The authorised biography of The Who's John Entwistle, here is the definitive, no-holds-barred biography of this legendary bassist. Drawing on his own notes for an unfinished autobiography that he started before his death in 2002, plus personal archives and interviews with family and friends, The Ox will give readers a never-before-seen glimpse into the two very distinctive poles of John Entwistle. On the one hand he was the rock star incarnate, larger than life, self-obsessed to a fault, and proudly and almost defiantly so. Extravagant with money, he famously shipped two vintage American cars across the Atlantic without having so much as a driver's licence, built and bigger and more grandiose bars into every home he owned, and amassed an extraordinary collection of possessions from arachnids, armour and weaponry to his Cuban-heeled boots. But beneath the fame and flutter he was also a man of simple tastes and traditional opinions, a devoted father and family man who loved nothing more than to wake up to a full English breakfast, or to have a supper of fish, chips and pint at his local pub. The self-styled lord of his baronial Cotswold manor house of the last 26 years rose from his bed around noon, bleary eyed and thick headed from indulging too much the night before, which was at the age of 57 all too often the case. Lisa Pritchett-Johnson, his American girlfriend, might have invited a gaggle of folk up to the house from the local pub. Entwistle would hardly even have known most of their names, but all of them would have raided the fully-stocked bar he kept downstairs and helped themselves to his drugs, Lisa cajoling them, always one drink and a line ahead of everyone else. He would have joined in regardless as it was never his style to be a bystander at a party. He and Lisa had vicious and spiteful fights but every morning he had his own well-established routine. He dressed in a crisp cowboy shirt, fresh-pressed jeans and a pair of moccasins, which would be changed for Cuban-heeled boots whenever he left the house. Not a crease in sight, or a hair out of place. Hung around his neck on a silver chain was a jewelled spider, gleaming with ruby-red eyes. After Entwistle?s untimely death, many of the stories in this book were shattered away by family, friends and loved ones, but now for the first time collected and we are introduced to the man behind the myth. 344pp, paperback well illustrated with colour and archive photos.

A glamorous British Library publication sub-titled 'Parlour Plays for Drawing-Room Performance', this tasteful literary publication includes a dialogue between Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe from Northanger Abbey, the settlement question duologue between Mr and Mrs John Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility, the reading of Jane Fairfax's letter duologue between Miss Bates and Emma from Emma, a strawberry picnic duologue between Mrs Elton and Mr Knightley from Emma, three loves duologues between Emma and Harriet and Emma and Mr Knightley from Emma, the proposal of Mr Collins exchange between Mrs Bennet, Elizabeth and Mr Collins from Pride and Prejudice and from the same classic novel Lady Catherine's visit duologue between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth Bennet. Read alone, aloud, in company or in front of an audience, for each playlet there is a suggestion of costumes like Mr Collins in black with a high choker and cravat tied in front, Elizabeth in pale primrose dress, the lapels of the bodice and the hem of the skirt embroidered in gold and white, clear muslin chemisette, wrapped undersleeves of the same. Pretty line art, the author was a progressive actor and director who died in 1930. A beautiful reprint, 138pp.

'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.

With its magnificent tower at the end of St Martin?s Lane near Trafalgar Square, we have a lively history of England's oldest continuously performing arts company. Susie Gilbert traces the development of the English National Opera from its earliest origins in the darkest Victorian slums of The Cut where it was conceived as a vehicle of social reform, through two World Wars and via Sadler's Wells to its great glory days at the Coliseum and beyond. Inspired by the idealism of Lilian Baylis, the Company's ethos is that opera in the vernacular, in English and not Italian or other foreign languages, can reach out to even the least privileged members of society, and create potent, immediate communication with its audience. The dual aim of the Company has been to extend the appreciation of opera to make the drama equal partner with the music. ENO played in village halls and regional cinemas during WW2, toured and travelled from Bournemouth to Kiev after it, and in 2008 returned for a short season to its birthplace at the Old Vic. ENO's biography illuminates the story of the development of British cultural life during the last 120 years and the growth of a middle class able to enjoy the possibilities of longer periods of leisure. The story begins in the era of Ruskin, William Morris and others who took on the role of missionaries in their efforts to tackle the chronic poverty, alcoholism and prostitution of the era and who saw housing reform as a link to cultural amelioration. The biography sets the Company's artistic achievements within the wider context of social and political attitudes to the arts, and the ever-changing theatrical style. With full access to ENO's archives, Gilbert has unearthed a rich range of material and held numerous interviews with fascinating personalities to weave an absorbing tale of life both in front and behind the scenes as it developed over the years, based heavily on the Company's management archives, and how producers have at some points seemed more interested in securing controversy than in satisfying the audience. The history ends in 2009. 2017 huge paperback reprint, 703pp.

In the mid-18th century the actor, dramatist, theatre manager - and shameless self-promotor - David Garrick was the most famous man in Britain after the king. Garrick had built his career around the performance and promotion of Shakespeare, and while the Bard was highly acclaimed 150 years after his death in 1616 it took one event to lift him from one great writer amongst many to the "Blest Genius of the Isle", a national icon and literary deity - and this event was Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769. Held at Stratford-upon-Avon in September, among the 3,000 attendees were the rich and powerful, the fashionable and curious, eligible ladies and fortune hunters and a horde of journalists, profiteers and hangers-on. For three days they paraded through garlanded streets, listened to songs, poetry and oratorios and enjoyed masked balls in a unique cultural event that was to elevate Shakespeare to the throne of genius. Except it was a disaster. Poorly planned, it imposed an army of Londoners on a backwater hamlet of hostile and superstitious locals who were both unable and unwilling meet their demands. The rain fell in sheets, flooding tents, dampening the much-vaunted fireworks, turning the town into a quagmire and this along with corruption, a poor press, dubious relics and even a giant sea turtle should have seen the event consigned to the bin marked greatest PR disasters. Yet, against all the odds, it was not, Garrick and company somehow wresting a triumph from the catastrophe it clearly was. This is the whole wonderful story, rich with wit, humour, gossip and political intrigue, told from the dual perspectives of organiser Garrick and attendee James Boswell. Packed with minute and often hilarious detail, Stott's recounting of the absurd and chaotic events of those three days is an absolute joy to read. 270pp, b/w illus.

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.

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.

Sub-titled 'Travels with Oscar Wilde', this is the outrageous and very personal memoir with riotous anecdotes, a rude and uproarious third memoir about the vicissitudes of fame and Rupert Everett's attempts to make a film about the last days of Oscar Wilde. He hoovers up 'a couple of dry martinis to conjure up a bit of sloshed sparkle - the dregs of my star quality.' Travelling across Europe for the film, Everett weaves in extraordinary tales from his past, remembering wild times, freak encounters and lost friends and of course celebrities. But we also meet glamorous but doomed Aunt Peta who introduces Rupert, then aged three, to the joys of make-up. In 1980s Paris, his great friend Lychee burns bright, and is gone. In 1970s London, a 'weirdly tall, beyond size zero' teenage Rupert is expelled from the Central School of Speech and Drama. Everett is wonderfully sharp and alive to all the comical absurdities of the movie business and turns out to be a masterly travel writer with the magical ability to make a city or building or group of people burst into life in a few words. Like his previous volumes, the memoir quivers with A-list gossip and sardonic prose and he is a brilliantly caustic wit on Hollywood and on the march of time. His scabrous account of his lifelong love of Oscar Wilde, he has a keen sense of the ridiculous as well as a huge capacity for the short-term enjoyment of life's sensual pleasures. He ricochets from Paris to Naples, Berlin to Venice in search of funding and locations, captures the snakes-and-ladders world of international finance and survives all the setbacks in the film's making, along with the stalwart support of loyal friends like Colin Firth and Emily Watson. 337pp, paperback with many colour photos.

This special history book describes the importance of music in parks and open spaces, the growth of the brass band movement, the legacy of the pleasure gardens movement, the impact of the great foundries, through to the decline and subsequent revival of the bandstand, and so much more. Packed with hundreds of archive and colour photos, beginning with a general prospect of Vaux Hall Gardens circa 1715 and the crowded opening of the bandstand in Congleton Park, Cheshire 1914, the commentary begins with the Registrar General of Tower Hamlets writing in 1839 'A Park in the East End of London, would probably diminish the annual deaths by several thousands... and add several years to the lives of the entire population.' The early Victorians recognised rapidly industrialising centres across the country and until this book there has been a clear gap in the understanding of the social impact of parks on local communities. Parks were often developed by a combination of local authorities and wealthy benefactors including Nash, Paxton, Gibson, Milner, Kemp and Loudon and great designs were often produced as recreation evolved. With many parks soon seeming to have a bandstand, what defined the role of music in parks and the effect on dissipating social divisions in society, music at seaside resorts, we begin to understand that in their heyday there were over 1500 bandstands in the country attracting the likes of crowds of over 10,000 in the Arboretum in Lincoln, to regular concerts in most of London's parks up until the beginning of WWII. Little is really known about them from their evolution as 'orchestras', the music played, the intricate and ornate ironwork or Art Deco designs and the impact of the great foundries, to the decline during post-Second World War and revival in the late 1990s, the book tells the stories of these pavilions made for music and their history, decline and revival. The brilliant Gazetteer lists town, location, date erected and manufacture or foundry where known and model by existing bandstands from Aberdare Park to the Promenade Youghall, County Cork and then the lost bandstands, covering all 1500 and with dozens of beautiful sepia postcards and images and modern sunny day blue skies colour photos. 236 very large pages in softback published by Historic England.
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From the Wizards Presents series this rare fourth edition preview is a behind-the-scenes exploration of the D&D game. It is a lavishly illustrated 96 page large softback which gives role playing game fans a unique glimpse into the making of the game with essays and commentary from the game's premier designers, developers and editors. They explore the most iconic locations and monsters and share insights never before revealed in any game product. There are staff thoughts on the preview to the fourth edition - good intentions, a high five moment and fun things, crunch time, writing monsters. There is beautiful artwork in full colour like the Hobgoblin fortress with skulls and faces, a Troll, the Mind Flayer Thrallkeeper, Spined Devil, a colour artwork of the curvaceous Githyanki, the Astral Sea seemingly floating through air and a rift to the elemental chaos with fiery colours and dark broody background. The line art of the monsters in the art gallery is superb, like the skeletal Tomb Guardian and Gargoyle Strangler and characters from the Shadow Fell like the Death Knight and Shadar-kai, a full page image of Orcus. These colour and line artworks are truly spectacular and at this price could be removed from the book for framing. 96 page extra large softback, a rare import.