Biography: arts & entertainment
Showing 1–16 of 25 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 -
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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Don’t look back, you’ll trip over
£25.00Don’t look back, you’ll trip over
I’m always asked questions – by fans, by other actors and friends, by my grandchildren. They want to know how I’ve lasted so long, how I handle fame, why I chose to do some of my films, which films and actors I like best and so forth. They also want to know what makes me tick, what makes me get up in the morning in my 90s, and whether I’ll ever retire. (The answer to that one is ‘No!) Over a long life, I’ve learnt a lot and had the opportunity to reflect. I’ve seen a new generation grow up, among them my own grandchildren, facing the world with all its challenges and problems. I hope they’ll find ‘Don’t Look Back, You’ll Trip Over’ helps them to be optimistic – and shows that anyone can blow the bloody doors off.
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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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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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Ian Fleming
£14.99Ian Fleming
Here is a fresh portrait of the man behind James Bond, and his enduring impact, by an award-winning biographer with unprecedented access to the Fleming family papers. Ian Fleming’s greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote.Ian’s childhood with his gifted brother Peter and his extraordinary mother set the pattern for his ambition to be ‘the complete man’, and he would strive for the means to achieve this ‘completeness’ all his life.
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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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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.
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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.
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Not your China doll
£25.00Not your China doll
Set against the glittering backdrop of Los Angeles in the gin-soaked Jazz Age and the rise of Hollywood, this debut book celebrates Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, to bring an unsung heroine to light and reclaim her place in cinema history.
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See what you’re missing
£20.00See what you’re missing
Will Gompertz takes us into the minds of artists – from contemporary stars to old masters, the well-known to the lesser-so, and from around the world – to show us how to look and experience the world with their heightened awareness.
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Studios of their own
£19.99Studios of their own
Studios of Their Own travels around the world, examining the unique spaces in which famous artists created their most notable works.Â
£19.99