'From 1964-66 Ossie Clark and his designs were frequently on the fashion pages of Vogue and other journals, and his girlfriend Celia Birtwell's prints were used for a Simon Massey collection... Janice Wainwright was also featured by Anne Batt of the Evening News, modelling her own 'gold lamé pants' with pop singer P. J. Proby (himself notorious for splitting his skin-tight trousers on Ready, Steady, Go) to prove that 'five of London's swankiest restaurants' would admit such a couple.' Swinging through the sixties and the entire second half of the 20th century, here is a history of the Royal College of Art 1948-2014. The worldwide influence of four charismatic and powerful women in charge of the college's School of Fashion changed the face of British and international style. Through their rigorous determination to produce nothing but the best, and the top-level design stars who emerged as the result, they have been largely responsible for the story of British and International fashion. Each individual professor after Madge Garland complemented the work of her predecessor. Janey Ironside, the sparkling innovator, put a modern spin on the stable foundations and was a brave and rigorous pioneer in an age of considerable resistance. Joanne Brogden consolidated what both the others had done, shepherding the school successfully into a competitive commercial world, ready for high-level industry. When Professor Wendy Dagworthy took over in the final decade of the 20th century, she took the school into a new era of British design excellence in ready-to-wear clothing. The book celebrates how the professors established links for their students between the College and famous brands such as Burberry, Kenzo Givenchy, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, Karl Lagerfeld and Max Mara. Chapters cover their personal lives, drinking problems, shows, marriages, London life, designer-dressmakers, 60s style, RCA takeover, galas and glamour and royalty, Lady Di's dress, the post-punk rebellion, designers to the rock stars and resignations and surprise departures. Superbly illustrated with full page and dozens of other colour photographs, rare black and white photographs, fashion stills, posters and design sketches. 230 heavyweight pages, 21 x 26cm.
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At the height of his fame as a portrait painter Lucian Freud could pick and choose his sitters, rejecting Jerry Hall's "plastic glamour" but completing a magnificent full-length military portrait of his old friend Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles. The second volume of this roller-coaster biography opens in 1968 with Freud on the brink of stardom but not quite there yet, still attracting lower prices and less publicity than his friend and rival Francis Bacon. In the opening chapters Freud pursues his model Jacquetta Eliot down to her ancestral place in Cornwall, reporting that "they ate off solid silver plates, even shepherd's pie". He changes his agent after discovering that Bacon has advised the Marlborough Gallery that Freud's work is overpriced. Freud's colleague Frank Auerbach also had a Jewish refugee background and their friendship developed as Francis Bacon faded. Painting out of the window is something Freud did when life was stressed and his back garden paintings from Gloucester Terrace, following the death of his father, are a highly prized departure from portraiture in their detailed depiction of urban decay. Freud admitted that he was irritated by Stanley Spencer ("I thought his paintings were suburban") but acknowledged that they had something in common. When Jacquetta became pregnant, her husband Peregrine accepted the child and the affair with Freud ended soon after. Meanwhile Sonia Orwell suggested bumping off Bacon's lover, but reason prevailed. Freud was a compulsive gambler and at least one bookie was paid with a portrait. The search for models was not always easy, and Feaver interviews Freud's daughters about the experience of being painted nude. Andrew Lloyd Webber was keen for Freud to paint his wife and "even threatened me with theatre tickets". The performer Leigh Bowery was introduced to Freud in 1986 and he in turn introduced his friend Sue Tilley, the fleshy benefits supervisor of several iconic canvases, paintings which startle by their physical realism - and he has tattooed swallows at the base of Kate Moss's back. Never a dull moment in this astonishing life. 568pp, paperback, black and white and colour photos.

A superb psychological study of a literary genius, this biography of Roald Dahl manages to peel back the layers of an infamously complex man with a brusque manner. Roald Dahl was a much-loved author and creator of many iconic literary characters like Matilda and the BFG and who had a lifelong partnership with Quentin Blake the illustrator. He considered his vocation as a storyteller to be as bold and exciting as an explorer's and, in his writing for children, he was able to tap into a child's viewpoint throughout his life. He created tales that were exotic in scenario, invested with a moral, and filled with vibrant characters. Dennison re-evaluates the received narrative surrounding Dahl - that of school sporting hero, daredevil pilot, and wartime spy-turned-author. He devotes a large chunk of the book to Dahl's Norwegian family and schooldays, their combination of warmth, tragedy, inspiration and savagery, all brilliantly evoked. He examines surviving primary resources as well as Dahl's extensive literary output, to tell the story of a man who identified as a rule-breaker, iconoclast and romantic, insider and outsider, and as a child's friend. He gets to Dahl's flawed, human core and mania. 264pp, colour photos.

The friendship between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift dominated the gossip columns of the 1950s. The public did not realise that Monty was gay, and he went out of his way to date women while conducting affairs with Hollywood names including Roddy McDowall and Truman Capote, and idolising James Dean and Marlon Brando. Clift had extraordinarily good looks while Taylor was widely acclaimed as the world's most beautiful woman, and the stills of their film A Place in the Sun are a photographer's dream. Elizabeth had her own problems and it was during her marriage to her second husband Michael Wilding that the famous episode in which she saved Monty's life occurred. In 1956 Taylor was starring with Monty in the film Raintree County and Monty attended a dinner party at the Wildings' Hollywood home up a precipitous and dark road. Monty was drinking and on the way back he crashed the car. As news reached the Wildings, Elizabeth raced down the hill to pull Monty free from the wreckage. Later Monty repaid the debt by providing his heart medication to revive Elizabeth when she collapsed. The accident left Monty with a damaged left side of the face, which directors did their best to accommodate but which inevitably affected his career, leading to smaller roles. Taylor insisted that Monty should be her leading man in their third and final co-starring film, Suddenly Last Summer. Two years later everything changed as Taylor fell victim to a consuming passion for Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra, and meanwhile Clift was seeing a lot of Marilyn Monroe after they starred together in her last film The Misfits in 1961. In spite of some jealousy of Marilyn, Taylor offered to help with her substance abuse and general struggle with life. Monty's death of a heart attack in 1966 was a lasting sadness to Taylor and in the 1980s she became a high-profile campaigner for AIDS sufferers, influenced by friendships with several gay people including Monty. 389pp, colour photos.

A life of glamour and tragedy set against cultural and political movements of 20th century Europe. 'Toto' Koopman (1908-1991) like her contemporaries Lee Miller and Vita Sackville-West, lived with an independent spirit more typical of the men of her generation. She moved in the worlds of fashion, society, art and politics with an insouciant ease which stirred both admiration and envy. Sphinx-like and tantalising, Toto conducted her life as a game, driven by audacity and style. Her biographer chases his enigmatic subject through the many roles and lives she inhabited, though her beauty, charisma and taste for the extraordinary which made her an exuberant fixture of Paris fashion and café society, her intelligence and steely sense of self which drove her towards bigger things, culminating in espionage during World War Two for which she was imprisoned by the Nazis in Ravensbrück. After the horrors of the camp, she found solace in Erica Brausen, the German art dealer who launched the career of Francis Bacon, and the two women lived out their lives together, surrounded by cultural luminaries like Luchino Visconti, but even in her later decades, Toto remained impossible for anyone to possess. The book chases her from her childhood in Java to Paris where she was a celebrated model, the concentration camp, to the vibrant art scene of postwar London as muse of the Hanover Gallery and finally to Panarea, the remote Aeolian island where she and Erica presided over a glittering social scene. She flouted convention and had notorious affairs with famous men and women making our subject scandalous and beguiling. 244pp, mono photos. Tiny remainder mark.

Mountbatten described himself as the "the best-known figure the Navy has produced since Lord Nelson" and his wife Edwina was not far behind, known to gossip columnists for her wealth and an ever-changing cavalcade of lovers. Less public was the suspicion of Mountbatten's homosexuality, to which the author devotes a chapter of recent evidence. On the fringes of the Royal Family and with the freedom associated with the Navy, Dickie frequently challenged the values and codes of his class. In young manhood Dickie's closeness to the Prince of Wales, later to abdicate as Edward VIII in order to marry Wallis Simpson, established him in royal circles, although the pair were not enthusiastic about Wallis. Their marriage was the subject of much public interest from the first, with Edwina's wedding lingerie featured in the press. Edwina soon felt trapped and established her own coterie of admirers, known as her "ginks", when Dickie was away of naval service, and her close friend Jean Norton was married but known to be having an affair with Max Beaverbrook. Finally Dickie confronted Edwina and they agreed to an open marriage in which both were free to have other partners. Yola Letellier was Dickie's principal long-term mistress, while Edwina's lovers included one known as the "Cuban Heel", and also reportedly the singer Paul Robeson. The outbreak of war in 1939 was in different ways the making of both Dickie and Edwina. As commander of HMS Kelly, Dickie's judgement was called into question, but he went on to become Head of Combined Operations for the Invasion of France. Edwina was acutely aware of her Jewish heritage and threw herself into work with refugees. As the last Viceroy of India Mountbatten achieved international recognition and in later years his mentoring of the then Prince Charles was not without controversy. What is the true story behind controversies such as the Dieppe Raid and Indian Partition, the love affair between Edwina and Nehru, and Mountbatten's assassination by the IRA in 1979? 490pp, photos.

A powerful Second World War story of three brothers and their sense of hope during the Holocaust, the book reads like a thriller. Harry Lenga was born in 1919 to a family of Chassidic Jews in Kozhnitz, Poland, and this true story narrated by him from his early life takes him through the ghettos, labour and death camps and early stages of 'liberation' where he and his brothers survived against the odds by a combination of luck, tremendous ingenuity, inner strength and belief, and because they could fix watches, a skill they had learned from their father, their lives were saved. Upon the German invasion of Poland, the Lenga family was upended and Harry and his brothers Mailekh and Moishe lived under the most devastating conditions imaginable, with death always imminent. They fixed watches for the Germans in the ghettos and the brutal slave labour camps of occupied Poland and Austria, from Wolanow and Starachowice to Auschwitz and Ebensee. The brothers endured, bartered, worked, prayed and lived to see liberation. In the retelling of their story there is little complaint or self-pity, and Harry's heartening story is an account of his childhood, the lessons learned from his own father, his harrowing tribulations, and the inspiring life before, during and after the war in a singular and vital story. It is a profoundly moving tribute to fortitude, resilience, brotherly love and faith. 'I really came to appreciate the life and death significance of having something as simple as a pair of shoes, a battered metal soup bowl, or a shave,' - Simon Scarrow. "So as a joke about the ARBEIT MACHT SREI ('Work Makes You Free') sign on the gate of the Auschwitz 1 camp. We would point to the smoke and the fire coming up from the crematoriums and say, 'Probably tomorrow that will be our ticket to freedom.'" 324pp, many photos.

Firbank (1910-2000) was a Canadian/Welsh author, farmer, soldier and engineer who enlisted during the Second World War and was awarded a Military Cross. After his marriage ended, he gave his wife Esmé their Dyffryn farm. He only returned to Snowdonia in 1993 after a spell living in the Far East, and he died in north Wales. Written on the eve of the Second World War, his memoir tells the remarkable story of how as a 21 year old Thomas decided on impulse to purchase the 2,400-acre hill farm in the rugged, inhospitable mountains of Snowdonia, and how he and his wife struggled to build it back to prosperity. It is a thrilling tale of tragedy and triumph, a portrait of a lost era when farming was a communal endeavour, offering precious insights into conservation and sustainability relevant for today. This new edition of the international bestseller is introduced with a foreword by nature writer Patrick Barkham and includes an afterword by a contemporary Welsh sheep farmer. But beware the thinking of the time - Firbank mercilessly kills foxes, drained 'bogs and swamps', fertilised natural grassland and 'harrowed' square miles of 'matted pasture'. As an Englishman, his writing is suffused with respect and generosity towards Welsh people yet sometimes his humour is directed against them. He and Esmé break the record for the fastest ascent of the 14 hills above 3,000 feet in Wales and, published in 1940, his is an uplifting tale of personal development, resilience and strong communities with a spiritual connection to the land on virtually every page. 319pp, eight pages of colour and archive photos.

Yeoman Warder of Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, the Ravenmaster gives a wonderfully personal insight about these powerful, unpredictable and highly intelligent birds. For centuries, the Tower of London has been home to a group of famous avian residents and each year the ravens are seen by millions of visitors, as much an integral part of the Tower as its ancient stones. But their role is even more important than that - legend has it that if the ravens should ever leave, the Tower will crumble into dust, and great harm will befall the kingdom. One man is personally responsible for ensuring that such a disaster never comes to pass - the Ravenmaster. Current occupant Christopher Skaife memorably describes the ravens' formidable intelligence, their idiosyncrasies, and their occasionally wicked sense of humour and he delves into the folklore and superstitions that surround the birds and their unique home. We find out that there must be a least six ravens at the Tower and about one of the ravens named Erin who doesn't like him, how their care comes first, and how he had to miss a wedding anniversary meal with his wife because one was ill, and his tribute to Munin who died of old age just as Skaife was finishing the book. 241pp, paperback with colour photos.

Educated at Cambridge but born in Oxford in 1941, Miriam Margolyes is a veteran of stage and screen and an acclaimed voice artist, and a potty mouth she has too! 'I have no secrets. I decided very early on in life that the strongest position was to be completely open.' Creator of myriad unforgettable characters from Lady Wiseadder to Professor Sprout, Miriam is the nation's favourite and most cheeky national treasure. At the age of 80 she finally decided to tell her life story. Find out how being conceived during an air raid gave her curly hair, what pranks led her to being known as the naughtiest girl ever to be educated at Oxford High School, and how as a teenager she ended up posing nude for Augustus John. Find out what she did when Warren Beatty asked 'Do you fuck?' and much more, with a cast list stretching from Martin Scorsese to Barbra Streisand, a cross-dressing Leonardo DiCaprio to an incomprehensible Isaiah Berlin, this biography is as full of life and surprises as its shockingly honest author. 438pp, many photos including colour.