Biographies & True Stories

Sometimes, we all need to get away...Griffith Review 74: Escape Routes plots the course of our daydreams, our transformations and our jailbreaks. It takes us across borders and through open and opening minds to places once out of reach. As restrictions...

Nightclub, theatre, creative hub, party place, and one of the most important venues in Scotland, Britain and Europe: for almost 25 years, The Arches was the beating heart of Glasgow.In 1991, former punk-turned-theatre director Andy Arnold walked into the...

The Silver Invicta is a stream of impressions from a fishing life, in its varying moods, coloured with plenty of whisky and eccentric company. Join Tom Harland on his light-hearted journeys with his fly rod; take part in his triumphs and disasters on...

Scotland's greatest export. The world's first super spy. Voted the sexiest man on the planet.Sir Sean Connery was a titanic figure on screen and off for over half a century.Behind the son of a factory worker, growing up in near-poverty on the harsh...

By 1971 no Lions team had ever defeated the All Blacks in a Test series. Since 1904, six Lions sides had travelled to New Zealand and all had returned home bruised, battered, and beaten.But the 1971 tour party was different. It was full of young,...

Ken Scotland was born on 29 August 1936 within sight of Heriot's Goldenacre ground, which he would go onto grace with great panache and skill several years later.A prodigious talent at fly-half while at school, he was converted into a full-back during...

Fifty Forgotten Books is a very special sort of book about books, by a great bookman and for book-people of all ages and levels of experience. Not quite literary criticism, not quite an autobiography, it is at once a guided tour through the dusty...

A woman whocarries her fate and that of her community in her hair is beguiled by the deceptivedesigns of Europeans out to colonise her most prized possession. A man findshappiness in the reincarnation of a lost love. A young woman risks her life...

Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, was born in 1538 into a family at the heart of Court struggles between Catholicism and Protestantism, and married twenty years later into the world of the Spanish Court, refuge of exiled English Catholics. The marriage...

In 2003 the former Women's Press editor and critic Sarah LeFanu published her acclaimed biography of Rose Macaulay with Virago Press.'A magnificent job ... imaginative and thoughtful, dense with distilled information ... LeFanu offers a skilled, visual,...

In 1935 Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was a well-established novelist, reviewer, columnist and feminist wit. She was part of the 'intellectual aristocracy' of England, but was also passionately interested in everyday life and its foolishnesses. Personal...

A shocking graphic novel tells the poverty and discrimination suffered by the Chagos Islanders when their eviction by the British enforced US military control of their Indian Ocean home.During the cold war, the US government sought to establish an...

By the time necrotising fasciitis was diagnosed, it was almost too late to save artist Zara Slattery. Her husband and three children prepared for the worst. This astonishing graphic memoir shows how she lived to tell the tale of life inside and outside...

'Where is home, Mum?' From the foothills of the Himalayas in the Kashmiri valleys to bustling Green Street in East London, Sabba Khan researches her identity from the global to the local, covering partition, displacement, and clothing choices for an...

The works in Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now articulates 'brave new words' at the heart of battles against limitations on fundamental rights of citizenship, the closure of national borders, fake news, and an increasing reluctance to...

Looking to commission an introduction from a fan of Norah Lange's previous works. Translated by award winning translator Charlotte Whittle and we may commission translators note. First translation in English of Norah Lange's memoir. An influential...

Holy Ghost is the first extended study of free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, who is seen today as one of the most important innovators in the history of jazz.Ayler synthesized children's songs, La Marseillaise, American march music, and gospel hymns,...

Part memoir, part social history, Revolutionary Spirit is the poignant, often hilarious story of a cult Liverpool musician's scenic route to fame and artistic validation. If Morrissey was the Oscar Wilde of the 1980s indie scene, Simpson was its William...

Arnold Schwarzenegger - a bodybuilder-turned-real-estate mogul who turned an undefeated streak at the Mr Olympia contest into an astonishing film career and eight years as the governor of California - is, for many people, the embodiment of the American...

Young Tom Morris, the son of the legendary pioneer of golf, Tom Morris, was golf's first superstar.Born at a pivotal moment in history, just as the new and inexpensive 'gutty' ball was making golf affordable and drawing thousands of new players to the...

How would you make sense of your life if you thought it might end tomorrow? In this captivating and best-selling memoir Vesna Goldsworthy tells the story of herself, her family and her early life in her lost country. There follows marriage, a move to...

"I have been seeking P.F. Sloan, but no one knows where he's gone"'P.F. Sloan' by Jimmy Webb"Absolutely none of 'em could beat ol' P.F."Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone magazineWhat's Exactly The Matter With Me? is a first-person account of an extraordinary...

<!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> Toxic debt, rising job losses, collapsing commodity prices and expanding poverty. How can we rein in these beasts unleashed by the free market economy?People First Economics takes a...

'I was raised with an artist's mentality; my first 25 years were spent as somebody who wanted to live among graphics and artwork and illustration, and then for the next 30 years it was all music. Recently, I've reverted into the arts, combining...

'I can be scratching around at home on an acoustic guitar, or singing a funny little idea into my phone, and all of a sudden, it becomes a beautifulfully fledged song. And I'm asking myself, how did we do that again? I still find that...

'Here on the shore, twenty years later, my message in a bottle has reached dry land. Words about our life, his death but mostly love and our journey to the end.' - Olivia HarrisonOlivia Harrison presents Came the Lightening a book of...

'These guitars have been really good tools; they're not just museum pieces. They all have a soul and they all come alive.' Eric Clapton'In his own words, Clapton tells his story through the history of his instruments.'Rolling StoneInSix-String...

'When I wrote and recorded these songs originally, I never would have expected the fantastic audience response all these years later; it's amazing.' Jeff LynneThe music of Jeff Lynne is beloved by fans all over the world and...

'I'm both blessed and cursed to be a guitar player. I didn't choose it, it chose me. The challenge was to find a way to weave my convictions into my music in a meaningful way.' - Tom MorelloAs the cofounder and guitarist of Rage Against the...

Garry Fabian Miller's Dark Room is a photography book unlike any other. At its heart is the artist's description of a life lived making pictures between the dark and the light, a deeply personal account woven against the history of photography from the...

'Long Live Freedom!'-Hans Scholl's last words before his executionThe White Rose (die Weie Rose) resistance circle was a group of students and a professor at the University of Munich who in the early 1940s secretly wrote and...

Many important and valuable rare books, manuscripts and artefacts related to Korea have been acquired by donations throughout the long history of the Bodleian Libraries and the museums of the University of Oxford. However, due to an early lack of...

A unique literary biography, this book brings to life Waugh's Oxford, exploring the lasting impression it made on one of the most accomplished literary craftsmen of the twentieth century.Oxford held a special place in Evelyn Waugh's imagination. So...

'Invention...does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos' - Mary Shelley In the 200 years since its first publication, the story of Frankenstein's creation during stormy days and nights at Byron's Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva has...

The thirteen letters collected by Jane Austen's House Museum, in Chawton, give us intimate glimpses into her life in Bath and Chawton and on visits to London, many details finding echoes in her fiction. Brought together in this book, these artefacts make...

Epitaphs are words to be remembered by, short poems or phrases literally written in stone. They can be practical, carrying some variation of the familiar "Here Lies," but they can also be brilliantly creative with personally meaningful quotes or words...

Thames aficionado Robert Gibbings once wrote that 'the quiet of an age-old river is like the slow turning of the pages of a well-loved book'. Writing the Thames tells a much-loved river's story through the remarkable prose, poetry and illustration that...

Exploring the Blackwell Collections (publishing and bookselling archives), Rita Ricketts discovered diverse characters associated with this world-famous company, between 1830 and 1940. There is a tailor's son saving souls, a reluctant radical, a...

'Show me another pleasure like dinner which comes every day and lasts an hour.' - Talleyrand'He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.' - Jonathan Swift 'There is no love sincerer than the love of food' wrote George Bernard Shaw in 1903. Poets,...

Published to mark the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, this book celebrates the greatest of English novelists by illustrating some of his abiding preoccupations. Prompted by quotations from the novels and other writings, each themed chapter explores...

No work has challenged its readers like Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. His 'Proverbs of Hell' have been culled for the slogans of student protest and become axioms of modern thought. Iconoclastic, bizarre, unprecedented, it is all of these...

Dusty Springfield was one of the biggest musical stars of the twentieth century. From the launch of her solo career in 1963, and until her departure for Los Angeles a decade later, she was Britain's biggest female star, with a glamour and voice that...

Xi Jinping wants to become the world's most powerful leader. To succeed, he must balance Mao's Little Red Book with the Analects of Confucius, and more.For Xi, the task ahead of China is to preserve the guiding ideology of Marxism, while challenging...

Sayings of the Companions of the Prophet (PBUH) is a selection of 365 profound and pithy observations made by the Prophet's illustrious Companions. The sayings supplement and complement the life-giving message of the Qur'an and Sunnah that these...

John Butt came to Swat in 1970 as a young man in search of an education he couldn't get from his birthplace in England. He travels around the region, first only with friends from his home country, but as he befriends the locals and starts to learn about...

Pitch to pre-publication journals as well as Islamic Horizons, Al Jadid, and Azizah magazine Will approach bloggers with mainstream Islamic interest such as MuslimMatters.org Target major Muslim US associations including Muslim Student Association,...

In the 1950s and 1960s, Memphis, Tennessee, was the launch pad of musical pioneers such as Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Al Green and Isaac Hayes, and by 1968 was a city synonymous with soul music. It was a deeply segregated city, ill at...

Critically acclaimed author Malachy Tallack returns in the Autumn of 2016 with a brand new excursion into the beautiful, mysterious and mythical landscapes of the world with Un-Discovered Islands. Gathered in this book are over twenty...