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.

Steve Roud

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Gerard Jones

In the depths of the Depression, out of the crowded tenements of New York and Cleveland, the comic book superhero leapt into being. Out of a mix of geekiness, science fiction, and outsider yearning, a crew of young men from working-class Jewish neighbourhoods and shady backgrounds created a series of blue-eyed, chisel-nosed crime fighters and adventurers who quickly captured the imaginations of young and old. Within a few years their creations had spawned a new genre that still dominates youth entertainment seventy years later. 
 
Gerard Jones draws on exhaustive research to portray how the immigrant experience and an outsider mentality shaped the vision of the make-believe hero, while a bizarre melting-pot of left-wing politics, mob money and the worlds of soft-porn and detective magazines contributed to the publishing world that produced the comics and brought them to millions. He chronicles how the success of the comics provoked a backlash that nearly destroyed the industry in the 1950s, and how later they surged back, inspiring a new generation to transmute pre-war fantasies into art, literature, blockbuster movies and graphic novels. 
 
Men of Tomorrow rivetingly demonstrates how the creators of the superheroes established their crucial place in the modern imagination.

Men Of Tomorrow

Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book

Nicholas Foulkes

It is said that asphyxiation brings on a state of hallucinatory intoxication...in which case the 71 year old artist who lay in his sprawling Provencal villa died happy. In the early afternoon of Monday 4 October 1999, wracked with Parkinson's, and unable to paint because of a fall in which he had broken his wrist, Bernard Buffet calmly placed a plastic bag over his head, taped it tight around his neck and patiently waited the few minutes it took for death to arrive. 
 
 Bernard Buffet:The Invention of the Modern Mega-artist tells the remarkable story of a French figurative painter who tasted unprecedented critical and commercial success at an age when his contemporaries were still at art school. Then, with almost equal suddenness the fruits of fame turned sour and he found himself an outcast. Scarred with the contagion of immense commercial success no leper was more untouchable. He was the first artist of the television age and the jet age and his role in creating the idea of a post-war France is not to be underestimated. As the first of the so-called Fabulous Five (Francoise Sagan, Roger Vadim, Brigitte Bardot and Yves Saint Laurent) he was a leader of the cultural revolution that seemed to forge a new France from the shattered remains of a discredited and demoralized country. 
 
 Rich in incident Buffet’s remarkable story of bisexual love affairs, betrayal, vendettas lasting half a century, shattered reputations, alcoholism, and drug abuse, is played out against the backdrop of the beau monde of the 1950s and 1960s in locations as diverse as St Tropez, Japan, Paris, Dallas, St Petersburg and New York, before coming to its miserable conclusion alone in his studio.

Bernard Buffet

The Invention of the Modern Mega-artist

Greg Marinovich

Joao Silva

The Bang-Bang Club was a group of four young war photographers, friends and colleagues: Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva, war correspondants during the last years of apartheid, who took many of the photographs that encapsulate the final violent years of racist white South Africa. Two of them won Pulitzer Prizes for individual photos. Ken, the oldest and a mentor to the others, died, accidentally shot while working; Kevin, the most troubled of the four, committed suicide weeks after winning his Pulitzer for a photograph of a starving baby in the Sudanese famine. Written by Greg and Joao, The Bang-Bang Club tells their uniquely powerful war stories. It tells the story of four remarkable young men, the stresses, tensions and moral dilemmas of working in situations of extreme violence, pain and suffering, the relationships between the four and the story of the end of apartheid. An immensely powerful, riveting and harrowing book, and an invakuable contribution to the literary genre of war photography. An eye-opening book for readers of Susan Sontag.

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