200 puzzles to delight fans of the Rovers Return Inn and one of Britain's most popular soap operas. Test your Corrie knowledge and problem-solving prowess. Can you solve Ken-dokus, work out the missing relationships in a family tree, match pets to their owners? Take part in a classic Rovers pub quiz and answer questions in the famous characters that have graced the screens from Elsie Tanner to Roy Cropper. 200 entertaining and inventive conundrums are enhanced by amazing facts, figures and trivia, archive photos, and of course flying ducks. 302pp, softback.

Enthralling listeners for 20 years, now you can play this popular quiz at home at any time or in the pub and with family and friends. Packed with over 1,700 questions it is written by the BBC Radio 2's expert quiz setters Phil Swern and Neil Myners. Who sang about 'Nutbush City Limits' in 1973? The Darkness reached the Top 10 in 2003 with the song 'I Believe in ... ' what? The answers to all questions are cunningly printed on the outside column of the page directly after the quiz page you are looking at. Nice clear layout, 176 page paperback.

While us oldies bemoan the shift from vinyl to CD and the fact that it deprived us of one of the greatest pleasures of music ownership - that great 12 inch artwork that was the album sleeve, replaced by a tiddly five inch booklet that you need a magnifying glass to read - spare a thought for this generation with their i-Pods and downloaded mp3s - they get nothing at all to go with the music! Here is both an unashamed wallow in nostalgia for us, and a taste of what they are missing for them, 1000 album sleeves, split into three sections; the '60s, '70s and '80s & '90s, 90s from music archivist, disc jockey, journalist, and former record-publicity executive Michael Ochs's enormous private collection. Both a trip down memory lane and a study in the evolution of cover art, this is a sweeping look at an underappreciated art form. Many are works of art, for example Andy Warhol's covers including the banana he designed for The Velvet Underground. Printed in eye-popping colour throughout, each has a caption of artist, title, year of release, record label, sleeve designer and extra notes. Beautifully presented by Taschen, 14 x 19.5cm, 576 pages.

'Peter Sellers and the RAF Gang Shows' is the sub-title of a story now told for the first time. The book reveals previously unknown film footage, photos, performances, broadcasts and recordings like two reels of 35mm film catalogued as 'RAF Gang Show, Akyab Island, Burma.' The footage of excellent quality shows a group of men in khaki Air Force uniforms. Among them is a rather skinny young man with a confident air who takes the lead in some staged high-jinks for the camera and later he is playing drums as part of a jazz quintet and acting in a two-handed sketch. That instantly recognisable face was Aircraftman 2223033 Richard Henry Sellers, better known as Peter Sellers, whose family came from the world of variety and vaudeville. Sellers was one of the biggest stars of the 1960s and 70s and his career began with characters such as Bluebottle on BBC Radio's The Goon Show. He achieved global fame as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther series but what is less well known is he served in the Royal Air Force Entertainment Unit, known as Gang Shows, for over three years. This is a tale of the formation and education of his remarkable talent as well as a small corner of WW2 history that is uniquely British. Groups of servicemen and women were sent all around the world with hampers full of theatrical props and costumes to rally the troops in distant outposts of Empire. 128pp, illus.

This keenly priced pack of three vintage journals reproduces classic comics covers from the 1950s, including Teen-Age Romances, Strange Worlds with a glamorous beauty on the cover, Baffling Mysteries and Web of Evil! Inside every journal are sample comic strips such as Sirens of Space! And lost worlds and vampires. Each fun and funky unique journal is either gridded, lined or blank, 18.34 x 1.65 x 25.5 cm. Pack of three journals.

Many consider this as Bob Dylan's finest album, featuring as it does Blowin' in the Wind, Girl from the North Country, Masters of War, Down the Highway, Bob Dylan's Blues, A Hard Rain's A'Gonna Fall, Don't Think Twice It's Alright, Bob Dylan's Dream, Oxford Town, Talkin' World War III Blues, Corrina Corrina, Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance and I Shall Be Free. These tracks never sound dated and we are thrilled to have this re-issued Definitive Collection 2018 Sony Music Entertainment 12" square stereo Columbia vinyl album. It has the iconic cover of the young Dylan in brown suede jacket, hands thrust into his jeans pockets with his smiling long haired girlfriend hugging his arm, trudging through the snow of the city down the middle of the street with parked cars alongside including an iconic 60s VW camper van. Includes VINYL MAGAZINE 2.

A bestseller on publication in 1985, this biography draws largely on the remaining 145 volumes of Cecil Beaton's manuscript diaries dating from 1922 to 1974 when he suffered his stroke. He began keeping a diary at Harrow, but destroyed it when he was about 20 because he was frightened that it might be found. He began his day to day diary at Cambridge in October 1922 and filled 56 volumes with closely scrawled material including his first trip to America from 1928-29, his year in Hollywood working on My Fair Lady, summing up a particular summer or weekend, an occasion such as the Duke of Windsor's wedding, and a fictional account of a day spent with his Delhi secretary Jean MacFarlane in 1944 which in fact was spent with his Cairo secretary Pamela Burns in 1942. In this biography, only the original manuscript diaries are quoted, especially when a published version also exists. Much of this material was at times unpublishable and it remains a candid portrait of its writer, and a valuable mirror to the many worlds in which he moved. Nothing has been changed from the expressions he and his circle used, many of which are no longer considered acceptable but they are as they were written at the time, some incredibly bitchy and snobbish and cruel. Cecil Beaton was not just a great photographer but one of Britain's greatest cultural icons who captured some of the most celebrated portraits of the 20th century and was also a designer of the iconic sets and costumes for the films My Fair Lady and Gigi. In 1980, he personally chose Hugo Vickers to be his biographer and entrusted him with his vast collection of diaries and letters written both personally and professionally over the course of his life. Drawing on five years of intensive research and interviews with the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Truman Capote, Princess Grace of Monaco and Sir John Gielgud, the biography explores Beaton's metamorphosis from being the child of a staid middle class family to an international figure mingling with the glittering stars of his age and detailing his great love for Greta Garbo and his private sense of failure. Republished 2020 paperback with Beaton family tree, 804pp, eight pages of colour and black and white photos.

Based on the TV programme The Why Workshop, this is a mind-bending collection of impossible questions viewers ask, from "Why are dusters yellow?" to "How do plant seeds know which way is Up?". For instance, why is loss of memory linked to having a baby? The answer is that the mother's brain undergoes changes to make it more emotionally sensitive, and as the authors point out, a baby will appreciate a mother who understands why it's crying rather than one who can recite 100 digits of pi. Why do men go bald? The cause is the male hormone testosterone, and an ancient Egyptian remedy was a medicinal lotion made of boiled porcupine quills, or alternatively a female greyhound's leg fried in oil with a donkey's hoof. So how and when did it become the norm to have three meals a day? The Romans only had lunch, and for the next two millennia it was two meals, but the Industrial Revolution with its longer working hours created a demand for three meals for working people. Now, you'll never get this one: in 1896, what was the 937th most popular name for a baby boy in America? Startlingly, it was Josephine. And the answers to the questions in the first sentence are that we don't know why dusters are yellow. Seed cells have microscopic balls called statoliths which drop to the bottom, so if that is where the roots should be, the stems grow in the opposite direction. Happy quizzing. 237pp, line drawings.

There was a widespread sense of loss when Victoria Wood died in 2016 while working on her biography, but as part of the research for that book 'Let's Do It', the critically acclaimed Sunday Times bestseller, her official biographer Jasper Rees uncovered a treasure chest of unseen work. From Victoria's first piece of comic prose for the school magazine, through to material written for the great TV shows of her maturity, this joyful hoard of unreleased material spans nearly half a century. Here are sketches, songs, stand-up monologues that no one else could have written, details of her university days in Birmingham in 1971, dialogues and exchanges at the bus stop complete with stage directions like 'Ext. The canal bridge. The man stands smoking. He finishes his cigarette, grinds it out on the bridge wall, throws it into the water and walks in the direction of his room. Int. School room the morning after the party...' 'Dorothy sees herself in black satin except Dorothy's got nothing to pop from the sort sexy ladies pop out of.' And there are rare photos in colour and black and white including the Bush Theatre 1978 where Victoria Wood and Julie Walters performed for the first time together from among the dozens of private album snapshots included. 285pp, illus.

In the very collectable Everyman Library Pocket edition with two pagemarkers, this unique collection of poetic tributes to the silver screen ranges over a full century from B-movies to Bollywood. From the silent film era to the present here are movie stars and bit players, art films and horror flicks, acclaimed directors and popcorn palaces. From Clark Gable to Jean Cocteau, more than a hundred poets riff on their movie memories - John Updike on theatres of his youth, Jack Kerouac and Robert Lowell on Harpo Marx, Sharon Olds on Marilyn Monroe, Louise Erdrich on John Wayne, May Swenson on the James Bond films, Terrance Hayes on early Black cinema, Maxine Kumin on Casablanca, and Richard Wilbur on The Prisoner of Zenda. Orson Welles, Leni Riefenstahl, and Ingmar Bergman share the spotlight with Shirley Temple, King Kong and Carmen Miranda, Ridley Scott, Hitchcock and Bresson. Beautiful design, 255pp. Remainder mark.