What's My Motivation?
As a boy, Michael Simkins always wanted to be someone. While his friends were out getting laid and stoned, he was tucked up at home dreaming of his name in lights, of holding an audience rapt, of perhaps becoming a TV heart-throb, or having someone,
| Billie Piper: Growing Pains
This is an astonishingly candid insight into the world of Billie Piper. Famous since the age of 15 -- first as the face of Smash Hits, then as a pop singer with three No.1 hits in less than three years -- Billie Piper has won over the critics and th
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Fall Out
In Baggage", the fearless and compelling memoir of a truly bizarre childhood, Janet Street-Porter amused and shocked as she revealedher inauspicious beginnings.Now, in Fall Out", we start where Baggage "left off. Young, attractive and brutally determ
| The Centre of the Bed
The story of Joan Bakewell's life and times spans the Blitz in Manchester, Cambridge during the glittering era of Michael Frayn, Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller et al, London at its most exciting in the swinging sixties and the world of the media and the
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Me: Moir
I was eight pounds when I was born, healthy and of good cheer, yet the midwife suggested that it might be a good idea for Mum to feed me on Complan, the weight-gaining food supplement. This she did, and I ballooned to a frightening ten stone by the a
| Michael Palin Diaries 1969-1979
Michael Palin has kept a diary since newly married in the late 1960s, when he was beginning to make a name for himself as a TV scriptwriter (for the Two Ronnies, David Frost etc). Monty Python was just around the corner. This first volume of his d
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A Young Man's Passage
This is Julian Clary's story, in his own words - the tale of an awkward schoolboy who became a huge worldwide success on stage and screen. After a sheltered suburban upbringing, Julian was sent to St Benedict's, where beatings from 'holy' men gave hi
| Days from a Different World
'I have already touched on my childhood in "Strange Places, Questionable People". But the further through life I get the more I want to revisit it. I want to look at the whole of my childhood, the England I grew up in and my family.' This is not a me
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The Blunkett Tapes
Born into a working-class family in Sheffield, David Blunkett ascended to one of the highest political positions in the country. But his remarkable rise was anything but smooth. The Blunkett Tapes is an intimate diary of his past nine years at the ce
| Gerrard
Steven Gerrard is a hero to millions, not only as the inspirational captain of Liverpool FC, but as a key member of the England team. Here, for the first time, he tells the story of his lifelong obsession with football, in an honest and revealing boo
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Angry White Pyjamas
Adrift in Tokyo, teaching giggling Japanese highschool girls how to pronounce Tennyson correctly, Robert Twigger came to a revelation about himself: he'd never been fit. In a bid to escape the cockroach infestation and sweaty squalor of a cramped apa
| Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy is one of the sacred figures in English writing, a great poet and a novelist with a world reputation. His life was also extraordinary: from the poverty of rural Dorset he went on to become the Grand Old Man of English life and letters, h
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North Face of Soho
After "Unreliable Memoirs", "Falling Towards England" and "May Week Was in June" comes the next instalment in the ongoing saga that is Clive James's life. His fourth - and eagerly awaited - volume of autobiography promises to be every bit as eventful
| Tuesdays with Morrie
Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Sc
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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all started with his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across t
| The Sound of Laughter
Peter Kay's unerring gift for observing the absurdities and eccentricities of family life has earned himself a widespread, everyman appeal. These vivid observations coupled with a kind of nostalgia that never fails to grab his audience's shared under
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The Last Mughal
At 4 p.m. on a hazy November afternoon in Rangoon, 1862, a shrouded corpse was escorted by a small group of British soldiers to an anonymous grave in a prison enclosure. As the British Commissioner in charge insisted, 'No vestige should remain to dis
| Love and Louis XIV
The book centres around the Sun King and his relationship with numerous and fascinating women. Naturally dividing into five parts, it concentrates on the King's mother, Anne of Austria, to whom he was devoted; his first important mistress, Louise de
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The Blue-eyed Salaryman
Niall Murtagh spent years as a world traveller - hitchhiking to Istanbul, bussing to Kathmandu and crossing the Atlantic in a home-built yacht. In 1986 he closed the door on his adventurous life and settled down in Japan, eventually joining Mitsubish
| Keeping Mum
Mum and Dad - Squibs and Bert - were a complete mystery to Brian Thompson as he grew up in Cambridge and London during the 1940s. His mother danced with the Yanks all night and slept under a fake fur coat all day, and when his father bothered to come
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