Secondhand Biographies

This is the dramatic story of Meihong Xu, a remarkable woman trained as an elite member of the Chinese Army, who fell in love with the visiting American professor on...

This is a biography of Napoleon III who ruled over 18 years of glittering success in France known as the Second Empire. Modern Paris was created out of its medieval...

Growing up within the narrow confines of the Mormon Church, bestselling author Martha Beck was raised in a home frequented by the Church's high elders. After Adam, her second child,...

This is the fantastic true story of Pitt the Younger's niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, who, at the turn of the eighteenth century left her homeland and travelled through Cairo, Jaffa,...

The love affair between British speed king Donald Campbell and vivacious singer Tonia Bern was one of the great romances of the twentieth century. But passion turned to tragedy with...

Ten years ago Zana Muhsen escaped from the life of slavery in the Yemen into which her father had sold her as a child bride, leaving behind her baby son,...

For Eve, Irene, Betty and Rosemary, working at the exclusive Heyworth's department store in Cambridge is a dream come true. Once the girls step inside the elegant building - surrounded...

The Lost Boy is the harrowing but ultimately uplifting true story of a boy's journey through the foster care system in search of a family to love. This is Dave...

Since she went to Belsen in 1945, to work with survivors of the camp at the age of nineteen, Helen Bamber's life has been devoted to working with people who...

Kate Adie's story is an unusual one. Raised in post-war Sunderland, where life was 'a sunny experience, full of meat-paste sandwiches and Sunday school', she has reported memorably and courageously...

She was a beautiful blond child, a quintessential Canadian teenager: she loved Saturday film matinees, giggled at pyjama parties, ran for student president, led the cheerleading squad, went steady with...

They were the most remarkable couple in London: the great sage Carlyle, with his vehement prophecies, and his witty, sardonic wife Jane. It was a strong, close, mutually admiring yet...

In spring 1956, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire - youngest of the six legendary Mitford sisters - invited the writer and war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor to visit Lismore Castle, the...

Jenny Mollen is an actress and writer living in Los Angeles. She is also a wife, married to a famous guy (which is annoying only because he gets free shit...

At the end of Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born Australian citizen. Resettling in America, they swore eternal fidelity, but also (each a survivor...

John Scott Haldane (1860-1936) was one of the greatest and most colourful of British scientists, acknowledged as the leading physiologist of the Victorian era. The most successful serial self-experimenter in...

Television presenter Anne Diamond's son Sebastian was born four weeks prematurely, and fought for his life for weeks in a special-care baby unit before being allowed home. He overcame those...

'This is the story of my journey into parenthood, from being a 24 year old man-child with no idea of what being a dad involved, to where I find myself...

'Confidence is about empowerment. It's about valuing who you are, not what you want to do or how you look. It's about finding the courage to live the life you...

'He pushed open the door, and I saw that he was pulling something out of a bag he was carrying. It was a gun - a sawn-off shotgun.'Featured on ITV's...

In the tradition of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential comes an insider's look into the cloistered world of classical music. Now a major Amazon.com TV series starring Gabriel Garcia Bernal.From her...

The tragic murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is well known. Why he was in Karachi; how he saw his role as an international journalist: why he was...

In 2004, Maggie Lane fell to her death from the cliffs at Beachy Head. While trying to come to terms with this tragic event, her husband, Keith, sought solace by...

When Jane Yeadon decided that she wanted to become a nurse, the Swinging Sixties had arrived in style. But before her training the nearest she got to anything swinging was...