Other books that might interest you

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  Three Weeks Eight Seconds - Greg...

  Nige Tassell

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  The gripping story of the greatest race in cycling history, when Greg LeMond cinched victory by a mere eight seconds. 
   
   
   
  For a race as long as the mighty Tour (three weeks of testing the limits of human endurance), to have the ultimate victory decided by a margin of just eight seconds almost boggles the mind.  But that's exactly what happened between American legend Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon. After more than 2,000 miles in the saddle, it remains the smallest margin of victory in the Tour's one-hundred-plus-year history. 
   
   
   
  But as dramatic as that Sunday afternoon on the streets of Paris was, the race wasn't just about that one time-trial. During the previous fortnight, the leader's yellow jersey had swapped back and forth between LeMond and Fignon in a titanic struggle for supremacy. At no point during the entire three weeks were the pair separated by more than fifty-three seconds, a razor thin margin between ultimate triumph or agonizing torment. 
   
   
   
  In Three Weeks, Eight Seconds, Nige Tassell brings one of cycling's most astonishing stories to life, examining that extraordinary race in all its multifaceted glory, complete with fresh first-hand testimony.

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  The Lost Childhood - And Other...

  Graham Greene

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  From Dickens to Wilde—literary criticism and personal reflections by a master “unmatched . . . in his uncanny psychological insights” (The New York Times).   Graham Greene shares his love affair with reading in this collection of essays, memories, and critical considerations, both affectionate and tart, “[that] could have come from no other source than the author of Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory” (The Scotsman).   Whether following the obsessions of Henry James, marveling at the “indispensible” Beatrix Potter, or exploring the Manichean world of Oliver Twist, Graham Greene revisits the books and authors of his lifetime. Here is Greene on Fielding, Doyle, Kipling, and Conrad; on The Prisoner of Zenda and the “revolutionary . . . colossal egoism” of Laurence Stern’s epic comic novel, Tristram Shandy; on the adventures of both Allan Quatermain and Moll Flanders; and more. Greene strolls among the musty oddities and folios sold on the cheap at an outdoor book mart, tells of a bizarre literary hoax perpetrated on a hapless printseller in eighteenth-century Pall Mall, and in the titular essay, reveals the book that unlocked his imagination so thoroughly that he decided to write forever. For Greene, “all the other possible futures slid away.”   In this prismatic gallery of profound influences and guiltless pleasures, Greene proves himself “so intensely alive that the reader cannot but respond to the dazzling combination of intelligence and strong feeling” (Edward Sackville West).  

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  Tears for a Tinker - The True...

  Jess Smith

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  More “heartwarming reminiscences” of Scottish Traveller life from the author of Jessie’s Journey and Tales from the Tent (Sunday Post).   In this book, Jess Smith concludes her riveting autobiographical trilogy, tracing her eventful life with Dave and their three children from their earliest years together. Their adventures and achievements are interspersed with stories of her parents’ childhoods, her father’s “tall tales,” and the eerie echoes of ghosts and hauntings that she has heard from gypsies and Travellers over many years.   This fascinating memoir is full of more unforgettable characters and insight into the Travellers’ way of life—a tradition that stretches back more than two thousand years and survives in the rich oral tradition of its people.

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  Geronimo's Story of His Life

  Geronimo

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  Geronimo’s Story of His Life is the oral life history of a legendary Apache warrior. Composed in 1905, while Geronimo was being held as a U.S. prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Geronimo’s story found audience and publication through the efforts of S. M. Barrett--Lawton, Oklahoma, Superintendent of Education, who wrote in his preface that “the initial idea of the compilation of this work was . . . to extend to Geronimo as a prisoner of war the courtesy due any captive, i.e. the right to state the causes which impelled him in his opposition to our civilization and laws.” Barrett, with the assistance of Asa Deklugie, son of Nedni chief Whoa as Apache translator, wrote down the story as Geronimo told it --beginning with an Apache creation myth. Geronimo recounted bloody battles with Mexican troopers, against whom he had vowed vengeance in 1858 after they murdered his mother, his wife, and his three small children. He told of treaties made between Apaches and the U.S. Army--and treaties broken. There were periods of confinement on the reservations, and escapes. And there were his final days on the run, when the U.S. Army put 5000 men in the field against his small band of 39 Apache.Geronimo had been a prisoner of war for 19 years when he told his story. Born in 1829, he was by then an old man, no longer a warrior, and he had come to an accommodation with many things “white,” including an appreciation of money. U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs personnel took him to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, where he roped cows in the “wild west show” and signed his name for “ten, fifteen, or twenty five cents.” By then he was perhaps the United States’ most “famous” Indian. In 1905 he was even invited to ride horseback in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade (though still a prisoner of war!).Geronimo dedicated his book to Roosevelt with the plea that he and his people be allowed to return to their ancestral land in Arizona. “It is my land, my home, my father’s land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace.” Geronimo died at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909, still a prisoner of war. (Introduction by Sue Anderson)

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  Lady Almina and the Real Downton...

  Countess of Carnarvon

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  Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey tells the story behind Highclere Castle, the real-life inspiration and setting for Julian Fellowes's Emmy Award–winning PBS show, and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants: Lady Almina, the fifth Countess of Carnarvon. Drawing on a rich store of materials from the archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters, and photographs, the current Lady Carnarvon has written a transporting story of this fabled home on the brink of war. Much like her Masterpiece Classic counterpart Lady Cora Crawley, Lady Almina was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Alfred de Rothschild, who married his daughter off at a young age, her dowry serving as the crucial link in the effort to preserve the Earl of Carnarvon's ancestral home.  Throwing open the doors of Highclere Castle to tend to the wounded of World War I, Lady Almina distinguished herself as a brave and remarkable woman. This rich tale contrasts the splendor of Edwardian life in a great house against the backdrop of the First World War and offers an inspiring and revealing picture of the woman at the center of the history of Highclere Castle.

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  HiBrow: Classic British Cinema -...

  Danny Boyle, Robert Carlyle,...

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  Some of the cast and production team are interviewed about the making of huge 1996 hit film Trainspotting. Interviews with Danny Boyle, Robert Carlyle, Kave Quinn, Rachel Fleming, Masahiro Hirakubo and Brian Tufano.Listen to opinions on what Danny Boyle is like as a director, how decisions were made about the film and how the music played a bit part. Includes more fascinating facts and insights from such a hugely successful and well-known film!

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