From the people who brought you the bestselling Confessions of a GP. Russell is a young criminal Barrister. It’s his job to defend the people who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law – Petty thieves, career criminals, drug dealers and murderers… The scary son of a famous footballer, whose violent behaviour has got him in trouble so many times he almost knows the law better than Russell. The thief of a marital aid, who has a rather unusual defence. The 27 year old drug addict accused of stealing a push-bike, a chainsaw, a bag full of washing and a small fridge – all at the same time. And Russell’s first murder case – a young woman accused of murdering her violent boyfriend. This fascinating insight takes us behind the closed doors of the British legal world. With plenty of drama inside – and outside – of the courtroom, you’ll find out how CCTV can make or break a case, how your Facebook page could land you in jail and why on earth they wear those funny wigs!

A journey into the headspaces and workplaces of some of Britain’s most unique artists, from the co-author of the critically acclaimed Holloway. Bill Drummond. Richard Lawrence. Stanley Donwood. Jenny Saville. David Nash. Manic Street Preachers. Dame Judi Dench. Cally Callomon. Sheryl Garratt. Vaughan Oliver. Jane Bown. Steve Gullick. Stewart Lee. The Butcher of Common Sense. Robert Macfarlane. Artists. Writers. Photographers. Musicians. A comedian. An actor. A printer. An airship. The people interviewed in this book come from all corners of Britain’s cultural landscape but are united in their commitment to their craft. At the beginning of this extraordinary memoir, Dan Richards impulsively decides to build an airship in his art school bar, an act of opposition which leads him to meet and interview some of Britain’s most extraordinary artists, craftsmen and technicians in the spaces and environments in which they work. His search for what it is that compels both him and them to create becomes a profound examination of what it is to be an artist in 21st Century Britain, and an inspiring testament to the importance of making art for art’s sake.

Bestselling author and foster carer Casey Watson shares the shocking true story of Tyler, an abused eleven-year-old who, after stabbing his step-mother, had nowhere else to go. Knowing a little of Tyler’s past – his biological mother, a heroin addict, died of an overdose when he was three – Casey feels bound to do her best for him. It isn’t easy; Tyler continuously lashes out, even trying to attack Casey herself. Investigation into his earlier childhood reveals why: forced to watch his mother die he was found emaciated and traumatised two days later, then delivered to a father who didn’t want him and a step-mother who beat him. With the horrific events of his past now vividly affecting the course of his present, Casey and her husband Mike are determined to veer him away from the violence and drugs they fear he will come to depend on. Heartbreaking and profoundly moving, Nowhere to Go tells the story of a child forsaken by his family but fought for by his foster carers.

Our Vinnie can either be read as a full-length eBook or in 3 serialised eBook-only parts. This is PART 2 of 3. You can read Part 2 two weeks ahead of release of the full-length eBook and paperback. The infamous Canterbury Estate in Bradford, a hotbed of crime, drink and drugs, was a law unto itself in the ’70s. So when one of their own was wronged in any way, the community always had its own way of dealing with it. The first title in a series of gritty family sagas, Our Vinnie accounts the dramatic true story of a brother’s determination to avenge his younger sister’s rape. Josie was just 11 when her Vinnie, then 14, was taken away to a detention centre. Distraught by his absence and left alone with indifferent parents, when she escapes from one of their rows she naively enters the house of a neighbour, Melvin, who – horrifically – leads her upstairs and overpowers her. Convinced by her friend Carol, Josie tells her sister Lyndsey about the rape but, with Vinnie out of the picture, Lyndsey uses the information for her own ends. When Vinnie returns, hardened by years inside the system, his outrage on discovering the truth is severe. And with new abuses continually coming to light, a cataclysmic series of violent events begins to spiral out of control… Dramatic and shocking, Our Vinnie is an unbelievable page-turner, documenting a community forsaken by society, and one brother’s unrelenting determination to take justice into his own hands.

My Uncle Charlie can either be read as a full-length eBook or in 3 serialised eBook-only parts. This is PART 1 of 3. You can read Part 1 three weeks ahead of release of the full-length eBook and paperback. If you lived on the notorious Canterbury Estate in the ‘40s and ‘50s, then you knew there was one man you did not want to cross: Charlie Hudson. A solitary man, feared and respected by the gangsters of the time, Charlie was a boxer who never lost a fight, in or out of the ring – the most infamous of The Canterbury Warriors. My Uncle Charlie, the second title in the explosive series unravels a story of debauchery, crime and self-destruction. Charlie Hudson was a born leader. The eldest of eight brothers and four sisters and with a boxer for a father, fighting was in his blood. And as the young protégé of local Italian gangster, Mr Cappovanni, Charlie not only learned to knock every opponent out, he also learned the tools of the crime and extortion trade well; emerging into adulthood in the middle of the war years as a natural heir: running cons, illegal books and a band of prostitutes. But when Charlie met Betty, a sweet, caring girl, he was determined to be a better man for her. He’d still deal with ‘business’ but no more would he bed his working girls, and the birth of their baby girl, Elizabeth, sealed it: he knew life could not get any better. But for a man who had only ever lived in the belly of the Canterbury Estate underworld, it could definitely get worse… Gritty and engrossing, book two of the Hudson family saga delves deeper into history of the infamous Canterbury Warriors; the true story of one man’s ascendancy to power, and the tragedy that brought it all crashing down.

My Uncle Charlie can either be read as a full-length eBook or in 3 serialised eBook-only parts. This is PART 2 of 3. You can read Part 2 two weeks ahead of release of the full-length eBook and paperback.

My Mam Shirley can either be read as a full-length eBook or in 3 serialised eBook-only parts. This is PART 1 of 3. You can read Part 1 three weeks ahead of release of the full-length eBook and paperback.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE ‘Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Hughes for a long time to come’Sunday Times ‘Captures the great poet in all his wild complexity. Powerful and clarifying, richly layered and compelling’ Melvyn Bragg, Observer Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific children’s writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the centre of this book is Hughes’s lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes’s inner life, preserved by him for posterity. Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, his book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes’s poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes’s own.

This authorised biography of the poet Kathleen Raine tells the story of how she developed from a small girl, who knew at the age of eight that she wanted only to write poetry, into a world-renowned poet and literary scholar. Philippa Bernard follows Kathleen Raine’s struggle against the constrictions of her suburban childhood to her exciting days at Girton College in the twenties, where she became friends with many brilliant writers, artists and scientists, including William Empson, Julian Trevelyan, Jakob Bronowski and the film maker Humphrey Jennings, friendships which lasted all her life. After a short marriage to Hugh Sykes Davies, she eloped with the poet Charles Madge to live in Blackheath where two children were born. An affair led to a break with Charles, who was involved at the time with Inez Spender, wife of the poet Stephen, and at the outbreak of war in 1939, she ran away with her children to the Lake District to the home of Michael Roberts and his wife Janet Adam Smith. Taking a cottage near Ullswater, she found a peaceful seclusion which enabled her to write some of her finest poetry, but found it difficult to support her family. Leaving the children with her friend, the art patron Helen Sutherland, she moved to London. In a room off the Tottenham Court Road, she came to know Sonia Brownell (later to marry George Orwell) who introduced her to the artists and writers of the Fitzrovia set, Dylan Thomas, Cyril Connolly and Rex Whistler among them, and including the strange figure of Tambi – James Tambimuttu – who published her first book of poems, Stone and Flower. Kathleen had already achieved much critical acclaim and published several volumes of poetry when she met through Tambi the naturalist and explorer Gavin Maxwell. She fell disastrously in love with him, but his homosexuality, which she understood from the beginning of their relationship, proved too much of an obstacle, for she totally failed to understand that this delightful companion, whose love of all natural things matched her own, completely failed to reciprocate the warmth of feeling that overwhelmed her. The title of his book, Ring of Bright Water, centred around his beloved otters at his home in Scotland, was taken from a poem of hers. An intensive period of research on the poet William Blake led to the publication of Blake and Tradition, marking Kathleen out as a leading Blake scholar. This was followed by works on Coleridge, Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Towards the end of her long life Kathleen Raine founded the journal Temenos with the help of Prince Charles, who became a good friend. She travelled to India, was honoured with the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and made a Companion of Honour. Philippa Bernard met her as a neighbour in Chelsea where she and her husband owned an antiquarian bookshop. In this book she assesses sympathetically the work of Kathleen Raine, but does not hesitate to throw a critical light on this unusual woman of the highest intellect who loved her children deeply but deserted them to follow her instincts, who had an entirely practical attitude to the world about her, but who pursued a spiritual path, and who achieved so much in the world of literature and poetry.

This Life of Grace is a biography and a history. It tells the story of Grace Jarrold, the youngest of eight children, who lived for almost ninety years in the village of Plympton in Devon. It also tells the story of the village over the last century, beginning with the Great War of 1914-1918, school life at that time as revealed in original documents, the building of ‘homes fit for heroes’ in the 1920s, and the General Strike of 1926. It describes the dwindling of the old ‘upstairs-downstairs’ life, the approach of the Second World War and the Blitz of Plymouth. After the tranquil period of fifteen years that followed the War, things changed at great speed. The influence of farming declined, leading to the closure of Plympton Market in 2002. The village grew to ten times its size at the time of Grace’s birth and it was absorbed into the City of Plymouth. All the events are recorded as they affected local people. Grace is at the heart of the story, much of it told in her words, related remarkably to the author in frank conversations as she relived her life when it was drawing to its close, during almost three years in a hospital bed. The life of her husband, Major William John Symons, of the Indian Army, is told by the same author in Stranger on the Shore, published in 2009. In a pre-publication review, Peter Smith of Crane Books, writes, ‘I liked This Life of Grace even more than Stranger, which I had found engrossing and very moving. This Life of Grace is written with such warmth and deep affection and understanding, bringing the characters vividly to life. Grace was a person of dignity and humility, an unusual combination, to which I felt a sense of eloquence, wit and humour should be added. She was very much a Grace.’

A new book and companion to the Steven Spielberg film tracing how Abraham Lincoln came to view slavery . . . and came to end it. Steven Spielberg focused his movie Lincoln on the sixteenth president tumultuous final months in office, when he pursued a course of action to end the Civil War, reunite the country, and abolish slavery. Invited by the filmmakers to write a special Lincoln book as a companion to the film, Harold Holzer, the distinguished historian and a consultant on the movie, now gives us a fast-paced, exciting new book on Lincoln life and times, his evolving beliefs about slavery, and how he maneuvered to end it. The story starts on January 31, 1865 less than three months before Lincoln assassination as the president anxiously awaits word on whether Congress will finally vote to pass the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Although the Emancipation Proclamation two years earlier had authorized the army to liberate slaves in Confederate territory, only a Constitutional amendment passed by Congress and ratified by three-fourths of the states would end slavery legally everywhere in the country. Drawing from letters, speeches, memoirs, and documents by Lincoln and others, Holzer goes on to cover Lincoln boyhood, his moves from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois, his work as a lawyer and congressman, his unsuccessful candidacies for the U.S. Senate and his victory in two presidential elections, his arduous duties in the Civil War as commander in chief, his actions as president, and his relationships with his family, political rivals, and associates. Holzer provides a fresh view of America in those turbulent times, as well as fascinating insights into the challenges Lincoln faced as he weighed his personal beliefs against his presidential duties in relation to the slavery issue. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment would become the crowning achievement of Abraham Lincoln life and the undisputed testament to his political genius. By viewing his life through this prism, Holzer makes an important passage in American history come alive for readers of all ages. The book also includes thirty historical photographs, a chronology, a historical cast of characters, texts of selected Lincoln writings, a bibliography, and notes.

Mom, m gay. With three little words, gay children can change their parents' lives forever. Yet at the same times it a chance for those parents to realize nothing, really, has changed at all; same kid, same life, same bond of enduring love. Twenty years ago, during a walk on a Mississippi beach, Ellen DeGeneres spoke those simple, powerful words to her mother. That emotional moment eventually brought mother and daughter closer than ever, but not without a struggle. Coming from a republican family with conservative values, Betty needed time and education to understand her daughter homosexuality -- but her ultimate acceptance would set the stage for a far more public coming out, one that would change history. In Love, Ellen, Betty DeGeneres tells her story; the complicated path to acceptance and the deepening of her friendship with her daughter; the media scrutiny of their family life; the painful and often inspiring stories she heard on the road as the first non-gay spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaigns National Coming Out Project. With a mother love, clear minded common sense, and hard won wisdom, Betty DeGeneres offers up her own very personal memoir to help parents understand their gay children, and to help sons and daughters who have been rejected by their families feel less alone.

The definitive history of the first 30 years of heavy metal, containing over 100 interviews with members of Black Sabbath, Metallica, Judas Priest, Twisted Sister, Slipknot, Kiss, Megadeth, Public Enemy, Napalm Death, and more. More than 30 years after Black Sabbath released the first complete heavy metal album, its founder, Ozzy Osbourne, is the star of The Osbournes, TV's favourite new reality show. Contrary to popular belief, headbangers and the music they love are more alive than ever. Yet there has never been a comprehensive book on the history of heavy metal - until now. Featuring interviews with members of the biggest bands in the genre, Sound of the Beast gives an overview of the past 30-plus years of heavy metal, delving into the personalities of those who created it. Everything is here, from the bootlegging beginnings of fans like Lars Ulrich (future founder of Metallica) to the sold-out stadiums and personal excesses of the biggest groups. From heavy metal's roots in the work of breakthrough groups such as Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin to MTV hair metal, courtroom controversies, black metal murderers and Ozzfest, Sound of the Beast offers the final word on this elusive, extreme, and far-reaching form of music.

The first practical explanation of how creativity works, this results-oriented bestseller trains listeners to move beyond a "vertical" mode of thought to tap the potential of lateral thinking.

"I've been mythicized, Mick-icized, eulogized and fooligized, I've been Cole-Portered and farmer's-daughtered, I've been Led Zepped and 12-stepped. I'm a rhyming fool and so cool that me, Fritz the Cat, and Mohair Sam are the baddest cats that am. I have so many outrageous stories, too many, and I'm gonna tell 'em all. All the unexpurgated, brain-jangling tales of debauchery, sex & drugs, transcendence & chemical dependence you will ever want to hear." The son of a classical pianist straight out of the Bronx of old Archie comics, Steven Tyler was born to be a rock star. Weaned on Cole Porter, Nat King Cole, Mick and his beloved Janis Joplin Tyler began tearing up the streets and the stage as a teenager before finally meeting his "mutant twin" and legendary partner Joe Perry. In this addictively readable memoir, told in the playful, poetic voice that is uniquely his own, Tyler unabashedly recounts the meteoric rise, fall, and rise of Aerosmith over the last three decades and riffs on the music that gives it all meaning. Tyler tells what it's like to be a living legend and the frontman of one of the world's most revered and infamous bands the debauchery, the money, the notoriety, the fights, the motels and hotels, the elevators, limos, buses and jets, the rehab. He reveals the spiritual side that "gets lost behind the stereotype of the Sex Guy, the Drug Guy, the Demon of Screamin', the Terror of the Tropicana." And he talks about his epic romantic life and his relationship with his four children. As dazzling, bold, and out-on-the-edge as the man himself, Does the Noise in My Head Bother Youis an all-access backstage pass into this extraordinary showman's life.

The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a grueling debacle that has striking lessons for the twenty-first century. In The Great Gamble , Gregory Feifer examines the conflict from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground. In gripping detail, he vividly depicts the invasion of a volatile country that no power has ever successfully conquered. A riveting account as seen through the eyes of the men who fought in the war, The Great Gamble tells an unforgettable story full of drama, action, and political intrigue whose relevance in our own time is greater than ever.

After being dumped by his longtime girlfriend, twenty-eight-year-old Justin Halpern found himself living at home with his seventy-three-year-old dad. Sam Halpern, who is "like Socrates, but angrier, and with worse hair," has never minced words, and when Justin moved back home, he began to record all the ridiculous things his dad said to him: "That woman was sexy. . . . Out of your leagueSon, let women figure out why they won't screw you. Don't do it for them." "Do people your age know how to comb their hairIt looks like two squirrels crawled on their heads and started fucking." "The worst thing you can be is a liar. . . . Okay, fine, yes, the worst thing you can be is a Nazi, but then number two is liar. Nazi one, liar two." More than a million people now follow Mr. Halpern's philosophical musings on Twitter, and in this book, his son weaves a brilliantly funny, touching coming-of-age memoir around the best of his quotes. An all-American story that unfolds on the Little League field, in Denny's, during excruciating family road trips, and, most frequently, in the Halperns' kitchen over bowls of Grape-Nuts, Sh*t My Dad Says is a chaotic, hilarious, true portrait of a father-son relationship from a major new comic voice.

From being chased along a beach by a pack of wolves in Mombasa to being told to get lost by film star Jack Palance, Bernie Howard’s mates loved hearing his stories about his time in the Navy so much that he decided to put them all in a book. Rum, Bum and Baccy is a collection of short stories about Bernie’s life as a sailor in the Royal and Merchant navies in the 1960s and 1970s, beginning with his training at HMS Ganges in Ipswich as a 15-year-old in 1962. “Nobody in my family or anyone I knew had been in the Navy, but for some reason I just always wanted to go to sea,” says Bernie, who ran the Cavendish Stores on Cavendish Road in Highams Park after he left the navy, from 1977 to 1983. “I wanted to travel, to see different parts of the world. It was the adventure of it, I suppose.” As a schoolboy in Swaffham in Norfolk, Bernie and his classmates would be visited by prospective employers from the likes of the fishing fleet and the Merchant Navy, but when someone from the Royal Navy came, he was sold. Bernie stayed in the Royal Navy until 1971, when he joined the Merchant Navy, working for Shell, and sailing on some of the biggest super tankers in the world. “The comradeship was great in the Royal Navy,” remembers Bernie, 67, who now lives in Peterborough, “but you lived in such tight conditions, there’d be 36 of us living in a very small room. In the Merchant Navy, you got your own cabin, you had your own toilet and shower, there were gymnasiums and television rooms on the ship – luxury compared to the Royal Navy! And the food was fantastic as well, some of the best food I’ve ever had.

Tracing the life of the author’s father, this passionate, vivid memoir follows him through his childhood in the west of England, his successful 25-year career in the Indian Army prior to the country’s independence in 1947, and his final years in Devonshire, where he raised a family while the symptoms of Huntington’s disease gradually set in. Born of a family of impoverished Cornish fishermen, he and his six sisters cared for their dying mother after losing their father at the start of the First World War, before Huntington’s reared itself in their lives and led to the early death of three of the siblings. An absorbing, tense story of an emerging family crisis, this is an inspiring narrative showing that, through courage and faith in the face of great adversity, peace can be found. William Symons was born in Newlyn in 1878. Following family tradition he became a fisherman and a member of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. In 1914, following some early action at sea in the First World War, he died at the age of 36 yrs, leaving a widow and seven children, a boy and six girls. Unknown to him, and to his family, he left another legacy. In his body he carried a faulty gene, which, if inherited, could lead to Huntington’s chorea, a disease that normally becomes apparent in middle age. William died before symptoms appeared but the disease, known at the time as St Vitus Dance, was to claim the lives of a number of his descendants. This book chronicles the life of his eldest child, and only son, William John, who was 12 years old at the time of his father’s death. There was a small naval pension and William earned what pennies he could in his spare time until he left school the following year aged 13 years and went to work, initially for Dick Bath, the coal merchant. Somehow the family managed to stay together even after the death of his mother, Florence Louisa, from tuberculosis in 1921. They attended St. Peter’s Church, where the vicar, Mr Phelps, knew the family well and gave them his support. In 1919 William (always known as ‘Jack’ in the family) signed on as a soldier in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and thus started a lifetime career in the Army and, from 1922, a long period of service in India. Mr Phelps helped him to weigh everything up and arrive at the decision to make this move. And so the story unfolds’. Eventually, at the age of 70 years, chorea would claim his life, but it was a life that saw a lot of happiness. Not least the birth of his two sons. The elder of these, John Symons, is the writer of this book.

It would be impossible for most of us to spend a day without coming into direct or indirect contact with dozens of people family, friends, people in the street, at the office, on television, in our fantasies and fears. Our relationships with others are the most changeable, infuriating, pleasurable and mystifying elements in our lives. Personality types, based on the ancient system of the Enneagram, will help you to enjoy more satisfying and fulfilling relationships in all areas of your life by introducing you to the nine basic personality types inherent in human nature. This knowledge will help you better understand how others think and why they behave as they do, as well as increasing your awareness of your own individual personality. Written by the leading world authority on the Enneagram, it offers a framework for understanding ourselves and those around us, as well as a wealth of practical insights for anyone interested in psychology, counselling, teaching, social work, journalism and personal management.

Your project went off without a hitch--but somebody else got the credit...You averted a crisis brilliantly--but no one noticed...You came to the meeting with a sensational idea--but it was ignored until someone else said the same thing... HOW CAN YOU GET CREDIT & GET AHEAD?In her extraordinary international bestseller, You Just Don't Understand, Deborah Tannen transformed forever the way we look at intimate relationships between women and men. Now she turns her keen ear and observant eye toward the workplace--where the ways in which men and women communicate can determine who gets heard, who gets ahead, and what gets done. An instant classic, Talking From 9 to 5 brilliantly explains women's and men's conversational rituals--and the language barriers we unintentionally erect in the business world. It is a unique and invaluable guide to recognizing the verbal power games and miscommunications that cause good work to be underappreciated or go unnoticed--an essential tool for promoting more positive and productive professional relationships among men and women.