Books published by Revel Barker

A hard-headed but often hilarious guide to the pleasures and pitfalls of travel by one of Britain's favourite writers.

A biography of Wales's greatest painter told in conversation with his friends.

Readers of this relaxed, pleasantly meandering memoir will have a pretty entertaining time themselves. It doesn't aspire to pomp or circumstance. Indeed, it often seems an idiosyncratic little stew of family reminiscences and moments of history. You follow the family Schwarz from Vienna to Manchester, as Hitler spreads his menace. You watch the young Walter get a place at Oxford (too young) and then learn about life on national service in Malaysia. He's a reporter on the Oxford Mail, a hack on the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary, a freelance in Jerusalem, a failed publisher in Lagos: the shade of William Boot is never too far away. But you also know he's much cleverer than he lets on, because he quotes at length from many of the tales he wrote from far away. In prison or out, during the Biafra breakaway, he was brave and shrewd and eloquent, the best man in the thick of it. He should have had a prize for that.

How To Become A Millionaire! As a schoolboy Johnny Inkster was told that money didn't grow on trees. But he knew that apples did, so he rented an orchard. Then he learnt that craftsmen who worked with wood - which also grew on trees - produced waste material that they would pay him to take away. And other people were prepared to buy it from him. Johnny Inkster was on the way to making his first million... Journalist Jodi Cudlipp followed Johnny's intriguing trail from the orchard on the outskirts of London, via adventures in Docklands, at the Old Bailey, and the south coast of England, all the way to a luxury yacht on the French Riviera.

Inspired as a 15-year-old by a classic book, The Street of Adventure, Harry Procter had an ambition: to become a top reporter in Fleet Street. When he was 22 he had achieved that goal and was on the Daily Mail, scooping the nation with human interest stories and scooping the world covering a meeting between President Truman and King George VI on board a US battleship where he ingeniously contrived to be the only newspaperman present. Switching to the Sunday Pictorial he delivered more front page exclusives. From The Girl Who Married Her Brother to the death-cell revelations of notorious murderers, the world waited every weekend for his latest scoop and when anybody had a story the word was 'Tell Harry Procter about it.' Readers wrote to him in their thousands. Week after week he wheedled his way into the intimacy of the victims of sensational stories: the London call-girl syndicate, crooked financiers, phoney doctors, drug dealers, confidence tricksters, dishonest officials and crooked politicians... The paper's circulation rocketed. Harry Procter was giving millions of readers what they craved for - ever more salacious and sordid detail - until he became ashamed of supplying it. Disillusion had set in.

From the broadsides of the sixteenth century to the broadsheets of the 19th century, taking in the Civil War newsbooks, the gutter press of the 18th century, the rise of the Sunday papers full of sex, sport and sensationalism, and the birth of the popular press, Bob Clarke describes the journey of the English newspaper from Grub Street to Fleet Street. It vividly portrays the way the news was reported, to provide a colourful, if often gruesome, picture of the social history of the past. Originally published in hardback at £60, the book is now revised and republished in paperback at a more accessible price. The Times Literary Supplement described it as 'A highly entertaining and informative introduction to English newspaper history.' And the Guardian said: 'This buoyant account... is larded with choice examples of 18th century journalism... there are stories of crimes and body-snatching... bilious political vituperation, macabrely precise accounts of some of the daily tragedies of life... it has a relish for its subject.'