A completely fresh insight into the mind of one of the UK's greatest playwrights, the letters between John Osborne and his first wife, actress Pamela Lane, are also a love letter to a now defunct system of repertory theatre, and life in post-war Britain.As these letters reveal, soon after their divorce, Osborne and Lane began a mutually supportive, loyal, frequently stormy and sometimes sexually intimate alliance lasting thirty years until Osborne's death. By the mid-1980s, they ha...

The third volume of Michael Palin's celebrated diaries.TRAVELLING TO WORK is a roller-coaster ride driven by the Palin hallmarks of curiosity and sense of adventure. Michael was not the BBC's first choice for the travel series AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, but after its success, the public naturally wanted more.Palin, however, had other plans. There was his film AMERICAN FRIENDS, a role in Alan Bleasdale's award-winning drama GBH, the staging of his West End...

Michael Palin's bestselling diaries of the 1980s.After a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, The Pythons made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful MONTY PYTHON'S MEANING OF LIFE. Writing and acting in films and television then took over much of Michael's life, culminating in the smash hit A FISH CALLED WANDA (for which he won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor), and the first of his seven celebrated television journeys for the BBC. He...

The World was my Lobster tells the story of George Cole's more than 70 years in the acting profession that began with a walk-on part at the age of 14 in the stage musical The White Horse Inn in 1939, and continues today having included such roles as David Bliss in the radio and television versions of A Life of Bliss, Flash Harry in the St. Trinian's films, and Arthur Daley in television's Minder.Adopted when he was only 10 days old, George Cole grew up in south London in the 1920s. On the ...

Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She grew up yearning to be an actress; but when that ambition was thwarted by marriage and the war, she turned to fiction. Her first novel, The Beautiful Visit, won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize - she went on to write fourteen more, of which the best-loved were the five volumes of The Cazalet ...

When Wallis & Edward was first published in 1986, weeks after the death of the Duchess of Windsor, it caused a sensation: this was the story the world had been waiting for. For the first time, the story of Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII was revealed in their own words. Michael Bloch's edition of their intimate correspondence takes us from the moment they met in 1931 up to their marriage in 1937, and includes Wallis Simpson's diary of their affair in form of her weekly letters...

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again.A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new li...

Kate by Claudia Joseph, is a true-life fairy tale: the biography of Kate Middleton, Princess-in-Waiting, who is quite possibly poised to be the next Queen of England. The extraordinary Cinderella story of the beautiful, charming, sophisticated young woman who has snagged Britain’s most eligible bachelor, Prince William, Kate is a must-read for all the many followers of the lives, loves, and remarkable turns of the royal family of Great Britain.For the first time in 350 years, a com...

Harry H. Corbett rose from the slums of Manchester to become one of the best-known television stars of the 20th century. Having left home as a 17-year-old Royal Marine during the Second World War, he fought in the North Atlantic and the jungles of the Pacific and witnessed first-hand the devastation wrought by the Hiroshima bomb. On his return home he wandered into the local theatre company and landed a starring role – The Front Legs of the Cow. Soon becoming a le...

The Empress of Crime's life was the ultimate detective story – revealed for the first time in this forthright and perceptive biography.While Ngaio Marsh had a flamboyant public persona, she was fiercely protective of her private life. And no one knows better how to cover tracks with red herrings and remove incriminating evidence than a crime fiction writer…This fascinating biography of Ngaio Marsh pieces together both the public and private Marsh in a way that is as rivetin...

Why did London Underground once employ a one-legged man to ride up and down the escalators at Earl's Court tube station? What did Hitler plan to do with Nelson's Column? Why is London's only medieval mummy a prostitute named Clarice la Claterballock? How did a beer flood in Tottenham Court Road drown nine people? Where can you see a pair of Queen Victoria's knickers?Containing chapters covering London past and present; buildings and streets; famous and unexpected Londoners; arts, li...

What are the classic works of Australian literature? And what can they tell us about ourselves and the land we live in? Providing a selected overview of Australia's greatest literature, Australian Classics is an accessible companion to our literature and a story of writing in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present.Australian Classics celebrates many of the country's beloved novels, poems, short stories, children's books and seminal works of non-ficti...