Autobiographies

Booker wining novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and critic - even admirers rarely know John Berger in all his literary incarnations. This collection of essays takes a look at his career. Berger's wide-ranging essays emphasise the continuities that have underpinned more than 40 years of tireless intellectual inquiry and political engagement.

Faced with cancer and financial ruin, the Civil War's greatest general and former president, Ulysses S Grant wrote his personal memoirs to secure his family's future. In doing so, he won himself a unique place in American letters. This title deals with his life as a soldier.

Maugham spent the winter months of 1919 travelling fifteen hundred miles up the Yangtze river. Maugham keenly observes, and gently ridicules, their dogged and oblivious persistence with the life they know.

From the writer of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", "All the President's Men" and "Marathon Man", Oscar-winning screen writer William Goldman presents his memories and views of movie-making, and of acting greats such as Redford, Olivier, Newman and Hoffman.

Quite possibly the most inspirational music biography ever written - essential. MUZIK

McCullin grew up in London during the aftermath of World War II. He has spent a large part of his life photographing wars in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. In this book he writes of the deprivation of his childhood and the much greater misery and horror he has witnessed during his career.

Opening with his impoverished childhood in Algiers, Todd brings the historical context to life, shedding light on Camus' later agonising conflict between sympathy for the working class Algerians and for the French colonials with a stake in their adopted land.

The world-champion freestyle skateboarder and the man who brought the ollie - the trick that revolutionised the sport by taking it from the ground to the air - to street skating shares the history of skateboarding, as he tells the dramatic story of his life.

In the spring of 1976, the film-maker, Francis Ford Coppola, and his family left California for the Philippines, where the film "Apocalypse Now" was to be filmed. In this book Coppola's wife records the events of a period which stretched from months into years.

In this classic of American literature, Thoreau gives an account of his two years' experience of the 'simple life' in the woods, telling how he sought and found material and spiritual sustenance in the solitude of the cabin which he built for himself on the shore of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts.

During the height of the Rolling Stones'success, Bill Wyman kept a diary, recoding the churning chaos of the band's creative evolution, power plays, recording sessions, tours, romances, drug busts, and financial disarray. Stone Alone is a meticulous, shrewd and humorous look at the complex personalities of the Stones and the role they played in the startling cultural revolution of the times.

NOBODY NOTICED, YOU KNOW, WHEN THE G-STRING CAME UNDONE -- WELL, I NOTICED -- NOBODY NOTICED THE MONEY, LIKE, FLOATING AROUND. I WOKE UP AT SOME POINT AROUND DAWN, THE TWO OF THEM WERE ASLEEP, AND ALL THREE OF US WERE COVERED WITH MONEY, EVERY SQUARE INCH OF SKIN HAD A DOLLAR BILL PASTED TO IT -- THERE WAS NOTHING BUT.

Maliodoma Patrice Some was born in a Dagara Village, however he was soon to be abducted to a Jesuit school, being harshly indoctrinated into European ways of thought and worship. This title tells the story of his return to his people, his hard initiation back into those people, which lead to his desire to convey their knowledge to the world.

Acclaimed as the definitive volume on artist Franz Kline, this book provides firsthand accounts of his Bohemian life and powerful work.

In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a "crisis in God's realm," one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber "considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman...."

The remarkable and moving story of Jacques Lusseyran, a blind French resistance leader who was interned at Buchenwald.

"When The Paris Diary exploded on the scene in 1966 there had never been a book in English quite like it: Its intimate combination of personal, literary, and social insights was unprecedented. Rorem's"

Ferrari, the name itself evokes the world of speed, a world of fast cars, heroic deeds and glamour. This is the story of the man behind the name. This biography goes back to Enzo Ferrari's origins and traces his remarkable rise to prominence.

Life With Picasso is a captivating book written by Françoise Gilot. Published by the Little, Brown Book Group in 1990, this masterpiece offers a unique insight into the life and works of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century - Picasso. The book is a mesmerizing blend of biography and art history, as it not only explores Picasso's artistic genius but also his personal life. Gilot, being an artist herself and Picasso's lover for a decade, provides an intimate perspective, making the narrative deeply personal and engaging. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in art, history, or the fascinating life of Picasso. Dive into 'Life With Picasso' and experience the world of art like never before.

This title is a reissue of a shocking true story of life behind the veil.

An autobiography of Woody Guthrie, founder of modern American folk music. This book presents a cynical, earthy and tragic account of his life in an Oklahoma oil-boom town, of the Depression that followed, and of his subsequent travels in, on, and under trains, in stolen cars and on his feet, round an America going rotten from the top downwards.

When actor, playwright and comedian Seamus O'Rourke first published Standing in Gaps in 2020 it found a wide audience amongst readers in rural Ireland. With a distinct talent for seeing the absurd in the ordinary, mundane lives of people who 'had nothing better to be at' and making it hilarious, Standing in Gaps manages to turn back time and transport the reader to a place where everything moved slowly - and in the Leitrim of the '60s, '70s and '80s, that means really slowly.In this memoir about family, people and time, O'Rourke finds diamond-tipped-needles in bales of really bad hay, providing laughter and stories of mayhem for his many fans.