The next book from the number one bestselling author of Cry Silent Tears.Joe was only five years old when he lost his voice. Only five years old when he was first beaten by his mother and raped by her boyfriend. And only nine years old when his mother sold him to a paedophile ring.At sixteen, Joe finally found the courage to escape and headed for Charing Cross station with no money in his pocket, no friends and nowhere to turn to. But the nightm ...
Winner of the 1989 Whitbread Prize for Book of the Year, this is the first volume of Holmes’s seminal two-part examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of Britain’s greatest poets.‘Coleridge: Early Visions’ is the first part of Holmes’s classic biography of Coleridge that forever transformed our view of the poet of ‘Kubla Khan’ and his place in the Romantic Movement. Dismissed by much recent scholarship as an opium addict, plagiarist, politic ...
Justine Picardie has spent the last decade puzzling over the truth about Coco Chanel, attempting to peel away the accretions of romance and lies. In this critically acclaimed, bestselling biography she shares the history of the incredible woman who created the way we look now.Coco Chanel was an extraordinary inventor – she conjured up the little black dress, bobbed hair, trousers for women, contemporary chic, best-selling perfumes, and the most ...
Previously published as My Mam Shirley.Behind the notorious Hudson men who dominated the Canterbury Estate for over 30 years were the girls, and my mam Shirley.The third instalment of this gritty series recounts the incredible stories of the unflinching women behind the legendary Hudson family.The Canterbury Estate in Bradford during the ’50s and ’60s was a tight-knit community reared on poverty, crime and violence, and at the top of the heap we ...
Love him or loathe him, Chris Eubank is one of life’s more eccentric personalities who has transcended the world of boxing and established himself as a media celebrity and role model to millions of fans the world over. His story is both gripping and extraordinary.He exploded into the public consciousness in November 1990 with a ferocious defeat of Nigel Benn for the WBO middleweight crown. Once crowned champion, he made 19 successful defences of ...
The story of a fascinating man who connected the great politicians, artists and thinkers at the height of British global power and influence.A famed aesthete, politician and patron of the arts, Philip Sassoon lived in a world of English elegance and oriental flair. Gathering a social set that would provide inspiration for Brideshead Revisited, Sassoon gave parties at which Winston Churchill argued with George Bernard Shaw, while Noel Coward and ...
Penelope Fitzgerald’s fascinating portrait of the tragic poet and her life at the heart of the Bloomsbury set.Thomas Hardy hailed her as ‘far and away the best living woman poet’; the formidable Charlotte Mew (1869–1928) was the writer of some of the best English poems of the twentieth century.In her private life, to all appearances, Mew was a dutiful daughter living at home with her elderly mother. But this respectable facade hid painful truths ...
This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the brilliant, prolific writer, C. S. Lewis.C. S. Lewis was a deeply complex man, capable of inspiring both great devotion and great hostility. This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the clever child from the ‘Little End Room’ of his Ulster childhood and adult life, exploring Lewis’s unwilling conversion to Christianity, the genesis of his writing, and the web of his relationships. ...
