Before his death in 2004, Fred presented many popular series, including Magnificent Monuments, The Age of Steam and Made in Britain, all of which attracted viewers in their millions.Fred is the companion to the 12-part BBC2 series celebrating the life of this great man, which combines highlights from some of Dibnah's classic programmes with previously unseen footage. The book can of course go much further than the series, including an extraordinarily account of Fred's childhood which evokes a lost England and our great industrial heritage. Fred's passion for the glories of the Victorian age and his fascination with the landscape he grew up in, plus his admiration for the craftsmen and labourers who made it all possible, captivate us on every page.Fred is the personification of everything that made England great in the first place. And this is a glorious tribute to a man whom millions came to love.

    The brutal murder of the Russian Imperial family on the night of July sixteenth to seventeenth, 1918 has long been a defining moment in world history. The Last Days of the Romanovs reveals in exceptional detail how the conspiracy to kill them unfolded. In the vivid style of a TV documentary, Helen Rappaport reveals both the atmosphere inside the family's claustrophobic prison and the political maneuverings of those who wished to save--or destroy--them. With the watching world and European monarchies proving incapable of saving the Romanovs, the narrative brings this tragic story to life in a compellingly new and dramatic way, culminating in a bloody night of horror in a cramped basement room.

    His lyrics and melodies paint indelible portraits of the people, places, and experiences that shaped him. He has served as model, mentor, supporter, and friend to at least two generations of the world’s most talented and influential singer-songwriters. In songs like “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” L.A. Freeway,” “She Ain’t Going Nowhere,” and “Texas 1947,” Clark’s poetic mastery has given voice to a vision of life, love, and trouble that has resonated not only with fans of Americana music, but also with the prominent artists—including Johnny Cash, Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Jeff Walker, and others—who have recorded and performed Clark’s music. Now, in Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark, writer, producer, and music industry insider Tamara Saviano chronicles the story of this legendary artist from her unique vantage point as his former publicist and producer of the Grammy-nominated album This One’s for Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark. Part memoir, part biography, Saviano’s skillfully constructed narrative weaves together the extraordinary songs, larger-than-life characters, previously untold stories, and riveting  emotions that make up the life of this modern-day poet and troubadour.

    With a career that began in the late 1950s, Joan kept mementos over the course of her entire working life, and Joan Rivers Confidential is a compilation of never-before-seen personal archives. Assembled by her daughter Melissa with Scott Currie, the book contains scripts and monologues, letters from famous friends, exchanges with fans, rare photographs, as well as classic and never-before-heard jokes—many simply scribbled on everything from hotel stationery to airplane boarding passes. Touching on subjects from her 50 years in show business (The Tonight Show, Las Vegas, Elizabeth Taylor, Heidi Abromowitz, the red carpet, and Fashion Police), this is a revelatory and humor-filled insider look at the popular, multitalented comedian.

    He became one of the ten richest men on the planet and controlled 80 per cent of the global cocaine trade before he was shot dead in 1993.In 1965, a secret mission by Colombian Special Forces, led by an MI6 agent, to recover a cash hoard from a safe house used by a young Pablo Escobar culminates in a shoot-out leaving many dead. Escobar and several of his men escape. Only a baby survives, Roberto Sendoya Escobar. In a bizarre twist of fate, the MI6 agent takes pity on the child, brings him home and later adopts him.Over the years, Pablo Escobar tries, repeatedly, to kidnap his son. The child, unaware of his true identity, is allowed regular meetings with Escobar and it becomes apparent that Roberto’s adopted father and the British government are working covertly with the gangster in an attempt to control the money laundering and drug trades.Many years later in England, as Roberto’s father lies dying in hospital, he hands his son a coded piece of paper which, he says, reveals the secret hiding place of Escobar’s ‘missing millions'. The code is published in this book for the first time.

    It is fiercely compelling" EDMUND DE WAAL, author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes A poet's memoir of his mother that flows backwards through time, and through a tumultuous period of European history - a tender and yet unsparing autobiographical journey. In July 1975, George Szirtes' mother, Magda, died in an ambulance, on her way to hospital after attempting to take her own life. She was fifty-one years old. This memoir is an attempt to make sense of what came before, to re-construct who Magda Szirtes really was. The Photographer at Sixteen moves from her death, spooling backwards through her years as a mother, through sickness and exile in England, the family's flight from Hungary in 1956, her time in two concentration camps, her girlhood as an ambitious photographer and her vanished family in Transylvania.The woman who emerges, fleetingly, fragmentarily - with her absolutism, her contradictions, her beauty - is utterly captivating. What were the terrors and obsessions that drove her? The Photographer at Sixteen reveals a life that is at Magda Szirtes from the depths of the end to the comparable safety of the photographer's studio where she first appears as a small child. It is a book born of curiosity, guilt and love.

    From his father, Winston Churchill surely inherited the gift of oratory. But from his mother he drew greater gifts of inestimable value to the nation he led in the dark days of 1940-1. She gave him her ache for action, her formidable stamina, her courage and, above all, the will to stand fast in adversity and to endure whatever fate threw at her. Jennie was an extraordinary beauty whose zest, courage, intelligence and conversational ease made her, in her own right, one of the international figures of her day. When she married Lord Randolph Churchill, a fascinating young man who was violently in love with her, she had no idea he would become the most brilliant and controversial politician in England at the time. But she was eminently suited to be the wife of a politician and, although her role would be `to applaud not to advise,' she brought to it her whole heart and her lively intelligence. Yet her marriage to Randolph was a struggle which she had to learn to endure, and after his death she went on marry twice more, to men much younger than herself. She adored Winston and went to great lengths to satisfy his whims as a young man, and she was hugely influential in shaping the great figure he would become. Anita Leslie has used personal memories and family papers to create a fascinating look at one of the most powerful of Churchill women, mother of Winston.

    During that time the country underwent a massive transformation, taking it from days of grandeur under the tsars to the chaos of revolution and the beginnings of the Soviet Union.At the center of all this tumult were four women of the Romanov dynasty. Marie Alexandrovna and Olga Constantinovna were born into the family, Russian Grand Duchesses at birth. Marie Feodorovna and Marie Pavlovna married into the dynasty, the former born a Princess of Denmark, the latter a Duchess of the German duchy of Mecklendburg-Schwerin.In From Splendor to Revolution, we watch these pampered aristocratic women fight for their lives as the cataclysm of war engulfs them. In a matter of a few short years, they fell from the pinnacle of wealth and power to the depths of danger, poverty, and exile. It is an unforgettable epic story.

    . . . This is an intelligent, thoughtful look into the mind of an artist."--New York Times Book Review Since the release of his first best-selling album Look Sharp in 1979, Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music through his originality as a composer and his notoriously independent stance toward music-business fashion. He has also been a famously private person, whose lack of interest in his own celebrity has been interpreted by some as aloofness. That reputation is shattered by A Cure for Gravity, Jackson's enormously funny and revealing memoir of growing up musical, from a culturally impoverished childhood in a rough English port town to the Royal Academy of Music, through London's Punk and New Wave scenes, up to the brink of pop stardom. Jackson describes his life as a teenage Beethoven fanatic; his early piano gigs for audiences of glass-throwing skinheads; and his days on the road with long-forgotten club bands. Far from a standard-issue celebrity autobiography, A Cure for Gravity is a smart, passionate book about music, the creative process, and coming of age as an artist.Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award Finalist

    His brilliant musicianship inspired his fans in London to scrawl graffiti in the underground train proclaiming, "Clapton is God." Nearly forty years later, this multi-million selling, Grammy award-winning virtuoso guitarist is still winning adulation from a whole new generation of fans.Crossroads, the definitive portrait of the man and his music, reveals with compassion and insight both the depths of Clapton's pain and the roots of his musical power. Michael Schumacher traces his career from the early years of the Yardbirds and John Mayall to the legendary supergroups Cream and Derek and the Dominoes to the solo career that has lasted a quarter of a century. Crossroads also explores the tumultuous life -- his heroin addiction, the excruciating relationship with Patti Boyd (George Harrison's wife and the woman who inspired the classic "Layla"), the year of 1990 when he lost four close friends, and the devastating death of his four-year-old son Connor the following year. Both revealing and sympathetic, this is the ultimate look at the enduring legend who transformed personal suffering into lasting artistic triumph.-- Revised and updated to include details on Clapton's new marriage and his recent recordings and tour-- Complete with a comprehensive discography and tour history

    Welcome to Weezer’s weird world, steered by brainchild Rivers Cuomo — perhaps the world’s most unlikely rock star. Exhaustively researched, Rivers’ Edge documents the rise of the band from Cuomo’s beginnings as a failure on Hollywood’s hair metal scene to his reinvention of himself as the undeniable ruler of Weezer. Luerssen uncovers what really happened during Weezer’s strange hiatus and subsequent re-emergence in 2000, which was one of the most successful comebacks in music history. Through key interviews with friends, associates, members of Weezer, and bandmates in their solo projects, Rivers’ Edge is a must-own for any Weezer fan.

    'They've let off an atom bomb today. Right here in W.A. Atom bombs worry the blazes out of me, and I want you at home.'In the sleepy and conservative 1950s the British began a series of nuclear tests in the Montebello archipelago off the west coast of Australia. Even today, few people know about the three huge atom bombs that were detonated there, but they lodged in the consciousness of the young Robert Drewe and would linger with him for years to come.In this moving sequel to The Shark Net, and with his characteristic frankness, humour and cinematic imagery, Drewe travels to the Montebellos to visit the territory that has held his imagination since childhood. He soon finds himself overtaken by memories and reflections on his own 'islomania'. In the aftermath of both man-made and natural events that have left a permanent mark on the Australian landscape and psyche – from nuclear tests and the mining boom to shark attacks along the coast – Drewe examines how comfortable and familiar terrain can quickly become a site of danger, and how regeneration and love can emerge from chaos and loss.

    Once an untouchable member of England's establishment-- a world-famous art historian and a man knighted by the Queen of England-- in a single stroke Anthony Blunt became an object of universal hatred when, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher exposed him as a Soviet spy. In "Anthony Blunt: His Lives," Miranda Carter shows how one man lived out opposing trends of his century-- first as a rebel against his class, then as its epitome-- and yet embodied a deeper paradox. In the 1920s, Blunt was a member of the Bloomsbury circle; in the 1930s he was a left-wing intellectual; in the 50s and 60s he became a camouflaged member of the Establishment. Until his treachery was made public, Blunt was a world-famous art historian, recognized for his ground-breaking work on Poussin, Italian art, and old master drawings; at the Courtauld Institute he trained a whole generation of academics and curators. And yet even as he ascended from rebellion into outward conformity, he was a homosexual when homosexuality was a crime, and a traitor when the penalty was death. How could one man contain so many contradictions? The layers of secrecy upon which Blunt's life depended are here stripped away for the first time, using testimony from those who knew Blunt well but have until now kept silent and documents from sealed Russian archives, including a secret autobiography Blunt wrote for his controllers. Miranda Carter's "Anthony Blunt" is the first full biography of the mythical Cold War warrior, and is at once an astonishing history of one the century's greatest deceits and adeeply nuanced account of fifty years in the British power elite, as experienced by one deep inside who wished to bring it down.

    Tracking down a mass murderer is a constant plot line in films, television, and literature. But these stories are so often based on real life. In certain circumstances, however, real life goes a step beyond what we could imagine happening in fiction. Sometimes, the actions of a serial killer can seem so extreme and strange, their motivations so twisted and evil, that we struggle to comprehend exactly how they fit into the modern world. In the case of Keith Hunter Jesperson, the truth behind his murder spree is more horrific than anything dreamt up by Hollywood’s best screenwriters. After a disturbing childhood left the giant of a man riddled with emotional and psychological scars, Jesperson travelled across Canada and spent time strangling and killing women whom he met along the way. While he was only convicted of eights murders, his own boasts suggest that total could have reached as high as 160. As a truck driver, he had the perfect cover story for travelling from town to town without having to put down roots. Often leaving an unsuspecting family at home, he was out in the wilderness committing heinous acts without anyone from the authorities coming close to suspecting his guilt. Jesperson, annoyed by the lack of attention he was receiving, began to leave messages to the public. Scrawled onto the walls of truck stop bathrooms, he signed each confession with a happy, smiley face. This led the media to christening him the Happy Face Killer. It was decades before the investigators came close to catching the killer, so read on to discover just how Keith Hunter Jesperson managed to get away with numerous horrific murders. This is the story of the Happy Face Killer. Scroll back up and grab your copy now!

    Written by Moe Howard's daughter, this detailed biography is bursting with photographs Curly traces the life of one wacky Stooge from birth to his final status as a cult hero.