Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Biographies & Memoirs

British television has hosted some celebrated double acts over the years. But none of these acclaimed duos come within a million miles of challenging the cherished place in television's golden age occupied by Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, whose partnership lasted from 1941 to Morecambe's death in 1984. Icons of British television in the 1970s, Eric and Ernie were, in the words of one commentator, 'the most illustrious, and the best-loved, double-act that Britain has ever produced'.

The Mountains Are High is a beautifully written, candid memoir about how reevaluating what is really important and taking a leap of faith to reach it can genuinely transform your life. As one of the ‘new migrants' tells Alec when he arrives: it is easy to change your environment, far more difficult to change your mind.

Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte. Some People Need Killing is Evangelista's meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines' drug war.

Opening with "A Second Home", in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, Giving Up the Ghost is a wry, shocking, and beautifully written memoir of childhood, ghosts (real and metaphorical), illness, and family. Finally, at the memoir's conclusion, Mantel explains how a series of medical misunderstandings and neglect left her childless, and how the ghosts of the unborn have come to haunt her life as a writer.

On New Year's Eve 2019, Rafael Behr had what is clinically known as a massive bloody heart attack. In part, it was the result of his compulsive relationship with politics, working as a journalist in Westminster, on the front line of bitter information wars. When he was discharged from hospital, he asked himself how he would ever re-engage with politics—how would he care enough to write about it—without the stress? Something had to change. In 2021, Rafael published an essay about that experience and some of the lessons he had learned.

The definitive insider narrative and the most fully characterised account yet of the chaos, scandal and destruction of Trump's first term, from two Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalists. Drawing on nearly three years of reporting, hundreds of hours of interviews and more than 200 sources, including some of the most senior members of the administration, friends and firsthand witnesses who have never spoken before, Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig take us inside some of the most controversial moments of Trump's presidency.

Kris was living a totally normal life as a 23-year-old: travelling the world, falling in love, making plans. However, when she found a lump in her boob and was told that it was not only cancer, but also incurable, life took on a completely new meaning. She was diagnosed at an age when life wasn’t something to be grateful for, but a goddamn right. Little did Kris know it was cancer that would lead her to a life she had never considered: a happy one.

Glamorised, mythologised, and demonised - the women of the 1920s were determined to reinvent the way they lived. Flappers focuses on six women who between them exemplified the range and daring of that generation’s spirit. Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka were far from typical flappers. Talented, reckless, and wilful, with personalities that transcended their class and background, they rewrote their destinies in remarkable, entertaining and tragic ways.

Slide "Further Under the Duvet", get yourself comfortable, and let Marian take you places you've never been before. Places like the Irish air-guitar championships, a shopping trip to Bloomingdales with a difference, and Cannes with a chronic case of Villa-itis. Along the way you'll encounter knicker-politics, fake tans, sticky-out ears and passionate love affairs both with make-up and Toblerones.

Suzanne Joinson grew up in a 1980s council estate in Crewe, where her parents were followers of The Divine Light Mission cult. This clash of class and counterculture destroyed her family, leaving a legacy of turmoil and poverty. Years later, she attempts to reclaim what she's lost and piece together the impact of a childhood infused with esoteric yoga practices, psychedelic encounters, and meditation techniques. She acquires replicas of beloved objects that had to be destroyed in regular purges in the hope of restoring family ties.

Groomed. Gaslighted. Ghosted. They thought they'd found their soulmate. They had no idea he was spying on them. These five motivated, independent women each thought they'd met their perfect partner - someone who shared their values, ambitions and goals. But after a while, in some cases years later, the men started to behave strangely. They disappeared for weeks at a time, saying they needed to go away to clear their heads. Small details about their lives didn't quite fit. Then they vanished, leaving a note saying that the relationship was over.

In Everything Is Going to be K.O. Kaiya Stone writes about her own experiences of living with specific learning difficulties: from struggling at school to being diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia while at university, to performing her own one-woman stand up show inspired by her journey. Always funny and unfailingly honest, Kaiya outlines the frustrations of having SPLDS but also the ways in which they have fuelled her creativity.

No other woman has had so many online romances–from Keanu Reeves to Brad Pitt to Prince William–and Becky Holmes is a favorite among peacekeeping soldiers and oil rig workers who desperately need iTunes vouchers. By winding up scammers and investigating the truth behind their profiles, Becky shines a revealing, revolting and hilarious light on a very shady corner of the internet.

In 1985, Peter Everett landed the job as Superintendent of Southwark Mortuary. In just six years he’d gone from lowly assistant to running the UK’s busiest murder morgue. He couldn’t believe his luck. What he didn’t know was that Southwark, operating in near-Victorian conditions, was a hotbed of corruption. Attendants stole from the dead, funeral homes paid bribes, and there was a lively trade in stolen body parts and recycled coffins. Set in the fascinating pre-DNA and psychological profiling years of 1985-87, this memoir tells a gripping and gruesome tale.

Simon Thomas (former Blue Peter presenter and, for so long, the face of Sky Sports Football) reveals how grief nearly destroyed him in his heart-breaking memoir. When Simon lost the woman he had loved for 16 years, the future he'd imagined for their happy family disappeared for ever. Gemma died from acute myeloid leukaemia, just three days after being diagnosed. In Love, Interrupted, Simon is brutally honest about his journey through grief, and opens up about how close he came to ending his own life.

In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceived his own crazy, beautiful plan: he would fly a Gipsy Moth aeroplane from England to Everest, crash land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit - all utterly alone.

As the youngest ever British Formula 1 driver, Lando Norris is trailblazing his way through the world of motor racing. After signing as a junior driver for McLaren in 2017, he has since asserted himself as the team's brightest talent and an aspiring world champion. Born to British and Belgian parents and raised in the idylls of south-west of England, Lando's childhood reflects how even the calmest of upbringings can create an adrenaline junkie.

For nearly two centuries of creativity, luxury, excess, scandal, war and corruption, the dark and sparkling world of the Riviera was a temptation for everybody who was anybody. Often frivolous, it was also a potent cultural matrix that inspired the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Coco Chanel, Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, James Baldwin, Catherine Mansfield, Sartre and Stravinsky. In Once Upon a Time World, Jonathan Miles presents the remarkable story of the small strip of French coast that lured the world to its shores.

The scandalous image of the Empress Messalina as a ruthless and sexually insatiable schemer, derived from the work of Roman historians such as Tacitus and Suetonius, has taken deep root in the Western imagination. The stories they told about her included nightly visits to a brothel and a twenty-four-hour sex competition with a prostitute. Tales like these have defined the empress's legacy, but her real story is much more complex. In her new life of Messalina, the classicist Honor Cargill-Martin reappraises one of the most slandered and underestimated female figures of ancient history.

Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This audiobook is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successive Oxfordshire gardens of her own and the smaller urban garden in the North London home she lives in today. It's also a wise, engaging exploration of gardens in literature, from Paradise Lost to Alice in Wonderland.