Sub-titled 'The True Tale of Boris Morros, Film Producer Turned Cold War Spy', here the Golden Age of Hollywood is the background to this story of a remarkable career. Boris Morros was a major figure in 1930s and 1940s Hollywood. A refugee from the Russian Civil War who had organised music for the last Tsar at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Boris rose through the ranks to become the Head of Music at Paramount Pictures. He was nominated for Academy Awards, then went on to produce his own films with Laurel and Hardy, Fred Astaire, Henry Fonda and others, but as J. Edgar Hoover would discover, these successes provided a cover for one of the most incredible espionage tales in the history of the Cold War - Boris Morros was Stalin's man in Hollywood. Boris's assignments took him to the White House, the Vatican, and deep behind the Iron Curtain. The high-level intel he provided the KGB included military secrets and compromising information on prominent Americans. His Russian handlers even pushed Boris to interfere in American politics, attempting to swing a presidential election to their preferred candidate, but in 1947 Boris flipped, and the height of the McCarthy era, he played a leading role in a deadly serious tale. Jonathan Gill's book is an extraordinary story about Russian spies at the heart of American culture and politics who seamlessly wove together public and personal lives, making sure classical music luminaries like Gregor Piatigorsky and Jan Peerce were photographed at the 1947 wedding of Boris?s son, Dick. After going public and denouncing some of his oldest friends and colleagues as Soviet spies, Boris lived life to the fullest with his second wife Marion and they partied hard. Pink Millionaire Alfred Stern and his wife, the daughter of the US Ambassador to Nazi Germany from 1933-1937, provided the funds, and the fun, that supported Boris's career as a Soviet spy. Life is stranger than fiction. 323pp, well illustrated.

The story behind the man who brought us The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, the film noir classics. James M. Cain was a master of the 'hard-boiled' school of writing in the 1930s and 1940s that included Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. His 1937 novel Serenade boldly portrayed its hero as a bisexual man. Before becoming a famous novelist, Cain taught journalism at various colleges in Maryland, wrote editorials for the New York World and was for a brief time Managing Editor at The New Yorker. While his biographer renders Cain's fast-paced life in New York and Hollywood, including his four wives, as he created a great number of short stories, novels, plays and magazine articles, part of the story is David Madden's own story. The long time relationship between the emerging young novelist and the elderly writer in decline enabled Madden to imagine Cain's creative process and throughout the book Madden meshes his own words with Cain's. Cain cooperated intimately and the biography is innovative in style and technique. 'Because I want Cain's own distinctly tough, frank, slangy voice to convey a sense of his life as a storyteller, I have employed three very unorthodox methods. First, I have restructured, pruned, and sometimes rephrased the pages he sent me and blended his words with my own phrases...' 'A second major feature of this biography, an imaginative impression of his creative process as a writer in the very act of writing, both fiction and non-fiction. A third major feature is my use of the technique that I have often used in my own fiction, whereby the point of view is confined strictly to what Cain remembers...' 'The mumps had released him from a six month stretch with Consolidated Gas and Light of Baltimore, secured through his father's connections, performing hateful routine tasks with ledgers. Inspecting roads and writing reports for the Maryland Road Commission had been enjoyable, but getting laid off was humiliating. As Principal of the high school in a little village of Vienna, Maryland, he had learned a few things about teaching.' Other chapters are titled The Butterfly and the Moth, Galatea and Mignon and The Magician's Wife. 300 pages.

Gangsters, psychopaths, terrorists, assaults, riots, cell fires, medical emergencies, understaffed wings, suicides, hooch, weapons - it's all in a week's work at Her Majesty's Prison Parkhurst. After 28 years working as a prison officer with 22 years at HMP Parkhurst, one of Britain's most high-security prisons, David Berridge has had to deal with it all. Thrown in at the deep end, David quickly had to work out how to deal with the most cunning and volatile of prisoners, and learn how to avoid their many scams. His book is a raw and uncompromising look at what really goes on behind the massive walls and menacing gates and his diaries will shock and entertain in equal measure, both horrifying and at times hilarious. Beware there is some fruity language as he works his way around bullying, the day they stopped a suicide attempt, crap diet, the scream he can still hear, a scrap on the exercise yard, getting truly screwed, drugs, and playing by the rules. Gives an explanation of prison slang, official terms and uniformed staff by rank. 286pp, paperback.

'I decided that BBC External Services at Bush House was the place for my long-term career. I got a job as Producer, Current Affairs and Overseas Talks and Features, and began my full-time established, pensionable BBC career in the autumn of 1962. The next three and a bit years were intense as events like the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 threatened the very world we lived in... Annie and I clung together in the bathroom of our house in Pimlico listening horror-struck to the President. [Jack Kennedy]. During the night, woken by the noise of traffic on the Embankment, I was convinced it was the start of the London population's exodus to avoid nuclear extinction.' Over almost 60 years, John Tusa has fought for and sometimes against the major arts and political institutions in the country. 'The BBC sections are totally enthralling and horrifying in equal measure' says Graham Sheffield formerly of the British Council. A distinguished journalist, broadcaster and leader of arts organisations, Tusa has stood up publicly for the independence of the BBC, the need for public funding of the arts, and for the integrity of universities. His recollections of a hilarious and petty-minded few months as head of a Cambridge college will be read as a case study in the absurdities of academic life. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1936, John became main presenter with Peter Snow of BBC2's Newsnight from its foundation in 1980. From 1986-92 he was Managing Director of BBC World Service and from 1995 to 2007 Managing Director at the Barbican Centre, at the time rejected and maligned, he led its recovery into the major cultural centre that it is today. From the battles to create Newsnight to six years defending the BBC World Service from political interference, Tusa's account is etched with candour. His record of two years of internecine warfare at the top of the BBC under the Chairman 'Dukey' Hussey will go down as a major contribution to BBC history. The sub-title of his book is 'Getting It Right, Getting It Wrong in Life, the Arts and Broadcasting' and Tusa recalls why he has been called a 'bastard', 'antichrist', and a 'contaminant' for his many campaigns. Why? Because he made a noise. 392pp, many illus, paperback.

The experimental poet E. E. Cummings grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a family dominated by an overbearing father, "the Reverend", a man in whom social liberalism fought unsuccessfully with repressive authoritarianism. The domestic situation was not much lightened by Cummings's mother, who strongly believed in cold baths, though this may have stood her son in good stead when, as a volunteer ambulance driver in the Great War, he was incarcerated in a French prison in 1917. The young Cummings was sensitive and a good artist, attending nearby Harvard university, where his dyslexia may have contributed to the development of an experimental poetic style. Through the undergraduate literary magazine Monthly he met the novelist Dos Passos who became a lifelong friend. An exhibition of paintings by avant-garde artists such as Gauguin, Kandinsky, Rousseau, Picabia and Munch introduced Cummings to Modernism, and in 1913 he was transfixed by Duchamps's "Nude Descending a Staircase", a pioneering Cubist work. After an unhappy relationship with his girlfriend Doris Bryan, Cummings fell under the spell of his friend Scofield Thayer's wife Elaine. Cummings wrote a poem for their marriage, and years later he was to have an affair with Elaine, eventually marrying her himself. In 1917 he sailed for France to volunteer for the ambulance service and soon became part of the Paris bohemian scene, attending the premiere of Satie's iconic ballet Parade, designed by Cocteau, costumed by Picasso, and performed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Cummings now fell in love with the prostitute Marie Louise, and although he was reluctant to have sex with her, his drawings of Marie Louise show an uninhibited fascination with her way of life. Finally he left for the Front, where his unexplained though short-lived prison sentence might possibly have been a stitch-up by censors tampering with letters home. 335pp.

Sub-titled 'The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane', J. B. S. grew up in Edinburgh into a family of important landowners who led strict, spare lives, obedient to their Calvinist virtue, but aristocrats all the same. The family lived for much of the year near Gleneagles where Robert had bought a farmhouse and to achieve a manorial look dressed it up with a turret. J. B. S.'s life was rich and strange, from his boyhood apprenticeship to his scientist father who first instilled in him a devotion to the scientific method, to his time in the trenches during WW1 where he wrote his first scientific paper, to his numerous experiments on himself including inhaling dangerous levels of carbon dioxide and drinking hydrochloric acid, to his clandestine research for the British Admiralty during WW2. Haldane is best remembered as a geneticist who revolutionised our understanding of evolution, but his peers hailed him as a polymath. One student called him 'the last man who might know all there was to be known.' Haldane foresaw invitro fertilisation, peak oil, and the hydrogen fuel cell, and his contributions ranged over physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, mathematics and biostatistics. He was also a staunch Communist, which led him to Spain during its Civil War and sparked suspicions that he was spying for the Soviets. He wrote copiously on science and politics in newspapers and magazines, and gave speeches in town halls and on the radio, all of which made him, in his day, as famous in Britain as Einstein. It is the duty of scientists to think politically Haldane believed and sought not simply to tell his readers what to think, but to show them how to think. Although he hated to be bothered by correspondence, he had letters piled up around his various offices over the years - in Cambridge in the 1920s, in University College London until the 1950s, in Calcutta and Bhubaneswar thereafter, but he always tried to reply and never shrank from exalting the scientific method, even in casual correspondence - 'Science advances by successive improvements in former theories.' 383pp, illus., 2020 US first edition.

An ordinary day begins with a gorilla, a blonde and a gun. Mid 20th century Hollywood, and Clancy Sigal is just back from fighting in the Second World War and an abortive solo attempt to assassinate Hermann Goering at the Nuremburg Trials. Charming his way into a job as an agent with the Sam Jaffe Agency, he plunges into a chaotic Hollywood peopled by fast women, washed-up screenwriters, wily directors and starstruck FBI agents trailing 'subversives'. An ex-union organiser, Clancy soon falls under the radar of the FBI, who are desperate to haul him up before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Will he give up the list of nine names to save his skin? The lowest of the low, the talent agent Clancy represents Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Barbara Stanwyck and Tony Curtis and he becomes drinking buddies with Lorre. This is the era of the Hollywood Blacklist, and Sigal, like many of his contemporaries, is subpoenaed to testify before the HUAC. This nonagenarian's hilarious memoir is star-studded, riveting and poignant. He went on to emigrate to Great Britain where he met and began a four year affair with the writer Doris Lessing. He later co-wrote the movie Frida and died in 2017. 340pp, paperback.

Writer of more than 25 books, many of them about the British royal family and their corgis, acclaimed as a five star sensation under its original title 'We Are Amused', this 2020 edition is brought up to date with fascinating details from Her Majesty to Meghan Markle, including William, Kate and their three children, the new jewels in the royal crown. The A-Z begins with Abdication, Accession, Act of Settlement 1701 through Birthdays and Bridesmaids and Court Circulars and the Duchy of Cornwall, Eton College, Footmen, the George Cross and George Medal, Handbags, Tax, Jubilees, Knighthoods, Ladies in Waiting, Maids of Honour, Nannies, Order of Succession, Palace Stewards and Picnics, Queens, Racing, Religion, Salaries and State Banquets, Tartans and Tweeds and Trooping the Colour, Valets and the Royal Cross, Royal Warrants and Wine, X-Ray Machine, Yachts, to Zara Phillips. Every detail of whatever the royals do, wear, eat and drink is avidly consumed and it is a never-ending soap opera. When Zara Phillips, daughter of the Princess Royal, appeared with a stud showing through her pierced tongue it made headlines for days and pictures sold all over the world, while speculation about the wealth of the Windsors provides endless stories. The scandal that was caused by the Duke of York's unfortunate friendship with an American billionaire who was convicted of sexual offences and found dead in his prison cell ended the Duke's career. Packed with fascinating details and witty to the point of wickedness. Which member of the royal family won't travel anywhere without his own lavatory seat? What wedding present did Gandhi give to the Queen and Prince Philip? Why did Diana's arrival at her wedding cause an unexpected commotion among the establishment? 274pp, paperback.

Wickedly funny, hilarious and candid, we are taken to London in the 1950s. Lottie is a reluctant typist at MI5 and an even more reluctant daughter of the organisation's most illustrious spy. She has had the bad luck to fall in love with Harry, a handsome if frustrated young actor who doubles as one of her father's best undercover agents in the Communist hotbed of British theatre. Together the two young lovers embark on a star-studded venture through the glittering world of theatre, but between missing files, disapproving parents, and their own burgeoning creative endeavours, life is about to become very complicated indeed. Filled with period detail, the teenager tells stories to make herself and other people laugh and one funny story follows another. Bingham wrote her first book Coronet Among the Weeds, her memoir of her life as a debutante, at the age of 19 and it was published in 1963 and became an instant bestseller. Her father John Bingham, the 7th Baron Clanmorris, was a member of MI5 where Charlotte worked as a secretary and was an inspiration for John le Carré's character George Smiley. Charlotte Bingham went on to write 33 internationally bestselling novels and films and TV series including Upstairs Downstairs. Here her prose is in its youthful insouciance, and she writes as an exceptionally observant young lady. 258pp, paperback.

The award-winning New York author sets off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a century-old cycle of estrangement. Alex Halberstadt's search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather, most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin, to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped three generations of his family. He visits Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. He returns to his birthplace of Moscow where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living dealing in black-market American records. Along the way he investigates the fragile and indistinct boundary between history and biography. Finally he explores his own story, that of an immigrant who arrived in America to a housing project in Queens, New York. A now fatherless ten year old boy struggling with identity, rootlessness, and a yearning for home, Alex became another in a line of sons who grew up separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. His family history is one of fear, suspicion, melancholy and rage, and Alex comes to realise that nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives. How poignant this memoir is in the light of recent events in Ukraine and the displacement of millions of people, this is a luminous memoir of identity, exile, ancestry and reckoning. 289pp, illus.