Secondhand Biographies

This new biography of Peggy Guggenheim charts the life of the infamous, multi-talented art collector and personality. Great-granddaughter of Swiss immigrant Simon Guggenheim, and daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who went...

Joe Queenan's acerbic riffs on movies, sports, books, politics, and many of the least forgivable phenomena of pop culture have made him one of the most popular humorists and commentators...

'One of the most moving books of the new year' STYLIST'Gorgeous and unsettling' NEW YORK TIMES'Brilliant and devastating...tender and lacerating' PANDORA SYKES'One of the literary world's most promising new voices'...

Fashion model, UN ambassador and courageous spirit, Waris Dirie was born into a family of tribal desert nomads in Somalia. She told her story - enduring female circumcision at five...

Tom Pocock presents a complete and completely believable Nelson. . It is unlikely that another could have handled Nelson with the confidence and fluency, the combination of detachment and intimacy,...

Rochester has the reputation as the archetypal 17th-century rake and with good reason. When Charles II returned to England in 1660, Rochester was at Wadham College, Oxford. Charles' restoration inspired...

Always a contradictory figure, Gloria Steinem has been both hailed and vilified as the "acceptable" face of feminism. Not until her political engagement found active voice through the "New York"...

'Intensely readable, poetic, truthful, wise and wonderful.' STEPHEN FRY'An extraordinary book.' SUNDAY TIMESStruggling to comprehend the shocking death of his teenage daughter, Ben Goldsmith finds solace in nature by immersing...

I mumble 'I need to order some sperm'. The receptionist puts me through to a technician to see if what I want is available. 'Number?' says the man. I give...

Collette Wolfe was on holidays in Lanzarote with her husband Anthony when they got the call that all parents most dread. Their beloved daughter Leanne had died, having taken her...

'The noises were fuzzy in the darkness. Like hearing a domestic dispute through an apartment wall. As a cop, it was a scenario I'd experienced many times as I'd approached...

In April 2009, a modest middle-aged woman from a village in Scotland was catapulted to global fame when the YouTube video of her audition for "Britain's Got Talent" touched the...

Shirin-Gol was just a young girl when her village was levelled by the Russians' bombs in 1979. After the men in her family joined the resistance, she fled with the...

From her father, Danielle Trussoni learned the importance of rock and roll, how to avoid the cops and never to shy away from a fight. Growing up, she was fascinated...

At the record-breaking age of 28 Piers Morgan was made editor of the News of the World, the UK's biggest-selling Sunday newspaper. The decade that followed was one of the...

Jenna Miscavige Hill was born into the Church of Scientology. The niece of its current director, David Miscavige, she grew up at the center of this highly controversial organization, strictly...

For ten hair-raising years, Andrew Graham-Yooll was the news editor of the Buenos Aires Herald. All around him friends and acquaintances were "disappearing". Although the slightest mistake might have caused...

In the sequel to his highly acclaimed first memoir Stillways Steve Bisley lands smack dab in the middle of Sydney. It's 1966. High-waisted bell bottom pants, paisley body shirts, velvet...

A raw, rough, poetic, funny, intensely moving and quite, quite beautiful memoir about a boy from the bush, growing up in Australian in the sixties. From one of Australia's favourite...

With great humour and vitality, Robert Roberts evokes his Edwardian childhood in the vivid portrait of a vanished community. Breathing the smoke from the factory chimneys, the children of Salford...

Richard Madeley is fascinated by the speed of change in family life and how being a father has changed since the time of his father and grandfather. InFathers & Sons,...