Waterstones Welsh Book of the Month - November 2021The '70s wasn't all glam rock and flares, punk and pogo-ing…In Painting the Beauty Queens Orange, the women who lived the decade reveal what it meant to push boundaries, claim your identity, and carve out your place amidst the winter of discontent, the scorching summer of '76 and the rise of Thatcherism.One young woman says a forced goodbye to her newborn baby. Another grasps new opportunities...

The wave of unrest which took place in 1840s Wales, known as ‘Rebeccaism’ or ‘the Rebecca riots’, stands out as a success story within the generally gloomy annals of popular struggle and defeat. The story is remembered in vivid and compelling images: attacks on tollgates and other symbols of perceived injustice by farmers and workers, outlandishly dressed in bonnets and petticoats and led by the iconic anonymous figure of Rebecca herself. The events form a core part of historical study and...

Why have both pop and politics in Britain become the preserve of an unrepresentative elite? From chav-pop pantomimes to retro-chauvinist 'landfill indie', the bland, homogenous and compromised nature of the current "alternative" sector reflects the interests of a similarly complacent and privileged political establishment. In particular, political and media policing of female social and sexual autonomy, through the neglected but significant gendered dimensions of the discourse surrounding ...

The UK alternative rock band, Manic Street Preachers, were and remain one of the most interesting, significant, and best-loved bands of the past thirty years. Their third album The Holy Bible (1994) is generally acknowledged to be their most enduring and fascinating work, and one of the most compelling and challenging records of the nineties. Triptych reconsiders The Holy Bible from three separate, intersecting angles, combining the personal with the political, history with memory, and pop...

The brilliantly funny and inimitable Alan Carr tells his life story in his own words, from growing up in a football-mad family in Northampton to his rise to become one of Britain’s best-loved comedians.‘Puberty had been unkind. Whereas it had come in the night and left the other boys with chiselled, stubbly chins and deep masculine voices, I’d been left with a huge pair of knockers and the voice of a pensioner.’ Alan CarrAlan Carr grew up in one of the most boring towns in ...

Journalist, presenter, broadcaster, husband, father, vigorous all-rounder: Alan Partridge. Star of action blockbuster Alpha Papa; a man with a fascinating past and an amazing future.I Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan is the memoir of Alan Partridge, the nation’s favourite broadcaster. It is a work of heart-breaking majesty.Genuinely one of the best books of the last fifteen to twenty years, I, Partridge charts the highs, lows and middle bits in the life of one of Europ...

Jeremy Clarkson, shares his opinions on just about everything in For Crying Out Loud.The publication of The World According to Clarkson in 2004 launched a multi-million copy bestselling phenomenon. But to no avail.Jeremy's one man war on crimes against common sense has not yet been won. And out hero's still scratching his head at the madness of it all. But it's not all bad. He's learnt a little along the way, including:• Why binge ...

Nostalgia, identity, eccentricity, gin drinking and occasional violence... these are just some of the themes that stand-up comedian Dara O Briain explores in Tickling the English.O Briain moved to England many years ago, but when he takes his show on tour around the country - from deserted seaside towns and remote off-shore islands, to sprawling industrial cities and sleepy suburbs - it's clear to him that his adopted home is still a bit of an enigma.Why do the Eng...

“A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place. . . . Delightful. . . . In Taylor’s patient and sympathetic hands, regular people become poets, philosophers, orators.” -- New York Times Book ReviewLondoners is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world's most fascinating cities–a vibrant narrative portrait of the London of our own time, featuring unforg...

A hilarious compendium of all that's weird and wonderful about life in the British Isles - the eccentric, bizarre bureaucracy and outright oddity reported over the last year by the nation's newspapers, including: Guardian headline, 'Man with false leg hit with toilet lid.'; The Astrological Magazine, 'announces that it is to cease due to unforeseen circumstances.' Jack Crossley spent some 40 years in Fleet Street and has compiled this laugh-out-loud collection of anecdotes and strange goin...

Steve Coogan was born and raised in Manchester in the 1960s, the fourth of six children. From an early age he entertained his family with impressions and was often told he should 'be on the telly'. Failing to get into any of the London-based drama schools, he accepted a place at Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre and before graduating had been given his first break as a voice artist on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image.The late eighties and early nineties saw ...

A Northerner in exile, Stuart Maconie goes on a journey in search of the North, attempting to discover where the clich�s end and the truth begins. He travels from Wigan Pier to Blackpool Tower and Newcastle's Bigg Market to the Lake District to find his own Northern Soul, encountering along the way an exotic cast of chippy Scousers, pie-eating woollybacks, topless Geordies, mad-for-it Mancs, Yorkshire nationalists and brothers in southern exile.The bestselling Pies and Prejudic...