From growing up as an orphan in 1920s New York, to serving in the Navy at the D-Day landings in Normandy, to a vagabond life drinking in Parisian cafés, to befriending America's greatest counter-cultural writers, Little Boy has seen it all. 'Grown Boy came into his own voice and let loose his word-horde pent-up within him.' This is the story of one man's extraordinary life, steeped in the exhilarating energy of the Beats, a magical cascade of language that gleams with Walt Whitman's visionary spirit, a meditation of iconic publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 99 years on the planet, rich in wisdom, emotion and memories. 'A spiralling stream of consciousness that celebrates the divine transcendence of poetry and an all too human coming-of-agelessness. His mentoring example and love of the written word is illuminating and inspirational.' Ferlinghetti, born 1919, was the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco and was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg's book Howl, and he has written over 40 poetry collections. This memoir was first published in 2019 and he died in February 2021. 179pp.

Financial magician, flamboyant politician, minister in both World Wars, press baron, serial philanderer, Winston Churchill's boon companion in the dark days of 1940-41 and in his later years, Max Beaverbrook was without doubt one of the most colourful characters of the first half of the 20th century. Born and brought up in the Scottish Presbyterian vastness of north-east Canada, he escaped to make his fortune in Canadian financial markets. By 1910 when he emigrated to Britain at the age of 31, Beaverbrook was already a multimillionaire. With a seat in the House of Commons and then a peerage, he came to know all the senior figures in both British and Canadian politics. In acquiring the Daily Express, he not only built it into a news empire, but used its considerable influence to campaign for his own pet causes. Charles Williams covers not only Beaverbrook's journalistic and political career, but also his at times questionable financial dealings, his wide circle of friends and his many relationships with women. Above all it is a story of 80 years of entrepreneurism, political dogfights, wars, sex and grand living, of fame, fortune and influence. Lady Diana Cooper once described Beaverbrook as 'this strange attractive gnome with an odour of genius about him.' 566 pages with reasonable quality but numerous and interesting black and white illus.

Much-loved children's poet and political campaigner Michael Rosen recalls the first 23 years of his life. Born in the North London suburbs, his parents Harold and Connie were both teachers who first met as teenage Communists in the Jewish East End of the 1930s. The family home was filled with stories of relatives in London, the USA and France, and of those who disappeared in Europe. Different from other children, Michael and his brother Brian grew up dreaming of a socialist revolution. Party meetings were held in the front room and summers were for communist camping holidays, but it all changed after a trip to East Germany in 1957 when his parents decided to leave 'the Party'. From that point on Michael followed his own journey of radical self-discovery - running away to Aldermaston to march against the bomb, writing and performing in experimental political theatre at Oxford University, getting arrested during the 1968 movements. The book ends with a letter to his father and the revelation of a heart-breaking family secret. The book opens with the poignant line 'About a year before I was born, my brother died; he was not yet two... My arrival into the world must have been a mixture of delight and dread.' With many intelligent inner thoughts about Shakespeare and Eng Lit, Great Expectations, the Vietnam War, the politics of culture, international connections and a postscript to his father Harold who died in 2008 and details of his Motions as a delegate in the Communist Party. An amazing slice of history and wonderful writing from the former Children's Laureate, photos.

Hugely admired in the early 20th century, the poet Charlotte Mew had a tragic life that ended in her suicide in 1928. But during the years when she was publishing poetry she was given the highest praise by Virginia Woolf and literary luminaries such as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. Mew's early life in Bloomsbury was devastated when her brother Henry, who suffered delusions, was incarcerated in Bethlem mental hospital. She was divided between three worlds: the desperate sadness of home life, the rich opportunities of the world of words, and the emotional reassurance found in the homes of literary acquaintances where she would later almost certainly fall in love with several women friends, though no love letters of hers survive. This fascinating biography shows how these worlds were intertwined in the life of a tiny woman with a massive talent. In the late 19th century women's emancipation was well under way, with Ibsen's Doll's House symbolising the restrictions that Bloomsbury women were keen to escape. Charlotte lived the intellectual life to the full, attending lectures and visiting the British Museum's Reading Room, meeting Aubrey Beardsley and his circle and starting a lifelong smoking habit. On the death of her father, Charlotte became head of the household, eventually nursing her sister Anne in her last illness and coping with the increasingly melancholiac Freda, who, like Henry, was committed to an asylum. Meanwhile Charlotte was writing and publishing in periodicals including Beardsley's Yellow Book, mainly poetry but also short stories. In a Southall literary circle she met the mystic Evelyn Underhill and the writer May Sinclair, who may have repulsed her sexual advances. Charlotte's collected verse, The Farmer's Bride, was well thought of by Sydney Cockerell, Walter de la Mare and John Masefield, while Siegfried Sassoon introduced her to the glamorous literary set surrounding Lady Ottoline Morrell. But the death of Charlotte's sister Anne precipitated her into a spiral of suicidal depression. 464pp, colour photos.

A strikingly attractive woman, with a keen sense of fun, E. Nesbit attracted a circle of young admirers who left fascinating glimpses of her in their letters and memoirs. She included them in her stories, and the letters she sent them are exceptionally revealing. She put the best of herself into her books for children. As Marcus Crouch explained she 'threw away their strong, sober, essentially literary style and replaced it with a miraculously colloquial, flexible and revealing prose which was her unique contribution to the children's novel.' She wove her whimsey and magic into the everyday lives of children. Nesbit's own life was just as extraordinary as anything found in the pages of her books. In adulthood she became as Humphrey Carpenter puts it, 'An energetic hack, keen to try anything to support her wayward husband and her odd household.' Her abiding passion was for poetry with a socialist theme. She lived through a time of extraordinary political upheaval and she was instrumental in introducing socialist thinking into British intellectual life. A founder member of the Fabian Society, she counted George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells among her closest friends. She was tireless for campaigning for the alleviation of poverty in London, and she spent considerable time and energy in helping poor children living on her doorstep in Deptford. She enjoyed the finer things in life and made no apology for doing so. She had a keen eye for nature and detested the creeping urbanisation she saw all around her. Some of her finest writing celebrates the beauty of the British countryside. The biography reveals who the person was behind the best loved classics The Railway Children and Five Children and It. 337 page paperback with photos including one of an elderly E. Nesbit holding chicks.

Pop artist, painter of modern life, landscape painter, master of colour, explorer of image and perception, for six decades, David Hockney has been known as an artist who always finds new ways of exploring the world and its representational possibilities. He has consistently created unforgettable images: works with graphic lines and integrated text in the Swinging Sixties in London; the famous swimming pool series as a representation of the 1970s California lifestyle; closely observed portraits and brightly coloured, oversized landscapes after his eventual return to his native Yorkshire. In addition to drawings in which he transfers what he sees directly onto paper, there are multiperspective Polaroid collages that open up the space into a myriad of detailed views, and iPad drawings in which he captures light using a most modern medium -testaments to Hockney's enduring delight in experimentation. This special edition has been newly assembled from the two volumes of the David Hockney: A Bigger Book monograph to celebrate art publisher Taschen's 40th anniversary. Hockney's life and work is presented year by year as a dialogue between his works and voices from the time period, alongside reviews and reflections by the artist in a chronological text, supplemented by portrait photographs and exhibition views. Together they open up new perspectives, page after page, revealing how Hockney undertakes his artistic research, how his painting develops, and where he finds inspiration for his multifaceted work. 15.6 x 21.7cm, 1.47 kg, 512 pages. Glorious colour reproductions. New from Taschen.

Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield, better known as Rebecca West, was a passionate suffragist, socialist, a fiercely intelligent writer and thinker who began her career with articles in The Freewoman and The Clarion. Her first book, a biography of Henry James, was published when she was only twenty-four and her first novel followed just two years later. She had a notorious affair with H.G. Wells, and their illegitimate son, Anthony, was born at the beginning of the First World War. Author of several novels, West is perhaps best remembered for her classic account of pre-war Yugoslavia, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon (published by Macmillan in 1941 and as relevant today as it was sixty years ago), and for her coverage of the Nuremberg Trials. When she died in 1983 at the age of 90, William Shawn of The New Yorker said: "Rebecca West was one of the giants and will have a lasting place in English literature. No one in this century wrote more dazzling prose, or had more wit, or looked at the intricacies of human character and the ways of the world more intelligently." Lorna Gibb's vivid and insightful biography affords a dazzling insight into her life and work. "It's especially impressive that Gibb manages to chronicle West's often complicated life in an even-handed, coherent way. Fast-paced and well-researched, this is a fine biography of a writer whose life and career was full of fascinating contradictions and intersections." - NPR Books. "It presents with discerning succinctness, a sharply etched portrait of a true original... Cissie Fairfield remained alive and well inside her alter ego, to judge from Lorna Gibb's brisk and affectionate biography." - The Sunday Times. "This riveting book is not a typical literary biography... Lorna Gibb may have read all of Rebecca West's vast output, but she does not flaunt it... Miss Gibb wisely leaves it to others to appraise her subject as a writer. What she does is to tell a gripping story of a woman's life." - Country Life. Paperback, 320 pages. Illustrated.

'How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History' is the sub-title title of this riveting account that puts us in the cockpit with Amelia Earhart and other brave women who took to the skies in the unreliable flying machines of the 1920s and 30s. The five remarkable women are Florence Klingensmith, a high school dropout from Fargo, North Dakota, Ruth Elder an Alabama divorcee, Amelia Earhart, the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled, Ruth Nichols, who chafed at her Blue Blood family?s expectations, and Louise Thaden, a young mother of two who got her start selling coal in Wichita. Together they fought the chance to fly and race aeroplanes and in 1936, one of them was to triumph, beating the men in the toughest race of them all. The prose reverberates with fiery crashes, then stings with the tragedy of lives lost, and sometimes equally heart-breaking stories on the ground. Reminder mark 338 page paperback with illustrations.

"Where Freya Stark wrote of the Marsh Arabs, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea goes into the deep interior of desert Iraq in 1955, some fifty years later." A delightful, extremely well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, Guests of the Sheik is an account of the author's two-year stay in the tiny rural village of El Nahra in southern Iraq. To help her anthropologist husband gather data, Mrs. Fernea agreed to dress only in the all-enveloping black veils of the women of the harem. Although she shared a small mud-brick cottage with her husband, her daily life was spent only with the women of the town, for in this polygamous society there existed no social communication between the sexes. The hardships were many but the rewards greater, especially for the readers of this extraordinary narrative: this volume gives a unique insight into a part of Middle Eastern life seldom seen by the West and life of the women who have no outwardly apparent role in society, but whose thoughts and ideas are now emerging with force and helping to shape modern Middle Eastern society. "Lives are hard, repetitively hard and unrelenting in all respects. Men live by the goodwill and social standing of those a rung above. And they, by those above them. Tribal status among other tribes, and status within the tribe, dictate where a man may work, whom he might marry and how his children will or will not prosper. Honour is a concept as much alive then as it is today." Paperback, facsimile reprint of the 1965 original, 346 pages, small remainder mark.

The legendary mid-sixties partnership of Joan Baez with Bob Dylan, "the voice and the poet", is often thought to have been dominated by Dylan's musicianship and personality, but the author of this absorbing book suggests the opposite was true. Joanie rose to fame through her involvement with the civil rights movement, appearing on stage with Martin Luther King at the age of 17, and consolidating that success the following year, 1958, with her legendary performance at the Newport Folk Festival. When the family moved from California to the east, Joan enrolled at Boston University, though she was soon performing regularly at Club 47 which she helped to put on the map. She signed up with Vanguard rather than Columbia to avoid the glitter and fuss of the more established label, and colleagues remember Joan's sincerity and "unphoniness" in this early period. In the early sixties she was touring black colleges with unsegregated audiences, and in 1963 she started singing with Dylan, some of whose songs she had covered, at the Monterey Folk Festival. Their legendary Newport performance, preserved on grainy footage, established Dylan's stardom as it had Joan's four years earlier. Baez and Dylan continued to sing together in 1964, but in 1965 the cracks in their partnership became apparent, with jealousies arising and Dylan's insisting that he did not want to engage in active politics. In the late sixties Joan was arrested and imprisoned twice for protests over Vietnam, and with her sisters she modelled the poster "Girls say yes to boys who say no" - encouraging men to refuse the draft. At this time Joan married and became a mother. Baez continued to pursue a politically engaged career, visiting Sarajevo and other war zones, and giving her farewell concert in 2019. A fascinating read. 224pp, discography, black and white photos.