Självbiografier

The biography of The Specials' Neville Staple.

On 2 May, 1536, in an act unprecedented in English history, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Did Cromwell, for reasons of his own, construct a case against Anne and her faction, and then present compelling evidence before the King?

His long love affair with music, art, the theatre, literature and sport illuminate this memoir as do relationships with remarkable women, among them the poet Ingrid Jonker, who have shared and shaped his life, and encounters with people like Ariel Dorfman, Anna Netrebko, Nadine Gordimer, Gunter Grass, Beyers Naude, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela.

A revealing examination of the making of America's most famous anti-Semite

In this magnificent vision of Venice, Peter Ackroyd turns his unparalleled skill at evoking place from London and the River Thames, to Italy and the city of myth, mystery and beauty.

This updated biography features a new preface by the author as well as an expanded notes section

While climbing in the Peruvian Andes, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates came face to face with disaster. Simpson fell and broke his leg and then was lost. As his partner Yates was starting to break camp four days later, Simpson crawled in through a blizzard. How both men overcame those four harrowing days is an epic chronicle of fear and friendship.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Funny, forthright and sharp as a knife . I would expect nothing less from the fabulously honest Paul O'Grady.' *****'He writes as he speaks, entirely from the heart .

A true story of a young woman who defeated her demons and conquered her cravings to become a weight-loss superhero to inspire us all.

Our fascination with Bob Dylan never ends. Timed for his 75th birthday in May 2016, and with a new Foreword, WHO IS THAT MAN? comes to paperback

Here is one of the great biographies of Alexander, in its original form, brought fully up to date with findings of modern research and criticism.

Saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer Ornette Coleman has earned enduring praise as an American jazz icon. Stephans weaves together analysis of Coleman's recordings and exploration of the free jazz movement with interviews of those who knew Coleman best to tell an inspiring story of artistic genius and resilience.

The Eagles wrote the soundtrack to the Seventies and Eighties - and even now their albums top the charts. But backstage, there were no peaceful, easy feelings...

Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) was an exceptional woman in an age rich in strong personalities. A feminist, intrepid traveller and sportswoman, she wrote nine volumes of autobiography, recounting a life packed with incident. Her writings, abridged by Ronald Crichton, and including a catalogue of her music, are full of brilliant portraits.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. This edition is based on the Third Edition of 1857, revised by Gaskell and collated with the manuscript and the previous two editions, as well as with Charlotte Bronte's letters, offering fuller information about the process of composition than any previous edition.

Packed with anecdotes and memories, My Word is My Bond is as frank, funny and disarmingly charming as the legend himself.

Or a tragic - and very public - death in the mountains?Years before, as communism was collapsing and the Balkans slid into chaos, Humar was unceremoniously conscripted into a dirty war that he despised, where he observed brutal and inhumane atrocities that disgusted him.

But most of all it is an uplifting story of an ordinary man who lit up America like a beacon in the night, was written off as a shambolic wreck and then - against all the odds - climbed back to become an even bigger star than he was first time around.

The first major biography of 18th century France's most mysterious woman, the daughter of Marie Antoinette, who vanished from public view during the tumultuous last days of the ancien regime

From his dazzling conducting debut in 1943 until his death in 1990, Leonard Bernstein's star blazed brilliantly. In this fresh and revealing biography of Bernstein's political life, Barry Seldes examines Bernstein's career against the backdrop of cold war America-blacklisting by the State Department in 1950, voluntary exile from the New York Philharmonic in 1951 for fear that he might be blacklisted, signing a humiliating affidavit to regain his passport-and the factors that by the mid-1950s allowed his triumphant return to the New York Philharmonic. Seldes for the first time links Bernstein's great concert-hall and musical-theatrical achievements and his real and perceived artistic setbacks to his involvement with progressive political causes. Making extensive use of previously untapped FBI files as well as overlooked materials in the Library of Congress's Bernstein archive, Seldes illuminates the ways in which Bernstein's career intersected with the twentieth century's most momentous events. This broadly accessible and impressively documented account of the celebrity-maestro's life deepens our understanding of an entire era as it reveals important and often ignored intersections of American culture and political power.

From the time he was three or four years old, John Elder Robison realised that he was different from other people. He was unable to make eye contact or connect with other children, and by the time he was a teenager his odd habits - an inclination to blurt out non-sequiturs, obsessively dismantle radios or dig five-foot holes (and stick his younger brother in them) - had earned him the label 'social deviant'. It didn't help that his mother conversed with light fixtures and his father spent evenings pickling himself in sherry.Look Me in the Eye is his story of growing up with Asperger's syndrome a form of autism at a time when the diagnosis simply didn't exist. Along the way it also tells the story of two brothers born eight years apart yet devoted to each other: the author and his younger brother Chris, who would grow up to become bestselling author Augusten Burroughs. This book is a rare fusion of inspiration, dark comedy and insight into the workings of the human mind. For someone who has struggled all his life to connect with other people, Robison proves to be an extraordinary storyteller.

Words like boldness, adventure and risk are surely coined especially for Andy Kirkpatrick. As one of the world's accomplished mountaineers and big-wall climbers, he goes vertically where other climbers fear to tread. This autobiography provides his thirteen-day ascent of Reticent Wall on El Capitan in California - the hardest big-wall climb.

Henri Matisse was one of the most important and beloved artists of the twentieth century, rivalled only by his friend - and competitor - Pablo Picasso. This title reveals the origins of Matisse's astonishing talent and provides an insight into his life and work.

An account of the painter Claude Monet, one of the key founders of the Impressionist movement and arguably the most influential painter of modern times. It tells the story of his life, the historical context of society at the time, and his relationships with Renoir, Sisley and Manet.

The Romans regarded Cleopatra as 'fatale monstrum', a tyrant to be crushed. Pascal said the shape of her nose changed the history of the world. Shakespeare and Tiepolo (and Elizabeth Taylor) portrayed her as an icon of tragic beauty. But who was Cleopatra, really? This biography discusses about Cleopatra.

This is the story of John Sussex, a highly successful derivatives trader whose career has spanned the radical technological, social and political changes that took place in the City of London during the Eighties and Nineties.

Denys Finch Hatton was an aristocrat of leonine nonchalance. He was a soldier in the East Africa Campaign, a white hunter, a farmer, a pilot, the epitome of the brave pioneer. This book tells the story of his love affair, and talks about the life of one of the key figures in the mythic story of the British settlers in East Africa.