'Gripping and all too timely' James Hawes'A brilliant mix of detailed research and vivid storytelling' Julia Boyd'History at its very best – and a fabulous translation, too' Graham HurleyIn March 1930, after the collapse of the coalition that had ruled Germany since 1928, President Hindenburg asked Heinrich Bruning, bespectacled and scholarly leader of the Catholic Centre Party, to form a government. Some three year...

From the moment of his birth in 1937, author Peter Walther was absorbed into the culture of the Catholic Church. Later, as an eleven-year-old boy, he believed he was called by God to be a missionary priest. Seventeen years later, he found himselfan ordained Catholic priestjourneying to a mission station in Sabah, North Borneo. A Calling in Question tells Walthers story of his struggle to free himself from the tangled web of a Catholic upbringing.This memoir presents a collage of se...

Rupert Everett's first memoir - Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins - was an international bestseller and an instant classic on publication in 2006. Reviewers compared him to Evelyn Waugh, David Niven, Noel Coward and Lord Byron. But Rupert Everett is - of course - one of a kind.Mischievous, touching and nothing less than brilliant, this new memoir is filled with stories, from childhood to the present. Astonishing encounters; tragedy and comedy; vivid portraits of friends a...

A great collection of questions, answers and facts! Why can't elephants jump? Why don't sheep shrink when they get wet? Divided into sections about animals, people, the law and funny names and places, each part of this hardback book explores little known and often amusing information - Certain to entertain!

Have you ever wondered where terms like ‘end of your tether’, ‘gets my goat’ or ‘letting ones hair down’ come from? Or why we call some people ‘geezers’, ‘sugar daddies’ or ‘lounge lizards’? Or where the words ‘eavesdropping’, ‘nickname’ and ‘D-Day’ come from? They are just a few of the many words and phrases that language expert Max Cryer examines in this fact-filled and fun new book. Max explains where these curious expressions come from, what they mean and how they are used. Along the w...

'A compelling memoir. Absorbing and graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, [Hanging with the Elephant] is clever and brilliantly pieced together. Harding writes like an angel' Sunday TimesFrom the No.1 bestselling author of Staring at Lakes, Talking to S**trangers and On Tuesdays I'm A Buddhist**'In public or on stage, it's different. I'm fine. I have no bother talking to three hundred peopl...

From bestselling author William McInnes, a book about the languid, unending holidays of summer; it's about going away and staying at home, about sunburn, seagulls, family and friends.Remember those long, languid holidays when the only decisions to be made were what to pack in the Esky and who should get the front seat on the drive to the beach?Let William McInnes reignite your nostalgia for holidays past, and give you a taste of the boundless opportunities ...

In the Washington Post Book World, Sven Birkerts called this exuberant novel "a complex and gripping work of invention and confession . . . I understood again how the prose of a true writer can bring us to a world beyond." The book spans almost thirty years in the life of a fictional "Paul Theroux," who moves through young bachelorhood in Africa, in and out of marriage, affairs, and employment, and between continents. It's a wry, worldly, erotic, and deeply moving account of one man's firs...

Each year on St Patrick's Day eighty million people around the world celebrate their Irish ancestry. Millions more don leprechaun hats and down pints of Guinness in the annual high-fiving of Ireland and the Irish.Charlie Connelly was one of them. He thought he had a good idea of what Ireland was all about. He was, after all, practically Irish. He had a bodhran and everything. Then, when he was least expecting it, he went to live there.Our Man in Hibernia follows Charlie's adv...

Pete McCarthy established one cardinal rule of travel in hisbestselling debut, McCarthy's Bar: "Never pass a bar withyour name on it." In this equally wry and insightful follow-up,his characteristic good humor, curiosity, and thirst for adventuretake him on a fantastic jaunt around the world in search of hisIrish roots -- from Morocco, where he tracks down the unlikelychief of the McCarthy clan, to New York, and finally to remote Mc-Carthy, Alaska. The Road to McCa...

From First Communions to CIÉ Mystery Tours – the heartwarming story of award-winning journalist Gene Kerrigan's childhood in Dublin in the '50s In his highly addictive style, Gene Kerrigan effortlessly reconstructs the Ireland of the 1950s and early '60s in which he grew up. An adult world of absolute moral certainties, casual cruelties and mass emigration; for children an age of innocence, but an innocence hemmed in by fear and guilt. In this brilliant and humorous memoir, Kerrigan tells ...

Michael Ondaatje’s selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.