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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Bridget Harrison

You're about to turn thirty, all your friends are getting engaged and pregnant - and your body-clock is ticking. Then you get an offer to move to New York. So you take a chance and break up with your boyfriend - only to land yourself in the singles capital of the world. 
 
When Bridget Harrison arrived in Manhattan to work for America's most famous tabloid, the New York Post, she was in at the deep end from day one. Dispatched by day to cover murders and muggings in the roughest corners of New York, by night she began to write a column about her search for love in a dating shark tank. So far so Sex and the City - until she realised the one man she was falling for also happened to be her boss (and unfortunately this wasn't fiction). 
 
 
THE HIGHS: 
Being sent out to cover your first breaking news story 
Having the chance to go on a new blind date every week 
Realizing you love your editor 
 
THE LOWS: 
Finding no-one you interview can understand your accent 
Going on a new blind date every week 
Realizing you love your editor

Tabloid Love

Jon Steele

Jon Steele is a war junkie. Soon after starting work as an ITN cameraman, he began to feel strangely at home in the kind of places ordinary people get evacuated from. Before long, he was living for the rush which comes as bullets fly past your head and bombs explode at your feet. Normal life just couldn't compete... 
 
In Georgia, Jon filmed on the last flight out of the besieged airport at Sokhumi, as the plane took off in the dead of night, all lights extinguished, going the wrong way down the runway, directly towards the nearby steep and virtually invisible mountain range while Abkhazian soldiers fired off random anti-aircraft shells in their general direction. 
In Moscow, he filmed in the midst of chaos as armed rebels and Militia fought bloodthirsty, hand-to-hand battles on the streets around him. 
In Rwanda, he filmed the horrific aftermath to the most brutal massacre of modern times - and his own neck got far too close to the edge of a machete for comfort. 
In Zaire, he filmed endless fields full of young children deranged by hunger and ravaged by cholera. 
In Bosnia, Jon realised that he had, in fact, seen and filmed more than he could cope with, and finally spiralled out of control, deep into emotional meltdown. 
 
But somehow War Junkie is also an incredibly funny and exhilarating book. The humour is dark but sharp as broken glass. The action comes so thick and fast you can forget to breathe. 
 
War Junkie is shocking, hilarious, deeply moving and, ultimately, it packs a powerful psychological punch. It will challenge everything you thought you knew about modern warfare as it shines an unforgiving spotlight into some of the darkest recesses of recent history.

War Junkie

Catherine Cookson

Catherine Cookson's previous collection of essays and poems, Let Me Make Myself Plain, was published in response to the enthusiastic reception of a series of late night radio Epilogues. Now, following the remarkable success of that volume, she has compiled a further selection of thoughts, recollections, and observations on life - and death - together with another collection of the poems she prefers to describe as 'prose on short lines'. 
 
As in Let Me Make Myself Plain, and indeed in the whole of her extensive writing, Catherine Cookson expresses her thoughts and feelings with remarkable candour and considerable wit. Above all, though, it is her down-to-earth common sense that shines through, as the forthright nature of her views expresses the hard-won philosophy of life she has developed for herself. 
 
In Plainer Still, she reveals many of the qualities that allow her to draw upon the great inner strength she needs to continue the battle of life - one that has, for the past fifty years, given her readers endless pleasure through the medium of her many novels, each of them inspired by the harsh and uncompromising nature of her early life. 
 
As the late John Braine wrote when reviewing Catherine Cookson Country, 'One way or another, she is an inspiration, a noble spirit.' Readers of Plainer Still, a new personal anthology illustrated with black-and-white photographs, will certainly find themselves inspired by the indomitable spirit of this most remarkable lady.

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