• 0 Items - £0.00
    • No products in the cart.

Non-fiction

20th Century Leaders: Churchill

£3.00

Winston Churchill’s political career spanned over 50 years, during which time he was alternately at the centre of power and out of favour. He is most remembered for his inspirational leadership in the second world war and his rousing speeches urging Britain to fight on. This book reveals the influences that shaped his life and career and looks at his strengths and weaknesses.

 

Quotation panels, featuring many of Churchill’s well-known sayings and comments, and the opinions of his well-known contemporaries, such as Stalin, are scattered liberally throughout. The final chapter examines his legacy and attempts to answer the question: how justifiable is his reputation in view of his achievements?

A Clutch of Curious Characters

£4.95

A historic edition:

 

Meet Monsieur Benoit, who appeared suddenly in Paris with a scheme for telegraphing messages across the world (or, at least, across the room) by means of electricity and the telepathic power of snails, and actually raised the money to build this extraordinary machine.

 

His powers of persuasion clearly exceeded those of Colonel Baker, who seemed the personification of Victorian solidity until that embarrassing incident in the sealed railway compartment, where he failed to entice Miss Dickinson to join in his bit of fun, and afterwards had to try and explain his conduct to the High Court, with the whole nation hanging on his every word.

 

Here is a fascinating collection of some of history’s most extraordinary characters. Richard Glyn Jones has cast his net wide to gather these accounts of human oddity and eccentricity, and the standard of his writing is high, with Lytton Strachey, Derek Hudson, Christopher Sykes and Ronald Knox among the authors included. Hilariously funny, sometimes rather sad, but invariably interesting, this is a superbly diverting book. And, with a couple of tiny exceptions, it’s all true.

A is a Critic: Writings from the Spectator

£6.00

As art critic of The Spectator, Andrew Lambirth’s reviews and articles have been entertaining and informing readers of the magazine since 1996. As he himself has written : “The coverage that this magazine, a weekly, gives to the arts is far wider than many daily newspapers. I wish more arts editors would take the initiative to cover a greater range of exhibitions than just the obvious.”

A Musician’s Guide to Surviving the Great Recession

£11.00

Practical tips for living a truly better life in a precarious economy:

 

Live better on less and have more fun doing it! This book offers hardcore, real-world, practical advice on how anyone can survive in a precarious economy. Learn useful tips and creative strategies, from a hardworking musician who, like most professional musicians, knows, from hard-won experience, how to not only keep the annoying wolf from the door, but how to give him a painful wedgie, so he’ll finally give up and leave you the f*&k alone.

A Traveller’s History of Cyprus

£4.90

“A Traveller’s History of Cyprus” offers a complete and authoritative history of the island’s past and also touches on the sensitive present-day issues for both sides of the island. Although Cyprus is a relatively small island, its position in the East Mediterranean has always given it strategic importance beyond its size. Well-placed for travel from all over the globe with plenty of sunshine throughout the year, Cyprus has become a favored tourist destination. All visitors, whether to the Greek or Turkish side of the island, discover the immensely rich history, which has resulted in so many civilizations making their mark upon its soil. With a historical gazetteer, chronology of major events, index, bibliography and historical and contemporary maps, this book is an invaluable companion to students or visitors to the island.

A Traveller’s History of Portugal

£4.90
This is a definitive concise history of Portugal, from its earliest beginnings right up to the politics and life of the present day. It was not until the twelfth century that Portugal became a country in its own right, having been a Roman colony and then having suffered both Barbarian and Islamic invasions. The golden age of discoveries, the reign and foresight of Henry the Navigator, and great seamen such as Vasco da Gama led to the founding of Portugal’s empire and wealth. Troubled times followed: in 1755 Lisbon was virtually leveled by the ‘Great Earthquake,’ and the country had hardly recovered its former prosperity when it was overrun by Napoleon’s troops at the start of the Peninsular War, to be followed not long after by the Miguelite civil war. The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw the Port Wine trade flourishing, and further expansion into Africa. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, ever since the bloodless revolution of 1974 overthrew the rightwing dictatorship of Salazar, the country has regained its stability, and now takes its rightful place in the European Community. Illustrated with maps and line drawings, the book has a full Historical Gazetteer cross-referenced to the main text that concentrates on the historic sites in a country that has retained its individuality and thus its appeal to the individual traveler.

A Traveller’s History of Turkey

£4.90

Throughout the millennia Turkey formed the core of several Empires–Persia, Rome, Byzantium–before becoming the center of the Ottoman Empire. All these civilizations have left their marks on the landscape, architecture and art of Turkey–a place of fascinating overlapping cultures. Traveller’s History of Turkey offers a concise and readable account of the region from prehistory right up to the present day. It covers everything from the legendary Flood of Noah, the early civilization of Catal Huyuk seven thousand years before Christ, through the treasures of Troy, Alexander the Great, the Romans, Seljuks, Byzantines and the Golden Age of the Sultans, to the twentieth century’s great changes wrought by Kemal Ataturk and the strong position Turkey now holds in the world community.

Abolishing the Police

£8.00

Publication date: 7th June 2021

 

“This is the first time we are seeing… a conversation about defunding, and some people having a conversation about abolishing the police and prison state. This must be what it felt like when people were talking about abolishing slavery.” – Patrisse Cullors, Black Lives Matter.

 

Abolishing the Police (An Illustrated Introduction) is both a contribution to this conversation and an invitation to join it. It provides rigorous and accessible analyses of why we might want to abolish the police, what abolishing them would involve, and how it might be achieved, introducing readers to the rich existing traditions of anti-police theory and practice.

 

Its authors draw on their diverse on-the-ground experiences of political organising, protest, and resistance to policing in the UK, France, Germany, and the United States, as well as their original research in academic fields ranging from law to security studies, political theory to sociology to public health.

 

Without assuming any prior specialist knowledge, they present the critical tools and insights these disciplines have to offer to ongoing struggles against the injustices of policing (and consider, in turn, what these disciplines must learn from these struggles.)

Adam Fuss

£8.00

With Jacques-Louis Daguerre, William Talbot Fox, Etienne Jules-Marey and William Blake as his predecessors, Adam Fuss creates photograms and daguerreotypes that evoke a general poetic and spiritual vision akin to urbanites of the 1800s, people who have lost contact with nature and God. While technically seeking to refine the beginnings of photography, Fuss attempts, in the 100 new works presented here, to record life and death. Colorful spirals created by pendulums lead into great depths; snakes create geometric waves in water; loving pairs of rabbits appear in silhouette; a hunched woman cries; sunflowers sprout withered leaves and broken stems; otherwise placid water bears the concentric marks of water drops; the shadows of silvery children’s clothing hover in mid-air; light reflects on birds in flight–and all, for Fuss, mark the simultaneous presence and absence of the corporeal under the title My Ghost.

Africa State of Mind: Contemporary Photography Reimagines a Continent

£30.00

A mesmerizing, continent-spanning survey of the most dynamic scenes in contemporary African photography, and an introduction to the creative figures who are making it happen.

Africa State of Mind gathers together the work of an emergent generation of photographers from across Africa, including both the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. It is both a summation of new photographic practice from the last decade and an exploration of how contemporary photographers from the continent are exploring ideas of ‘Africanness’ to reveal Africa to be a psychological space as much as a physical territory – a state of mind as much as a geographical place.

Dispensing with the western colonial view of Africa in purely geographic or topographic terms, Ekow Eshun presents Africa State of Mind in four thematic parts: Hybrid Cities; Inner Landscapes; Zones of Freedom; and Myth and Memory. Each theme, introduced by a text by Eshun, presents selections of work by a new wave of African photographers who are looking both outward and inward: capturing life among the sprawling cities and multitudinous conurbations of the continent, turning the legacy of the continent’s history into the source of resonant new myths and dreamscapes and exploring questions of gender, sexuality and identity. Each of the photographers seeks to capture the experience of what it means, and how it feels, to live in Africa today.

Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive

£25.00

The definitive monograph on Alex Prager, one of the truly original image makers of our time.

Alex Prager is a photographer and filmmaker whose elaborate sets and complex staging draw on a rich cultural heritage of cinematic style, informed by street photography, to produce work that is unerringly memorable. At once temporal and timeless, bright but shadowed, Prager’s images exist within a hyperreal world, deeply rooted in the eerie undertones of Los Angeles, where the line between reality and fiction is blurred.

Prager’s critically acclaimed work is introduced here, spanning a decade of photographic work and five films. This collection of carefully curated photographs is complemented by an in-depth interview by Nathalie Herschdorfer, director of the Musee des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland, and discursive essays by Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Mansfield, executive director of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine, and Clare Grafik, senior curator at The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

Amy Winehouse: A Losing Game

£4.00

As known for her fraught personal life as her chart-topping songs, Amy Winehouse who died at the age of 27 in July 2011 was one of the most compelling vocalists in the world. But despite this fact, it was her self-destructive excesses that made headlines. Drinking binges, self-harm, eating disorders, drug abuse, and a turbulent marriage overshadowed her music even as her record sales soared, and the media watched eagerly as Amy’s world imploded. This richly illustrated biography tells her story in full, from childhood through to the pleasures and pains of superstardom, her blazing talent, the years she lost to her addictions, the final days before her death, and the legacy of her raw and heartfelt music.

Another Side of Bob Dylan

£14.00£18.00

A vivid, first-hand account of Nobel Prize-winning singer and songwriter Bob Dylan as an artist, friend, and celebrity, illustrated with never-before-seen photographs, and told by an engaging raconteur who cut his own swathe through the turbulent counterculture.

 

August 2014 marks 50 years since Bob Dylan released his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. Recorded in one night, in the middle of a turbulent year in his life, the music marked a departure from Dylan’s socially-conscious folk songs and began his evolution toward other directions.

 

During the years they spent together, few people outside of Dylan’s immediate family were closer than Victor Maymudes, who was Dylan’s tour manager, personal friend, and travelling companion from the early days in 1960s Greenwich Village through the late 90’s. Another Side of Bob Dylan recounts landmark events including Dylan’s infamous motorcycle crash; meeting the Beatles on their first US tour; his marriage to Sara Lownds, his romances with Suze Rotolo, Joan Baez, and others; fellow travelers Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Wavy Gravy, Dennis Hopper, The Band, The Traveling Wilburys, and more; memorable concerts, and insights on Dylan’s songwriting process.

 

On January 26th, 2001, after recording more than 24 hours of taped memories in preparation for writing this book, Victor Maymudes suffered an aneurysm and died. His son Jacob has written the book, using the tapes to shape the story.

 

A Los Angeles Times Best Seller.

Art, Survival & So Forth: The Poetry of Charles Bukowski

£11.95

This is the book that thoughtful readers of Charles Bukowski have been waiting for. Based on extensive research, it places Bukowski’s poetry in it’s American cultural context, and explores the key poems and collections in his development. It traces magazines, literary contacts and influences from the mid-1940’s to The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992).

 

Want to know about Bukowski and the movies, the Beats, Hemingway, Céline and Walt Whitman? About how and why Bukowski formed his unique style and image? And about where he fits in to West Coast and post-War American verse? Scholarly but accessible, this is the essential book to have. Also contains drawings by David Hernandez, rare photographs of C.B., and a preface by Gerald Locklin. – The Editor

Being Elvis: A Lonely Life

Elvis Presley is a giant figure in American popular culture, a man whose talent and fame were matched only by his later excesses and tragic end. A godlike entity in the history of rock and roll, this twentieth-century icon with a dazzling voice blended gospel and traditionally black rhythm and blues with country to create a completely new kind of music and new way of expressing male sexuality, which simply blew the doors off a staid and repressed 1950s America.

 

In Being Elvis veteran rock journalist Ray Connolly takes a fresh look at the career of the world’s most loved singer, placing him, forty years after his death, not exhaustively in the garish neon lights of Las Vegas but back in his mid-twentieth-century, distinctly southern world. For new and seasoned fans alike, Connolly, who interviewed Elvis in 1969, re-creates a man who sprang from poverty in Tupelo, Mississippi, to unprecedented overnight fame, eclipsing Frank Sinatra and then inspiring the Beatles along the way.

 

Intimate and unsparing, Being Elvis explores the extravagance and irrationality inherent in the Elvis mythology, ultimately offering a thoughtful celebration of an immortal life.

Belle and Sebastian: Illustrated Lyrics

£20.00

A beautiful collaboration between Belle and Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch and illustrator Pamela Tait: a unique visual reinterpretation of Murdoch’s favourite Belle and Sebastian songs.

From the imagined lives of the passengers riding Glasgow buses in the early 1990s to questions raised about the status quo and musings on the meaning of religion, Stuart Murdoch, frontman of Scottish indie pop band Belle and Sebastian, has written some of the most captivating lyrics of the past two decades. Belle and Sebastian recorded their first critically acclaimed album Tigermilk in three days, played a sold-out show at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic, and famously forgot their drummer, dressed in his pyjamas, outside a Walmart. Their songs have animated many film soundtracks, developing a cult following that has helped to define the sound of indie music as we know it today.

The first book in the ‘Illustrated Lyrics’ series combines the words selected from over twenty-four years of Belle and Sebastian songs with specially commissioned illustrations from Scottish artist Pamela Tait, whose intricate and whimsical character illustrations Stuart Murdoch stumbled upon and fell in love with when he rediscovered old fan mail Pamela had sent to him over a decade ago. Set with expressive typography, this is an exceptional publication that will seduce even the most devoted fans to ‘see’ these wonderful songs afresh.

Birth School Metallica Death

£9.90

Metallica have sold in excess of 100 million albums and won seven Grammys. Their journey from scuzzy Los Angeles garages to the stages of the world’s biggest stadia has been an epic and often traumatic one, and one of the few truly great rock ‘n’ roll sagas.


No music writers have been afforded greater access to Metallica over the years than Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood, two former editors of Kerrang. Having conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with the band, they have between them gained an unparalleled knowledge of the group’s history and an insiders’ view of how their story has developed: they have ridden in the band’s limos, flown on their private jet, joined them in the studio, been invited to the quartet’s ‘HQ’ outside San Francisco and shared beers and stories with them in venues across the globe. There are countless memorable stories about the band never before seen in print, tales of bed-hopping and drug-taking and car-crashes and fist-fights and back-stabbing that occur when you mix testosterone and adrenaline, alcohol and egomania, talent and raw ambition.

 

Perceptive, emotionally attached, and intellectually rigorous, Birth, School, Metallica, Death will be the essential and definitive story of this extraordinary band. Volume I takes us from the band’s inception through to the recording and eve of release of their seminal, self-titled, 1991 album.

Boy About Town: A Memoir

£8.00

As a boy, Tony Fletcher frequently felt out of place. Yet somehow he secured a ringside seat for one of the most creative periods in British cultural history.

 

Boy About Town tells the story of the bestselling author’s formative years in the pre- and post-punk music scenes of London, counting down, from fifty to number one: attendance at seminal gigs and encounters with musical heroes; schoolboy projects that became national success stories; the style culture of punks, mods and skinheads and the tribal violence that enveloped them; life as a latchkey kid in a single-parent household; weekends on the football terraces in a quest for street credibility; and the teenage boy’s unending obsession with losing his virginity.

 

Featuring a vibrant cast of supporting characters (from school friends to rock stars), and built up from notebooks, diaries, interviews, letters, and issues of his now legendary fanzine Jamming!, Boy About Town is an evocative, bittersweet, amusing and wholly original account of growing up and coming of age in the glory days of the 1970s.

Brutally Honest

£9.50

The tell-all memoir from the loudest, proudest Spice Girl – and the truth behind the headlines

 

As one-fifth of the iconic Spice Girls and judge on X Factor and America’s Got Talent, Melanie Brown, a.k.a Scary Spice, has been an international star since her twenties. Brutally Honest is an exposé of the struggles and acute pain that lay behind the glamour and success.With deep personal insight, remarkable frankness and trademark Yorkshire humour, the book removes the mask of fame and reveals the true story behind the Spice Girls, as well as the horror of her most recent marriage and her 10 year struggle to be free.

Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop

£4.99

Has the global phenomenon that is Pop Idol completely ruined pop music, or is it just the natural revolution of a genre of music that has always been manufactured? From Tin Pan Alley via The Monkees and finally to boy bands, this is the complete history of the most successful genre of music ever. Manufactured acts have been the money-spinning mainstay of the pop industry for decades. Bubblegum: The History of Plastic Pop takes a decade-by-decade look at some of the music industry’s more cynical creations from the 1950s to the 21st century, encompassing acts such as The Monkees, The Bay City Rollers and The Spice Girls, as well as the phenomenon that is Pop Idol and its siblings.

 

This revealing study includes interviews with the movers and shakers of the pop world and the artistic armies behind their successes, including Chinn and Chapman, Stock, Aitken and Waterman, Simon Fuller, Paula Abdul and Cathy Dennis. The result is a comprehensive look back at some of the fly-by-nights of pop and a DIY guide to becoming a pop star, listing the dos and don’ts of making it in the pop music industry.

Bunnyman: A Memoir

£20.00

Growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s and ’70s, when skinheads, football violence and fear of just about everything was the natural order of things, a young Will Sergeant found the emerging punk scene provided a shimmer of hope amongst a crumbling city still reeling from the destruction of the Second World War.

 

From school-day horrors and mud flinging fun to nights at Liverpool’s punk club, Eric’s, Sergeant was fuelled by and thrived on music. It was this devotion that led to the birth of the Bunnymen, to the days when he and Ian McCulloch would muck around with reel-to-reel recordings of song ideas in the back parlour of his parents’ council estate house, and to finding a community – friends, enemies and many in between – with those who would become post-punk royalty from the likes of Dead or Alive, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Teardrop Explodes to name a few.

 

It was an uphill struggle to carve their name in the history of Liverpool music, but Echo and the Bunnymen became iconic, with songs like ‘Lips Like Sugar,’ ‘The Cutter’ and ‘The Killing Moon’. By turns wry, explicit and profound, Bunnyman reveals what it was really like to be part of one of the most important British bands of the 1980s.

Bushcraft Survival

£6.99

In BUSHCRAFT SURVIVAL Ray Mears travels to some of the most remote and beautiful wildernesses in the world, and experiences first hand the survival techniques of different indigenous cultures.

 

From the Hudson Bay in Canada, via Tanzania and the jungles of Venezuela, to the moors and highlands of Britain, BUSHCRAFT SURVIVAL explores a range of locations and techniques from indigenous peoples. Drawing on centuries of knowledge as well as his own experience, Ray demonstrates how our enjoyment of the wilderness comes through respect for our surroundings and the people, plants and animals that live there.

Chris Killip

£50.00

The definitive, full-career retrospective of the life and work of Chris Killip (1946-2020), one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers.

‘I didn’t set out to be the photographer of the English de-Industrial Revolution. It happened all around me during the time I was photographing’ Chris Killip, 2019

Grounded in sustained immersion and participation in the communities he photographed, Chris Killip’s keenly observed work chronicled ordinary people’s lives in stark, yet sympathetic, detail. His photographs are recognized as some of the most important visual records of 1980s Britain; as editor of this book Ken Grant reflects, they tell the story of those who ‘had history “done to them”, who felt its malicious disregard and yet, like the photographer with whom they shared so much of their lives, refused to yield or look away.’

Published to coincide with the first full retrospective of Killip’s life and work at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, this book, designed by Niall Sweeney & Nigel Truswell at Pony Ltd, presents photographs from each of his major series alongside lesser-known works. It includes a foreword by Brett Rogers, in-depth essays by Ken Grant tracing Killip’s life and career, and texts by Gregory Halpern, Amanda Maddox and Lynsey Hanley.

Churchhill: The Statesman as Artist

£19.99

Across almost 50 years, Winston Churchill produced more than 500 paintings. His subjects included his family homes at Blenheim and Chartwell, evocative coastal scenes on the French Riviera, and many sun-drenched depictions of Marrakesh in Morocco, as well as still life pictures and an extraordinarily revealing self-portrait, painted during a particularly troubled time in his life. In war and peace, Churchill came to enjoy painting as his primary means of relaxation from the strain of public affairs.

 

In his introduction to Churchill: The Statesman as Artist, David Cannadine provides the most important account yet of Churchill’s life in art, which was not just a private hobby, but also, from 1945 onwards, an essential element of his public fame. The first part of this book brings together for the first time all of Churchill’s writings and speeches on art, not only ‘Painting as a Pastime’, but his addresses to the Royal Academy, his reviews of two of the Academy’s summer exhibitions, and an important speech he delivered about art and freedom in 1937.

 

The second part of the book provides previously uncollected critical accounts of his work by some of Churchill’s contemporaries: Augustus John’s hitherto unpublished introduction to the Royal Academy exhibition of Churchill’s paintings in 1959, and essays and reviews by Churchill’s acquaintances Sir John Rothenstein, Professor Thomas Bodkin and the art critic Eric Newton. The book is lavishly illustrated with reproductions of many of Churchill’s paintings, some of them appearing for the first time. Here is Churchill the artist more fully revealed than ever before.

Clubland Confidential

£5.50

‘Owen writes fast and tough, like a cop flick voice-over – if anything, Clubland Confidential is Robin Moore’s The French Connection remixed for the “chemical generation” ‘ -The Guardian

 

Clubland Confidential is the true story of the rise and fall of a decadent nocturnal empire that stretched over several American cities and spawned its own subculture of celebrities and wannabes. Journalist, Frank Owen spent nearly a decade inside the nightclubs of the 1990s – an era when disco gave way to more unsettling dance music, cocaine was supplanted by Ecstacy and heroin, ‘clubkids’ mingled with bully boys, trans people danced with stockbrokers, and celebrities looked on. But as the drugs got out of control, their world became murkier and slowly began to implode. As clubland decadence turned to darkness, its self-publicised king, Michael Alig, committed one of the most notorious crimes of New York’s recent history – the violent murder of Angel Melendez. With his friends fleeing for cover, a tangled web of mafia-related crimes begins to emerge and the secrets of New York nightlife are dragged through the courts.

Colour Mania (Victoria and Albert Museum): Photographing the World in Autochrome

£45.00

Exquisite yet too fragile to exhibit, one of the world’s greatest collections of autochromes – a pioneering colour photography process – is presented to a wide audience for the first time.

Offering unprecedented access to the V&A’s collection of autochromes – one of the greatest collections of early colour photography in the world – Colour Mania presents this pioneering photographic process in its full, vibrant, wondrous and painterly beauty and provides a breath-taking view of the early 20th century in colour.

Autochromes are so fragile and light sensitive that they cannot be displayed in public – this book presents the only chance to see the V&A’s internationally significant collection. Invented by the Lumiere brothers – also pioneers of cinema – the autochrome was the first widely available colour photography process. Upon its commercial release in 1907, it was eagerly embraced by Pictorialist photographers and advocated by its leading member Alfred Stieglitz, who predicted ‘soon the world will be color-mad’.

Photographed with great care for this book, the V&A’s abundant collection of autochromes is brought to the public for the very first time. Organized thematically and with in-depth sections focusing on the photographers who engaged with the process, Colour Mania is built upon the latest scholarship and research by Catlin Langford and includes insights into how these extraordinary photographs are being preserved for future generations.

An opportunity to travel in time and understand a tour de force in photographic technology, Colour Mania will delight anyone who desires to experience the past in colour.

Cover Versions: Singing Other People’s Songs

£4.00

Back in pop’s early days, every record was a cover version. Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald were famous for interpreting other people’s songs, and the closest Elvis Presley ever got to writing one was when his manager, Colonel Parker, arm-twisted the rights away from the original songwriters. The balance of power shifted when The Beatles and the Stones wrote all their own material, yet the great tradition of the cover version never died. In this elegantly-tooled volume, Adam Sweeting gets the lowdown on cover versions – the worst, the most popular, the most frequently recorded, the most successful, the stupidest, the most tasteless, the most influential, and the ones nobody got around to yet.

1 2 6