In 1897, an Indian yogi named Bava Lachman Dass exhibited himself at the Westminster Aquarium in London, demonstrating forty-eight yoga positions to a bemused audience. Four years earlier, Hindu philosopher Swami Vivekananda had spoken at the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, where theosophist Annie Besant rhapsodised about 'his inborn sense of worth' and the 'exquisite beauty' of his spiritual message. The Victorians had conflicted views on the religious beliefs and practice...

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A stunning biography of "pure self-interest and cruelty, tempered only slightly by the great musical achievements of Mr. Spector's golden age in the early 1960s" (The New York Times).He had a number one hit at eighteen. He was a millionaire with his own record label at twenty-two. He was, according to Tom Wolfe, “the first tycoon of teen.” Phil Spector owned pop music. From the Crystals, the Ronettes (whose lead singer, Ronnie, would become his second wife...

In 2002, the reclusive and legendary record producer Phil Spector gave his first interview in twenty-five years to Mick Brown. The day after it was published an actress named Lana Clarkson was shot dead in Spector's LA castle. This is Brown's odyssey into the strange life and times of Phil Spector. Beginning with that fateful meeting in Spector's home and going on to explore his colourful and extraordinary life and career, including the unfolding of the Clarkson case, this is one of the mo...

In January 2000, two Ambassador taxis twisted their way up the narrow road leading towards Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills of northern India - the home-in-exile of the Dalai Lama. In one taxi was a fourteen-year-old boy, the 17th Karmapa, one of the most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism.The boy's arrival in Dharamsala was the culmination of an extraordinary escape which had brought him 900 miles across the Himalayas, in conditions of high danger, from the monastery in Ti...

This is a narrative recounting a spiritual voyage taking the author around the world in a quest for the divine. A trail of chance, synchronicity, divine providence and the occasional railway and airline schedule, leads Brown from the extraordinary figure of the 19th-century occult adventuress Madame Blavatsky, via the philosopher Krishnamurti, to the genial Scottish clairvoyant who claims that the Christ of the age is alive and well and living in London. In India, he encounters the miracle...

Phil Spector, born in the Bronx in 1939, grew up an outsider despised by his peers. Yet after his family moved to California, he learned everything he could about music, formed a band, and had a number-one hit with "To Know Him Is to Love Him." He quickly became the top producer of early rock and roll, originator of such girl groups as the Ronettes, a millionaire by twenty-one, and the owner of his own record label by twenty-two. He scored hit after hit using a new technique called the "wa...

The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook.Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–...

**Uncover the madness at the heart of society in this Sunday Times bestseller.'The belly laughs come thick and fast' – The Observer'Chirpy, inquisitive, funny' – Craig Brown**What if society wasn't fundamentally rational, but was motivated by insanity? This thought sets Jon Ronson on an utterly compelling adventure into the world of madness.Along the way, Jon meets psychopaths, those whose lives have been touched by madness and those whose j...

NOW AN AWARD-WINNING MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY MARTIN SCORSESE, STARRING LEONARDO DICAPRIO, MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY AND JONAH HILL.'What separates Jordan's story from others like it, is the brutal honesty.' - Leonardo DiCaprioBy day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sunk a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hot...

“Larson is a marvelous writer...superb at creating characters with a few short strokes.”—New York Times Book ReviewErik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, the bestselling author of Devil in the White City turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power.The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germa...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2011A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 TitleOne of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 titleOne of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011It's the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder th...