Gloucester Crescent is a curving, leafy street, tucked between Camden Town and Primrose Hill, filled with the sound of clacking typewriters and children playing. Unremarkable in many ways unless you notice the lady in the van outside one house and the familiar-looking famous residents crossing the road. The son of Jonathan Miller writes his memoir, written the eyes of a growing child, the story of a very particular family and their circle of brilliant, idealistic and intellectual friends in the London of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. William explores the back gardens of homes of his famous neighbours, attends dramatic rehearsals with his dad, fails exams and is bullied at school, gets drugs from the philosopher A. J. Ayer's wife, and tries to watch the moon landing with Alan Bennett and a room full of writers. But against this backdrop of lively anecdote and hitherto-unseen domestic detail, William struggles at school and at home and his at times heart-breaking memoir is about how we grow up and move on from our childhoods, and what happens when we come back. A funny, tender and moving story of a young boy trying to find his own identity, a memoir about love, life, art and whole of life. Wonderful. 336pp, paperback, photos and other illus.

The definitive portrait with unseen photographs by iconic photographer Terry O'Neill, this is like gazing through a window at the most extraordinary and exciting moments in Elton John's life complete with the madness and style. O'Neill worked for many years and took more than 5,000 photographs of Elton John from intimate back stage shots to huge stadium concerts. See Elton laden with packages leaving the Cartier shop for his Rolls Royce, during a soundcheck at the huge Dodge Stadium in Los Angeles where he truly did rock the world and had a football knockabout during rehearsals, under a huge fluffy rug on a bed reading Esquire and Penthouse magazines, wearing crazy glasses for a photo shoot aboard a plane, working with Gus Dudgeon at Caribou Ranch Recording Studio 1975, sharing a breakfast table with his white cat, signing his Captain Fantastic albums while watching TV at home, multifunctioning riding his stationary bicycle and taking phone calls in the bathroom, in sequin costumes, wearing designer labels, doing his trademark famous jump with hands still on the piano keyboard, with his long term collaborator Bernie Taupin, at home with his dogs in Windsor, dancing with Kiki Dee in 1976 when they released their classic duet, posing with his likeness in Madam Tussauds, with Diana Ross hosting the Rock Music Awards in 1975, posing with many famous names, behind the scenes at Watford Football Club, with his mother and grandmother and posing on locations such as the Palais Garnier Opera House in Paris. Elton John clearly loves the limelight! Truly a superb gallery, colour and atmospheric black and white, 256pp, 20.8 x 26cm.
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One of the world's greatest blues guitarists, Stevie Ray Vaughan had a meteoric career, assisted by a high-profile collaboration with David Bowie, before his life was cruelly cut short in a helicopter crash in 1990 when he was only in his thirties. This tribute book prints extracts from interviews from Guitar World magazine, not only with SRV but also interviews with friends and collaborators including his bandmates bassist Tommy Shannon, drummer Chris Layton and keyboardist Reese Wynans. A highlight of the book is the "lost interviews" with Vaughan between 1986 and 1989 when he spoke revealingly to Andy Aledort. At the time he had just left the rehab centre which also helped his friend Eric Clapton. SRV reminisces about his first records by Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters and B. B. King. He describes how addiction had let his self-centredness and ego get out of control, particularly when everyone was telling him he was wonderful. The lyrics of blues numbers tended to emphasize hurt and pain, but Vaughan eventually found that some songs are kinder than others. On the road, he describes repeated technical problems with amps, and Vaughan ended up with a combination of a Dumble, a Marshall, a Bassman and a Super Reverb. He reminisces about the Montreux Jazz Festival of 1982 when Bowie said "Stevie was so complete, so vital and inventive with the form" and asked him to play on his next record, which turned out to be the smash hit Let's Dance. Bowie said their collaboration was one of the greatest musical experiences of his life. Vaughan's last show was opening for Clapton at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre in Wisconsin. He hitched a lift home with some of Clapton's team, who were all lost in the crash. 254pp, a Backbeat paperback, photos.

Royal biographer Andrew Morton needs no introduction and this superb biography, published just before the late Queen's death in 2022, gives an overview of her whole reign, covering the same period as the blockbuster TV series The Crown, with a final chapter full of pertinent comments on controversial members such as Prince Andrew and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. In her teenage years the young princess was particularly admired for her tapdancing and acting skills, and in the press her name was linked to several likely suitors. "Porchie", who later became her racing manager was, unlike Lord Euston, "safe in taxis", but when Elizabeth fell in love with Philip there was no indecision. Their early married life was shattered by the death of the King when, as has often been described, duty started to come first. The marriage had its ups and downs, with Philip's name sometimes being linked with glamorous women, but friends commented how even later in life there was a flirtatious relationship between the two and the spark never left. In the Cold War years the Queen played a diplomatic role, meeting the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and putting him at his ease by saying she had no idea what all the cutlery was for either. She had a serious role in influencing public opinion, for instance when she shook the hand of IRA leader Martin McGuinness. President Kennedy's wife Jackie criticised the Queen's style and said she was heavy going, but as Princess Margaret commented, "That's what she's for". Margaret's unhappy relationship with Peter Townshend and her subsequent divorce from Antony Armstrong-Jones are fully discussed, as are the spate of royal divorces which initially caused the Queen great distress. The story of Prince Charles's marriage and affair with Camilla Parker Bowles is familiar ground, but there are interesting details such as the letter to the Queen from Andrew Parker Bowles's fellow officers complaining that the affair with Camilla was bad for the regiment. William and Catherine, Harry and Meghan also feature in the royal story. 427pp, colour photos.

With exemplary Cases From Russia, Ukraine, and Poland, the author starts this compelling study with the story of her grandfather Morris Greenfield and the way he survived the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. Somehow he finally made it to the United States in 1930, fleeing from the onset of the Holocaust. Morris was not a rebel, but put his talents to adapting. Anti-semitism was a fact of his life, but it failed to crush him. Jewish children were excluded from the school in his Russian village, but the Orthodox priest sneaked him into class. In 1907 he was drafted and found himself in Vladivostok, where the antisemitism he encountered prompted him to desert and head for America, travelling by train and crossing to Shanghai, then taking a German ship to Naples and New York. He was supported by his brother who was already there and had sent him money, but returned to visit his widowed mother and found himself in a military prison. Morris got away during the civil war and survived a series of picaresque adventures hand to mouth, supplying authorities with commodities in return for protection, and finally with his wife returned to America for good. In the main part of the book the author considers three more cases in which anti-semitism constituted a challenge not only to Jews but also to gentiles confronted with its extreme consequences. Frequently Jews were caught up in the bind between fighting for civil rights within their native country, and asserting the right to their own communal and cultural identity within the nation state. The first of the author's three examples focuses on the resistance of early 20th century Russian intellectuals against discrimination, in partnership with Jewish leaders and the newly created state Duma. The second follows the 1927 Paris trial of Russin-born Sholem Schwarzbard who shot and killed the ex-Ukrainian leader as an act of vengeance on behalf of Jews. The trial focused on whether this was justified. Finally the author examines reactions to the legacy of Andrzej Bobkowski when his memoirs were revealed to have had anti-semitic elements edited out. 260pp, paperback.

This roller-coaster of a book is impossible to put down as the author tells the story of the charismatic entrepreneur Sam Phillips, who became his friend in 1979. Credited with inventing Rock 'n' Roll by launching Elvis's career, in 1952 Sam Phillips pioneered Sun Records in Memphis, a recording company specifically designed to bring forward Black talent. His commitment to all kinds of equality was later consolidated when he founded an all-female radio station. In 1950 Black artists had no place to go to record in the South, and Sam wanted to open up an area of freedom within the artistic community regardless of colour, so in 1952 Sam and Jimmy Connolly established Sun Records in his Memphis Recording Studios, with the help of Sam's wife Becky and her business acumen. For the first time the couple were able to own a house with their young sons Knox and Jerry. Sam recorded the best of Black and white talent, but unusually most of the behind-the-scenes workers were also Black. Jimmy Bragg, the world's champion smoke ring blower, was lead singer of the Prisonaires, inmates of the Tennessee state Penitentiary, and his song "Just walkin' in the rain" was a massive hit for the studio, putting them on the map locally and nationally. Howard Seratt's country gospel music was a new direction for Sam, who at the same time had not forgotten a kid who did a personal recording for his mother in the studio some years previously. He invited the nineteen year old Elvis to a session, which did not go well until Sam unearthed the old blues number "That's All right, Mama" and Elvis's voice really took off. Sales were phenomenal and a legend was born. By the late 50s Johnny Cash was another Memphis sensation. Jerry Lee Lewis was the most naturally talented person Sam had ever worked with, although he was an unstable performer and was ricocheting from marriage to marriage. Jerry went on the road with Chuck Berry, and although Jerry Lee was the undisputed headliner, they came to blows, sometimes literally, over who was going to close the show. A fascinating action-packed narrative. 763pp, discography, photos.

Colourful carved and decorated totem poles, beautiful beaded soft supple moccasins, fully beaded dresses and accessories, the deer dancer, the Bear Clan Hat, sky messages making material offerings to the spirits for guidance, bentwood boxes, chests, masks and canoes from British Columbia decorated with swirling symmetrical colourful pattern carvings, porcupine quills, birch bark and sweet grass used by the Ojibwe (also known as Chippewa) keep North American native traditional art alive. Here are garments of great celebrated leaders such as the shirt of Crazy Horse to pictures of Indians of All Tribes protesting at Alcatraz about their rights and properties, all about Indian and American education and the drive for justice and political recognition which led to new confrontations at Wounded Knee and Washington, DC. This magnificent celebration of Native American cultures and civilisations combines a wide-ranging text by scholars, writers and readers from tribes like the Standing Rock Sioux and Mohawk and Cherokee and Maya and many more, exploring the profound meaning of ceremonial life and its intimate connections with the land. There is a poignant chronicle of the impact of Indian boarding schools on Native families and cultures, the activist days of the 1970s and poems by Louise Erdrich and others and eloquent examples of a literary renaissance. 320 full page gorgeous colour illustrations depicting wondrous examples of indigenous cultures. 336pp in very large softback, 22.86 x 30cm, originally published in 2004 to commemorate the opening of the Museum of the American Indian.

In 1936 the abdication of King Edward VIII in order to marry Wallis Simpson dramatically divided public opinion. One of the King's high-profile supporters was Winston Churchill, who had tears in his eyes when he visited Edward as he prepared to leave his flamboyant Windsor residence Fort Belvedere for the last time. A friend of the Duke remarked that "there was nothing in him which understood the intellectual or spiritual sides of life", and several people, including Wallis, described him as never having progressed beyond boyhood. Wallis confided to a friend, "Can you imagine a more terrible fate than to have to live up publicly to the legend of a love you don't feel?" This fascinating book tells the story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as they now became, in the years following the abdication. Edward initially stayed with the Rothschilds, running up huge bills which no-one knew who was supposed to pay for. The Rothschilds' patience disappeared when Edward started to play the bagpipes at 3 am. Following marriage to Wallis, the couple travelled round Europe staying with friends, some of whom were Fascists. Wallis's lawyer worked for Hitler's top officials and the couple's Nazi sympathies were viewed with alarm. The couple were not to be invited to any embassy. In August 1939 the Duke telegraphed Hitler asking him not to go to war, to which Hitler replied that the "correct channel" must be found. When war broke out, Mountbatten took his destroyer across the channel to collect the couple. The Duke was reluctantly despatched to be governor of the Bahamas. En route they stayed in Portugal, where their security was ordered to shoot them if they fell into German hands during visits to the casino. In the Bahamas the couple lived a rackety lifestyle which included an unsolved murder in their entourage, and after the war they followed a monotonously swinging lifestyle in Paris. Archive photos, 410 pages.

We follow beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman. With diamond rings on her fingers and bespoke brogues on her feet, Ilia steps fearlessly into the world of cricket and riding to hounds. But, without prospect of work in a bleak, war-ravaged England, Esmond remembers the glorious ease of Cairo during his series of leave from the desert campaign and he decides to move there to start a bookshop, a branch of W. H. Smith's. But growing resistance to foreign interests, especially British, erupts in the 1952 uprising, and the Cairo Fire burns much of downtown, including the English bookshop. From letters and journals read only after the couple's death, from photographs found coiled in a film cylinder, from gifts and love tokens and mementos, the author pieces together the discoveries her parents made. It is a luminous memoir of a fraught union with unrequited hopes, richly intertwined with myth, the river Lethe feeling as real as the Nile. Vivid recollections of Cairo swirl with ever-present dreams of a city where Warner's parents, friends and associates are still restlessly wandering. 'An entrancing weave of memoir, history, autobiography and fiction, this is one of Marina Warner's most beautiful works.' 416pp, illus. and photos, paperback.

Real-life stories of heartbreak and hope, direct from the very frontline of the NHS. London born Lysa left school to join a travelling circus, working in Europe for four years as an acrobat and ring-mistress. In a slight change of direction, she qualified first as a nurse and then as a paramedic and finally an emergency care practitioner, spending over 20 years saving lives in the UK. Today she is happiest in the mountains of Tuscany but still works shifts in a London Urgent Care Centre. A teenage boy lies on the pavement, bleeding from a stab wound. A distraught mum watches in mute shock as her daughter suffers a terrifying fatal asthma attack. A young girl is gang-raped and her stricken boyfriend takes an overdose. A disturbed young man flings himself in front of a speeding train at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Few people can imagine living in a world where such situations are part of everyday life. Yet for veteran paramedic Lysa Walder these and thousands of other emergency call outs are part of a day's work - scenes of tragedy, heroism, loss and horror, but also stories of triumph and humour. Working for over 20 years in the London Ambulance Service, the world's biggest and busiest free service for much of that time, she reveals what it's really like to work face-to-face with death and destiny every day. 282 page paperback.