4 Biography / Autobiography


BIOGRAPHY/ AUTOBIOGRAPHY


To the young this is a world for action; not for moping and droning in.


- Charles Dickens, David Copperfield


73178 BRIEF LIVES by Paul Johnson


‘We all like to hear about famous men and women. The more particular and personal the information, the better. That is why, instead of putting together an autobiography, mainly about myself, I have chosen to produce these sketches, varying greatly in length according to the material I possess, of the remarkable people I have known during a long life...’


Johnson has known popes, presidents, prime ministers, painters, poets, playwrights and even the foul-mouthed publican Muriel Belcher who ran the legendary Colony Club. Harking back to the scandalously anecdotal 17th century book by John Aubrey on the celebrities of his time, Johnson draws on more personal experience formed over 60 years of friendships in his high-class and occasionally salacious human comedy show. Arranged A-Z and includes The Beatles, Lord Beaverbrook (a generous man with a magnificent cellar) and Brendan Behan who became a member of the IRA aged 14. Johnson is a really good gossip, especially when describing someone like the awful Tom Briberg, the most persistent and promiscuous homosexual ever to sit in the House of Commons. Like reading 250 obituaries but much more fun. 296pp in paperback. £8.99 NOW £4


73126 COUNTRY GIRL: A


Memoir by Edna O’Brien The publication of Edna O’Brien’s memoir last year was a major literary event. The doyenne of Irish literature and considered by Philip Roth to be “the most gifted woman now writing in English”, she was born the youngest child of a strictly religious family in Co. Clare and had what she described as a “suffocating” childhood. At the age


of 20 she was awarded a pharmacist licence, and it was around this time she began reading in earnest. Her brilliant first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960 and was banned in Ireland, denounced from the pulpit and even burned for its frank portrayal of the sex lives of its women characters. 1970 saw A Pagan Place, which railed against her repressive childhood. Here is her childhood with her alcoholic father, the dreaded tinker families and mad Mabel, the Sisters of Mercy convent, the pharmacy and the flowering of her love of books and on through her astonishing literary career. Along the way there are many encounters with the giants of music and Hollywood as well as literature, and these cameos lend her story a touching, sometimes painful poignancy. She has the imaginative insight of a poet and here is a book of great depth and honesty. 339pp, photos. £20 NOW £6.50


72505 ALWAYS THE


CHILDREN by Anne Watts Subtitled ‘A Nurse’s Story of Home and War’, this is the story of Anne Watts who grew up in a village in North Wales in the 1940s. Defying her Merchant Navy father’s views, she trained as a nurse and midwife at Manchester Royal Infirmary, joined Save the Children fund and was posted to Vietnam in 1967. ‘No daughter of mine is going to


spend her life wiping people’s arses!’ One of only a few British nurses in the region, Anne witnessed the random cruelty of warfare, nursing injured children and caring for wounded and dying servicemen. Over some 45 years she brought courage and compassion to those in need. Woven into her compelling memoir is the story of how her idyllic childhood was shattered by the discovery of a shocking family tragedy when she was 10 years old which was to shape her destiny. 386pp in paperback with 16 pages of colour and b/w photos. £6.99 NOW £4


73074 ALL IN ONE BASKET by Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire


You would think that books written by a duchess would be prim, proper and - excuse us for mentioning the word in connection with Bibliophile - boring, but no such thing. This duchess vows that she writes ‘solely in an effort to amuse’ and amuse she does. All In One Basket brings together two volumes of her


writings, Counting My Chickens and Home to Roost. They offer a disarming look at a life lived not only with zest but with total originality, to say the least. The author is one of the famous, and sometimes infamous, Mitford clan - that brood of writers, icons and agitators - and lives up to the family reputation for eccentricity. Here she writes about her struggles and successes at Chatsworth, England’s greatest stately home, about the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition in Washington, about country life and about her beloved chickens. She recalls anecdotes featuring famous friends, from Evelyn Waugh to John F. Kennedy, including a heartfelt account of the latter’s funeral, and admits to being mad about Elvis Presley. 359 paperback pages with line drawings by Will Topley. With introductions by Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett. $17 NOW £6


73180 DIAL 999 by Les Pringle


The heart warming true life adventures of an ambulance driver in 1970s Britain taking us back to a time when lonely old ladies would call 999 and have a cup of tea waiting when the driver turned up for a chat and when learning to drive the ambulance meant going out for one test drive and managing not to hit a pedestrian. At the age of 23, Les Pringle decided to escape


from office life, broaden his horizons and become an ambulance driver. Little did he realise how broad those horizons would turn out to be as every day brought another glimpse into other people’s lives. Card-playing corpses, unfaithful husbands and ‘flying’ ladies, this is a wonderfully written book which was previously published as ‘Blue Lights and Long Nights’. 396 page paperback edition with fairly large print. £6.99 NOW £3.50


73027 SOMETHING SENSATIONAL TO READ IN THE TRAIN: The Diary of a


Lifetime by Gyles Brandreth Most of you will know the engaging and witty GB, as he calls himself, from his appearances on Just a Minute and Have I Got News For You, but we can bet that you will be knocked for six by the incredibly wide range of his talents and interests as evidenced in this huge


selection from his enchanting diaries. Here is his lifetime couched in an inimitable vivid style, from the touching letter his father wrote to his mother on the day of his birth to the most moving goodbye we have ever read. ‘Something sensational’ indeed, if not exactly what you would want to heave about in a crowded train! You will not be able to tear yourself away from GB’s gripping experiences as a jumper-sporting TV presenter (he once boasted of having more than 1,000) as MP and government whip and as a royal biographer with unique access to the Queen. From Woody Allen to Virginia Woolf, Michael Aspel to Peregrine Worsthorne and Princess Anne to the Duke of Windsor the cast of thousands includes princes, presidents, three archbishops and a vast number of actors in this rich volume encompassing entertainment, politics, history, gossip and life itself. 706 paperback pages with b/w and colour photos.


£14.99 NOW £6


72758 COUNTING ONE’S BLESSINGS: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother edited and with an introduction by


William Shawcross Brimming with wit, acute


observation and a deeply held sense of duty, the letters of the Queen Mother constitute a vivid chronicle both of her long life and of the 20th century as a whole. When some of


them were printed in her official biography, the Sunday Times described them as full of ‘liveliness and irreverence, steeliness and sweetness’ and now, in this huge selection, the letters offer readers a vivid insight into the person behind the public face. The Queen Mother was, from her childhood a prolific correspondent. William Shawcross, author of the BBC TV series Monarchy and Queen and Country, has selected the most representative, many of which have not been published before. They reveal, in her own words the much-loved little girl writing teasing letters to her many siblings and friends, the young woman who, after a long courtship and two refusals, accepted the Duke of York’s proposal of marriage, and the new Duchess who brought a sense of ease and fun into the public and private lives of the Royal Family. We can experience her delight in her beloved daughters and her real anguish when she and her husband realized that he would become King because his brother, Edward VIII was determined to abdicate. We can admire her work during the Second World War and her horror at the suffering caused by the Blitz, her joy in the marriage of her elder daughter Elizabeth, her grief at the tragically early death of her husband, the King, and her determination to find a new role for herself during the long years of widowhood. Touching and very moving revelations. An immense 666 pages with photos in colour and b/w, notes and family trees. £25 NOW £10


71101 SOME GIRLS,SOME HATS AND HITLER by Trudi Kanter


When the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938, welcomed by cheering crowds, Trudi Kanter designed hats for the smartest women in Vienna. Here she is falling in love with Walter, a charming and charismatic businessman, but their idyll is about to end. Trudi and Walter are Jewish, and as Hitler’s tanks roll into Austria, Trudi immediately realises they have to flee. An incredible true story moving from Vienna to Prague to Blitzed London. 242pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £3


72141 INSTEAD OF A BOOK: Letters to a Friend


by Diana Athill and Edward Field The irrepressible Diana Athill was, until she retired, a well-known and much respected editor. For over 30 years, she has corresponded with the American poet Edward Field, freely exchanging jokes, pleasures and pains with an old friend. This sparkling, witty volume incorporates gossip about mutual friends, sharp pen portraits and uninhibited accounts of her relationships. We loved her throwaway remark, after learning that she might have to have radiation treatment on the same day as she was scheduled to give a talk, ‘I must find out whether the radiation will leave me looking like Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer!’ 328 pages. £20 NOW £6


71933 CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD DIARIES:


Volume One: 1939-1960 edited by Katherine Bucknell


Christopher Isherwood was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing novels. The famous and hugely praised musical Cabaret was based on his book Goodbye to Berlin. In these intimate writings, Isherwood records his search for a new life in California, his work as a successful screenwriter in Hollywood, his pacifism during World War II, and his friendships with such gifted artists and intellectuals as Greta Garbo, Charles Chaplin, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and Aldous Huxley. He later took US citizenship and, throughout the period covered by this volume, continued both to write novels and to sustain his literary friendships with, amongst others, E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams and a host of others. One acquaintance summed him up as ‘both assured and neurotic, fearless and fretful, generous and small-minded, forgiving and remorsefully judgemental…’ - an intriguing mixture indeed! 1,050 paperback pages. £20 NOW £6.50


72365 WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN WINTER: A


Memoir in Blindness by Candia McWilliam Candia McWilliam was born in Edinburgh in 1955 and her first three novels A Case of Knives (1988), A Little Stranger (1989) and Debatable Land (1994) each won major literary awards. A descent into divorce, alcoholism and writer’s block appeared to have destroyed her writing career, but she fought back and her life seemed to be back on course by 2004. Then, in a cruel twist of fate for one whose life revolved around reading and writing, in 2006 she began to suffer from blepharospasm, a condition in which the eyelids become permanently shut and one is rendered functionally blind, although the eyes themselves remain healthy. Forced to look inward and to the past, she embarked upon a painful personal voyage, a memoir that offered no hiding place - her childhood in Edinburgh, devastating alcoholism, finding and losing her bearings at Cambridge and in London, her marriages, her divorces, her children and, looming over everything, her mother’s suicide. We end in 2009, when following a complex operation and a life-long course of Botox injections, she has regained most of her sight. 440pp. first US edition of 2012. $27.99 NOW £6


70102 SLEEPING WITH BAD BOYS by Alice Denham


Caught between the sheets are James Dean, Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner, Philip Roth and William Gaddis. The steam rises page by page as Alice, the only Playboy Playmate to have her fiction published in the same issue as her centrefold, chases her dream of writing as a young, oversexed beauty in the literary swirl of 1950s Greenwich Village, New York City. Broadway, Playboy and literary America as never seen before. Photos, some of Alice nude. $14.95 NOW £6


70855 GIRL IN THE PAINTED CARAVAN by Eva Petulengro


Subtitled Memories of a Romany Childhood, Eva was born into a gypsy family in 1939. She would travel the country with her family in their painted caravan and spend idyllic evenings by the fire as they sang and told stories of their past. Eva didn’t go to school or even visit a doctor when she was unwell. Instead her family would gather wild herbs to make traditional remedies, hunt game and rabbits for food. She describes the wonderful characters of her family from her grandfather ‘Naughty’ Petulengro to her five beautiful aunts. 310pp in paperback with photos. £6.99 NOW £2.75


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60667 WILD MARY: A Life of Mary Wesley


by Patrick Marnham


The author of ‘The Camomile Lawn’ published her first novel in 1983 when she was 70 years old. Born Mary Farmar and related to the Duke of Wellington, Mary grew up a rebel who believed she was her mother’s least favourite child. She married for escape and her first marriage to Lord Swinfen was brief


and conventional. In the late 1930s, she began a fascination with Heinz Ziegler, a Czech university professor and wartime air gunner. At the outbreak of the Second World War Mary was, as she put it, ‘roped into Intelligence’, where she worked on breaking codes. MI5 and her rackety life during the Blitz eventually inspired her novels, many of which were concerned with multiple wartime love affairs. She drew on her eccentric friends and her love of Cornwall and the West Country. Arsenic and old lace guaranteed. 289 pages, photos. £20 NOW £6


71846 A BETHNAL GREEN MEMOIR: Recollections of Life in the 1930s-1950s by Derek Houghton


Readers will become quite nostalgic at the mention of the Hackney Empire, Pellicci’s café and Kelly’s Pie and Mash Shop. Here the relative peace of his time as an evacuee contrasts strongly with the destruction of Bethnal Green when the bombs rained down during the Blitz. 160 paperback pages, archive photos, map. £14.99 NOW £5


71477 BETWEEN THE SHEETS: The Literary


Liaisons of Nine 20th Century Woman Writers by Lesley McDowell


In this groundbreaking book Lesley McDowell takes nine partnerships and argues that the women managed exploitative partners in such a way as to give an edge to their own work. Discusses Katherine Mansfield’s debt to John Middleton Murry and the on-off relationship between the bisexual H.D. and Ezra Pound, who precipitated Hilda into marriage with Richard Aldington and then took a flat across the landing with his own new wife. We see Rebecca West and H.G. Wells and sophisticated Anais Nin described her relationship with Henry Miller as a “diabolical compact”. 365pp. £16.99 NOW £3


73174 THE TREASURES OF QUEEN ELIZABETH by Tim Ewart


With luxury padded cover and 10½” square slipcase featuring the 1953 Coronation image of the Queen with her ermine cape,


sceptre and orb and in full Coronation regalia, the book contains rare removable documents of historic importance. It is written by ITV’s Royal Correspondent Tim Ewart and published by André Deutsch in a very collectable volume packed with memorabilia. Among the 15 items reproduced in facsimile in the document wallets inserted in the book are a design for the Queen’s dresses by Sir Hardy Amies, an invitation to one of the garden parties held at Buckingham Palace, a menu for a White House dinner, extracts from programmes, the White House Oath of Allegiance she signed on 2nd June 1953, and throughout the text pictures such as the Queen with members of her Privy counsel, the crowning of the Prince of Wales in 1969, intimate home life, presidential balls and other royal duties, meeting sports people, travelling to the Commonwealth, out riding, public perceptions, the good years and bad and the Golden Years since the turn of the Millennium. The document wallets will come away from the pages for easy removal. The final double page spread is the extended royal family on the balcony at


Buckingham Palace watching a fly past for the last royal wedding. With a great saving through Bibliophile.


£30 NOW £12


71411 A BEAUTIFUL MIND by Sylvia Nasar John Nash, mathematical genius, suffered a devastating breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of just 31. Yet after decades of leading a ghost-like existence, he was to re-emerge to win a Nobel Prize and world acclaim. This award-winning biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, became a major film illuminating both the man and his mathematics and is here told without sentimentality. Nash’s life in Princeton was during a period of intense intellectual excitement. Remainder mark, 461pp, illus paperback.


£8.99 NOW £2.75 71858 GROWING UP IN A WELSH VALLEY:


Beneath a Valley Sky by Bronwen Hosie This collection of nostalgic, humorous and moving tales follows Rhymney-born Dai Morrissey as he leaves the valley aged 18. Travelling to England he finds work with Hudson & Terraplane, fitting radios into their luxury cars. Along the way he meets a few celebrities and also his future wife. WWII brings an end to carefree days, with Dai witnessing the tragic effects of war firsthand. He survives and goes on to have six children including Bronwen, the author of this book. Photos, 128pp in large softback. £12.99 NOW £4


72363 THE TEMPTRESS: The Scandalous Life of Alice de Janzé: and the Mysterious Death of Lord Erroll by Paul Spicer


The scandalous life of Alice, Countess de Janzé, here is passion and murder in Kenya’s Happy Valley. No one paid too much attention to the privileged and decadent colonial set until on a January morning in 1941, Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, was shot dead at the wheel of his Buick. Some say the good-looking womaniser had it coming. Cuckolded husband Jock Delves Broughton stood trial for Erroll’s murder but was acquitted and the mystery remained unsolved, until now. American heiress Alice de Janzé had been conducting a clandestine affair with Joss for years. She arrived in Kenya as a glamorous, newly married countess in the 1920s, but by 1941 she had turned 40 and Erroll was courting younger lovers. Increasingly isolated, she was thrown into despair, resulting in his murder and her own tragic demise. 262pp with photos. Remainder mark. $25.99 NOW £6


70999 MY SPEED KING: Life with Donald


Campbell by Tonia Bern-Campbell The love affair between British speed king Donald Campbell and vivacious singer Tonia Bern was one of the great romances of the 20th century. Passion turned to tragedy with the dramatic death of Campbell on Coniston Water in January 1967 as he attempted to break the world water speed record in his famous jet boat ‘Bluebird’. It has taken Tonia until now to choose to tell the full story of what it was really like. The result is a tale of fast cars and high living, cruelly cut short. 235 pages with b/w photos. £17.99 NOW £3


71361 A FORK IN THE ROAD: A Memoir by André Brink


Author of 16 novels including A Dry White Season and The Rights of Desire and translated into 30 languages, André Brink in the ’60s he moved to Paris, where his discovery of a wider artistic life and the exhilaration of the 1968 student uprising confirmed his desire to become a writer. He decided to return home and oppose the apartheid establishment with all his strength. Thus began years of harassment by the police, censorship and fractured relationships between family and friends, but conversely this also led to extraordinary friendships and working relationships with ANC leaders both in Africa and overseas. His lifelong love affair with art, literature, music, theatre and sport shines through the pages, as do his relationships with Ingrid Jonker, Nadine Gordimer and Anna Netrebko, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Gunter Grass. 438pp, photos. £17.99 NOW £3


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