Other books that might interest you

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  The Joyce We Knew - Memoirs of...

  Ulick O'Connor

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  A collection of personal reminiscences of James Joyce by some of his friends and contemporaries which give a deep insight into the character of the man and bring to light many less well-known characteristics. Readers may be surprised to find out from these intimate accounts what an extrovert Joyce was: he was every bit the practical joker in the school drama society and in the gymnasium, and had ambitions to become a first-class swimmer. The perfect Edwardian 'card', the contrast provided here between the withdrawn Stephen Dedalus of his novels and the real Joyce is truly remarkable.

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  What You Become in Flight - A...

  Ellen O'Connell Whittet

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  With a promising career in classical ballet ahead of her, Ellen O'Connell Whittet was devastated when a misstep in rehearsal caused a career-ending injury. Ballet was the love of her life. She lived for her moments under the glare of the stage-lights—gliding through the air, pretending however fleetingly to effortlessly defy gravity.
  
  Yet with a debilitating injury forcing her to reconsider her future, she also began to reconsider what she had taken for granted in her past. Beneath every perfect arabesque was a foot, disfigured by pointe shoes, stuffed—taped and bleeding—into a pink silk slipper. Behind her ballerina's body was a young girl starving herself into a fragile collection of limbs. Within her love of ballet was a hatred of herself for struggling to achieve the perfection it demanded of her.
  
  In this raw and redemptive debut memoir, Ellen O'Connell Whittet explores the silent suffering of the ballerina—and finds it emblematic of the violence that women quietly shoulder every day. For O'Connell Whittet, letting go of one meant confronting the other—only then was it possible to truly take flight.

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  Fight Another Day

  J.M. Langley

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  As a young subaltern in the Coldstream Guards, the author lost his arm at Dunkirk and was captured but eventually escaped via Lille, Paris, Marseilles, Spain and Gibraltar.  He describes the fierce fighting outside Dunkirk, his captivity, escape and extraordinary life in Vichy France, before the Germans controlled it.  His fellow escapees and the French who sheltered them make a rich cast of characters.On return to London, Langley is recruited into the Secret Service and told to organize the safe return of allied soldiers, sailors and airmen who had succeeded in either escaping from or evading the Germans.  He describes the astonishing courage and sacrifice of the heroic underground operators who ran these escape lines across Belgium and France.  Despite betrayal and infiltration from Germans, collaborators and traitors, over 3000 men were safely brought back to fight another day.Langley and Airey Neave, who joined him after his historic home run from Colditz, had to wrestle with rival secret organizations for resources to carry out their vital work.All this and more is brilliantly described in this gripping, beautifully written book.

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  Cannibal Killers - Monsters with...

  Moira Martingale

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  Anthropophagy – humans eating their fellow-humans – creates a curious blend of revulsion and fascination. When the perpetrator is a murderer – most commonly a sadistic serial killer – the crime is not only shocking, but also bewildering. 
  Moira Martingale’s comprehensive study, Cannibal Killers: The Impossible Monsters, was originally written in 1993, when the Internet was in its infancy, when few homes had computers and when the character Hannibal Lecter from the book and movie The Silence of the Lambs was regarded as an entirely fictional character, with no real-world counterparts or inspirations. The book demonstrated that this was an erroneous assumption. Translated into several languages and widely used as a resource by students studying for criminology degrees, this seminal work tracked the phenomenon of cannibalistic murderers throughout history, from the monstrous Sawney Bean, who killed and ate hundreds of travellers in Scotland five hundred years ago, to Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrei Chikatilo, Ed Kemper and Issei Sagawa – all loners, hiding their most terrible of secrets. 
  Then came the World Wide Web. In this comprehensively updated edition we see that in the twenty-first century cannibals who thirst for human flesh and blood are still among us, and, alarmingly, they have moved online to find their victims.

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  Invasion Diary

  Richard Tregaskis

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  The Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy in 1943 were bloody and pivotal, securing the Mediterranean, capitalizing on the overthrow of Mussolini, and pinning down German troops that could have been used on the Russian Front or in France after D-Day. The men who made the Allied victories in Sicily and Italy possible-soldiers and officers, bombardiers and drivers, doctors and generals-are honored and remembered in these pages by famed war correspondent Richard Tregaskis. His experiences take him from bomb-bay doors over Rome, to the chaotic front lines in Italy, where he nearly died from a shrapnel wound. The uniquely American features of the Second World War are unforgettably inscribed through the pen of Richard Tregaskis.

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  Invictus - Nelson Mandela and...

  John Carlin

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  Beginning in a jail cell and ending in a rugby tournament-the true story of how the most inspiring charm offensive in history brought South Africa together. After being released from prison and winning South Africa's first free election, Nelson Mandela presided over a country still deeply divided by fifty years of apartheid. His plan was ambitious if not far-fetched: use the national rugby team, the Springboks-long an embodiment of white-supremacist rule-to embody and engage a new South Africa as they prepared to host the 1995 World Cup. The string of wins that followed not only defied the odds, but capped Mandela's miraculous effort to bring South Africans together again in a hard-won, enduring bond.

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