4 Biography / Autobiography craftsman, artist, inventor and steam enthusiast and his


forthright views on life in general. When he made his debut on TV, he became a new cultural icon, a chimney climber from Bolton who fell in love with England’s decaying industrial landscape, an unflagging storyteller whose charm and wit was matched only by his down- to-earth manner, a celebrity and true British eccentric. For young Fred, the mills and their machinery, and particularly the chimneys with their magnificent ornamental tops held an enchantment which he never outgrew. It is the sad irony of his life that some of the skills he taught himself in the art of steeplejacking should have been turned to the demolition of what he loved. His incredible stamina would carry him through a storytelling marathon until he retired hoarse. Nobody ever complained of getting short change from Fred. This charming volume brings him to life again. 192 pages with archive b/w photos. £15.99 NOW £6


73075 A BOOK OF SECRETS: Illegitimate Daughters,


Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd In an unclassifiable book, part biography, part autobiography, part fantasy and make-believe, the reader is carried away to a hill above the Italian village of Ravello, on which sits the Villa Cimbrone. The characters described in this strange volume are destined never


to meet there, yet the Villa and one man, unite them all. This elegiac work is about the quest to unearth and recount the stories of women - some of them on the fringes of the British aristocracy but all on the periphery of the respectable world. Here, among others, are Alice Keppel, the mistress of both the second Lord Grimthorpe and Edward, Prince of Wales, Eve Fairfax, a muse of August Rodin, and the novelist Violet Trefusis, lover of Vita Sackville-West. The book profiles, too, such dignitaries as Lord Randolph Churchill, D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, along with bankers and Members of Parliament during the late 19th and 20th centuries, most of them linked somehow to the Villa Cimbrone. 264 paperback pages with b/w archive photos and family trees.


$16 NOW £6 73289 NO ANGEL: The Secret


Life of Bernie Ecclestone by Tom Bower


In the diminutive figure of Bernie Ecclestone - diminutive only in stature - he has a subject who could not fail to fascinate. Born into poverty on 28 October 1930 in Suffolk, he did not receive a birthday present until his eighth birthday, by which time, still impoverished, the family had


relocated to Dartford. Today, with an estimated worth of over £2 billion earned from his inspired and relentless development and promotion of F1 racing, he is on first name terms with pretty well everybody who is anybody and one of the most recognised faces on the planet. But how did he graduate from selling second- hand cars and motorbikes on London’s notorious Warren Street in the 1950s to become the major player he is today? Here he has cooperated fully with Bower to tell the whole truth about his amazing rags-to-riches story - the deals, the marriages, the triumphs and disasters, with no detail spared; as he freely admits, “I’m no angel.” Ecclestone is a true one-off, and Formula One racing was and still is the biggest minefield in sport. 417pp with eight pages of mostly colour photos. £8.99 NOW £4


73401 TREASURES FROM THE ATTIC: The Extraordinary Story of Anne Frank’s Family by Mirjam Pressler with Gerti Elias Carefully preserved amongst opera hats and evening gowns in the attic of their home, Anne Frank’s grandmother Alice and her daughter, Anne’s Aunt Leni, left behind over 6,000 letters and diaries. It took Gerti Elias two-and-a-half years to transcribe and edit them. Using this new-found material, the editor of the definitive version of the famous Diary of a Young Girl has been able to give readers the opportunity to read the full epic saga of a loving, close-knit family, in good times and bad, from different parts of Europe and spread over several generations. Anne wrote her diary over two years, from the age of 13, while hiding in the secret annexe of her father’s Amsterdam warehouse, in an attempt to escape the horrors of anti-semitic Nazi occupation. The diary has been read by tens of millions of people all over the world, and remains a beloved and deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit. Now it can be put in its proper context. Here are photographs of Anne and her family, her father’s letters from the concentration camp at Auschwitz, his poignant descriptions of searching for his family after the war, and the miraculous return of the diaries. 399 pages with illustrations in b/w, archive photos and plates in colour, afterword and Stern/Frank/ Elias family tree. £20 NOW £7


71900 DIANA VREELAND by Eleanor Dwight Diana Vreeland was the fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar for 25 years. Collaborating with the legendary editor Carmel Snow, she drastically changed the look of the magazine by using provocative, exciting photography. She hobnobbed with the cream of fashion photographers such as Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Irving Penn and Cecil Beaton, and worked and played with the trendsetters, artists, models and celebrities of the day including Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Hubert de Givenchy, Andy Warhol and Jackie Kennedy. As if that were not enough, she then became editor in chief of Vogue for nine years, bringing vitality and beauty to its pages, letting her photographers and editors follow their own creative bents, sending them off to shoots in foreign lands, and encouraging them to use their talents in fresh ways. Her story is told with panache and flair. 308 pages 21cm by 26cm, 300 drawings and photos. £19.99 NOW £6.75


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72551 THE MAN WHO WAS GEORGE SMILEY: The Life of


John Bingham by Michael Jago When John le Carré joined MI5 in 1958, his mentor was the Honourable John Bingham, an experienced spymaster who had started out as a popular political journalist. Bingham created a humorous child’s-eye view of the world in his column “Fierce Baby’s Journal”, a way of addressing


controversial subjects taboo to adults. A fluent German and French speaker with the ability to blend into the background and go about unnoticed, Bingham also offered his services to MI5 and spent several years during the war in Germany running British agents. He and le Carré became friends, with the younger man particularly admiring the care Bingham took to preserve the security of his agents. When le Carré based his spymaster George Smiley on Bingham, his mentor was flattered, but as the fictional Smiley went on to profess disillusionment with the British security services in order to gain the confidence of his Russian opposite, Karla. 308pp, photos. £20 NOW £7


69468 ALL IN ONE BASKET: Nest Eggs by Deborah Devonshire


The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, once chatelaine of Chatsworth, combines two of her most popular books, Counting My Chickens and Home to Roost, with some new material to delight readers who rejoice in observant, skilful and very often laugh-out-loud prose. She tackles a broad range of subjects from marble mania through changing language and cold houses to President Kennedy’s funeral without ever losing either her sense of humour or her effortless style. En route, the reader is treated to glimpses of her Mitford childhood, wonderings about who tourists actually are and an hilarious account of a journey from Inchkenneth, an island off the coast of Mull, to Oxfordshire, by train, accompanied by two dogs and a goat. Nothing seems to rattle the lady, even milking the goat in the First Class Waiting Room although she has only a Third Class ticket. 359 pages with witty line drawings. Introduced by Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett. £20 NOW £10


72553 TONY BENN: A Biography by Jad Adams


In a comprehensively revised edition of Jad Adams’ classic biography, the author chronicles the life and political career of one of the most enigmatic and controversial politicians of the post-war era. It reveals the behind-the-scenes story of his bitter battles with every leader of the Labour Party since Hugh Gaitskell. Here is his service in the governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, his role as a champion of the Left during the Labour Party’s long period in opposition, his retirement from Parliament in 2001 to ‘spend more time involved in politics’, and his subsequent emergence as a leading figure of the British opposition to the war in Iraq. He has written the most extensive published political diary of his times and has also kept what are probably the best records of any politician. His campaign for a referendum on membership of the Common Market meant that a constitutional door was opened which can never again be closed. Yet he is widely seen as a failure, someone who almost became leader of the Labour Party. Why? 550 paperback pages, photos. £14.99 NOW £5.75


72786 SEMI INVISIBLE MAN: The Life of Norman Lewis by Julian Evans


Norman Lewis (1908-2003) from the 1950s to the ’90s, wrote books which have stood the test of time better than all but a handful of contemporaneously published novels. Son of a pharmacist and born in Enfield, his accounts of pre-Vietnam War southeast Asia, pre-mass tourism Spain and wartime Naples remain required reading, true masterpieces of travel writing. A British spy for over 20 years, he also raced for Bugatti before the war and was a crack shot. Living in Ibiza after the war, he was a flamboyant host, a businessman with mafia connections and lived a life of rock-star hedonism. Simultaneously biography and a meditation on the art of biography. 813pp, 32 pages of photos. £25 NOW £7


71088 GLITTER AND THE GOLD by Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan


The 9th Duchess married the 9th Duke of Marlborough in 1895 and went to live in England from America. Leaving her life in America she came to England and took up residence in her new home, Blenheim Palace. Consuelo is also a revealing witness to the glittering balls, huge weekend parties and major state occasions she attended or hosted. Here are her encounters with every important figure of the day from Queen Victoria, Edward VII and Queen Alexandra to Tsar Nicolas, Prince Metternich and the young Winston Churchill. 290pp in paperback reprint of the 1973 original. Photos. £8.99 NOW £4


71757 LUCKY by Alice Sebold


In a memoir hailed for its searing candour and wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was utterly transformed when, as an 18 year old college girl, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus. What propels this chronicle of her recovery is her indomitable spirit: ‘After telling the hard facts to anyone, from lover to friend, I have changed in their eyes.’ Her dazed family and friends sometimes bungle their efforts to provide comfort and support in this narrative which is by turns chilling and inspiring. 254pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £2.75


71922 THE ENCHANTER: Nabokov and


Happiness by Lila Azam Zanganeh We find ourselves participating in a hymn to the pleasures of language and of reading in general. Zanganeh has tracked novelist Vladimir Nobokov through his books and found them filling her life, her imagination and her dreams. She seeks out his feeling for memory, sexual passion, nature, love in all its forms and language in all its allusions, explores his geography, his Russian childhood, his European sojourns, his love of


butterflies, and the landscapes of ‘his’ America, and experiences the devotional love that can develop between a reader and a writer. 228 pages, illus. £20 NOW £5.50


72017 CISSIE’S ABATTOIR by Éibhear Walshe


A ray of light in the puddle-grey town of Waterford in the 1960s and 70s, Cissie Hamm was both abattoir owner and guest house landlady and exactly what every self- proclaimed nancy boy needs in his life. The author’s personal voyage takes us through his childhood city, the mental hospital where his father worked and the Folly church where he served as an altar boy. But it is his witty little grandmother Cissie who taught by example how to survive and prosper. 150pp in paperback. £7.99 NOW £2.50


72372 YOUNG PRINCE PHILIP: His Turbulent Early Life


by Philip Eade


This Sunday Times bestseller is as suspenseful as any thriller. Married for more than 60 years to the most enduringly famous woman in the world, Prince Philip is the longest- serving royal consort in British history. Eade examines the Prince’s extraordinary upbringing in Greece,


France, Nazi Germany and Britain. It contains new material from interviews, archives and film footage and is well spiced with royal titbits. Philip emerges as a figure of singular vitality, self confident, devastatingly handsome and famously opinionated. With an index that reads like a who’s who, the truth about the Mountbattens, Malta, the birth of his children, foreign travels, here is a 344 page paperback with many never- before-seen photos. £8.99 NOW £4


72025 PRIVILEGE AND POVERTY: The Life and Times of Irish Painter and Naturalist


Alexander Williams RHA 1846 to 1930 by Gordon Ledbetter


Primarily a landscape painter, Alexander Williams was also an apprentice hatter, taxidermist, professional singer, and founder member of the Dublin Sketching Club, with a keen interest in bird watching and ornithology, and a knowledge of 19th century firearms. His solo exhibitions in Dublin became annual fixtures, eagerly attended by crowds of a thousand and more. He was favoured by the Lord Lieutenant and the ‘Castle Set’, exhibited at the RHA for a record-breaking 61 years and also showed with many other leading painters of the day such as Jack Yeats, Percy French and Walter Osborne. 366 pages, colour and b/w illus. £17.99 NOW £5


72130 THINGS MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME by Blake Morrison


This is the son’s search to uncover the truth about the remarkable Kerry girl who qualified as a doctor in Dublin in 1942, worked in British hospitals throughout the war, and then reinvented herself as a conventional wife and mother. At the heart of the book there is a passionate wartime love affair, seen through the frank, funny and furious letters his parents Kim and Arthur wrote during their courtship. 338pp, photos. £16.99 NOW £4


72143 ALL MADE UP by Janice Galloway When she entered secondary school, the author was still sharing a bed with her mother. Her awareness of the opposite sex was limited. She was more excited by Latin and the school orchestra than by make-up or boys. Using visceral descriptions of puberty, sex and schoolroom politics, she casts her piercing gaze on the morals and ambitions of one small town, seen through the stories of three generations of women. Under the wing of one exceptional teacher, music became her passion. 312 pages. £16.99 NOW £4


72361 LADY AND THE PEACOCK: The Life of


Aung San Suu Kyi by Peter Popham Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, known throughout the world as an icon of democracy and non- violent dissent in Burma, was recently back in the news again, so we are especially pleased to be able to offer this major biography at this time. Suu Kyi’s father, Aung San, was the architect of Burma’s independence, but was assassinated in 1947 when she was just two years old. In 1972 she married British academic Michael Aris and had two sons, but despite being a self-described “housewife” she never forgot that she was the daughter of Burma’s national hero. Everything changed in 1988. Returning Burma to nurse her ailing mother, within six months she was leading the biggest popular revolution her country had ever seen. Confined to house arrest by the dictatorship, her party still won a landslide victory in the 1990 election, but the regime refused to recognise the vote, even though in 1991, still under house arrest, she received the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then she has spent over 15 years in detention and narrowly avoided assassination twice. 45 b/w photos, 448pp. First US edition of 2012. £20 NOW £6.50


72456 GUNTHER PLUSCHOW: Airman,


Escaper, Explorer by Anton Rippon Gunther Plüschow was a German whose remarkable wartime achievements have been overlooked in favour of home-grown heroes, and here he gets the accolades he deserves. Plüschow holds a unique place in military history, in that during WWI he was the only German POW ever to escape from the British mainland and make it all the way back to Germany in 1915. He was also a fearless aviator who single-handedly flew against British and Japanese forces on Germany’s besieged Far East colony of Tsingtao at the start of the war. Miraculously surviving the war, afterwards he became an explorer while there was still just about enough left on earth to explore. He became the first man to see Tierra del Fuego from the air, but tragically met an untimely death when his parachute failed to open in 1931. Here is the mandarin who escorted the captured airman to Shanghai, the safe house where he pretended


to be mad in order to fool his neighbour, his journey across America where he was celebrated as a hero, recapture at Gibraltar, escape from Donington Hall POW camp in Leicestershire and stowing away on a Holland- bound ferry at Tilbury docks, as well as his post-war escapades in South America superbly and immediately brought to life. 26 b/w photos, 194pp. £19.99 NOW £7.50


72371 THE QUEEN: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy by Ben Pimlott


A classic of modern history, this bestseller has been updated and has a foreword by Lord Hennessy. Here is a portrait of a complex personality in a unique situation, an ethnic minority of one, in a biography of the Queen from the Abdication crisis through the death of Princess Diana to the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton.


Packed with photographs and cartoons, some lovely relaxed ones like riding with her sister Margaret in South Africa 1947 and preparing to hand Prince Philip her coat at a wedding in 1946. 794 pages in paperback. £12.99 NOW £3.75


72501 THINGS I’VE BEEN SILENT ABOUT:


Memories by Azar Nafisi In this engrossing memoir, an Iranian - who was expelled from the University of Tehran for refusing to wear the veil - tells her personal story of growing up in Iran against the background of a country’s political revolution. Her father escaped into narratives enchanting his children with classic tales. When he started seeing other women, his young daughter kept his secrets from her mother but, because of this, she chose not to remain silent about other personal, as well as political, cultural and social injustices. A powerful historical portrait of the many periods of change leading up to the Islamic Revolution. 336 paperback pages, illus.


! £11.99 NOW £4 72531 JUST ONE CATCH: The Passionate Life


of Joseph Heller by Tracy Daugherty Born in New York’s Coney Island in 1923, Joseph Heller, later to achieve world fame as the author of Catch-22, had a bewildering and frightening childhood. His father was a Russian Jew who emigrated in 1913, and the four year old Joey attended his funeral without realising what the event was. Enlisting for the war, Heller trained as a bombardier and was at the centre of the massive bombing campaign of 1944 when B-25 crews were flying two missions a day. Heller did 60 missions, and in a terrifying incident his plane’s co-pilot was killed by flak while the gunner received a massive leg wound which Heller patched, keeping him alive. A post-war Fulbright scholarship to study in Oxford was followed by copywriting for Time-Life, marriage, accompanied by the constant affairs which complicated his private life. Catch-22 in 1961 caught the new cynical mood. The book also covers Heller’s divorce, second marriage and later work. 548pp, photos. £25 NOW £7.50


BUSINESS AND COMPUTERS


The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavour upon the business known as gambling.


- Ambrose Bierce


73452 PERSONAL COMPUTING FOR SENIORS by Harshad Kotecha


This “bookazine” is designed to introduce the uncertain older age group to the world of computers, what they can do and - more pertinently - what they can do for you personally. You are most likely to want to use a computer for letter writing, storing and editing photo albums and music, contacting friends, shopping, banking and researching safely online, to name but a few. It also helps with the desktop vs. laptop debate and has a super troubleshooting section in case you are too embarrassed to ask your grandchildren! Covers Windows Vista, although most of the tasks and uses are little- changed in more recent (or indeed older) versions of Windows. The text and screenshots are nice and large and it includes plenty about such services as eBay, Skype, comparison websites, genealogy sites and search engines like Google. Great value. 146pp, colour, 9"×11½” magazine softback format. £7.99 NOW £3.50


73667 TOUGH CALLS: Making the Right Decisions in Challenging Times


by Allan Leighton with Teena Lyons


We are all faced with difficult decisions from time to time. In business, the choices with which executives are sometimes faced can make the difference between acclaimed success coupled with ongoing prosperity, and failure linked with financial disaster. This


book shows you just how the experts make their decisions. Allan Leighton began his career at Mars Confectionary, where he rose to become group marketing director before leaving to join the ASDA supermarket chain, which was making big losses. There he was credited with turning what he once described as ‘a basket case’ into a highly successful company that was sold for £6.7 billion! Here, he describes the thought processes behind specific decisions that he has had to make during the course of his career - not only at ASDA but at Wal-Mart, the US retail giant, the Royal Mail and elsewhere. He also talks to many other big


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