A sweeping work of historical fiction which winds through the nascent days of cinema in Paris and Fort Lee, New Jersey, America's first movie town, and the battlefields of Belgium during World War One. It tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man's doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder. For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days taking photographs of Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview him about 'The Electric Hotel', the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended his career of his muse, Sabine Montrose, the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated - celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude's memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him. The novel is a portrait of a man entranced by the magic of movie-making, a luminous romance, and a whirlwind trip through the heady, endlessly inventive days of early cinema. 449pp, paperback.

'The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust Inside The White House' is the sub-title of this fascinating work of popular history by the New York Times bestselling author. She uncovers the bedroom secrets of American Presidents and explores the surprising ways voters have reacted to their leaders' sex scandals. Alexander Hamilton had a steamy affair with a blackmailing prostitute. Warren G. Harding once had to hide his mistress in a White House closet. John F. Kennedy swam nude with female staff in the White House swimming pool. Narcissism, a thirst for power, a desire for importance seem to go hand in hand with sexual promiscuity. In her eye-opening book, Eleanor Herman revisits some of the sex scandals that have shocked the public and asks provocative questions such as does rampant adultery show a lack of character or the stamina needed to run a country? Do Americans now care more about issues other than a politician's sex life? What is sex like with the most powerful man in the world? And when America finally elects a female president, will she too have sexual escapades in the Oval Office? Chapters include Thomas Jefferson's Pursuit of Happiness, Grover Cleveland's High Character, Woodrow Wilson's Throbbing Pulses, FDR and the Good-Looking Ladies, Gary Hart and the Monkey Business That Changed Everything, Bill Clinton Did Not Have Sex With That Woman, Donald Trump Can Do Anything, and From Ooh-La-La to Bunga-Bunga: The Political Sex Scandals of Other Nations. 367pp, paperback.

A bright Coney Island Jew tries to rise in the gin-soaked world of WASP publishing, where his job is to mash the tragedy of the Rosenberg executions into pulp. This cunning and engrossing book is set in 1953. Simon Putnam is a recent Harvard graduate, newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm. He has entered a glittering milieu of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family on Coney Island. But his first assignment, editing "The Vixen, the Patriotic and the Frantic", a steamy bodice-ripper improbably based on a recent trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, makes him question the cost of admission into this exciting new profession, because Simon has a secret - his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel's. His dilemma grows thornier when he meets the author, the startlingly beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge, ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. As mysteries deepen, as the confluence of sex, money, politics and power spirals out of Simon's control, he must face what he's lost by exchanging the loving safety of his home for the witty, whiskey-soaked orbit of his charismatic boss, the legendary Warren Landry. But everyone is keeping secrets and ordinary events may conceal a diabolical plot. Includes passages from Anya's hilariously bad novel and illuminates a period of history with striking similarities to the current moment, plus timeless questions like how do we balance ambition and conscience, social mobility and cultural assimilation? Desirable roughcut edges to the 318pp in this US first edition.

Sub-titled 'The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938-1941', this sweeping ground-breaking epic combines military with social history, the world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict's first crucial years, Alan Allport tackles questions such as: could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the right ones? How well did the British organise and fight? How well did the British live up to their own values? What difference did the war make in the end to the fate of the nation? He also looks intimately at the changes in wartime society and culture and draws on a large cast of characters from the leading statesmen and military commanders who made the decisions, to the ordinary men, women and children who carried them out and lived through their consequences, to present a comprehensible and compelling single history of 46 million people. What he tries to explain is how a country that got so many things catastrophically wrong in the early years of the conflict managed not just to hold out against Hitler, but in the second anniversary of the war's outbreak in September 1941, to have apparently halted the rout and even perhaps to be constructing a plausible theory of victory. It ends on a note of cautious hope. With maps including the battlefield of May to June 1940, the Battle of Britain, major Luftwaffe night attacks, the North Atlantic, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Imperial Crisis spring 1941 and Bomber Command targets September 1939 to December 1941. The British-born historian's book has been published in the USA, 590 roughcut pages which are highly desirable in the US. 2021 Alfred A. Knopf New York.

This New York Times Best Book of the Year is sub-titled 'Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman'. Truman Capote's film Breakfast at Tiffany's is brought into focus in a book rich in incident and set among the glitterati of America's most glamorous era with juicy film gossip and behind-the-scenes insight on how Audrey Hepburn and designer Hubert de Givenchy created Holly Golightly's iconic style and that little black dress. Wasson goes beyond the legend to explore the woman and the film that captured the imagination of the nation in 1961, when the staid propriety of the Eisenhower years gave way to the glamorous modernity of the Kennedys. With a colourful cast of characters including Truman Capote, Edith Head, Givenchy, 'Moon River' composer Henry Mancini and of course the iconic Audrey Hepburn herself, Wasson in his exquisite portrait of Audrey Hepburn peels back her sweet façade to reveal a much more complicated and interesting woman and he captures a fascinating turning point in American history and a transformation of notions of fashion, film, sex and culture. It is worth reading just to find out exactly what went into making the amazing party scene; this is an enjoyable and informative book, everything a film book ought to be. 231pp, paperback, photos.

'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.

"He whom Pussy Po detains a captive in her silken chains, must curb the furious first of prey, Nor rend the warbler from his spray! Nor let his wild, ungenerous rage An unprotected foe engage. O, should cat of Darwin prove foe to pity, foe to love!" The grandfather to Charles Darwin wrote to his biographer, the poet Anna Seward in these veiled terms - the cats themselves escaped with their reputations unscathed. T.S. Eliot types a rhyming birthday party invitation to all Jellicle Cats for his four-year-old godson. Nikola Tesla exalts on the finest of all cats in the world. Jack Kerouac's mother grieves at the death of the family cat. This irresistible volume from the compiler of the bestselling series includes affectionate missives about our feline companions from Charles Dickens, Raymond Chandler, Anne Frank, Elizabeth Taylor, Jack Lemmon writing to Walter Matthau, Edward Lear, Robert Southey, and many more - 27 letters capturing the profound delight of having or observing a cat. The letters are as revealing of the writers as they are of their beloved felines. 128 page paperback with rough-cut edges. Reminder mark

Sub-titled 'Thrilling Tales of the Sea Volume Three' here is seafaring before the 20th century bristling with peril. Illustrated with beautiful woodcuts and maps chapters cover The Loss of the Fleetwood of Boston, The Dromahair and Dreadful Sufferings at Sea: 'We cleared away the wreck as much as possible, and try to get some canvass to steady her...' 'We lived on half a biscuit a day. A barrel of salt beef and a barrel of salt pork were under the hatches, and after the storm somewhat abated we could just get at them by watching our chances between the seas. This was all the food we had...' Other stricken craft are the derelict junk Isukin Maru seven months adrift, the Milton, the Brigantine Mary T. Kimball and eleven days on a raft, the Psyché living on an open boat on sharks' blood and the wreck of the Amy Turner. There are stories of survivors and orphans at sea, the lost ship Margaret Tyson, the wreck of the schooner Leader, the loss of Jane Lowden and the terrible sufferings of shipwrecked crews, of the captain saved after 109 days on a wreck where passengers and crew starved, and tragedy and heroism in the Irish Sea. And finally mid-Pacific Crusoes with the tale of the Seladon and 2,000 miles in an open boat, tales of starving men and cannibalism, a castaway?s murder mystery, a wandering minstrel story, whale ships and castaways at Galapagos Islands. 254pp, paperback, illus.

Our favourite cats and dogs all need a special friend they can batter to bits, and the brilliant concept for this volume is to photograph a collection of dismembered toys and match some of them with a commentary from their owners - the savage canines and felines who show their love by inflicting maximum injury. An aggrieved black and white toy glares out of the picture and tells the story of how he was rescued from a plastic bin in an all-night mart by none other than his hero, Frank Sinatra himself. Frank came in with his girlfriend for a bottle of Jack Daniels and in no time at all our furry friend was in the limo heading for the concert. But he never got to hear his idol sing, because the inebriated Frank seized him and started to chew on his fur, and the bodyguard threw him out of the car. A cute legless bear warns "Never get divorced in California". When Johnny ran off with Lila to Vegas, everything went fine at first and their bear Lucky went everywhere with them. When Lila got her break in a reality show, though, Johnny was unable to handle the disparity and took it out on the bear, insisting the injuries had been inflicted by their dog, though as the bear got to stay with the now-rich partner he wasn't complaining too much. Polyphemus, a melancholy long-eared toy with a gaping hole where his eyes should be, laments the fact that his master Odysseus, the author of his wound, gets star billing from literary types like Homer or James Joyce. Rabbits, gonks, a battered Ernie from Sesame Street all lament their fates. No page numbers, 130 colour photos. Softback.
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"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.