Winner of the Sports Book of the Year 2018 this is the most definitive biography of Muhammad Ali that has ever been published, based on more than 500 interviews with those who knew him best and with many dramatic new discoveries about his life and career. Chapter headings include Cassius Marcellus Clay, The Loudest Child, Phantom Punch, Exile, Martyr, The Five Million Dollar Match, Ali v. Frazier and Getting Old. When the frail, trembling figure of Muhammad Ali lit the Olympic flame in Atlanta in 1996, three billion people were once again gripped by the story of the world's most famous sporting icon. The man who had once been reviled for his refusal to fight for his country and for his fast-talking denunciation of his opponents was now almost universally adored, the true cost of his astonishing boxing career clear to see. Jonathan Eig's ground-breaking biography takes us not only inside the ring for some of the most famous bouts in boxing history, but also to find out about Ali's personal life, finances, faith and the moments when the first signs of his physical decline began to show. Ali was a symbol of freedom and courage, a hero to many, but this is also a very personal story of a warrior who vanquished every opponent, but was finally brought down by his own stubborn refusal to quit. A richly researched, sympathetic and unsparing portrait of a controversial figure, the familiar is glanced from a new perspective in Eig's fluent prose. 24 pages of black and white photos at the end, 623pp in softback.

Known as Mahatma Gandhi, this popular and influential book covers the period from his birth in 1869 to the year 1921, describing his childhood, schooldays, early marriage, journeys abroad, legal studies and practise. One of the most inspiring figures of our time, Gandhi recounts the story of his life and how he developed his concept of Satyagraha or active non-violent resistance which propelled the Indian struggle for independence and countless other non-violent struggles of the 20th century. A prominent figure in the freedom struggle in India from British rule, he is also known as 'The Father of the Nation' in India. Thrown in prison he remained there for several years due to other political offenses allegedly committed by him. As British rule ended, Gandhi was saddened by India's partition and tried his best to bring peace among the Sikhs and Muslims. On 30th January 1948, Gandhi was shot dead by a Hindu nationalist for allegedly being highly concerned about the nation's Muslim population. This heavyweight softback has a new foreword by noted peace expert and teacher Sissela Bok. 528pp in facsimile reprint of the 1957 edition, an American imported paperback. Tiny remainder mark.

A moving memoir following the Glass siblings throughout the course of the 20th century exploring assimilation, identity and home, the book is the story and secrets of a 20th century Jewish family. After her grandmother died, Hadley Freeman travelled to her apartment to try and make sense of a woman she'd never really known. Sala Glass was a European expat in America, defiantly clinging to her French influences, famously reserved, fashionable to the end, yet to Hadley much of her life remained a mystery. Sala's experience of surviving one of the most tumultuous periods in modern history was never spoken about. Hadley found a shoebox filled with her grandmother's treasured belongings and started a decade-long quest to find out their haunting significance and dig deep into the extraordinary lives of Sala and her three brothers. The search takes Hadley from Picasso's archives in Paris to a secret room in a farmhouse in Auvergne to Long Island and to Auschwitz. Hadley brings to life Alex's past as a fashion couturier and friend of Dior and Chagall. Trusting and brave Jacques, a fierce patriot for his adopted country and the brilliant Henri who hid in occupied France - each of them made extraordinary bids for survival during WWII. Alongside her great-uncles' extraordinary acts of courage in Vichy France, Hadley discovers her grandmother's equally heroic but more private form of female self-sacrifice. At the same time the book is an acute examination of the roots, tropes and persistence of anti-Semitism. A brave and thrilling almost detective story. 448pp, illus. Family tree.

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.

The bombshell book that everyone was talking about by the radio genius and maestro of Mastermind, John Humphrys has been a journalist with the BBC for a record-breaking 50 years. He has reported from all over the world and presented front line news programmes on both radio and TV, including serving as presenter of Radio 4's Today programme since 1987. He pulls no punches and now, freed from the restrictions of being a BBC journalist, he reflects on the controversies he has reported on and been involved in, including the interview that forced the resignation of his own boss, the Director General. In typically candid style he also weighs in on the role the BBC itself has played in our national life, for good and ill, and the broader health of the political system today. Now he offers his life story from the poverty of his post-war childhood in Cardiff, leaving school at 15, to the summits of broadcasting where he was the BBC's youngest Foreign Correspondent. Along the way he recalls the experiences that have marked him most - being the first reporter at the terrible disaster in Aberfan, reporting from South Africa in the dying days of apartheid, from Ireland during the Troubles, and from the White House on Richard Nixon's historic resignation and in war zones around the globe throughout his career. John was also the first journalist to present Nine O'clock News on TV. We are even offered glimpses of his human side off-mic. 400 page large paperback, colour and black and white photos.

On a daily basis Consultant Paediatric Neurosurgeon Jay Jayamohan makes life-and-death decisions on the most vulnerable and fragile members of society - babies and children. Daily, parents and carers put their faith in him and his team. Developments in the field of neurosurgery have been massive over recent years, and many of the everyday procedures Jayamohan undertakes would have been undreamt of only a few years ago. Despite this he is on the cutting edge of his work in this area and faces new and puzzling challenges every day. Many of his patients are faced with a lifetime of surgery, with each step along the treatment path often leading to unknown or unexpected repercussions. Though he is proud of his successes he learns from every procedure that goes wrong. Compassionate, frank and revelatory, his book portrays a man faced with potentially devastating decisions who's driven to help as many children as possible. 'There are two ways to open a child's head. The pretty way and the quick way. Usually I shave the hair, use a scalpel to nick the skin then apply an electro-cautery device to burn down to bone level. It's a slow, precise method and leaves almost no scarring. But it takes time. Time, the interminable single note of the heart monitor reminds me, I don't have.' Jayamohan is an Asian who struggled in 1970s Britain as an Asian growing up and he has been featured in two highly acclaimed BBC fly-on-the-wall series following the work of neurosurgeons and their highs and lows. He is truly an inspirational man. 256pp.

A sublime view of the treasures and torments to be found in wakefulness, this is an entertaining and existential nocturnal reverie in search of lost sleep. Rich in imagery, beautiful, jagged and precise, this is a lyrical, witty and humane exploration of a state we too often consider only superficially. With her new memoir, Marina Benjamin has produced an unsettling account that treats our inability to sleep not as a disorder but as an existential experience that can electrify our understanding of ourselves, and of creativity and love. In her bravura piece of writing, at once philosophical and poetical, the book ranges widely over history and culture, literature and art, entwining the author's personal story spliced with cultural criticism. There are moments of stunning poetry suddenly interrupted by passages of fevered introspection. The book aims to light up the workings of our inner minds in which art, philosophy and science jostle together. 133pp.

In 29 intimate, brilliant and funny essays, Claire Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia, the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt, and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk and Valeria Luiselli and examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger. She tours her favourite paintings at Boston Museum of Fine Arts and in the luminous title essay explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of 'a single successful sentence'. With a peripatetic upbringing, a warm and complicated family, her devotion to art and literature shines through and she proves once again she is 'an absolute master storyteller'. The essays have been collected from her other published work and include Our Dogs, Teenage Girls and How to be a Better Woman in the 21st Century. 306pp.

Sub-titled 'Scott, Zelda, and The Jazz Age Invasion of Britain: 1904-1929' this extraordinary history shows how the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's creation of Jay Gatsby, war hero and Oxford man at the beginning of the Jazz Age attracted an astounding array of authors and intellectuals. The poet T. S. Eliot, the polo star Tommy Hitchcock, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were a diverse group of Americans who came to the City of Dreaming Spires when the Rhodes Scholar programme had just begun and World War One had enveloped much of Europe. Fitzgerald created the character Jay Gatsby shortly after his and Zelda's visit to Oxford, and the creation is a cultural reflection of the aspirations of many Americans who came to the University of Oxford seeking beauty, wisdom and social connections. Beginning in 1904, the story chronicles the experiences of American expatriates through Prohibition and the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, interpreted through the pages of the classic novel The Great Gatsby. It shows how much Fitzgerald owes a debt to the medieval, romantic and European historical tradition and what he would have experienced at the post-war university encountering an impressive array of artists including W. B Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. An interesting mix of intellectual, cultural, biographical and emotional history populated with transformative Great Thinkers. With maps on endpapers of the City of Oxford, 346pp, a glossary of Oxford terms like Battels (expenses incurred), Punt and Torpids (boat race for novice crews). US first edition.

Sub-titled 'The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak', Jonathan Cott first interviewed the artist in 1976 for Rolling Stone following the publication of the trilogy that began with 'Where the Wild Things Are', 'In the Night Kitchen' and 'Outside Over There'. Over the course of a revelatory conversation about his life, work, and the fantasies and obsessions that drove Sendak's creative process, they focussed on the many themes and images that would appear in the new book five years later. Widely considered to be one of the most important children's book artists of the 20th century, this very pictorial large hardback reproduces in colour dozens of illustrations plus archive photos and images from books, book jackets and pen and ink drawings. Sendak illustrated more than 100 children's books that have sold more than 30 million copies in his native USA alone. Among the earliest and most enduring of these are 'A Hole Is to Dig' for which Sendak provided mercurial pen-and-ink drawings of a gaggle of feisty, rollicking city kids, and the equally beloved Little Bear series with understated, cross-hatched Victorian drawings memorably incarnating three generations of a snug and kind-hearted ursine family. He created his own indelible children's literature immortals, among them the incorrigibly wilful Pierre from the Nutshell Library whose automatic 'I don't care!' response to every parental request is a mantra that will forever resound when encountering the terrible twos, terrifying threes and fearsome fours. Then there was the irrepressible little boy named Mickey from 'In the Night Kitchen' who floats out of his bed and out of his pyjamas and then freefalls, completely naked, into a surrealistic underworld kitchen where a trio of grinning Oliver Hardy look-a-like bakers proceed to mix him into batter and try to turn him into a delicious Mickey-Cake. And there is the rebellious wolf-suited Max who threatens to eat up his mum. 'Outside Over There' sees a 16 year old girl entering another worldly maze in order to rescue her young brother from the clutches of a goblin king. Biographical details and psychological analysis, art history and reflections of the playwright Tony Kushner illuminate the complex nature of this creative genius. 242 large pages, colour illus. Remainder mark.
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