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Art is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur
by Catherine Hewitt'[A] diligently researched, beautifully produced and insistently sympathetic biography.' Kathryn Hughes, Guardian A new biography of the wildly unconventional 19th-century animal painter and gender equality pioneer Rosa Bonheur, from the author of the acclaimed Mistress of Paris and Renoir's Dancer. Rosa Bonheur was the very antithesis of the feminine ideal of 19th-century society. She was educated, she shunned traditional ‘womanly’ pursuits, she rejected marriage – and she wore trousers. But the society whose rules she spurned accepted her as one of their own, because of her genius for painting animals. She shared an intimate relationship with the eccentric, self-styled inventor Nathalie Micas, who nurtured the artist like a wife. Together Rosa, Nathalie and Nathalie’s mother bought a chateau and with Rosa’s menagerie of animals the trio became one of the most extraordinary households of the day. Catherine Hewitt’s compelling new biography is an inspiring evocation of a life lived against the rules.
The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency in a World Turned Mean
by David Bodanis'David Bodanis is an enthralling storyteller. Prepare to be taken on a surprising, wide-ranging and ultimately inspiring journey to explore what makes us human' Tim HarfordCan you succeed without being a terrible person? We often think not: recognising that, as the old saying has it, 'nice guys finish last'. But does that mean you have to go to the other extreme, and be a bully or Machiavellian to get anything done?In THE ART OF FAIRNESS, David Bodanis uses thrilling historical case studies to show there's a better path, leading neatly in between. He reveals how it was fairness, applied with skill, that led the Empire State Building to be constructed in barely a year - and how the same techniques brought a quiet English debutante to become an acclaimed jungle guerrilla fighter. In ten vivid profiles - featuring pilots, presidents, and even the producer of Game of Thrones - we see that the path to greatness doesn't require crushing displays of power or tyrannical ego. Simple fair decency can prevail.With surprising insights from across history - including the downfall of the very man who popularised the phrase 'nice guys finish last' - THE ART OF FAIRNESS charts a refreshing and sustainable new approach to cultivating integrity and influence.
The Art of Resilience: Strategies For An Unbreakable Mind And Body
by Ross Edgley‘Incredible individual, incredible book, incredible story.’ CHRIS HEMSWORTH ‘A hero who is as humble as he is resilient… testament to a “never give up” spirit!’ BEAR GRYLLS ‘From reading this book, the message that comes shining through is this: you can achieve anything.’ ANT MIDDLETON
The Art of Resistance: My Four Years In The French Underground: A Memoir
by Justus RosenbergA gripping memoir written by a 96-year-old Jewish Holocaust survivor about his escape from Nazi-occupied Poland in the 1930's and his adventures with the French Resistance during World War II
Arthur Jeffress: A Life in Art
by Gill HedleyArthur Jeffress was an art dealer and collector from a Virginian family who bequeathed his “subversive little collection” (Derek Hill) to Tate and Southampton City Art Gallery on his suicide in 1961. That suicide, a result of his expulsion from Venice, has been the subject of speculation in many memoirs.Gill Hedley's biography of Jeffress has benefited from access to many hundreds of unpublished letters written between Jeffress and Robert Melville, who ran Jeffress' own gallery from 1955-1961. The letters were written largely while Jeffress was in Venice and reveal a vivid picture of the London gallery world as well as frank details of artists, collectors and the definitive story of his suicide.Previously unpublished research reveals new information about the lives of Jeffress' lover John Deakin, his business partner Erica Brausen, the French photographer André Ostier and Henry Clifford, and the way in which all of them influenced Jeffress' first steps as a collector from the 1930s onwards.
The Artist in Time: A Generation of Great British Creatives
by Chris Fite-WassilakThe Artist in Time brings together twenty creatives from across the UK, with photographs and interviews that disclose their daily working habits and motivations. All born before 1950, this is a collective portrait of a generation who have shaped our artistic landscape. They provide a range of different answers to the question 'what makes an artist?', and a set of insights into what makes up a creative life. Giving the reader access to the studio and working spaces of a diverse group of painters, poets, choreographers, filmmakers, illustrators, musicians, photographers, sculptors, writers and creators, The Artist in Time is a handbook for creativity and inspiration, made up of artists from all backgrounds who have all in their own way shaped, and continue to shape, the creative landscape of the United Kingdom.
The Artist in Time: A Generation of Great British Creatives
by Chris Fite-WassilakThe Artist in Time brings together twenty creatives from across the UK, with photographs and interviews that disclose their daily working habits and motivations. All born before 1950, this is a collective portrait of a generation who have shaped our artistic landscape. They provide a range of different answers to the question 'what makes an artist?', and a set of insights into what makes up a creative life. Giving the reader access to the studio and working spaces of a diverse group of painters, poets, choreographers, filmmakers, illustrators, musicians, photographers, sculptors, writers and creators, The Artist in Time is a handbook for creativity and inspiration, made up of artists from all backgrounds who have all in their own way shaped, and continue to shape, the creative landscape of the United Kingdom.
As Good As It Gets: Life Lessons from a Reluctant Adult
by Romesh RanganathanConfronted by the realities of adulthood, Romesh Ranganathan must face an uncomfortable truth: this is not quite how he imagined it.Watching his friends descend into middle age, his waistline thicken and his finances dwindle to fund his family’s middle class aspirations, Romesh reflects on the demands of daily life and the challenges of adulting in the modern world.As he reluctantly concludes that he is indeed a grown man, Rom wrestles with the greater questions that threaten his being: Could I save my family in a crisis? Do I possess the skills to assemble flatpack furniture? Am I too old for streetwear? Is it alright to parent my kids through the medium of Fortnite? Is celibacy the secret to a passionate marriage?From one of the countries most beloved comedians and author of the Sunday Times bestseller STRAIGHT OUTTA CRAWLEY comes the hilarious and painfully accurate dissection of what it really means to grow up.
As if by Chance: Journeys, Theatres, Lives
by David LanA family day at the beach. There's a song, an argument, a dash across the white sand and into the high rolling waves. We're in Cape Town and David Lan is ten years old. Cut to 1969 and, visiting London fresh out of high school, he interviews theatre luminaries Sybil Thorndike, Tom Stoppard, Trevor Nunn, Paul Schofield before heading home to join the South African army. Now it's 1999. We're at the Young Vic where David is interviewed to be artistic director, a job he'd do for eighteen years, ensuring its flowering into a great world theatre. There's a redesign to be imagined, money to be raised, shows to be staged. And when the doors reopen in 2006 we meet the extraordinary artists he draws in: Ivo Van Hove, Jude Law, Richard Jones, Gillian Anderson, Patrice Chereau, Katie Mitchell, Stephen Daldry, the Isango Ensemble, Yerma, The Jungle, The Inheritance. We travel to Peter Brook's Paris, to Iceland in pursuit of a circus Romeo and Juliet, to Lithuania in search of his great grandparents, to a refugee camp in Congo with Joe Wright and Chiwetel Ejiofor, to Broadway for the Tony Awards. There's spirit mediums in the Zambezi Valley, Chekhov's Yalta, Luc Bondy's Vienna, making a BBC film in Angola, rehearsing a new play in Israel/Palestine. Along the way, memories constantly rise to the surface: the Royal Court in the 70s and 90s, school plays, his parents' complicated marriage. Woven through it all is his decades long relationship with playwright Nicholas Wright.At times hilarious and always deeply felt, David Lan's deft travels evoke a wildly varied life in theatre as well as a unique theatre of life.
The Ascent: A house can have many secrets
by Stefan HertmansThe dazzling new novel by Stefan Hertmans, author of the modern classic War and Turpentine.'Magnificent' Philippe Sands'Powerful and humane' Observer'An utterly masterly book' Jonathan CoeIn 1979, Stefan Hertmans fell in love with a dilapidated old house in Ghent, Belgium, which he restored to become his peaceful sanctuary. Now, all these years later, he learns that a bust of Hitler once sat on the mantelpiece, and a war criminal and his family relaxed in its rooms.This shocking discovery sends Hertmans off to the archives, to uncover the secrets of the house and to reimagine this man's life and expose the atrocities he's responsible for. We see Willem Verhulst as a weak, narcissistic man who climbed high in the ranks of the SS; a fascinating case study for the cruel and perverse mentality of the Nazis.The Ascent portrays the deep tragedy of Flemish collaboration during the Second World War, as Hertmans masterfully brings history and the house to life, imagining individual lives to tell the greater European story.Translated from the Dutch by David McKay
Asleep and Awake
by John FullerAn elegantly jubilant and personal new collection celebrating love, life and creativity from award-winning poet and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, John FullerIn this personal and characteristically brilliant new collection from John Fuller, an abundance of memories abound. From “those once endless years” of a childhood in wartime – tasting of Granny’s chicken soup, twizzers and cherry-go-rips – to the pattern of family and friendships, important milestones are brought to vivid life. In ‘Before We Met – and After’ a sequence of recollections cherish a wife on her eightieth birthday; ‘In Whose Head’ a piece by Schumann is revisited through advancing years; and in ‘Keeper of the Fire’ and ‘In Memory of John Bayley’ late poems of remembrance memorialise lost friends. These are poems of being and time, full of lyric feeling and Fuller’s distinctive wit and lightness of touch. Alive with the clang and sway of the “chosen colours of daily family life”, together they form a resonant gathering of poems that celebrate, with thoughtfulness and joy, “the feel and length of our lives”.
Assassinations That Changed The World
by Nigel CawthorneWe live in an age of asymmetric warfare. Huge armies no longer face each other on the battlefield. Instead heads of major powers and lone assassins (or martyrs) target each other to pursue their agendas. President Donald Trump felt it necessary to use drones to blow away the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Qasem Soleimani-a mastermind of terrorism in the Middle East who threatened the lives of US troops-and President Barack Obama felt fully justified in sending in US Navy SEALs to take out Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. This is the nature of modern warfare. And it is only going to get worse.When nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, in 1914, he triggered the First World War. Few assassinations have had such devastating consequences, but political assassinations have always changed the world – often in ways that the assassins and their cohorts could not have predicted. The murder of John F. Kennedy left Lyndon B. Johnson free to escalate the war in Vietnam. However, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. while not derailing the demands for African American civil rights in the US, did lead many to abandoning his commitment to nonviolence and adopting more radical means. In a world globalized by social media, more lone-wolf assassins seek their fifteen minutes of fame by taking out a famous figure, while leaders of world powers have everything to gain by decapitating terrorist organizations, employing the latest surveillance technology to obliterate their leaders. There are forty-eight assassinations that changed the world in this book. Rest assured that in the coming years we will see many more.
Assignment Moscow: Reporting on Russia from Lenin to Putin
by James RodgersThe story of western correspondents in Russia is the story of Russia's attitude to the west. Russia has at different times been alternately open to western ideas and contacts, cautious and distant or, for much of the twentieth century, all but closed off. From the revolutionary period of the First World War onwards, correspondents in Russia have striven to tell the story of a country known to few outsiders. Their stories have not always been well received by political elites, audiences, and even editors in their own countries-but their accounts have been a huge influence on how the West understands Russia. Not always perfect, at times downright misleading, they have, overall, been immensely valuable. In Assignment Moscow, former foreign correspondent James Rodgers analyses the news coverage of Russia throughout history, from the coverage of the siege of the Winter Palace and a plot to kill Stalin, to the Chernobyl explosion and the Salisbury poison scandal.
Astrid Lindgren (Little People, Big Dreams Ser. #43)
by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara<strong>In this book from the critically acclaimed, mulitmillion-copy best-selling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover how Astrid Lindgren grew up to become one of the world’s best-loved authors, and the creator of the irresistible Pippi Longstocking.</strong><br /> <br /> Little Astrid grew up on an old farm in Sweden. Her childhood was very happy, so happy that <strong>she never wanted to grow up</strong>. When she was four, her friend Edit read Astrid her first story. Suddenly, the entire place was filled with giants, witches and fairies.<br /> <br /> They all came out from a <strong>magic object called a book</strong>. Astrid did her best to learn how to read, and once she started, she couldn’t stop! Soon, there were no books left to borrow from the library and her friends.<br /> <br /> Learn how Astrid turned her love of books and telling stories into a career as<strong> a world-renowned author. Accessible and easy to follow text </strong>means that this book can<strong> inspire young readers </strong>in just the same way that Astrid was inspired when she started reading, all those years ago.<br /> <br /> This moving book features <strong>stylish and quirky illustrations</strong> and <strong>extra facts at the back</strong>, including a <strong>biographical timeline</strong> with historical photos and a detailed profile of the inspiring writer’s life.<br /> <br /> <strong>Little People, BIG DREAMS </strong>is a <strong>best-selling biography series for kids</strong> that explores the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.<br /> <br /> This empowering series of books offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The <strong>board books</strong> are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The <strong>hardcover</strong> and <strong>paperback</strong> versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. With rewritten text for older children, the <strong>treasuries</strong> each bring together a multitude of dreamers in a single volume. You can also collect a selection of the books by theme in <strong>boxed gift sets</strong>. <strong>Activity books</strong> and a <strong>journal</strong> provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.<br /> <br /> <strong>Inspire the next generation of outstanding people </strong>who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!<br />
Astrid Lindgren (Little People, Big Dreams Ser. #43)
by Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara<strong>In this book from the critically acclaimed, mulitmillion-copy best-selling Little People, BIG DREAMS series, discover how Astrid Lindgren grew up to become one of the world’s best-loved authors, and the creator of the irresistible Pippi Longstocking.</strong><br /> <br /> Little Astrid grew up on an old farm in Sweden. Her childhood was very happy, so happy that <strong>she never wanted to grow up</strong>. When she was four, her friend Edit read Astrid her first story. Suddenly, the entire place was filled with giants, witches and fairies.<br /> <br /> They all came out from a <strong>magic object called a book</strong>. Astrid did her best to learn how to read, and once she started, she couldn’t stop! Soon, there were no books left to borrow from the library and her friends.<br /> <br /> Learn how Astrid turned her love of books and telling stories into a career as<strong> a world-renowned author. Accessible and easy to follow text </strong>means that this book can<strong> inspire young readers </strong>in just the same way that Astrid was inspired when she started reading, all those years ago.<br /> <br /> This moving book features <strong>stylish and quirky illustrations</strong> and <strong>extra facts at the back</strong>, including a <strong>biographical timeline</strong> with historical photos and a detailed profile of the inspiring writer’s life.<br /> <br /> <strong>Little People, BIG DREAMS </strong>is a <strong>best-selling biography series for kids</strong> that explores the lives of outstanding people, from designers and artists to scientists and activists. All of them achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.<br /> <br /> This empowering series of books offers inspiring messages to children of all ages, in a range of formats. The <strong>board books</strong> are told in simple sentences, perfect for reading aloud to babies and toddlers. The <strong>hardcover</strong> and <strong>paperback</strong> versions present expanded stories for beginning readers. With rewritten text for older children, the <strong>treasuries</strong> each bring together a multitude of dreamers in a single volume. You can also collect a selection of the books by theme in <strong>boxed gift sets</strong>. <strong>Activity books</strong> and a <strong>journal</strong> provide even more ways to make the lives of these role models accessible to children.<br /> <br /> <strong>Inspire the next generation of outstanding people </strong>who will change the world with Little People, BIG DREAMS!<br />
At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva (Psychoanalytic Horizons)
by Alice JardineAt the Risk of Thinking is the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Paris, with the history of her ideas. Informed by extensive interviews with Kristeva herself, this telling of a remarkable woman's life story also draws out the complexities of Kristeva's writing, emphasizing her call for an urgent revival of bold interdisciplinary thinking in order to understand--and to act in--today's world.
Aural History
by Gila AshtorAural History is an anti-memoir memoir of encountering devastating grief that uses experimental storytelling to recreate the winding, fractured path of loss and transformation.Written by a thirty-something psychotherapist and queer theorist, Aural History is structured as a sequence of three sections that each use different narrative styles to represent a distinctive stage in the protagonist’s evolving relationship to trauma. Aural History explores how a cascade of self-dissolving losses crisscrosses a girl’s coming of age.Through lyric prose, the first section follows a precocious tomboy whose fierce attachment to her father forces her, when he dies and she is twelve years old, to run the family bakery business, raise a delinquent younger brother, and take care of a destructive, volatile mother.In part two, scenes narrated in the third person illustrate a high-achieving high school student who is articulate and in control except for bouts of sudden and inchoate attractions, the first of which is to her severe and coaxing English teacher.The third story tells of her relation with a riveting, world-famous professor, interspersed with a tragic-comic series of dialogues between the protagonist and a cast of diverse psychotherapists as she, now twenty-five years old and living in New York City, undertakes an odyssey to understand why true self-knowledge remains elusive and her real feelings, choked and incomplete.In what Phillip Lopate calls “an amazing document,” Aural History pushes the narrative conventions of memoir to capture a story the genre of memoir usually struggles to tell: that you can lose yourself, and have no way to know it.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Arcturus Classics)
by Gertrude SteinA witty and beautifully written account of the lives of Gertrude Stein and her wife Alice B. Toklas and a fascinating look into early 20th century Paris and the development of modernist culture.Written in the voice of her life partner, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a remarkable literary achievement. By turns experimental, insightful and bitingly satirical, Stein's great biography is both deeply personal and wide-ranging in its ambition.As she recounts her life from the fin de siecle up to the 1930s, she tells the story of the Parisian art scene, including modernist masters like Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, the impact of World War I on contemporary France, and her encounters with brilliant literary figures like Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson.
Autopsy: Life in the trenches with a forensic pathologist in Africa
by Ryan BlumenthalAs a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal’s chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book.In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he’s encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife.Blumenthal takes the reader behind the scenes at the mortuary, describing a typical autopsy and the instruments of the trade. He also shares a few trade secrets, like how to establish when a suicide is more likely to be a homicide.Even though they cannot speak, the dead have a lot to say – and Blumenthal is there to listen.
Baba Padmanji: Vernacular Christianity in Colonial India (Pathfinders)
by Deepra DandekarThis book is a critical biography of Baba Padmanji (1831-1906), a firebrand native Christian missionary, ideologue, and litterateur from 19th-century Bombay Presidency. Though Padmanji was well-known, and a very influential figure among Christian converts, his contributions have received inadequate attention from the perspective of ‘social reform’ — an intellectual domain dominated by offshoots of the Brahmo Samaj movement, like the Prarthana Samaj in Bombay. This book constitutes an in-depth analysis of Padmanji’s relationships with questions of reform, education, modernity, feminism, and religion, that had wide-ranging repercussions on the intellectual horizon of 19th-century India. It presents Padmanji’s integrated writing persona and identity as a revolutionary pathfinder of his times who amalgamated and blended vernacular ideas of Christianity together with early feminism, modernity, and incipient nationalism. Drawing on a variety of primary and secondary sources, this unique book will be of great interest for area studies scholars (especially Maharashtra), and to researchers of modern India, engaged with the history of colonialism and missions, religion, global Christianity, South Asian intellectual history, and literature.
Baba Padmanji: Vernacular Christianity in Colonial India (Pathfinders)
by Deepra DandekarThis book is a critical biography of Baba Padmanji (1831-1906), a firebrand native Christian missionary, ideologue, and litterateur from 19th-century Bombay Presidency. Though Padmanji was well-known, and a very influential figure among Christian converts, his contributions have received inadequate attention from the perspective of ‘social reform’ — an intellectual domain dominated by offshoots of the Brahmo Samaj movement, like the Prarthana Samaj in Bombay. This book constitutes an in-depth analysis of Padmanji’s relationships with questions of reform, education, modernity, feminism, and religion, that had wide-ranging repercussions on the intellectual horizon of 19th-century India. It presents Padmanji’s integrated writing persona and identity as a revolutionary pathfinder of his times who amalgamated and blended vernacular ideas of Christianity together with early feminism, modernity, and incipient nationalism. Drawing on a variety of primary and secondary sources, this unique book will be of great interest for area studies scholars (especially Maharashtra), and to researchers of modern India, engaged with the history of colonialism and missions, religion, global Christianity, South Asian intellectual history, and literature.
Bach: J. S. Bach And His Sons (Master Musicians Series)
by David SchulenbergBach has remained a figure of continuous fascination and interest to scholars and readers since the original Master Musicians Bach volume's publication in 1983 - even since its revision in 2000, understanding of Bach and his music's historical and cultural context has shifted substantially. Reflecting new biographical information that has only emerged in recent decades, author David Schulenberg contributes to an ongoing scholarly conversation about Bach with clarity and concision. Bach traces the man's emergence as a startlingly original organist and composer, describing his creative evolution, professional career, and family life from contemporary societal and cultural perspectives in early modern Europe. His experiences as student, music director, and teacher are examined alongside the music he produced in each of these roles, including early compositions for keyboard instruments, the great organ and harpsichord works of later years, vocal music, and other famous instrumental works, including the Brandenburg Concertos. Schulenberg also illuminates how Bach incorporated his contemporary environment into his work: he responded to music by other composers, to his audiences and employment conditions, and to developments in poetry, theology, and even the sciences. The author focuses on Bach's evolution as a composer by ultimately recognizing "Bach's world" in the specific cities, courts, and environments within and for which he composed. Dispensing with biographical minutiae and more closely examining the interplay between his life and his music, Bach presents a unique, grounded, and refreshing new framing of a brilliant composer.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup: The Story of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos Scandal
by John CarreyrouNow with a new afterword covering the months-long landmark trials of Theranos founders Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani.‘I couldn’t put down this thriller’ – Bill GatesWinner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.The shocking true story of the breathtaking rise and collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes, written by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end.Seen as the female Steve Jobs, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup ‘unicorn’ promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by wealthy investors, Theranos sold shares that valued the company at more than $9 billion.There was just one problem: the technology didn’t work . . .Despite threats of legal action, brave whistleblowers started to talk. They revealed a culture of intimidation and secrecy, technology that repeatedly failed, results sent to real patients that were incorrect but upon which life-changing medical decisions were being made, with devastating consequences.The riveting story behind The Dropout, in Bad Blood, John Carreyrou investigates the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and scandal set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.'A tale of corporate fraud and legal browbeating that reads like a crime thriller' - The 10 Best Nonfiction Books, TIME
The Bad Room
by Jade KellyAfter years of physical and mental abuse, Jade thought her kindly foster mother would be the answer to her prayers. She was wrong … this is her staggering true story.
Ballroom Fever
by George LloydFrom pig farm to the Ballroom. The dog-eat-dog 70’s Ballroom scene was lubricated with huge amounts of alcohol and sex; and budding ballroom professional George Lloyd was there for every filthy second of it. Plucked from a life of mucking out hogs, George is snapped up by a London dance school where he becomes a rising star of Ballroom. The late 70’s signals the death knell for Ballroom dancing across the country. However, the guy who saves the day is none other than George Lloyd, who helps many dance schools by introducing Disco Dancing to his classes. Through a haze of drink and a coterie of adoring women, George becomes an instant doyen of the British dance scene and is nominated for one of the biggest awards in the industry. But, for every new star on the block, there is always a queue of nasty adversaries, with daggers sharpened, waiting in the shadows. “George Lloyd’s moving memoir captures a period of a time steeped in aspic, love, death, tragedy, success, decadence, violence and gentleness. Beneath the glow of the light fantastic, all human life is here in this book.” Kevin Allen. “It’s definitely a TEN from Len.” Len Goodman. “George will spin you across the dance floor of his extraordinary life leaving you drunk, dizzy and ravenous for more.” Rhys Ifans. “A great read and right up my street.” Catherine Tyldesley.