we had the first air raid of the war on London. My room is just opposite the police station, so I got the full benefit of the sirens. It made me leap out of bed...' The war continued for five more years, but Vere's comments on her work, friends, what was happening to London and the news ('We hold our breath over Crete', 'There is to be a new system of Warning') combine to make Few Eggs and No Oranges unusually readable. It is a long - 600 page - book but a deeply engrossing one. The TLS remarked: 'The diaries capture the sense of living through great events and not being overwhelmed by them... they display an extraordinary - though widespread - capacity for not giving way in the face of horrors and difficulties.' 'A classic book that still rings vibrant and helpful today... a heartwarming record of one articulate woman's coping with the war,' wrote the Tallahassee Democratic Review.

    For over four decades now, by way of innumerable short stories, essays, poems and novels, Ruskin Bond has championed simplicity and quietude in life and in art. This collection of essays and episodes from his journals is, in his own words, "a celebration of my survival as a freelance'. The author's early forays into the literary magazines of the 1950s and '60s are described in the first part of the book, along with some examples of his work at the time. The sections that follow contain extracts from an unpublished travel journal he kept during the '60s, episodes from the highways on which he was a frequent traveller, and vignettes of life in Mussoorie, past and present. With understated humour and compassion, Ruskin Bond records the charming eccentricities of friends and acquaintances (a former princess cheerfully obsessed with death and disaster); the silent miracles of nature ("New moon in a purple sky'); life's little joys (the smell of onions frying) and its fleeting regrets. Nostalgic and heart-warming, full of wisdom and charm, The Lamp is Lit provides a fascinating glimpse into the life of "our very own resident Wordsworth in prose.

    Recounts how the author, an Austrian, escaped from an English internment camp in India in 1943 and spent the next seven years in Tibet, observing its social practices, religion, politics, and people.

    The city of his birth was totally unrecognizable. “My city that once was had vanished,” he writes: “I was a foreigner in my hometown.” The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions that sparked Open Up, City Gate. In this lyrical autobiography of growing up—from the birth of the People’s Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution—Bei Dao uses his extraordinary gifts as a poet and storyteller to create another Beijing, a beautiful memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through. At the center of the book are his parents and siblings, and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Open Up, City Gate is told in an episodic, fluid style that moves back and forth through the poet’s childhood, recreating the smells and sounds, the laughter and the danger, of a boy’s coming of age during a time of enormous change and upheaval.

    The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

    As honest, unexpected, and downright hilarious as the man himself, It's Only a Game shows the many sides of Terry: the former pipeline worker, cattle-raiser, professional singer, youth minister, actor, television and radio talk-show host, and public speaker -- and replays all the hard-hitting, bone-crunching details from his heyday with the Pittsburgh Steelers.More than a collection of his funniest stories, It's Only a Game is the personal account of Terry's search for the life before and after football...as only he could tell it.

    As a dress designer, few could compare. An ingenious architect, she innovated the use of marble in her parents’ mausoleum on the banks of the Yamuna River that inspired her stepson’s Taj Mahal. And she was both celebrated and reviled for her political acumen and diplomatic skill, which rivaled those of her female counterparts in Europe and beyond.In 1611, thirty-four-year-old Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and most cherished wife of the Emperor Jahangir. While other wives were secluded behind walls, Nur ruled the vast Mughal Empire alongside her husband, and governed in his stead as his health failed and his attentions wandered from matters of state. An astute politician and devoted partner, Nur led troops into battle to free Jahangir when he was imprisoned by one of his own officers. She signed and issued imperial orders, and coins of the realm bore her name.Acclaimed historian Ruby Lal uncovers the rich life and world of Nur Jahan, rescuing this dazzling figure from patriarchal and Orientalist clichés of romance and intrigue, and giving new insight into the lives of women and girls in the Mughal Empire, even where scholars claim there are no sources. Nur’s confident assertion of authority and talent is revelatory. In Empress, she finally receives her due in a deeply researched and evocative biography that awakens us to a fascinating history.

    In it, he looks at the world and takes the perhaps surprising view that it's actually not nor will be the end of the world. His vivid prose, his clear-sightedness and the wonderful anecdotes about the many strange people and places he has come across - from emperors to movie stars, from Chelsea to China - all add up to a richly satisfying read. And with his long experience and his remarkable ability to explain what's really going on out there, he offers us all a crumb of comfort in desperate times.

    The greatest mass migration in history began, as Muslims fled north and Hindus fled south, over a million being massacred on the way. Britain's role as world power came to an end and the course of Asia's future was irrevocably set. Patrick French offers a reinterpretation of the events surrounding India's independence and partition, including the disastrous mistakes made by politicians and the bizarre reasoning behind many of their decisions. Exploring the interplay between characters such as Churchill, Mountbatten and Gandhi, it reveals a tale of idealism and manipulation, hope and tragedy. With sources ranging from newly declassified secret documents to the memories of refugees, Patrick French gives an account of an epic debacle, the impact of which reverberates across Asia to this day.

    Kaye's fiction will discover here the source of the characters, settings, and certain incidents of her novels. Most of all, they will bask in this warm account of a young woman's remarkable life--and the beginnings of a love affair with an India whose time has passed but which has not been forgotten. 24 pages of black-and-white photographs.

    A rare, exotic portrait of the matriarchs of a brilliant Indian family Ranging from the final days of the Raj and the British Empire to the present, Lucy Moore vividly re-creates a splendid lost world and describes India's national growing pains through the sumptuous, audacious lives of four ravishing, influential women of the same family- Sunity Devi, friend to Queen Victoria; Chimnabai, fierce nationalist; Indira, her flamboyant daughter; and Ayesha, her equally fashionable daughter- who fought tirelessly and with incomparable grace to turn an ancient tradition of noblesse oblige into a progressive democracy.

    Period photographs illustrate this you-are-there account of the daily lives and tribulations of all who suffered through the war, from ordinary people to the Confederacy's generals and political figures.

    Laying bare the personalities, pyrotechnics and political intrigues of the Blair years, it was described as Yes Minister meets Alan Clark.Funny and self-deprecating, the new diaries run from his sacking by Blair as a minister after the 2005 elections to Election Day 2010 as he prepares to step down after 23 years as an MP wryly observing ' they say failed politicians make the best diarists, in which case I am in with a chance.'Praise for A View from the Foothills'...gems sprinkled across every page...' Peter Hain

    Even if there's no vertical accountability to "We, the People of India", these Babus have a world of their own - they read The Economist, play golf, attend AMP courses at Harvard, take study sabbaticals at INSEAD and take a ransom to do just do their job. They are easily the most-wide read amongst India's intellectuals and share a world almost like a Bilderberg or a Freemason societyM.K.Kaw is a retired IAS officer who has been there, done that. He gives a promising preview that entertains as much as it informs in this cheeky book that is sure to be lapped up by all bureaucracy members. M.K.Kaw worked in Himachal Pradesh as well as New Delhi in various postings from Finance Secretary to the Central Pay Commission. The present book is a sequel to an earlier book "Bureaucrazy" published in 1993. It is more elegant, presentable, and full of wit in Wodehousean fashion. Divided into seven parts, and populated with 47 chapters. There is one chapter almost on every conceivable facet of bureaucracy - the ways and means of wives of IAS officers, from egoistic officers like Seshan to diffident members, the need to have Godfathers, to "sir" your officers, the anatomy of corruption, etc. There is only one flaw: while profusely witty and analytical, there's a lot of "bharichaara" and fraternity on the whimsical ways in which the Babus have been ruling our country long after the British Babus have left. Easy read

    But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.Thus begins an epic, reckless, and terrifying five-year journey of escape for Enjeela, her siblings, and their father to reconnect with her mother. In navigating the dangers ahead of them, and in looking back at the wilderness of her homeland, Enjeela discovers the spiritual and physical strength to find hope in the most desperate of circumstances.A heart-stopping memoir of a girl shaken by the brutalities of war and empowered by the will to survive, The Broken Circle brilliantly illustrates that family is not defined by the borders of a country but by the bonds of the heart.