'What My Listeners Say and Why We Should Take Note' is the premise of this enjoyable memoir from an entertaining raconteur. A keen candidate on Strictly Come Dancing, presenter of Eggheads, Points of View, Crimewatch, interviewer and brother of comedian Tim Vine, on his popular BBC Radio 2 lunchtime show, Jeremy Vine has taken over 25,000 listener calls. He has decided to take stock of the wisdom his listeners have imparted over the airwaves like the man who describes getting an infection on his genitals after touching a fish, a caller arrested for being naked and why he was annoyed about it, a futuristic robot that comes into the studio and won't even turn on, a man who cooks and eats dolphin live on air in 2015, George aged 75 describing his sex life, a caller admitting to having shot and killed several cats, an item about the murder of a village goose, possibly by a sniper, and a caller not happy about cows living outside a nightclub in Bristol. It's clearer than ever before that caller wisdom is far more valuable than most of what we hear from 'the experts'. Totally unvarnished and unspun, the ordinary person turns out to be not so ordinary after all and here are the moments of truth from the world of politics, war, Brexit - and it always helps to make people laugh. A hilarious account of Jeremy Vine's life, by way of musings on everything including love, lollipop ladies, Len Goodman and poisonous plants. 340pp, paperback, colour photos.

Fay Wray was most famous as the blonde in a diaphanous gown who captured the heart of the mighty King Kong, the 25 foot 60 tonne gorilla as he placed her, nestled in his 8 foot hand, on the ledge of the 102 story Empire State Building, putting Wray at the height of New York's skyline and cinematic immortality. She starred in more than 120 films opposite Hollywood's biggest stars including Gary Cooper (The Legion of the Condemned, The First Kiss, The Texan, One Sunday Afternoon), Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, William Powell and Charles Boyer and cowboy stars like Ronald Colman (The Unholy Garden), Ralph Richardson and Melvyn Douglas. She was directed by the masters of the age in The Wedding March, The Street of Sin, The Four Feathers and King Kong, Thunderbolt, Behind the Make-Up directed by Dorothy Arzner and Dirigible by Frank Capra among them. The book's and Fay Wray's counterpart Robert Riskin was considered one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. Academy-Award winning writer (nominated for five), producer, ten-year-long collaborator with Frank Capra on pictures such as American Madness, It Happened One Night, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon and Meet John Doe, he was hailed by many as 'among the best screenwriters in the business' - F. Scott Fitzgerald. Riskin wrote women characters who were smart, sexy and always resilient and made streetwise optimistic films with a sense of humour. The couple lived large lives finding each other after establishing their artistic selves and after each had had many romantic attachments - Wray an 11 year long difficult marriage and a fraught affair with Clifford Odets and Riskin a series of romances with among others Carole Lombard, Glenda Farrell and Loretta Young. Here are their lives, work, their fairy-tale marriage that ended so tragically, told in a dual quintessential biography of American lives, ultimately and blissfully intertwined. The book is written by their daughter, an acclaimed writer and producer. 397 desirable roughcut US pages, approximately 50 illustrations.

Ravi Shankar became a household name when the Beatles started promoting his music in 1968, but he was already a prominent figure in the American West Coast scene, with David Crosby of The Byrds pronouncing him one of the finest musicians on the planet. By 1967, when Shankar had settled in California, Indian music was linked with the psychedelic experience, though Ravi denied taking drugs himself and was horrified by a visit to Haight-Ashbury, centre of San Francisco's hippie scene. The Monterey Pop Festival was initially built round Shankar's performance, and although the Festival was ruthlessly taken over and reorganised by The Mamas and the Papas, Ravi's own performance was widely hailed as a profound religious experience. Shankar had the good fortune to be born in Benares, centre of Hindi pilgrimage. His early career was spent on tour as a dancer, including a visit to Weimar Germany as Hitler was rising to power, and he had meetings with Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. But it was his change to concentrate on the sitar that brought him world fame as he introduced audiences to the two key elements of Indian classical music, the raga or melody and the tala, the time or rhythm. Shankar first visited America in 1956, and he moved to California in time for the Summer of Love, performing at Woodstock as well as Monterey. His international fame increased as he became associated with conductors such as Zubin Mehta and Yehudi Menuhin and he was nominated for an Academy Award for the musical score of the film Gandhi. This comprehensive biography by an author who knew him personally includes not only Shankar's career but also his personal life including many love affairs. 658pp, photos in black and white and colour.

The BBC TV series Peaky Blinders was a hit from its first showing in 2013. Transforming our perception of Birmingham of a century ago with swagger, glamour and extreme violence - not to mention a visceral soundtrack - we see the charismatic yet deeply flawed Shelby family prowl the second city's dingy backstreets leaving bloody chaos in their wake as they strive to remain the Birmingham's top gang. But who were the real Peaky Blinders, and how close to the truth is the show? Leading historian Prof. Carl Chinn discovered his own PB heritage back in the 80s and is himself the son of an illegal bookmaker and was thus able to draw on a wealth of totally original photos and interviews with family and friends to write this book. First myth to dispel is that the name was not derived from the practise of fitting razor blades to the specially stiffened peaks of their flat caps to create a fearsome weapon. While some real-life PBs may have done this, the real reason was their fashion for pulling the peak of their cap to one side of their heads, thus covering (or blinding) one eye. Secondly, there was not one gang called the Peaky Blinders. It was a generic term for the city's roughs that came into use in the 1890s and was interchangeable with "slogging gangs", itself a label for any gang member with a predilection for violence. Weapons were belts, stones, knives, coshes and boots and these people were not glamorous - they were brutal and vile, and eventually put to flight by strong police action led by Chief Constable Charles Rafter. Whether you want the truth behind the TV, or have an interest in the history of Birmingham, this is the book for you. Packed with miniscule detail and the kind of insights and information that only come from close association. Many photos, 276pp paperback.

"I never wanted to be a big star. I just wanted to be the biggest at what I do! Powerful, unstoppable, heavy - when that word still meant something good!" - Meat Loaf, as told to Mick Wall. Everything in the story of Meat Loaf is big. From the place he was born (Texas); to the family he was born into (his father weighed 22 stone, his uncle weighed over 40 stone, while Meat Loaf himself weighed 17 stone before he was even in his teens); to the sound he made (a colossal collision between Richard Wagner, Phil Spector and Bruce Springsteen); and of course the records he sold - nearly 50 million in Britain and America alone. From a tumultuous childhood with an alcoholic father to the relentless abusive bullying he endured, nobody could have predicted Meat Loaf's meteoric rise to fame. But when the messianic rock opera Bat Out of Hell was released in 1977, it became one of the biggest albums of all time, selling over 45 million copies worldwide to date. Its release marked the start of a rollercoaster ride of incredible highs and seemingly career-ending lows. By the 80s, Meat Loaf was battling with drug and alcohol addiction and escalating money problems. But just when it seemed like it was all over, the astonishing success of Bat Out of Hell II and the mega-hit 'I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)' marked an extraordinary new wave of success. Now, Mick Wall will bring this extraordinary story up to date, drawing on the hours he spent with Meat Loaf, both in interviews and on tour, as well as offering up a unique insight from those who have known him best. Softback, 310pp, colour photos.

Sub-titled 'The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix', this first-rate analysis is an engaging memorial to a rock revolutionary. 'Arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music' says Jimi Hendrix's citation in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. James Marshall Hendrix remains unique as an African American who broke out of the traditional 'Black' genres of blues, R&B and soul to play hard rock to an overwhelmingly white audience, almost single left-handedly creating what became known as heavy rock. With unprecedented access to Jimi's younger brother Leon, the two most important women in his life, and numerous previously untapped sources, bestselling music biographer Philip Norman resurrects the real Jimi. His death in 1970 aged only 27 when his fame was at its height has long been rock music's greatest unsolved mystery, but finally we learn where the responsibility lay for his lonely, squalid end. Here he is pictured with The Who, record producer Chas Chandler, with the Jimi Hendrix Experience bass player Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell in matching afros and the fashion model girlfriend of Keith Richards, Linda Keith who discovered Jimi in New York. Fabulously detailed about his generosity, threads, contacts, musicians, antics and anecdotes of this Voodoo Chile. A thrilling and star spangled read, 392pp in paperback. Colour and b/w photos.

This long-neglected Edwardian classic, set in the shabby world of England's theatricals, populated by hack writers, drunken actors, pushy stage mothers and unscrupulous directors, is a tale full of drama, greed, ambition and love and one man's quest as an actor for a secure wage and fame. Christopher Tatham is trying to 'make it' in acting, surviving on third-rate bit parts and the charity of his uncle, continuing to hope for the elusive leading-man role. A chance encounter with the enchanting Peggy Harper seems to herald a change of fortune. But Tatham is soon forced to give up his flagging career for a dispiriting position as a clerk in the City as he wanders nostalgically through the West End in his lunchbreak, still filled with longing for a life denied him. In a London daubed with greasepaint and filled with hungry actors, will Peggy and Tatham manage to carve out a life for themselves and attain the success and stability they crave? Toasting engagements with ginger beer, living hand to mouth, Merrick's seedy world makes for grim reading and when Peggy turns out to a fame-hungry, vain and vacant as she first appears, Christopher's lot looks unlikely to improve. In an age in which fame and celebrity are widely courted and craved, this book is still an intriguing and potentially cautionary tale. 164 page paperback.

Journalist Walter Shapiro always assumed that the stories about his great uncle Freeman Bernstein, particularly the one where he conned Hitler's war effort out of a valuable shipload of scrap metal, were just urban myths, particularly as other family members were law-abiding types with a healthy respect for the long arm of the law. This is the story of a professional swindler with a phenomenal gift of the gab, told in racy style to match the subject's extraordinary career. The story starts in Hollywood in 1937, where Freeman went up to see Mae West with a consignment of jewels from which the streetwise star easily extracted the best pieces, leaving Freeman with the junk, though she rewarded him with several pages in her autobiography. Freeman knew he was wanted by several police departments and submitted to arrest quietly as he left Mae's apartment block. In fact the charge was defrauding Hitler, to which he responded with the immortal line, "Hitler ain't got a thing on me". The son of Polish immigrants, Freeman got on the rung of showbusiness with a vaudeville arcade, inching his way towards Hollywood by fleeing from serial bankruptcies and dud cheques. His fortunes turned when he signed on the popular artiste May Ward, whom he married to cement the contract, and in World War I they had considerable success entertaining the troops. But Freeman could never go straight, and soon he and May had perfected the Anniversary Gag in which cruise ship passengers were conned into believing they were celebrating an anniversary and were then cheated at cards. The crowning con of Freeman's career was exporting scrap-metal claiming it was valuable nickel, swindling his Nazi clients with the time-honoured method of providing a few inspection bags of the real thing. 430pp, photos. Remainder mark.

Sub-titled 'The Fall and Rise of Women in Film', this fascinating polemic is a powerful and sobering page turner, peppered with humour. It is a call to arms from Empire magazine's Helen O'Hara who explores women's roles both in front of and behind the camera since the birth of Hollywood, and how those roles are reflected within wider society. Hollywood was born just over a century ago, at a time of huge forward motion for women's rights. With no rules in place to stop them, there were many women who forged ahead in many areas of filmmaking. Yet despite the work of early pioneers like Dorothy Arzner, Mable Normand, Mary Pickford and Alice Guy-Blaché, it soon came to embody the same old sexist standards. Women found themselves fighting a system that fed on their talent, creativity and beauty, but refused to pay them the same respect as their male contemporaries ? until now. The tide has finally begun to turn and a new generation of women in front of and behind the camera are making waves in the industry and shaping some of the biggest films to hit our screens. Helen O'Hara reveals the women largely written out of Hollywood's own origin story in her encyclopaedic, illuminating and passionate book. Her themes include how women fell silent before sound, how the auteur theory twisted film, movie brats and the fake gaze, and how to end the pay gap. 354pp.

Hidden hints, motifs, references and background detail on the greatest movies, hidden within are plot clues, homages to other films and hidden details that expose on-set challenges, inside jokes and post-production cover-ups. This special book lifts the lid on the clever, the fudged and the inspired to make you look at the screen a little closer and find things tucked away or brushed over. They may be subtle touches that a director put in the background, elements of one movie featuring in another, or ironic moments that actually came from happy accidents. Discover the film that changed product placement, Superman's hidden moustache, author cameos in films of their books, and the heist movie plot hole that even the director couldn't explain. In the 1991 film Frankie & Johnny there's a scene where Al Pacino opens the door to his apartment and a look of sheer shock crosses his face. He could never have guessed the surprise (concealed from the audience) that the director had arranged to achieve this reaction. Find out what made this happen on page 97. Over 100 moments of screen history and stories of split-second decisions, in Magnolia of 1999 there are consistently references to numbers eight and two, around 20 of them in total and those familiar with the Bible will therefore get a hint about a major sequence near the end of the film. Forrest Gump of 1994, The Bourne Identity 2002 and Two Mules For Sister Sara of 1970 all contain scenes shot on the quiet such as the swapping of the burro from a brown to a smaller grey white one in the latter film. Alien 3, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fahrenheit 451, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Taxi Driver, Kill Bill Volume One, Led Zeppelin permitting School of Rock 2003 to use one of their tracks, the list of hidden gems and insider knowledge goes on. 240pp in large softback, packed with colour illus and nice colourful graphic design.