Other books that might interest you

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  Anoint My Head - How I Failed to...

  Andy Macleod

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  It’s 1992 and Horace dreams of becoming a rockstar with his band the Pointy Birds. The only problem is that his day-job (mis)filing vinyl in a Soho record store is stealing all his time and energy, plus rival bands like Suede, Blur, Pulp and Radiohead are moving on to bigger and better things. But then someone called Ricky offers his services as a band manager and at last the dream can start. 
  Anoint My Head is the tale of a band who didn’t become rich, or famous but had a manager who did. It is also the story of a musical era, and documents the rise of some of the biggest British Britpop bands of the nineties, plus a comedian who went on to write quite a successful sitcom about a paper merchants in Slough. 
  A coming-of-age story about pursuing your dreams and what happens when reality gets in the way.  
  Perfect for fans of Caitlin Moran, Nicky Hornby & Ricky Gervais. 
  ‘Captures the time and the aspirations of a young band brilliantly. A great eye-opener into the absurd thought process of what it might take to headline Glastonbury!' Steve Lamacq BBC 6 Music 
  ‘All the fun of youthful dreams and the poignancy of disappointment - plus a remarkable A-list cameo. Magnificent.’ Phil Harrison Time Out / Guardian  
  ‘Hilarious warts-and-all story of a Britpop band whose big ambitions did not meet their talents’ Dan Carrier Camden New Journal 
  'Super-evocative, Proustian and a wonderful walk down memory lane.’ Mark Bowen Wichita Recordings 
  "A healthy measure of Nick Hornby with a dash of Adrian Mole had he joined an indie band. Just the tonic for these serious and uncertain days. Bottoms up!' Josh Levay Pointy Birds keyboardist/naysayer 
  “If Spinal Tap had been an indie band in 1990s Britpop London. Brilliant!” Dave Macleod

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  Wilderness - A Journal of Quiet...

  Rockwell Kent

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  The artist and adventurer chronicles his seven-month excursion to a remote cabin on Alaska’s Fox Island with his nine-year-old son. In August 1918 Rockwell Kent and his nine-year-old son settled into a primitive cabin on an island near Seward, Alaska. Kent, who during the next three decades became America’s premier graphic artist, printmaker, and illustrator, was seeking time, peace, and solitude to work on his art and strengthen ties with his son. This reissue of the journal chronicling their seven-month odyssey describes what Kent called “an adventure of the spirit.” He soon discovers how deeply he is “stirred by simple happenings in a quiet world” as man and boy face both the mundane and the magnificent: satisfaction in simple chores like woodchopping or baking; the appalling gloom of long and lonely winter nights; hours of silence while each works at his drawings; crystalline moonlight glancing off a frozen lake; killer whales cavorting in their bay. Richly illustrated by Kent’s drawings, the journal vividly re-creates that sense of great height and space—both external and internal—at the same time that it celebrates a wilderness now nearly lost to us.Including Extensive Hitherto Unpublished Passages from the Original Journal.“Twenty-nine years after his death, [Rockwell] Kent has returned with a vengeance. Not since the height of his pre-McCarthyism popularity has so much of his work been available to the public.” —Scott Ferris, Smithsonian“Conservationists and ecologists should rejoice at the reappearance of this splendid diary telling of the winter of 1918-1919, during which the late Rockwell Kent and his nine-year-old son exulted in the beauties of Alaska’s remote Fox Island. Kent’s strong woodcuts and sketches perfectly complement an unaffected text that tells in an authentic and most effective way of unspoiled nature in all its glory. . . . This book has considerable merit as an account of rugged life in Alaska, as a paean to the glories of nature, and as a record of Kent’s graphic work.” —Library Journal

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  Everything Is Wonderful -...

  Sigrid Rausing

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  “Pages of dreamlike prose explore Estonia’s terrible Nazi-Soviet past, the trauma of dictatorship, and how memory processes that trauma.” —The Financial Times   A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year  Just like it was taken for granted that houses could be abandoned and slowly decay, so it was taken for granted that people died in prisons, and that it was possible that no-one would really ever know the cause of death. This is the nature of totalitarianism . . .   In the early 1990s, after  the collapse of the USSR, Sigrid Rausing completed her anthropological fieldwork on the peninsula of Noarootsi, a former Soviet border protection zone in Estonia. Abandoned watch towers dotted the coast line, and the huge fields of the Lenin collective farm were lying fallow, waiting for claims from former owners who had fled war and Soviet and Nazi occupation.   Rausing’s conversations with the local people touched on many subjects: the economic privations of post-Soviet existence, the bewildering influx of western products, and the Swedish background of many of them. In Everything Is Wonderful Rausing reflects on history, political repression, and the story of the minority Swedes in the area. Here she tells her story of what she observed as she lived and worked among the villagers—witnessing their transition from repression to freedom, and from Soviet neglect to post-Soviet austerity.   “A delicate, precise, and richly informative memoir of a forgotten Europe and a vanished world.” —Timothy Garton Ash

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  Bernard Who? - 75 Years of Doing...

  Bernard Cribbins

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  Seventy-five years in the making and packed with entertaining anecdotes, Bernard Who? tells the wonderful story of one of the longest and most celebrated careers in show business.Bernard Cribbins's life has been an eventful one. In 1943, he left school aged fourteen and joined Oldham Repertory Company where he earned fifteen bob for a seventy-hour week. After being called up for National Service in 1946 he became a paratrooper and spent several months in Palestine being shot at. On returning home, and to the theatre, Bernard was eventually approached by George Martin, then an A&R man for Parlophone Records, who suggested he made a record. Just months away from producing The Beatles, Martin asked Bernard to come to Abbey Road Studios in north London and, after teaching him how to sing into a microphone, they eventually recorded two hit singles - 'The Hole in the Ground' and 'Right Said Fred'. These, together with appearances in now classic films such as Two Way Stretch and The Wrong Arm of the Law (not to mention a certain television programme called Jackanory), catapulted Bernard to stardom and, by the time he started filming The Railway Children in 1970, he was already a national treasure.Since then, Bernard's CV has been an A-Z of the best entertainment that Britain has to offer, and, thanks to programmes such as the aforementioned Jackanory, The Wombles, and, more recently, Old Jack's Boat, he has become the voice of many millions of childhoods.'A fitting celebration of one of our most versatile and enduring acting talents' Sunday Express'charming, unassuming and full of amiable, homespun wit' The Oldie

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  Dinner with Edward - The Story...

  Isabel Vincent

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  A memoir of food and friendship “combining the warm-heartedness of Tuesdays with Morrie with the sensual splendor of Julie and Julia” (Booklist, starred review). Isabel Vincent first arrives at Edward’s New York apartment to check on him as a favor to his daughter. She has no idea that the nonagenarian baking a sublime roast chicken and a light-as-air apricot soufflé will end up changing her life. But their meeting comes at a moment of transition for each of them: Edward wants nothing more than to follow his late wife to the grave, while Isabel is watching her marriage unravel. As Edward and Isabel meet weekly for the glorious dinners that Edward prepares, he shares so much more than his recipes for apple galette or the perfect martini, or even his tips for deboning poultry. Edward teaches Isabel the art of slowing down, taking the time to think through her own life—cutting it back to the bone and examining the guts, no matter how messy that proves to be.Dinner with Edward is a book about love and nourishment, and about how dinner with a friend can, in the words of M. F. K. Fisher, “sustain us against the hungers of the world.” “A rare, beautifully crafted memoir that leaves you exhilarated.” —Rosemary Sullivan, author of Stalin’s Daughter “This is a memoir to treasure.” —Booklist (starred review)

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  Doddie's Diary - The Highs the...

  Doddie Weir, Stewart Weir

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  'I never set out to take the lead. It just happened - like MND itself. But we are making a fight of it.'DODDIE WEIRIn the five years since Doddie Weir's MND diagnosis, he has continued to live life to the max. He's raised millions for research and support for his fellow sufferers with the help of some incredible charity fundraisers, celebrated his 50th birthday and been awarded an OBE. And throughout it all, Doddie has tackled life head on, like the mad charging giraffe he has always been, both on and off the rugby pitch.Now, join Doddie as he lifts the lid on what his life with MND has really been like, both in public and in private. Being Doddie, there's always lots of laughter and an incredibly positive attitude, but it's also a rollercoaster of emotions. It's a battle Doddie will continue to tackle with his trademark dignity and legendary humour. And it's a fight he remains determined to win.

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