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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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

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

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

Dave Thompson

Dave Thompson, author of Virgin's acclaimed Red Hot Chili Peppers biography, takes a new and very detailed look at the creation of one of the world's most influential bands. After all the streets of London had been covered in 'Clapton Is God' tributes, the three top rock instrumentalists of their time, all stars in their own right, came together to form Cream. Cream went on to become the first band to break open 
the lucrative US market by dint of their live shows alone. 
Updated to include details of their recent tour, this definitive account goes on the road with them then and now, day by relentlessly hedonistic day.

Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm

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

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

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

Jon Sandys

Ever noticed a digital watch in a historical film? Or seen a camera crew in a mirror? 
There's nothing we like more than finding a continuity error, a historical inaccuracy or a technical blunder. This third edition of the bestselling Movie Mistakes brings you over a thousand slip-ups to look out for.

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