Showing titles in Memoirs, Diaries & Correspondence

Michael Palin's bestselling diaries of the 1980s. After a live performance at the Hollywood Bowl, The Pythons made their last performance together in 1983 in the hugely successful MONTY PYTHON'S MEANING OF LIFE. Writing and acting in films and television then took over much of Michael's life...

TRAVELLING TO WORK is the third volume of Michael Palin's widely acclaimed diaries. After the Python years and a decade of filming, writing and acting, Palin's career takes an unexpected direction into travel, which will shape his working life for the next 25 years. Yet, as the diaries reveal...

Alan Bennett is one of the country's most celebrated and best-loved authors. This unmissable collection of diaries and memoirs brings together for the first time Telling Tales, Diaries: 1980-1990, the autobiographical section of Untold Stories, which covers the period 1997-2004, and Keeping On Keeping On: The Diaries 2005-2014. With wit, wisdom, sharp social commentary and perceptive impressions, Alan Bennett's memoirs and diaries are a joy to discover, and a delight to hear again.

This third and final volume of the unexpurgated diaries of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon begins as the Second World War is turning in the Allies' favour. It ends with a prematurely aged Chips descending into poor health but still socially active and able to turn a pointed phrase about the political events that swirl around him and the great and the good with whom he mingles.

This second volume of the best-selling diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon takes us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the prime minister Chips so admired was credited with having averted a general European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement, and on to the tribulations of the early years of the Second World War. It closes with a moment of hope, as Channon, in recording the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, reflects: 'The war must be more than half over.'

Finally given the heave-ho by Pandora, Adrian Mole finds himself in the situation of living with the love-of-his-life as she goes about shacking up with other men. Worse, as he slides down the employment ladder, from deskbound civil servant in Oxford to part-time washer-upper in Soho, he finds that critical reception for his epic novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, is not quite as he might have hoped.

Over the next ten years, we watch through Michael's eyes as the world reels from the successive shocks of September 11, the 7/7 bombings and the global financial crash. With the warmth and gentle empathy that have endeared millions of fans to him over the decades, Michael documents the day-to-day detail of living in a world buffeted by such powerful winds of change.

Step aboard Boater, a mesmerising voyage along the tranquil waterways of England, written by former UK Canal Laureate, Jo Bell. ' It's not a lifestyle. It's a life ' For over twenty years, Jo Bell, archaeologist and poet, has travelled the waterways of England (and sometimes Wales) meeting...

THE LAUGH-OUT-LOUD, IRREVERENT BOOK FROM THE AWARD-WINNING COMEDIAN FORMERLY KNOWN AS HUGO BOSS. As seen on Joe Lycett's Got Your Back and Last One Laughing. Also seen on Taskmaster, Great British Sewing Bee, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and The Harry Hill Show. Soon to be seen on Celebrity...

A sparkling collection of the major works of the ever-adored Oscar Wilde, with incredible casts including Judi Dench, Martin Clunes, Michael Sheen, Miriam Margolyes, Ian McDiarmid, Joely Richardson, Penelope Keith, Martin Jarvis, Diana Rigg, Simon Russell Beale, Sheila Hancock, Ian McKellen and Stephen Fry.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS POPULAR NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2014 A laugh-out-loud true story of the trials and tribulations of being a live-in nanny in 1980s London and inspired a major TV series starring Helena Bonham Carter. ***** In 1982 Nina Stibbe, a 20-year-old from Leicester...

Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices.

Born in Chicago in 1897, 'Chips' Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958. His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite. Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody. 

Tina Brown kept delicious daily diaries throughout her eight spectacular years as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Today they provide an incendiary portrait of the flash and dash and power brokering of the Excessive Eighties in New York and Hollywood. 'A fabulous odyssey ... I read it in a mad...

As Assistant Private Secretary to four monarchs, 'Tommy' Lascelles had a ringside seat from which to observe the workings of the royal household and Downing Street during the first half of the 20th century. These fascinating diaries begin with Edward VIII's abdication and end with George VI's death and his daughter Elizabeth's Coronation. In between we see George VI at work and play, a portrait more intimate than any other previously published.  

History cannot be relived, but thanks to a tradition that spans millennia, we can revisit it in the letters of the people who influenced or witnessed the moments it changed forever. In Written In History, acclaimed historian Simon Sebag Montefiore selects some of the greatest letters ever written from ancient times to the 20th century: declarations of war, petitions for peace, diplomatic entanglements, steamy love letters and beyond.

Forty-five episodes from Series 1-8 of the Sony Award-winning BBC Radio comedy show, hosted by Rufus Hound. In this hilarious and revealing show, host Rufus Hound invites his guests to revisit their formative years by dusting off their intimate teenage diaries and reading them out in public for...

After her mother, Brenda, passed away and her father sold the family home, broadcaster and writer Emma Kennedy found herself floundering, unable to make peace with the complex, charismatic woman who had been her mum. And then they found the letters. This heartbreakingly funny book about the impact of discovering lost letters is a celebration of correspondence; those lost acts of penned love, the vivid snapshots in time scattered back through a life.

For everyone who loves watching Amanda Owen and her family on Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive & The Kids and Our Yorkshire Farm, or enjoys reading her bestselling books, comes this delightful and uplifting collection of her monthly Dalesman columns. In Tales From the Farm by the Yorkshire...

Kenneth Rose was one of the most astute observers of the establishment for over 70 years. The wry and amusing journals of the royal biographer and historian made objective observation a sculpted craft. His impeccable social placement located him within the beating heart of the national elite for decades. He was capable of writing substantial history, such as his priceless material on the abdication crisis from conversations with both the Duke of Windsor and the Queen Mother.

Una ricercatrice, ossessionata dalla paura di impazzire, intraprende un’indagine per rompere il silenzio che avvolge la storia della sua bisnonna Elisabeth, detta Betsy — una donna dichiarata schizofrenica e sottoposta a lobotomia negli anni ’50, una delle prime in Francia. Di lei nessuno parla: i figli hanno sempre taciuto, i nipoti ignorano quasi tutto di lei. Attraverso lettere, archivi ospedalieri e interviste ai discendenti, Adèle Yon ricompone l’esistenza di una donna brillante e ribelle, troppo viva per il suo tempo.

Er ist der literarische Magier des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts: Nobelpreisträger und gefeiertes Genie, Großbürger und Familienvater, mit seiner Frau Katia in jahrzehntelanger Ehe verbunden und zugleich so unglücklich, wie man nur sein kann. Er liebt und darf nicht lieben, die Vorstellungen seiner Zeit stehen ihm im Weg. Was für ein Antrieb zu großer Literatur – und was für ein leidvolles Leben.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Inside Vogue, written and read by Alexandra Shulman. Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Shulman kept a diary of British Vogue's Centenary year. And what a year. She reveals the emotional and logistical minefield of producing the 100th...

The Bookshop in Wigtown is a bookworm's idyll - with thousands of books across nearly a mile of shelves, a real log fire, and Captain, the bookshop cat. You'd think after twenty years, owner Shaun Bythell would be used to the customers by now. Don't get him wrong - there are some good ones among...

'ABSOLUTE HEAVEN' INDIA KNIGHT 'WARM AND UPLIFTING' AJ PEARCE 'THE PERFECT ANTIDOTE TO THE WORLD RIGHT NOW' JENNIE GODFREY Many of us dream of owning a bookshop, but for Katie Clapham it happened by accident, when she moved back to the seaside town she grew up in and went into business with her...

Winner of the 2018 Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album. When Carrie Fisher recently discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved—plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a...

Everyone knows who you find in bookshops: people who want to buy books. But, as Shaun Bythell reveals, that's really only half the story. Join Shaun as he introduces us to seven bookshop characters, from the Person Who Doesn't Know What They Want (But Thinks It Might Have a Blue Cover) to the harried Parents Secretly After Free Childcare and all the way over to the erotica section, where we'll meet The Person Who Is Up to No Good.

Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown - Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea. A book-lover's paradise? Well, almost... In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky.

Brought to you by Penguin. In 1940 Steinbeck sailed in a sardine boat with his great friend the marine biologist, Ed Ricketts, to collect marine invertebrates from the beaches of the Gulf of California. The expedition was described by the two men in SEA OF CORTEZ, published in 1941. The...

Performed by Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Liz Phair, Oliver Ray, Tom Robbins, Frank Lisciandro, Anne Morrison Chewning, Sefton Graham, and Ian Morrison. Includes Jim Morrison’s final poetry recording, now available for the first time, at the Village Recorder in West Los Angeles on his 27th...