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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Anthony Burgess

These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco names; he once taught a group of Nazi socialites that the English equivalent of 'heil' was 'sod' and had them crying 'Sod Hitler'. Little Wilson and Big God moves from Moss Side to Malaya recalling Burgess's time as an education officer in the tropics, his tempestuous first marriage, his struggles with Catholicism and the beginning of his prolific writing life. Wise, self-deprecating and bristling with incident, this is a first-class memoir.

Little Wilson and Big God

George Orwell

'You can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business' 
 
As a struggling writer in his twenties, Orwell lived as a down-and-out among the poorest members of society. In this, his early memoir, Orwell recalls with vivid clarity his time working as a penniless dishwasher in Paris, pawning clothes to buy a day's worth of bread and wine, sleeping in bug-infested bunks, trading survival skills and cigarette butts with fellow tramps, and trudging between London's workhouse spikes for a few hours' sleep and tea. With all of the sensitivity and compassion that Orwell is known and loved for, he exposed the hardships of poverty and gave readers an unprecedented look at life lived on the fringes of society. 
 
This vivid account is an enduring call to support the world's most vulnerable people and exemplifies his belief that 'The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.' 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KERRY HUDSON

Down and Out in Paris and London

Christopher Isherwood

In November 1929, Christopher Isherwood - determined to become a 'permanent foreigner' - packed a rucksack and two suitcases and left England on a one-way ticket for Berlin. With incredible candour and wit, Isherwood recalls the decadence of Berlin's night scene and his route to sexual liberation.  As the Nazis rise to power, Isherwood describes his dramatic struggle to save his partner Heinz from persecution.

Christopher and His Kind

Andre Schwarz-Bart

THE BOOK: In every generation, according to Jewish tradition, thirty-six just men, the Lamed-waf, are born to take the burden of the world's suffering upon themselves. At York in 1185 the just man was Rabbi Yom Tov Levey, whose sacrifice so touched God that he gave his descendants one just man each generation, all the way down to Ernie Levey, the last of the just, killed at Auschwitz in 1943. This, then, is the story of Ernie Levey.

The Last of the Just

Wilfred Owen

'Orpheus, the pagan saint of poets, went through hell and came back singing. In twentieth-century mythology, the singer wears a steel helmet and makes his descent "down some profound dull tunnel" in the stinking mud of the Western Front. For most readers of English poetry, the face under that helmet is that of Wilfred Owen.' Professor Jon Stallworthy, from his Introduction. 
 
When Wilfred Owen was killed in the days before the Armistice in 1918, he left behind a shattering, truthful and indelible record of a soldier's experience of the First World War. His greatest war poetry has been collected, edited and introduced here by Professor Jon Stallworthy. This special edition is published to commemorate the end of the hellish war that Owen, though the hard-won truth and terrible beauty of his poetry, has taught us never to forget.

The War Poems Of Wilfred Owen

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

One of the world's greatest works of travel and adventure writing, reissued on its 100th birthday. 
 
This is a gripping account of an expedition gone disastrously wrong. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest members of Scott's team, recorded the experience of his adventure and in doing so created a masterpiece of travel writing. Despite the horrors that Scott and his men faced, Cherry's account is filled with details of scientific discovery, unforgettable descriptions of landscape and a belief in the spirit of human beings. A celebrated and compelling book on Antarctic exploration. 
 
INTRODUCED BY SARA WHEELER 
 
'The Worst Journey in the World is to travel what War and Peace is to the novel... a masterpiece' New York Review of Books 
 
* Voted Number 1 in National Geographic's 100 Best Adventure Books of All Time *

The Worst Journey in the World

Ranked number 1 in National Geographic’s 100 Best Adventure Books of All Time

Edmund White

FROM THE AUTHOR OF A BOY'S OWN STORY AND THE FAREWELL SYMPHONY 
 
'A superb introduction to the great novelist and playwright, vagabond, thief and convict, and to the brutal childhood from which he mined his remarkable vision' J G Ballard, Books of the Year, Sunday Times 
 
Interviewing lovers, friends, publishers and acquaintances, Edmund White draws from material, letters (a number published here for the first time) and other original sources to explore the perverse extremes of Jean Genet's life and writing. Separating the fact from the mythology which was fostered by Genet himself, White's portrait is a deftly painted celebration of French Literature's most modern rogue.

Genet

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe's debut collection of essays - a brilliant, form-bending dive into the future of America as it careened through the 1960s 
 
In 1965, Tom Wolfe dropped like a bomb onto the American literary scene with his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, an incandescent panorama of American counter-culture, its dances, bouffant hairdos, customised cars and rock concerts. Capturing the energy of the age in its portraits of Phil Spector, Cassius Clay, Las Vegas and the Nanny Mafia – as well as asking, why do doormen hate Volkswagens? – Wolfe’s flamboyant essay collection remains one of the great, revolutionary landmarks of modern non-fiction. 
 
'Journalism, it is said, is the first draft of history. Nobody exemplifies the dictum better than Wolfe, the cultural observer and social critic par excellence' Daily Telegraph

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

Nik Cohn

Nik Cohn had planned a trip around the world, but when a friend told him that Broadway is 'the world within itself', he started walking up the Great White Way, from Battery Park to Times Square. Escorted by a drum-playing Russian taxi driver, fuelled by duck soup and whiskey and sleeping in crackhouse hotels, Cohn encountered pickpockets, dancers, old  magicians, disgraced politicians, epic storytellers, part-time messiahs, and an unforgettable transvestite called Lush Life. Hallucinogenic history, rogues' gallery, personal odyssey, this extraordinary saga is also an extended love letter to a dream of New York now lost.

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