Biography & Autobiography

In this funny and poignant memoir and cultural history, the television personality, columnist, and author of Drag pays homage to Lou Reed's groundbreaking album Transformer on its fiftieth anniversary and recalls its influence on his coming of age and...

Was Philip de Laszlo a secret agent and was MI5's source really as they claimed? Did an enemy spy really paint the portrait of the young Princess Elizabeth? In 1917, noted society portrait painter Philip de Laszlo, who painted such luminaries as the...

**Voted Wisden Cricket Monthly's best cricket book ever in 2019**WINNER, BEST CRICKET BOOK, BRITISH SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2010_________________Golden Boy is a blistering expose of the tumultuous Lillee/Marsh/Chappells era of Australian cricket, as viewed...

'The definitive biography' Roy StrongThe remarkable story of Bess of Hardwick, her ascent through Elizabethan society and the houses she built that shaped British architectural history.Born in 1521, Bess of Hardwick, businesswoman, money-lender and...

To understand how to empower yourself, first of all you have to recognize and accept your vulnerability. In Stronger, Gareth shares how he has managed to deal with the adversity life has thrown at him over the years, from his school years to his most...

Grigory Rasputin, the Siberian peasant-turned-mystic, was as fascinating as he was unfathomable. He played the role of the simple man, eating with his fingers and boasting, 'I don't even know my ABC...' But, as the only person able to relieve the...

MEET EL SICARIO.A fugitive in the US with a $250,000 price tag on his head.He has executed hundreds of people, is an expert in torture, spent years working for the state police, and received training from the FBI. In grim and graphic detail he offers a...

Mrs Jordan's Profession is the acclaimed biography of Dora Jordan by bestselling author Claire Tomalin'Intelligent, finely made and wonderfully readable. As gripping as the best fiction' Independent on Sunday Acclaimed as the greatest comic actress of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781590170168Author Girolamo CardanoFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint NYRB ClassicsPublisher The New York Review of Books, IncWeight(grams)...

The bestselling memoir by France's president, Emmanuel Macron. Some believe that our country is in decline, that the worst is yet to come, that our civilisation is withering away. That only isolation or civil strife are on our horizon. That to protect...

Gustaf Mannerheim was one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. As a young Finnish officer he witnessed the coronation of the last Tsar and was decorated for bravery in the Russo-Japanese War. He spent two years undercover in Asia as an agent of...

"Beautifully written, searingly honest, and deeply affecting ... when the book ended, I only wanted more" - Roxane Gay"Ford is a writer for the ages, and Somebody's Daughter will be a book of the year" - Glennon Doyle, author of Untamed"Truly a classic...

An updated edition of this acclaimed book, now with a new preface and published to tie in with the bicentenary of Champollion's breakthrough in 1822. Cracking the Egyptian Code is the first biography in English of Jean-Francois Champollion, the...

'The cold reality of my gender was dawning on me. It was motherhood that forced me to understand the timeless horror of our position. The reason women had not written novels or commanded armies or banked or doctored or explored or painted at the same...

The British comedian of Nigerian heritage and co-executive producer and writer of the CBS hit series Bob Hearts Abishola chronicles her odyssey to get to America and break into Hollywood in this lively and humorous memoir. ...

'There are two ways to open a child's head. The pretty way and the quick way. Usually I shave the hair, use a scalpel to nick the skin then apply an electro-cautery device to burn down to bone level. It's a slow, precise method and it leaves almost no...

Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape is the astonishing biography of French cycling star Jacques Anquetil. For the first time since his death in 1987, it reveals the extraordinary truth behind the legend, the man and the cyclist.His list of 'firsts' alone makes...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783944203485Author Chris WilliamsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 394Imprint Lola BooksPublisher Lola BooksDimensions(mm) 217mm * 130mm * 22mm

WARTIME BERLIN: The Niemann family - Karl, Minna and their four children - live in a quiet, suburban enclave. Every day Karl commutes to work, a business manager travelling around inspecting his "factories". In the evenings he returns home to life as a...

Is 'Romeo and Juliet' really a love story, or is it a play about young people living in dangerous circumstances? How might life under occupation produce a new reading of 'Julius Caesar'? What choices must a group of Palestinian students make, when...

Burt Bacharach is one of the most celebrated and legendary song-writers of the twentieth century. Throughout his sixty year career he has worked with artists from Dionne Warwick to Dr Dre, Marlene Dietrich to Elvis Costello.In Anyone Who Had a Heart,...

***A SUNDAY TIMES AND INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR AND INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER***The bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I've Loved) asks, how do you move forward with a life you didn't choose?Hailed by Glennon...

The first comprehensive biography of an extraordinary English poet and composer whose life was haunted by fighting in the First World War and, later, confinement in a mental asylumIvor Gurney (1890-1937) wrote some of the most anthologized poems of the...

William Shakespeare stills stands head and shoulders above any other author in the English language, a position that is unlikely ever to change. Yet it is often said that we know very little about him - and that applies as much to what he believed as it...

In 1941, at age twenty-five, Sinatra told a friend, 'I'm going to be the best singer in the world'. Two years on, the bobbysoxers were already weeping and screaming for him in their thousands. Half a century on Bono defined him as 'the Big Bang of...

A bad reputation has its commitments.' So wrote home Jochen Peiper from the fighting front in the East in 1943, characterizing his battle-hardened command during the Second World War. Peiper's War is a new serious work of military history by the...

John Darnielle describes Master of Reality through a fictional character, a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric centre in southern California in 1985.John Darnielle describes "Master of Reality" in the voice of a fifteen-year-old...

Henry Tudor is probably the best known king in English history, most famous for having had six wives. Henry wanted immortality, not as a notorious husband, but as a king who made England strong and powerful. Essential to that, he believed, was the...

New Statesman's Best Books of the Year, 2018Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year, 2018When life threw journalist Christina Patterson an involuntary-redundancy shaped curveball she decided to tear up the rulebook. Dreaming of revenge and irritated by...

In 1988, then struggling writer Davis Miller drove to Muhammad Ali's mother's modest Louisville house, knocked on the door and introduced himself to his childhood idol. Nearly thirty years later, the two friends have an uncommon bond, the sort that can...

A gripping, all-access biography of Joe Frazier, whose rivalry with Muhammad Ali riveted boxing fans and whose legacy as a figure in American sports and society endures History will remember the rivalry of Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali as one for the...

This in-depth biography of Italian intellectual Antonio Gramsci casts new light on his life and writing, emphasizing his unflagging spirit, even in the many years he spent in prison. One of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth...

Is it still WFH when you're now just binary code? Whilst working on a spreadsheet for a New York-based PR firm, Gerald has his consciousness uploaded into his company's Slack channel. He posts for help, but his colleagues assume it's an elaborate joke to...

Messner describes with clarity and passion his journey through Tibet. He identifies with legendary mountaineers who have been before him - Mallory, Irvine and Wilson come to life as he makes his ascent to the roof of the world.About the AuthorAn Italian...

'A 21st-century Nora Ephron' Stephen May'Witty, hilarious at times, poignant' Alyson Feltes, writer, OzarkPRINCE CHARMING? HAPPILY EVER AFTER? CHILDHOOD FAIRY TALES ARE FULL OF PROMISES, BUT THE REALITY - LIFE - IS A VERY DIFFERENT STORY. AND THAT STORY...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781538747339Author Andrew MortonFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint Grand Central PublishingPublisher Grand Central PublishingWeight(grams)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781621382928Author Bella V DoddFormat PaperbackPage Count 274Imprint Angelico PressPublisher Angelico PressWeight(grams) 313gDimensions(mm) 203mm * 133mm *...

'I was on the street and I was free - but what now?'This is the story of Lex Lesgever: a young Jewish boy who found himself alone on the streets of wartime Amsterdam, the only survivor of his large family. He was just 11 when the Germans invaded in May...

'In any human life there are going to be periods of unhappiness. Learning how to be sad is a natural first step in how to be happier' Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute Helen Russell is an expert on...

This is the quintessential first-person combat memoir of a special forces soldier at war. Edward Dvorak joined the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam in the summer of 1967. He then joined Company F, 51st Infantry, Long Range Patrol, Airborne. For Dvorak...