Diana. Closely Guarded Secret by Ken Wharfe

Here is the authentic voice of someone who played an important role in Diana's life, becoming a friend and confidant not only to her, but to her sons as well. It is the voice of a man who is, above all, an exceptionally perceptive observer of the extraordinary events he watched unfold around the Princess during what was perhaps the most crucial period of her life. Packed with anecdotes, his account provides the most intimate portrait of Diana to date, as well as a fitting tribute to one of the outstanding figures of our age.

The Wicked Wit of Charles Dickens

A prolific novelist and chronicler of Victorian England, the works of Charles Dickens have inspired, enthralled and entertained millions across the globe. In The Wicked Wit of Charles Dickens, aspects of the personal life of Britain's greatest writer are revealed and explored, along with the highs and lows of his professional life, covering such subjects as childhood and family, women and love, politics and wealth, marriage and divorce.

Great Football Headlines and Great Rugby Headlines

Appealing to sports fans everywhere, Football Headlines and Great Rugby Headlines provide a fascinating record of individual and team achievements from across the globe - an essential chronicle of sporting history taken from the newspapers of the day. Do you remember England's incredible 1966 World Cup campaign? Can you recall the glory days of the legendary Stanley Matthews? Or perhaps you remember when Barry John led the British Lions to victory against New Zealand in 1971? Can you recall England's triumphant Grand Slam win in 1980? Containing a wide selection of emotive headlines, detailed reports, statistics and triumphant pictorial scenes from newspapers of the time, Great Football Headlines and Great Rugby Headlines capture some of the most memorable moments of the game's success stories over the last hundred years.

The World According to Heavy Metal

What is Ozzy Osbourne�s opinion of marriage?� How does Alice Cooper feel about the education system?� Who would Axel Rose vote for?� Discover the answer to these and many other conundrums within the pages of The World According To Heavy Metal�.

Stufflebeem, Brockway and Sturt

With over 1500 entries, their meanings and associated anecdotes you can at last answer that perennial question �What�s in a name?� A good deal of intriguing information about our ancestors, actually: where they lived, or what they looked like, what they did for a living � even their morals, personal habits and the important events in their lives. Here too are the origins of such revered American names as Roosevelt, as well as surnames which, while they may have originated in Britain, Ireland or elsewhere in Europe, have become commonplace, sometimes in adapted versions, in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Out of India: A Raj Childhood

WINNER OF THE 2002 J.R. ACKERLEY PRIZE FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY �To have been a child of the Raj leaves an indelible stamp, and Michael Foss beautifully and affectionately evokes the innocence and wonder, but also the unease, only half understood, of living in a crucial period of Indian history, leading up to Partition.� Raleigh Trevelyan, author of �The Golden Oriole: A 200-year History of an English Family in India�. Born in India in 1937, Michael Foss�s childhood was spent between the cold, grey austerity of Britain under threat, and the brightly lit and teeming vitality of wartime India. Here, beautifully evoked, is a childhood spent amongst grudging and unloving English relations; a sufferance of cruelly harsh schooling, a bleak, dank landscape; and a sense of permanent cold and a savage hunger even for dreadful food. All of this was suddenly changed for the sub-continent�s jumble of conflicting sights and sounds and smells: the vital, stinking, hot, noisy, crowded streets; the calm, quiet grace of moghul architecture; the ancient Hindu kingdoms reduced to stones amid the roots of trees; the monumental Victorian buildings that echoed British power; the attitudes of the Raj; the self-conscious majesty and pomp�

Sporting Slip-Ups and Goalmouth Gaffes

Sport should be fun, even when it�s being taken deadly seriously. In fact, that�s when it�s the most fun, because it�s when the deadly serious get their comeuppance or their pride bubble is burst that we tend to laugh the most. We�ve all had that sense of �schadenfreude� when a sportsman who�s been doing so well throws it all away on the last hole, penalty shot, last ball, last furlong, or the last lap. Not all the stories in our collection feature such mishaps, but there are plenty that do. Some reveal plain stupidity, some bad luck. Some are funny, others just interesting in a quirky sort of way. �Sporting Slip-Ups and Goalmouth Gaffes� takes a light-hearted look at things that have gone wrong in the world of sport; a collection of events that might otherwise be forgotten. We have found stories in a variety of ways � trawling through books and records, surfing the Internet, talking to sporting friends, reading newspapers and magazines � and have enjoyed bringing to you some of the wackier moments of sport, such as when the autograph-signing famous golfer found himself pushed into the lake by adoring fans; when the US president�s golf ball hit a woman spectator between the eyes, shattering her glasses; when a famous racing driver pulled down an awning onto his boss�s head because he had forgotten to unhook the air line as he set off for the starting grid, and the story of the football team that ended the season with minus one point. Our collection of stories spans three centuries, featuring some celebrated tales, and some not so well known, from the nineteenth century through to the present day. We hope you will find them as entertaining and amusing as we do. (Stephen Blake and Andrew John, April 2002).

The Battle of Britain and the Blitz

�Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire last for a thousand years, men will say, �This was their finest hour.�� Winston Churchill, Speech in Parliament, 18 June 2023 �The doodlebugs were pretty frightening, but the V-2s were terrifying. And I don�t know whether we were tired by then, or what it was, but a lot of people would admit to that � that we were much more scared then than when the bombs were raining down on us during the Blitz. I think we were tired. I was only longing for the end by then.� Myrtle Solomon, A young Civil Servant, 1945

Women at War

The words and voices of the women in �Women at War� come from people whose lives, taken together, cross three centuries. There are women who, as children of the British Empire, shared the nineteenth-century planet with Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde, and women who share the new millennium with Queen Elizabeth II and Madonna. But at the centre of all these lives are the two cataclysms of the first half of the twentieth century, Europe�s two-part civil war: the Great War of 1914-18 and the Second World War of 1939-45. These were events so terrible that they shaped the century, and were still casting shadows on children born at the century�s end.

Voices From the Twentieth Century

In a breathtaking new direction in publishing, the �Voices from the Twentieth Century� series combines text based largely on eyewitness accounts lodged in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, with CDs based upon actual recordings held in the same archives. Illustrated with hundreds of contemporary photographs and illustrations, in colour and black-and-white, each narrative is drawn on the reminiscences of soldiers and civilians, men, women and children who lived through some of the most momentous years of the twentieth century, and is provided with a running �timeline� to show the actual course of history. The accompanying readings feature the voices of veterans and survivors as they describe the events, invariably doing so with that clarity of memory that is the hallmark of all the best historical writing. Moving, often funny, sometimes tragic, always engrossing, these remarkable eyewitness histories are an essential adjunct to our understanding of who we are, and why we are as we are.

Ozzy Unauthorized by Sue Crawford

This fascinating biography is that rare thing; a genuine page-turner. With 32 pages of colour photographs, including a number of rare and unusual shots, and a full discography and chronology, Ozzy is a comprehensive, mind-blowing study of the past, present and, with its specially commissioned astrological chart, even the future of a true survivor and a true star.

Kylie Confidential by Sean Smith

'Kylie Confidential' by Sean Smith is an honest, authoritative and and fun portrait of the Queen of Pop, who has transformed herself from innocent girl-next-door to the world's sexiest woman, with all the twists and turns in between. In a series of thought-provoking self contained �pen portraits� which together form a complete picture of her life in our times, �Kylie Confidential� takes the unique approach of looking at the pop icon in her many extraordinary incarnations � as pop puppet, as an original style setting talent and as one of the most desirable women on the planet. Published to coincide with her major UK and European tour, �Kylie Confidential� builds the essential portrait of a superstar which will surprise and entertain. �Kylie Confidential� looks at how her motivation has driven her to success, why she is not so innocent, with an exclusive chapter devoted to an interview with one of her former lovers, how she has become one of the great survivors of pop and, in the process, become one of the most desirable women on the planet. Kylie�s recent success has been a phenomenon. She has won two �Brits�, two �Top of the Pops� awards and a �Carling NME� award as well as many others worldwide. Her 2001 million seller �Can�t Get You Out Of My Head� topped the charts throughout Europe, Asia and Australia as well as providing Kylie with her first top ten hit in the USA for more than a decade. The album �Fever�, a UK Number One, entered the US charts at Number Three, a spectacular achievement. Her first four UK tour dates sold out within one hour. Kylie shares with Madonna the distinctions of having UK Number Ones spanning three decades. She has finally eclipsed the Material Girl in terms of worldwide popularity. �Kylie Confidential� includes a full discography, chronology and a specially commissioned birth chart. With 32 pages of stunning photographs, �Kylie Confidential� is the Number One book for every Kylie fan and for all those fascinated by a phenomenon that has spanned three decades.

The Wicked Wit of Jane Austen Compiled by Dominique Enright

The Wicked Wit of Jane Austen is an absorbing collection of her sharpest, most profound and amusing observations - on human nature, money, marriage, life and society - taken from her novels and also from her extremely entertaining letters. Easy to dip into and highly quotable, this beautifully decorated volume will delight all Austen devotees, as well as readers less familiar with her life and work.

Access All Areas: Sports SK8 - SNO - HOOPZ - BMX

Whether you're into snowboarding or hoopz, BMX or skate, Access All Areas are a new series of small handbooks, packed with up-to-the-minute details to give you the latest lowdown on the sport of your choice.

Madonna pb by Andrew Morton

In this new paperback format of his best-selling title Madonna, Andrew Morton speaks to those in her inner circle about her ambitions, lifestyle and relationships with family, friends and men. Their stories and insights give a fresh and revealing perspective on arguably the most famous woman on the planet.

Pocket Poets: Kipling - Burns - Keats - Wordsworth

Michael O'Mara Books brings to you four of the World's greatest poets in a pocket-sized format, providing readers with everything that fine poetry offers. The first four in the series are: Robert Burns 'A Red, Red Rose' and other poems, William Wordsworth 'The Daffodils' and other poems, John Keats 'Ode to a Nightingale' and other poems, Rudyard Kipling 'If_' and other poems. All small, beautifully designed volumes containing a selection of these authors most famous poems and some of their less well-known or often neglected work.

The Most Evil men and Women in History by Miranda Twiss

Channel 5 Tv-Tie In Caligula, Nero, Attila The Hun, King John, Torquemada, Prince Vlad Dracula, Francisco Pizarro, 'Bloody' Mary I, Ivan IV 'The Terrible', Elizabeth, Countess Bathory, Rasputin, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Ilse Koch, Pol Pot, Idi Amin

The Seventies: Good Times, Bad Taste

"The seventies, ah, the seventies. 'A low, dishonest decade' like Auden's thirties, or 'that discredited decade' as Tebbit once wierdly called the sixties?...It was innocent if by innocent one means I knew nothing of drugs, and my only access to thoughts of sex was from libraries and bibliographies. Today they have late night on Channel 4 and the internet. It didn't feel innocent at the time, however, it felt lurky, sly and furtive." (Stephen Fry)

 Wan2tlk?

 JK Rowling: A Biography

 Eye of the Storm

Morton takes on Madonna

Andrew Morton�s latest biography will detail the life of "Queen of Pop" Madonna, and his plans have caught the interest of the press. The internationally-best-selling biographer of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Posh and Becks is not deterred by the singer�s determination not to reveal details of her private life, and speculation is rife as to what he may write.