Vivacious, confident and striking, young Australian Sheila Chisholm met her first husband, Lord Loughborough, in Egypt during the First World War. Arriving in London as a young married woman, she quickly conquered English society, and would spend the next half a century inside the palaces, mansions and clubs of the elite. Her clandestine affair with young Bertie, the future George VI, caused ruptures at Buckingham Palace, with King George offering his son the title Duke of York in exchange...

From the bestselling author of Sheila comes the story of a bewitching Australian socialite who fascinated the world.Enid Lindeman stood almost six feet tall, with silver hair and flashing turquoise eyes. The girl from Strathfield in Sydney stopped traffic in Manhattan, silenced gamblers in Monte Carlo and dared walk a pet cheetah on a diamond collar through Hyde Park in London.In early twentieth-century society, when women were expected to be demure and obedient, the grandd...

WINNER OF THE TIMES 2017 BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR PRIZESHORTLISTED FOR THE 2016 BOARDMAN TASKER PRIZE FOR MOUNTAIN LITERATURE'One of the two best Alpinists of his time - Mallory was the other.' The TimesIn the spring of 1901 a teenager stood on top of a hill, gazed out in wonderment at the Australian landscape and decided he wanted to be a mountaineer. Two decades later, the same man stood in a blizzar...

A Matilda's story of football, motherhood and breaking down barriers.**'Katrina's book is a powerful testament to grit, endurance, and agility. It shows how perseverance, focus, and strong values lead to true success. A must-read for anyone seeking strength in themselves and those they love.' - Cathy Freeman OAM'This is a heartwarming book full to the brim with love of family, of friends, of football. Yet, we discover in its pages just how much courage it t...

Discover New Methods for Dealing with High-Dimensional DataA sparse statistical model has only a small number of nonzero parameters or weights; therefore, it is much easier to estimate and interpret than a dense model. Statistical Learning with Sparsity: The Lasso and Generalizations presents methods that exploit sparsity to help recover the underl

The Australian actress who became one of London's most famous suffragists.Discover the most inspiring woman you've never heard of ...In 1909, a young Australian actress made headlines around the world when she took to the sky over London in an airship emblazoned with the slogan 'Votes for Women' and dropped leaflets over the city. Muriel Matters was dubbed 'that daring Australian girl', and the American media declared it to be the world's first aerial protest.Just m...

The marvellously strange but true story of the family behind the famous Darrell Lea confectionery company.In the early 1930s, the Australian family confectionery company Darrell Lea was a sensation, its shops stacked with delicious chocolates, marshmallows, nougat and much more in line with the company's motto to 'Stack 'em high, watch 'em fly'.It was at this time that Montague Lea met the vivacious teenage 'ticket writer' Valerie Everitt. Monty fell hard f...

The tumultuous life of internationally renowned opera singer, and one of the first global celebrities, Dame Nellie Melba.Nellie Melba is remembered as a squarish, late middle-aged woman dressed in furs and large hats, an imperious Dame whose voice ruled the world for three decades and inspired a peach and raspberry dessert. But to succeed she had to battle social expectations and misogyny that would have preferred she stay a housewife in outback Queensland rather than parade hersel...

George Ingle Finch, mountaineer, soldier, scientist, rebellious spirit, boy from the bush, was in his day one of the most famous men in the world. In 1922 he stood at the highest point on Everest, a feat not bettered for 30 years. He invented the predecessor to the puffer jacket and pioneered the use of oxygen in climbing. A World War I hero whose skills also helped save London from burning to the ground during the Blitz of World War II, he was a renowned scientist who was personally chose...

Justin Langer scored more centuries than Ian Chappell, Doug Walters or Bill Lawry and had a better average than Mark Taylor, David Boon or Mark Waugh yet lived almost every moment of his glittering Test career as if it was his last.In this intimate and at times poignant account, Langer looks back on the mateship, change room antics and onfield triumphs which made up his 105-Test innings as a member of one of the game's greatest teams. Peer behind the scenes to relive the night they...

In the stifling Australian heat of October 1993, a campsite the size of a small town was spontaneously created at a lonely desert roadhouse by the side of the Stuart Highway, which links Darwin with Alice Springs. The 1200 men and women who swagged on the unforgiving ground beside their horses, cars, trucks and even helicopters had come to this isolated place Dunmarra to help solve a mystery and save a life.A local son had disappeared without a trace. No-one was certain if he had b...

'In this highly readable biography of Nellie Melba...Robert Wainwright tells the story of the girl with the incredible voice who, by sheer force of her personality and power of her decibels, took the operatic world by storm and managed to escape from her violent husband' Ysenda Maxtone Graham, DAILY MAILNellie Melba is remembered as a squarish, late middle-aged woman dressed in furs and large hats, an imperious Dame whose voice ruled the world for three d...