew Baker travels by bullet train, bobsled, go-kart, and (most dangerous of all) bus in his constant quest to arrive at the match/race-meeting/mountain-top on time. Between soul-enhancing visits to the Dead Goat Saloon and the Arnold Schwarzenegger Museum, he breakfasts with Steve Redgrave, dines with Sebastian Coe and even takes in a game or two. 
 
Because nothing - not Brazilian muggers, nor Chinese security services - shall stand between him and his noble calling: to bring the great British public its daily sporting fix. 
 
Andrew Baker's brilliant comic debut will appeal to the armchair traveller and the armchair sports fan alike. But most of all to anyone who enjoys the misfortunes of others...

Where Am I And Who's Winning?

Mario Gmurr

Learn something new about yourself today. 
 
What does your workspace say about you? The most revealing clues aren’t on your desk or on your computer. Rather, they’re those paperclips in your bin – the ones you’ve fiddled with, probably without even realising it. 
 
When psychiatrist Mario Gmür started scrutinising paperclips bent by his patients, he found that they actually reveal multitudes about the creator’s character, quirks and hidden desires. Are you an optimist? A pushover? A Lothario? A bully? 
 
After studying the links between paperclip shapes and distinct character types, Gmür has created a delightful collection of quizzes and psychological profiles that allow readers to discover their innermost truths using these miniature metallic sculptures. 
 
Part Rorschach test and part humorous horoscope, The Paperclip Test offers an amusing yet astonishingly insightful personality gauge for anyone who has ever bent a paperclip without thinking about what secrets that tiny shape might hold.

The Paperclip Test

Joseph O'Connor

The Irish Male at Home and Abroad is the hilarious sequel to Joe O'Connor's bestseller The Secret World of the Irish Male. From flirting lessons in downtown Manhattan to being offered a good ride in Disneyland by the now legendary Wanda, it was a long, strange and hilarious trip. Now, in The Irish Male at Home and Abroad, O'Connor returns faster, funnier and filthier than ever before. 
 
Impersonating Santa Claus in a busy Dublin store on Christmas Eve, spending a penny in Lord Jeffrey Archer's penthouse loo, traipsing the local-radio publicity circuit in 100-degree Australian heat, on the run in revolutionary Nicaragua, contemplating the Shroud of Turin, or making a deposit in a grotty sperm bank - here are tall tales and short stories: absurd, anarchic and unforgettably side-splitting adventures from home and abroad. 
 
Laugh-out-loud funny, yet always affectionate and sometimes poignant, O'Connor roams through an Ireland of wife-swapping sodomites and late-night sodalities, when not getting lost in the restless new Europe of beach holidays, terrible beauties and Baywatch lookalikes. It's going to be another weird and uproarious trip. But like Wanda once said: Hitch a ride, sweetheart, and hang on real tight!

Irish Male At Home And Abroad

Dan Kennedy

How would you like a six-figure marketing job at the hallowed record label that signed everyone who counts in the last fifty years of pop music? Before you answer, we'll throw in a plush office, a hip assistant and a bottomless expense account? 
 
Dan Kennedy thinks all of his dreams have come true at once. In reality, he's just walked into a nightmarish episode of The Office. From his first assigment - creating a campaign celebrating 25 years of Phil Collins' love songs - he knows he's in way over his head, and from the looks of others around the boardroom, he's not alone. 
 
With cameos by ageing rock stars, dinosaur music-biz kingpins, hip-hop thugs and Iggy Pop, Rock On is an achingly funny tale of rock and roll, office life, and what happens when the suits take control.

Rock On

How I Tried to Stop Caring about Music and Learn to Love Corporate Rock

David Bellos

Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot, unmistakeable with his pipe, brolly and striped socks, was a creation of sheer slapstick genius that made audiences around the world laugh at the sheer absurdity of life. This biography charts Tati's rise and fall, from his earliest beginnings as a music hall mime during the Depression, to the success of Jour de Fete and Mon Oncle, to Playtime, the grandiose masterpiece that left the once delebrated director bankrupt and begging for equipment to complete his final films. Analysing Tati's singular vision, Bellos reveals the intricate staging of his most famous gags and draws upon hitherto inaccessible archives to produce a unique assessment of his work and its context for film lovers and film students alike.

Jacques Tati His Life & Art

David Lodge

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research. 
 
His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety. 
 
But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely. 
 
Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

Deaf Sentence

Benjamin Lee

A hilarious collection of the most agonizing real-life inconveniences faced by the iPhone-losing, polenta-burning, Eurostar-missing middle classes, illustrated by Matt Blease 
 
‘My pug has hiccups’ 
 
 ‘I've given myself a croissant headache’ 
 
‘I just dropped batteries in my quinoa’ 
 
‘Think I’ve forgotten how to ski’ 
 
Can't find your melon baller? Wrestling with wrapping paper? Struggling to figure out how to properly pronounce quinoa?? Get your daily trials into perspective with this hilarious collection of the top #MiddleClassProblems from around the globe. 
 
Since 2010, Benjamin Lee has run the hugely popular @MiddleClassProb account, and in this book he has selected the all-time highlights.

Middle Class Problems

Problems but not real actual problems, just middle class ones

Rich Cohen

Rich Cohen's maternal grandfather was called Ben Eisenstadt. Ben was one of those Jews that, with an anger bred of exclusion, went on to reshape the world. He did so by inventing Sweet 'n Low, a granulated sweetener which, in its tiny pink packet, is still found on every table in every diner in America. This simple invention spawned one of the great American fortunes. This is the story of that fortune, how it was made and how it remade and tore apart everyone who touched it. 
 
In Sweet and Low, Rich Cohen - the youngest son of Ben's favourite daughter - takes a journey into his own and his family's past. It is a story of family feuds (his mother was eventually disinherited by her mother), eccentricity verging on madness, gangsters, lawyers, corruption, accountants, ex-wives - a quest for a secret history, a black comedy of the American dream.

Sweet and Low

A Family Story

Glyn Maxwell

Britain is reeling from reports of a terrorist bomb on a film set that has killed a hundred people and, possibly, the brightest star in Hollywood, Thomas Bayne. Caught up in the middle of the national mourning is Susan Mantle - a rather hopeless London tour-guide - who is seen crying on a park bench and is taken up by the media as a symbol of the blitz spirit, appearing on the rolling news with the headline 'beautiful but crying'. 
 
She is crying, though, for other reasons: she's just been told by a clairvoyant that she is about to die. Reason and the real world are quickly relinquished as Susan is swept into a media maelstrom, becoming the baffled and increasingly unwilling star of reality TV. Buffeted by the demands of her new public, and her private terrors about her own mortality, Susan starts to lose control of everything.

The Girl Who Was Going To Die

John Fuller

Jealous curses and hate poems, love lyrics and erotic dances: John Fuller has always written light verse, and Song &amp; Dance is a boisterous and engaging collection, fizzing with intelligence and wit. There are tributes, and there are celebrations. Jokes abound in 'The Spellchecker's Guide to Poetry' and the wine is poured for 'Florio Drinking Song'. Befitting Fuller's musical ear, a host of rhythms beat time. Fans will fall on pleasingly intricate riddles and admire the high-wire gymnastics of unusual verse forms, including the inverted rhopalics of 'The Trans-sexual Circus'. 
 
But behind the fun is some sharp criticism of literary attitudinising, and a climactic injunction, to dance while we can, preferably with each other.

Song & Dance

Jean-Paul Kauffmann

Near the end of his life, the great Romantic artist Eug-ne Delacroix (1798-1863) painted one of the most enigmatic episodes from the Bible: Jacob wrestling with the angel. This painting, which decorates the wall of the Chapel of the Holy Angels in the Paris church of Saint-Sulpice, is Delacroix's "spiritual testament". But Sain-Sulpice is a mysterious church where everything happens behind the scenes. A fan of Inspector Maigret, Jean-Paul Kauffmann investigates the painting and the church, paying particular attention to its hidden history. He searches for clues in a bar in Dieppe, a castle in Quercy, a village in the Argonne, an oak tree in the forest at S-nart, even a golf course in the Loiret. The trail leads him to an art critic, a lecturer at the Louvre, and a sculptor who has a studio in the attic of Saint-Sulpice itself. All these intertwining threads finally come together in a central motif in which Kauffmann himself is involved. There comes a time in which everyone must wrestle with the angel.

Wrestling With The Angel

Chris Newens

2017 WINNER OF THE BODLEY HEAD | FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
In this quest across India during the recent cash crisis, Chris Newens follows in the footsteps of TV chef Rick Stein in search of divine truth and the perfect curry. Steeped in the smells and colours of south India, Cash and Curry is a brilliantly funny and intelligent journey of discovery that muses on the love of food, various incarnations of godliness, the power of belief and the true meaning of value.

Cash and Curry

An Unlikely Pilgrimage

Andre Dubus III

It is the summer of 1967 and, with one more year of high school to go, Leo Suther still has a lot to learn. He's in love with Allie Donovan, the beautiful girl who has turned his head ever since she moved to his small Massachusetts town. And he feels a real draw to the blues his father has taught him. Leo soon finds himself in the middle of a consuming love affair - and an intense testing of his political values by Allie's father, who challenges him on the escalating Vietnam conflict and forces him to examine just where he stands in relation to the people in his life. Throughout his - and the nation's - unforgettable 'summer of love', Leo is learning the language of the blues, which seem to echo the mourning he feels for his dead mother, his occasionally distant father, and the youth that is fast giving way to manhood.

Bluesman

Laurie Penny

Molly Crabapple

DISCORDIA is a story of courage and collapse in a country and a culture struggling to map out its future. A short ebook combining a 24,000-word essay with 36 detailed drawings, DISCORDIA is a feminist-art-gonzo-journalism project conceived at Occupy Wall Street and created in the summer of debt and doubt after the euphoric street protests of 2011-2012. 
 
In July 2012, artist Molly Crabapple and journalist Laurie Penny travelled to Greece. There, they drew and interviewed anarchists, autonomists, striking workers and ordinary people caught up in the Euro crisis. DISCORDIA is the result. In an impassioned climate where ‘objective’ journalism is impossible, Penny and Crabapple offer a snapshot of a nation in the grip of a very modern crisis where young and old see little reason to go on, the left is scattered and the far right is assuming greater power and influence. Along the way they drink far too much coffee, become hypnotised by street art, and somehow manage not to get arrested or mugged. 
 
DISCORDIA is an experiment in form, using the illustrated ebook format to its fullest extent to tell a story unique to the wordlength and digital platform involved. Crabapple's intricate, Victorian-inspired ink drawings lend a timeless quality to what is a conscious foray into a new kind of journalism - inspired by the New Journalism of the 1970s, in particular the art-journalism collaborations of Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman, but reworking that tradition for a 21st century world where young women must still fight at every turn to be taken seriously. 
 
DISCORDIA weaves together the personal and political, picking out those elements of the Greek crisis that are recognisable across the West to a generation struggling to articulate its purpose in a world of spiralling unemployment, democratic collapse and civil unrest. The solutions to the failure of modern neoliberal statecraft are very different to the 'tune in, turn on, drop out' ethos of the sixties: these days the drugs are worse and rock 'n' roll can't save us. The future is a question in search of an answer. 
 
Available only digitally, with a foreword by economic journalist and writer Paul Mason, this beautifully illustrated ebook is part-polemic, part-travelogue and part-paean to the birthplace of civilization brought to its knees. Part of the Brain Shot series, the pre-eminent source of short form digital non-fiction. 
 
'This is the Next Big Thing in journalism: digital, visual, intelligent, heartfelt, post-political, female, alarming, and engaging. It's both an honest chronicle of one corner of the collapse of a civilization, and an inspiring demonstration of the kinds of thinking, craft, and collaboration that might yet get us through.' Douglas Rushkoff, author of LIFE INC.

Discordia

Six Nights in Crisis Athens

Matthew Baylis

Alastair Strange is having trouble.  His girlfriend Martha, tired of late night telly and takeaway pizzas, has reinvented herself as the real estate princess of Putney. His dream job has turned into a nightmare and his Dad's been arrested for burglary.  Just when things couldn't get worse, along comes Alastair's old friend, society It-girl Tara, with a tantalising job offer. Alastair finds himself teaching media studies in an Ealing school.  A cushy number, he thinks, but that's before Tara calls the favour in- The derelict Ealing Studios are next to the school - their presence haunts Alastair and acts as a continual motif for his story, combining the quirky wit and eccentricity of the Ealing films with an eye for the absurdities of modern urban life.  Flat-sharing with the impossible Davenport, dealing with mysterious girls on the bus and disastrous blind dates, it would seem that there is, perhaps, one last comedy left in Ealing.

The Last Ealing Comedy

Kristen Radtke

Imagine Wanting Only This is a haunting graphic memoir about leaving, and those left behind. 
 
After the sudden death of a beloved uncle, Kristen becomes obsessed with abandoned places – derelict Midwestern mining towns, an Icelandic village preserved in volcanic ash, Cambodian temples reclaimed by jungle. At the same time, she examines what it means to be an artist, to be hungry for the next experience, to be always in transit. 
 
Beautifully illustrated in black and white, Imagine Wanting Only This confirms Kristen Radtke as an important new voice in the comics world.

Imagine Wanting Only This

Derek Wilson

The image of Charles II as a randy monarch who dragged the crown through the moral mire and irredeemably weakened its position has persisted throughout the three centuries since John Evelyn gave his judgement.  That judgement, Derek Wilson argues, is okay as far as it goes.  The Restoration court did set an example of cynical libertinism that provoked opposition not only from outraged preachers, but also satirical journalists and angry mobs who pelted royal mistresses and burned down brothels.  But Charles' bedroom antics are symptoms and not causes of social decadence.  Why did Pepys complain 'there is nothing almost but bawdry at court from top to bottom' or Bishop Burnet observe that throughout the three kingdoms people were 'throwing off the very professions of virtue and piety'? The answers must be sought in the traumatic upheaval of the Civil War and its aftermath in the life of Charles Stuart and his people.  In a society that was shaken loose by violent conflict the position of women changed radically.  Many experienced a new freedom and an enhanced power to influence men and events.  Charles grew up with and actually enjoyed the company of strong women.  Ministers complained of his 'effeminate conversation'.  As well as the notorious, grasping mistresses - the leach-like Lady Castlemaine, 'dearest Fubs' K-roualle, the outrageous Nell Gwynn - Charles was influenced by his domineering mother, Henrietta Maria, his 'pushy' nurse, Christabella Wyndham, his much-loved sisters, Mary and 'Minette', his only great love, Lucy Walter, his long-suffering wife, Catherine of Braganza and a cavalcade of devoted royalist ladies, actresses, whores, and ambitious gold-diggers who surrounded him throughout his exile and after his restoration.  It is this miscellany of relationships that Derek Wilson explores and helps us to understand in All the King's Women. These relationships helped to form Charles II's character, shape the course of political events and, ultimately, seal the fate of the dynasty.

All The King's Women

Saranya Subramanian

RUNNER-UP OF THE 2020 BODLEY HEAD / FINANCIAL TIMES ESSAY PRIZE 
 
'It's an exhausting, futile battle, really. Every night, the same smug cockroach squeezes herself out of my bathroom drain's grilled lid, scuttles into the toilet and shower area, and waltzes around like she owns the place.' 
 
The Cockroach and I is an astonishingly vivid, funny, trenchant portrait of life in Bombay in 2020 during the pandemic. It is alive to the nameless and the numberless of the city, alive to history, and alive to the special strangeness of a year of living surrounded by death and uncertainty. 
 
Here are innumerable human beings pushed inside their homes while insects and animals roam freely, each playing their roles.

The Cockroach and I

Bruce Robinson

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHNNY DEPP 
 
A screenplay based on the novel by Hunter S. Thompson 
 
It's 1960. In a highrise hotel not far from the beaches of San Juan, a man is recovering from an animal of a hangover. 
 
Paul Kemp is an alcoholic journalist who's barely seen better days, arriving at the only job he can get: writing horoscopes for failing rag The Daily Star. His fellow hacks are mostly crazy drunks on the verge of quitting, so Kemp fits in perfectly. 
 
But when he meets the impossibly gorgeous Chenault and her flashy boyfriend Sanderson, Kemp finds himself in way over his head - party to shady business deals, in hair-raising car chases with enraged Puerto Ricans, experimenting with a hitherto unknown hallucinogen - and finally discovers a mad, desperate devotion to the truth. 
 
Bruce Robinson brings Hunter S. Thompson's novel to the big screen with all the brilliance, wild humour and fierce energy associated with the acclaimed writer and director of Withnail &amp; I and The Killing Fields.

The Rum Diary: A Screenplay

Andreas Staïkos

Dimitris and Damocles live in the same block of flats. They share a love of cooking, and, it soon transpires, a lover - Nana. What follows is the story of their competition to win Nana's heart through her appetite. As the plates pile up, and the recipes grow ever more mouth watering, a bizarre and comic duel develops, fought with sea-urchin salads, stuffed vine leaves and delicacies from all corners of the Aegean to win the consummate femme fatale or to end up with the sting in the tail...

Les Liaisons Culinaires

Alan Jenkins

ALAN JENKINS - POERTY IS EXHILARATING. . . . . IT IS CHARGED WITH EROTIC ENERGY, RAGE, SORROW AND CONFUSION. - DAVID LEHMAN The poeoms in Alan Jenkin's magnificent new collection are closely linked, forming a movingly autobiographical book which deals with the disjunction between the aspirations of youth and the realities of middle-age. The narrator looks back on his twenties, full of the grand ambition to be the next Rimbaud, and wryly contrasts it with his current situation: friends dead, women lost, opportunities missed. Images of drifting, of the random patterns that fate imposes on existence, weave their way through poems full of sea-scapes and sailing boats. Ghosts loom through the mist; objects imbued with memory accumulate like driftwood. But although Alan Jenkins writes about a sense of loss and failure -his rich poetry formally dextrous and inventive, witty and subtle in its allusions - acts as a counterbalance, showing how the twisting of an emotion into shape can salvage feelings of pointlessness. Through his personal experience, he explores themes that will resonate with a broad audience: the difference between men and women.

The Drift

Ruth Dudley Edwards

They were 'Cudlipp' and 'Mr King' when they met in 1935. At 21, gregarious, extrovert and irreverent Hugh Cudlipp had many years of journalistic experience: at 34, shy, introspective and solemn Cecil Harmsworth King, haunted by the ghost of Uncle Alfred, Lord Northcliffe, the great press magnate, and bitter towards Uncle Harold, Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail, was fighting his way up in the family business. 
 
Opposites in most respects, they were complementary in talents and had in common a deep concern for the underdog. Cudlipp, the journalistic genius, and King, the formidable intellect, were to become, in Cudlipp's words, 'the Barnum and Bailey' of Fleet Street. Together, on the foundation of the populist Daily Mirror, they created the biggest publishing empire in the world. 
 
Yet their relationship foundered sensationally in 1968, when - as King tried to topple the Prime Minister - Cudlipp toppled King. Through the story of two extraordinary men, Ruth Dudley Edwards gives us a riveting portrait of Fleet Street in its heyday.

Newspapermen

Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street

Gerry Stergiopoulos

'I look at the way some women behave when they're dating, and I'm sorry girls, but it's an absolute car crash. The rules of successful dating are simple, but I bet you've been breaking them all.' 
 
After seeing too many of his female friends left all dressed up with nowhere to go, Gerry Stergiopoulos, every woman's ultimate best gay friend, has gone on a quest to understand why so many fabulous women have a catastrophic love life. 
 
Gerry unflinchingly enters a world of waxing, Spanx pants, dodgy self-help books, internet dating, wingwomen and smirting, to bring you his tried-and-tested History Channel technique, his perfect killer one-liners, the ingenious blackjack-based Scottish Shower system, the unbreakable three-month rule and even some sound lessons from his native Greece. 
 
Treat Them Mean and Keep Them Keen is the only dating book that gives it to you straight: it tells you what to hide and just how much to reveal, what to do and when to do it. You might be shocked at what Gerry suggests - but his advice works.

Treat them Mean and Keep them Keen

Novelist, critic, lecturer, reviewer, man-about-conferences, David Lodge, as both analyst and practitioner, is one of our foremost experts in the forms of fiction. He is also an uncommonly sympathetic and informed observer of the passing scene, and his penetrating vision is set in a consistently ironic frame. David Lodge's humour can be a devastating weapon, but it is continually engaging because as often as not the sniper's sights are trained on the author himself, and on the curiously mobile, cosmopolitan yet specialist world he inhabits. 
 
 
The essays and reviews collected in this volume are selected from the occasional writings over a span of twenty years, and are all prompted by an impulse - or an invitation - to "write on" some specific topic: a book, a film, an anniversary, a trip abroad. They also reflect the drive of the professional to keep writing, "to keep the muscles of composition exercised." 
 
 
The pieces collected here are designed for a wide audience, and most focus, in more or less direct ways, on Lodge's own work as a novelist. Enthusiasts will take especial pleasure in discovering sources for episodes from his novels, in tracing how reality mutates into fiction - or how on occasion, the process works the other way round.

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