A two-generation saga of the Manners family, Resolution shares the history of John Masters, Marquis of Granby, who famously led a cavalry charge during the Seven Years' War and his two sons - Charles, who was involved in Whig politics and reconciling with American rebels during their War for Independence, and Robert, who embarked on a naval career and became the post-captain of the Resolution as he commanded a major line-of-battle ship in the largest British fleet ever to operate so far from home waters up to that date. Admire the achievements of the brothers, from Charles balancing the debates of the influence of British 'king and Parliament' in America, but also the seeming increase in 'Royal authority' in Britain at the expense of British people's own 'life, liberty and property', to Robert's improvement of the armed, 74-gun Resolution under his command which he wrote about, claiming it 'to be the fastest sailer of any line battle ship or frigate in the West Indies.' Discover how John Masters, Marquis of Granby, became a hero after the Seven Years War because he was, unusually for the time, generous and concerned for his men, giving him the titles of 'mob's hero' and 'father of the army' and inspiring works such as 'The British Hero', which was written by Richard Rolt and set to music by William Boyce. Learn how Granby was passionate about fox hunting at Belvoir Castle and breeding racehorses at the family sitting Chevely Park in Cambridgeshire, and find out how he struggled in the political sphere as he would 'tremble like a woman' whenever he was about to public speak - despite holding an elected seat in the House of Commons. The lives of the two brothers are eloquently interwoven, whether writing about Charles' hesitation at ending the war with American rebels so promptly as it would blight his younger brother's chances at a rapid promotion, discussing how Charles' inheritance of land and title meant he could help young Robert accrue funds to live ashore in London and allow the brothers to grow closer, or reflecting on Charles' decision to stay at Cheveley Park to canvass on behalf of Robert's electoral prospects while he was at sea after 1780. Vivid images range from landscapes of an English man-of-war entering Portsmouth Harbour by Dominic Serres, 'A view of Belvoir Castle from the South West with Belvoir Hunt in Full Cry' by Thomas Badeslade in 1730, and 'The Battle of the Saintes', 12 April 1782 by Lieutenant William Elliott RN, to portraits including John Manners in the uniform of the Royal Horse Guards (the blues) by Sir Joshua Reynolds, a pastel commissioned by Granby of Charles aged eighteen by Hugh Douglas Hamilton in 1771, and Robert aged fourteen in midshipman's uniform by Hamilton completed in 1772 when Robert decided to join the Royal Navy. Family tree and glossary, maps, black and white and colour images, pagemarker, 482pp.

The London Brick Company of Stewartby and Peterborough has served the building industry by rail and by road. This second, fully revised edition from Nostalgia Road celebrates the company's history. The guide shares the company's growth, its acquisitions and its delivery service as well as details on the brick-making process. The book explores how the firm emerged from a series of acquisitions of different brick-making firms from the 1880s until a new company emerged as the London Brick Company Ltd. in 1936. It shares how the company grew to become the major producer of bricks in the country and the biggest brick company in the world. Learn how the organisation was well ahead in social thinking by offering better conditions and higher pay levels for their staff in accord with their philanthropic ideals which were similar to the Quakers and the Cadbury family. Discover how, in 1974, the firm bought Whittlesey as the clay reserves in the Peterborough area could be better managed under the control of one company rather than multiple. The book also offers insight into how elite the firm was, highlighting that one of the biggest benefits of the semi-dry brick industry, as typified by the London Brick Company, was the fact that huge quantities of bricks could be produced cheaply by use of the continuous kiln. There are also fantastic images to bring the company's history to life, including a landscape shot of the horse and rail transport at the company's No.2 yard near Peterborough in the late 1800s and a photograph of a London Brick Company vehicle called the Foden DG6 which was a 6-wheeler similar to the brick vehicles requisitioned by the Ministry of Supply in the Second World War. Paperback, 8" x 8.3", colour and black and white images, 52pp.

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.

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

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.

Immortalised as the dashing Patrice de Sauveterre in Nancy Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love, Gaston Palewski was Nancy's lover in the war years when her marriage was disintegrating. Nancy's husband, the good-looking Honourable Peter Rodd ("Prod"), was universally regarded as unbelievably boring, a view Nancy shared. This lively and readable double biography recounts the intertwined lives of Nancy and Gaston. The six Mitford sisters are the stuff of legend and in her teenage years Nancy shared the Fascist sympathies of her sisters Diana and Unity, but at some point Nancy saw the light and during the war was requested by a friend at the War Office to infiltrate the Free French Officers' Club. De Gaulle had set up the Free French headquarters in London at 4 Carlton Gardens, and Gaston was de Gaulle's right hand man, escaping to England from Tangiers at the start of the French occupation. While De Gaulle would dine at the Ritz, the Connaught or the Savoy, Gaston preferred the Dorchester or the Travellers' club, though he wearied of London life and briefly returned to command the Free French forces in North Africa. Nancy met Gaston in 1942, both of them habitues of London's upper class bomb shelter, "the Dorch". He was everything a classic French lover should be, sensitive, someone who actually liked women, a good lover. After the war Nancy went to live in Paris, where she wrote prolifically, while her romance with Gaston gradually subsided into friendship. The affair provided Nancy with many memorable scenes in her novels, for instance the corridor-creeping at country house parties, and Nancy also drew on the experiences of her friends Diana Cooper and Diana Mosley, neither of whose marriages were monogamous. A fascinating portrait of an era. 290pp. Remainder mark, US import.