Biography: arts & entertainment
Showing 1–16 of 26 results
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Andy Warhol: A Graphic Biography
£14.99Andy Warhol: A Graphic Biography
In Andy Warhol: A Graphic Biography, discover the iconic artist’s story and how he changed art forever. A unique depiction of Warhol’s truly incredible life.
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Barry Cryer
£9.99Barry Cryer
Revealing the story of the man behind the jokes, this book is an ode to both Barry’s incredible life and to the lessons he so generously imparted on the art of comedy during his 60-year career. Stretching from the music halls of the 50s, via working alongside everyone from Morecambe and Wise to John Cleese and David Frost, and into more recent times as a stalwart of Radio 4’s long-running ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’, this book is a hugely entertaining insight into the life of a true comedy legend. Bob, Barry’s son, also shares a range of exclusive material unique to the Cryer family – including family photos, memorabilia, oral recordings, interviews with friends and colleagues (among them Sandi Toksvig, Rob Brydon and Judi Dench) – as well as Bob’s own personal reflections on living and working with a comedy icon.
£9.99 -
Beyond Ophelia
£30.00Beyond Ophelia
Better known as ‘Lizzie Siddal’, the model who posed for John Everett Millais’s painting Ophelia, Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti is now finally recognised as a Pre-Raphaelite artist in her own right, working alongside her male colleagues on equal terms. Elizabeth’s designs were truly original, the creation of her own imagination. They embodied the essence of Pre-Raphaelitism that her husband Gabriel & other members of the circle were striving to achieve. The male members of the group copied the ideas from Elizabeth’s small sketches to create their own masterpieces which have since become the epitome of Pre-Raphaelite art. The exclusion of women from the narrative has had a major impact in creating the perception of the Pre-Raphaelites as a male artistic movement; in ‘Beyond Ophelia’, Glenda Youde shows Elizabeth not as a pathetic drowning figure, but as the initiator of a directional change in Pre-Raphaelite art.
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Catland
£22.00Catland
‘Part-biography, part-social history, Catland is its own breed of historical investigation’ Amanda Foreman
Some called it a craze. To others it was a cult. Join prize-winning historian Kathryn Hughes to discover how Britain fell in love with cats and ushered in a new era.
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David Shepherd
£20.00David Shepherd
The talents and achievements of incredible wildlife artist, David Shepherd, including his foibles, eccentricities and larger-than-life character, are beautifully captured in this biography written by his son-in-law, JC Jeremy Hobson.
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Erotic vagrancy
£12.99Erotic vagrancy
Thirteen years in the writing, ‘Erotic Vagrancy’ doesn’t only surpass every other biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton yet to appear, this rich, vital and passionately articulated book, which is as extravagant and wayward as its two subjects, is also about celebrity, creativity, being flawed, being brilliant, sexuality, the intermingling of a low and a highbrow existence, pride, insecurity, attraction and repulsion, and devilry. We see Taylor the child actress exchanging dogs and horses for husbands. We see Burton emerging from the mists and brimstone of Wales to be the greatest theatrical animal of his generation. The pair come together in Rome during the making of Cleopatra, which gives Lewis the opportunity for a major farcical set-piece. We are shown the splendid vulgarity of the Sixties, where the narrative of Taylor and Burton becomes a Pop Art story.
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Forever in the sunshine
£10.99Forever in the sunshine
Morecambe and Wise – the most famous and best-loved British comedy double-act of all time. In this book, Eric Morecambe’s son Gary sheds new light on the comic geniuses who became the nation’s best friends. Gary reveals what it was like behind the scenes, with touching and hilarious stories of life in the Morecambe and Wise family homes, along with memories from Eric’s wife Joan and his daughter (and Ernie’s goddaughter) Gail, who has never written about her father before.
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Halfway to Hollywood
£14.99Halfway to Hollywood
This second volume of Michael Palin’s diaries covers the 1980s, a decade in which the ties that bound the Pythons loosened as they forged their separate careers. After a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, they made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful ‘Monty Python’s Meaning of Life’.
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I haven’t been entirely honest with you
£25.00I haven’t been entirely honest with you
Hello to you, I am with news. Basically, I have had an unexpectedly difficult decade – there have been surprising joys but also deep revelations and challenging lows. I shall be honest about those, because what I discovered in the difficult times were my, what I call, treasures. Treasures – practical tools, values, ways, answers researched from some great scientists, neuroscientists, therapists, sociologists (all the ‘ists’) out there – that have genuinely led to a sense of freedom, joy, peace and physical recovery I never would have thought possible.
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Ian Fleming
£14.99Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming’s greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture, but Fleming’s life was more mysterious than anything he wrote. Ian’s childhood with his gifted brother and extraordinary mother established his ambition to be ‘the complete man’. Only a writer for his last twelve years, his dramatic personal experiences and career in Naval Intelligence put him at the heart of critical moments in world history, while also providing rich inspiration for his fiction.
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Jane Austen at home
£26.00Jane Austen at home
This telling of the story of Jane’s life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the way in which home is used in her novels to mean both a place of pleasure and a prison.
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Janet Leach
£25.00Janet Leach
Janet Leach’s childhood in Texas through the Roaring Twenties and the Depression imbued her with resilience and numerous practical skills, initially acquired on her grandparents’ self-sufficient farmstead. At nineteen she took a Greyhound bus to cosmopolitan New York and soon found work as a sculptor’s assistant. During the war she worked on Staten Island, welding the hulls of US-Navy destroyers. After discovering pottery, she met Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, before spending two years potting in Japan, where her love of pottery was sealed.
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Lady Caroline Lamb
£9.99Lady Caroline Lamb
From the outset, Caroline Lamb had a rebellious nature. From childhood she grew increasingly troublesome, experimenting with sedatives like laudanum, and she had a special governess to control her. As the niece of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, she was already well connected, and her courtly skills resulted in her marriage to the Hon. William Lamb (later Lord Melbourne) at the age of 19. For a few years they enjoyed a happy marriage, despite Lamb’s siblings and mother-in-law detesting her and referring to her as ‘the little beast’. In 1812 Caroline embarked on a well-publicised affair with the poet Lord Byron – he was 24, she 26. Her phrase ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ became his lasting epitaph. When he broke things off, Caroline made increasingly public attempts to reunite. Her obsession came to define much of her later life, as well as influencing her own writing, and Byron’s.
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Literature for the people
£12.99Literature for the people
A fascinating, evocative history of Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, two poor but idealistic young men who created a Victorian publishing empire.
£12.99 -
Masquerade
£14.99Masquerade
The voice, the dressing-gown, the cigarette in its holder, remain unmistakable. There is rarely a week when one of ‘Private Lives’, ‘Hay Fever’, and ‘Blithe Spirit’ is not in production somewhere in the world. Phrases from Noël Coward’s songs – ‘Mad About The Boy’, ‘Mad Dogs and Englishman’ – are forever lodged in the public consciousness. He was at one point the most highly paid author in the world. Yet some of his most striking and daring writing remains unfamiliar. As T.S. Eliot said, in 1954, ‘there are things you can learn from Noël Coward that you won’t learn from Shakespeare’. In Oliver Soden’s story-packed book, the master finally gets his due.
£14.99 -
Mozart in Italy
£12.99Mozart in Italy
An expertly researched and vividly written account of Mozart’s formative trips to Italy, from the author of Mozart’s Women and Handel in London.
£12.99