Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Once again, the legendary comedy duo unearth six vitally important subjects... and then tit about about them. From surviving on a desert island to being eaten by a cardboard crocodile, Dawn and Jennifer will entertain, inform and thoroughly tit about for your pleasure. (Batteries not included.)

Britain's most chilling crimes are brought sensationally to life in this compelling new series, using court room transcripts, police interviews, 999 calls, secret audio recordings and eye witness testimony.

Louise was like any other excited mother-to-be during her first pregnancy, but no one could have predicted what happened when she gave birth. During an emergency c-section, she had severe complications and fought for her life over a number of days, whilst her son was taken into NICU. This terrifying experience impacted on Louise's mental health in a way that completely changed her life, as she has battled to come to terms with what happened to her, whilst also becoming a mother.

From early on, we are taught that getting a certain job is the only to get ahead, that we have to do well at school, that failure is embarrassing and to be avoided. We're so busy trying to follow these rules that we never stop and ask ourselves: What's my purpose? What do I really want? Simon Squibb is on a mission to change stranger's lives for the better. Here, he shares the hard-won life lessons from his years in the business world, plus his own personal life, and empowers listeners to identify their own meaningful goals.

Living in the Belgian Congo with her husband in the 1960s, Fran’s mother became pregnant with a daughter. However, right after she gave birth in the hospital, she felt strange. Unbeknownst to anyone, another daughter was on the way, but before anybody responded, an hour had passed. Because of the delay, Fran was born with cerebral palsy. Growing up with her siblings in Africa, Fran always felt different. When everyone else was playing and having fun, she would watch and wish she could join in.

Dallas Willard spent his life making eternal living concrete for his friends. After his unexpected passing in 2013, the kaleidoscope of memories and the diversity of the lives he had touched could not be confined to one or even two memorial services but three. It is this wide breadth of impact that inspired friends, family, colleagues, students, and leaders of the church to gather their reflections on this celebrated yet humble theologian and philosopher.

When celebrated writer Joan Didion’s life was altered forever, she wrote a new chapter. In this adaptation of her iconic memoir, Didion transforms the story of the shattering loss of her husband and their daughter into a one-woman play performed by Tony Award winner Vanessa Redgrave, who originated the role on Broadway in 2007. 

[Contains Mature Themes] This much we do know: Sophie Toscan du Plantier was murdered days before Christmas in 1996, her broken body discovered at the edge of her property near the town of Schull in West Cork, Ireland. The rest remains a mystery.

Some crimes are so horrific they attract the harshest punishment possible: a sentence that means the guilty will die behind bars.

Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just 20 years, from October 1795, when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'état, he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the revolution had descended.

In Pole to Pole we join Michael Palin on the second of his epic challenges. Travelling from the North Pole to the South Pole, he experiences every extreme the globe has to offer. As he crosses 16 countries by train, truck, raft, Ski-Doo, barge, balloon and bicycle, he meets a diverse range of fascinating characters and landscapes while his own endurance is tested to the limit. With his customary aplomb, he plunges himself into the local cultures, starring in a crayfish documentary in Novgorod, attending a baby-rolling ceremony at a Cypriot wedding, and consulting an Mpulugu witch-doctor.

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an 1100-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe and built her back up again. At 22, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. After her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State - alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than an idea: vague, outlandish, and full of promise.

Pat Marry, former colleague of Adrian Donohoe and the detective inspector in charge of the investigation, and journalist Robin Schiller take us inside the notorious case, describing the gardai's unprecedented collaboration with the FBI, the NYPD and Homeland Security which finally brought Brady to justice, following the lengthiest police inquiry and murder trial in the history of the Irish state. Filled with details not previously known to the public, Murder at Lordship is the definitive account of one of the most shocking crimes of this century.

In 1986, before Michael Lewis became the best-selling author of The Big Short, Moneyball, and Flash Boys, he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to New York- and London-based bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years - a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. 

Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken footballs on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf's skyscrapers, Gary wanted something better. Something a whole lot bigger. Then he won a competition run by a bank: 'The Trading Game'. The prize: a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader in the whole city. A place where you could make more money than you'd ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public schoolboys and borderline psychopaths, yet they start to feel like family.

Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo, and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals, and generational changes that produced violent, unreliable leaders and recruits.

Janey has been a determined fighter all her life - from her tough Glasgow childhood to becoming the much-loved comedian she is now. It was the strength she needed to survive as a sweary-mouthed woman in the male-dominated comedy clubs of the 1990s. At the end of the long sell-out tour which followed she received the devastating news she had ovarian cancer. Her future hung in the balance, but even in treatment, a new tour went ahead, called Not Dead Yet. Janey now faces her fears head on and shares the tumultuous journey she's on, continuing to find humour even in her darkest moments.

As the country's top forensic pathologist, Dr Richard Shepherd has spent a lifetime uncovering the secrets of the dead. When death is sudden or unexplained, it falls to Shepherd to establish the cause. Each post-mortem is a detective story in its own right - and Shepherd has performed over 23,000 of them. Through his skill, dedication and insight, Dr Shepherd solves the puzzle to answer our most pressing question: how did this person die?

In Unruly, David Mitchell explores how early England's monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects' destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky sods who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear to us today in their portraits.

This magnificent biography of Henry VIII is set against the cultural, social and political background of his court - the most spectacular court ever seen in England - and the splendour of his many sumptuous palaces. An entertaining narrative packed with colourful description and a wealth of anecdotal evidence, but also a comprehensive analytical study of the development of both monarch and court during a crucial period in English history.